Yet the cues Bouyeri gave off are also the very same cues one might expect to see in anyone who has undergone a conversion toward non-violent or pacifistic Islamic religious conservatism, and do not necessarily indicate conversion into the Salafi-jihadist fold. The danger of CVE is that it risks conflating the two and promotes an atmosphere of mistrust. There are many cases in which ordinary Muslims have been singled out and harassed—not for anything they may have done, but because of the suspicious minds of others, who see a Muslim man reading a scholarly book on terrorism and think “terrorist,” or who read support for Palestine as support for global jihadism. Even converts to radical Islam—or the “non-violent extremists” whose ideology Britain’s new strategy aims to counter, in addition to the violent variant—aren’t necessarily appropriate targets for suspicion. As the terrorism scholar John Horgan puts it, “The overwhelming majority of people who hold radical beliefs do not engage in violence … and … people who engage in terrorism don’t necessarily hold radical beliefs.”

Another major weakness of CVE lies in its naïve and imaginatively cramped view of social life, of which so much is theater, and where how people act is often at variance with their unvarnished “backstage” self. Erving Goffman, the foremost exponent of this “dramaturgical” view of social affairs, wrote that “a performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself,” and remarked on the prevalence of “disidentifiers”—affectations or props intended to convey normalcy—among stigmatized groups.

In his study of men who visited public restrooms in search of sex, Laud Humphreys described how the men, 54 percent of whom were married and living with their wives, would adopt conservative postures in public so as to detract from their then-illicit sexual liaisons with men and boys. In Goffman’s terminology, they were “disidentifying,” much like the 9/11 hijackers, who made a point of shaving their beards and visiting strip clubs prior to launching their attacks. (“How conveeenient,” Andrew Sullivan mordantly remarked about that stratagem.)

CVE seems blissfully ignorant of this theatrical dimension of everyday social life, and the lengths to which people go to conceal their innermost thoughts and feelings. “I couldn’t believe it, I can’t believe it. ... My son ... loved music and breakdancing and football. … He wanted just to work, to have a nice cellphone, a laptop or nice clothes,” said Radhia Manai, the mother of Seifeddine Rezgui, who this summer calmly slaughtered 38 people at a beach resort near the city of Sousse in Tunisia. But her account could stand in for any number of recent jihadist-assassins, like 15-year-old Hassan Mahania, whose father reportedly told the BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen that “his son was a typical teenager, not political and certainly no radical.” Clearly, such accounts are self-exculpatory, serving to immunize the parents of terrorists against the criticism that they should have intervened to stop their children’s murderous actions. But they may also be sincere and truthful.

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