Join us tomorrow, Thursday, December 8, at noon EST, 5pm UK Time, for a conversation about kindness as a counter to extremism. You can sign up for the LinkedIn Live event here. Just booked to speak at the 2023 South by Southwest conference in March, our guest speaker, Hadiya Masieh, is an expert consultant in the area.
Do you know anybody who has gotten radicalized over recent years? It’s a timely question, what with anti-semitism and white supremacy on the rise in America, and conspiracy theories spreading with disinformation. Extremist causes are tapping into real issues facing people like loneliness, anger, and depression, and then leveraging them to insert their narratives. It helps them raise money and accrue power.
From school shootings by “incels” to Kyrie Irving and Kanye West sharing antisemitic propaganda and this morning’s news that Germany has arrested a group planning to overthrow the government, believing in a “deep state”, much of what has happened recently in the news is concerning. There are other extremist beliefs and causes, too, from some of the craziness that came up during the pandemic to the other fringes.
Hadiya focuses on community cohesion, interfaith relations, counter extremism, and women’s involvement in extremism and radicalisation. She’s also been involved with efforts to deradicalize one the Charlottesville “unite the right” marchers. Hadiya has been a counter extremism consultant for various Governments and NGOs worldwide. She has worked with both nonprofit and commercial organisations including Google and Facebook. Now she’s running an organization called the Groundswell Project.
She runs a kindness mapper, which highlights organizations helping vulnerable people away from extremism. Right now, it’s in the U.K., only. But imagine the possibilities for doing such a thing internationally.
Hadiya’s own history is interesting. She spent a decade as a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical political albeit nonviolent group that seeks an Islamic caliphate. But then the terrible events of 7 July 2005 transformed her outlook. “I feel like I was a pawn,” she told the Observer. “Led down the garden path when I didn’t know better.” Today, she devotes her time to speaking out against Islamist extremism, as well as extremism of all kinds.
I’m interested to hear from Hadiya what America can learn from efforts to counter extremism in Europe. And I hope you’ll join us for what I’m sure will be a fascinating transatlantic conversation.
Again, you can sign up for the LinkedIn Live event here.
