Countering Jihadist Propaganda Is Harder Than It Seems

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

In January 2014, Calgary's Christianne Boudreau learned about the death of her son, 22-year-old Damian Clairmont, in a tweet from an Islamic State fighter.

As Boudreau told VICE, she believed her son had traveled to Cairo 14 months earlier to study Arabic. It wasn't until members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) questioned Boudreau about her son that she discovered he had actually traveled to Syria to fight against the Assad regime with an al Qaeda–affiliated rebel group and, later, for the Islamic State. According to Abu Muhajir's Tumblr eulogy to Clairmont, the young man's path to Syria began with a chance encounter in a Calgary Tim Hortons, but it's likely that Clairmont had already encountered online propaganda that made him susceptible to Abu Muhajir's extremist ideology. Ironically, it was the Islamic State's reach on social media that allowed Boudreau to learn of her son's fate.

It's also why she participated in Extreme Dialogue, a Canada-wide social media campaign launched earlier this week to reduce the appeal of extremist ideologies to young people. The campaign was funded by the Canadian government via the Kanishka Project and created by an "international consortium" of nonprofits and charities. It's goal is to provide counter-narratives to those spread by violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State or white supremacist gangs. The Extreme Dialogue Facebook and Twitter accounts direct users to a website that hosts a ten-minute video about Boudreau and her son, as well as a video about Daniel Gallant, a former neo-Nazi from northern British Columbia who describes his indoctrination as a young man into white supremacist communities and his eventual "disengagement" from those activities and beliefs.

Continued with a video...

Good for her. She is taking a bad thing that happened to her son and using it to hopefully save others. I hope it works. This must be very difficult for her to do and to relive her own grief over and over.