Radical Thoughts: Fears About and Supportin ISIS Among Jordanian College Students

Abstract

Regardless of the sizable number of terrorist attacks in the last decade in Jordan, Jordanians’ fear of the terrorists or risk of dying in a terrorist attack in Jordan is almost non-existent. What drives the young educated student to sympathize and support terrorist groups like ISIS? Sympathy and support for terrorist groups like ISIS among youths in Jordan can be understood by tracing its roots of the micro (personal factors), meso (institutional factors), and macro-level (social, cultural factors). Youths’ sympathy and support for ISIS are based on religious beliefs, social taboos, kinship, and social ties. The current study aims at examining radical, conservative, and extremist thoughts, fear about, and behavioral and material support for ISIS among college students in Jordan. Findings showed that, on average, 59% of students expressed radical thoughts, concentrated on areas of social and religiously conservative and extremist beliefs. Moreover, results showed that 66% of students carried extreme ideas, with 90.7% accepting the use of violence. More than half (61%) of the sample expressed conservative thoughts ranged from stoning adultery cases (82.4%) to segregation of women in the workplace (59.4.%). Findings showed less than half of the sample, 43.4% feared that they might become victims of ISIS one day, and 69.4% of students worried about the emergence of radical groups in Jordan. Also, findings showed that about 10% of students expressed behavioral or/and material support for ISIS ranging from money donation (11.7%) to providing personal and operational assistance (8%). Students’ overall average justification for ISIS’s support was 14%, and 15.6% of students justified their behavioral and material support for ISIS due to foreign assistance for Muslim authoritarian regimes. The lowest justification was for seeing ISIS as a defender of Islam. Finally, there was a significant relationship between radical thoughts and each of the support justifications (r = .254), strain (0.32), fear (0.46), religiosity (0.78), and ISIS support (r = .297). Additionally, there is a significant relationship between ISIS’s support and ISIS’s support justification (r = .72). Radical thoughts, violent extremism beliefs, conservative beliefs, stress, victimization, and justification explained 56% of the variance on behavioral and material support for ISIS and had an overall significant effect on behavioral and material support for ISIS (F = 85.936, α = .000).