Violent Extremism is a Choice, but Those Who Choose It Can Change
Army veteran Chris Buckley returned from his second tour in Afghanistan an angry man. After multiple wartime injuries and seeing his friend shot to death, he was filled with hate. “Every injury I sustained was given to me by a Muslim,” he said in the moving documentary, Refuge. Back home in the north Georgia rural town of Lafayette, he joined the Ku Klux Klan, who told him it was OK to hate.
When Chris joined the Klan, his wife Melissa told him that was the final straw. After seeing him through an addiction to opioids because of a broken back suffered in war, “I told him you have a choice, it’s me and the kids or the Klan.” At a turning point in his life, Chris chose to connect with Arno Michealis, who he and Melissa were introduced to by producers of a docu-series that was subsequently canceled. Arno, a former white supremacist, mentors people to help them recover from violent extremism.
Of Arno, Chris realized, “besides Melissa, it was the first time I felt compassion from someone who wasn’t obligated to give it to me.” Chris quit the Klan but told Arno that “tolerance of Islam and Muslims is off-limits.”
Arno, as he said in Refuge, knew that “to let go of that hatred of Islam was an absolute prerequisite to the continuance of this healing process.” The only way to do that was to get to know a Muslim man on the level of one human to another.
Arno had met Heval Kelli, an immigrant and cardiologist living in Clarkston, Georgia at a conference on Islamophobia. He asked if he would talk with Chris. At first the two traded texts; then came a phone call and eventually an in-person meeting in Lafayette.
“So, you’re Muslim,” Chris said. “I had the hardest time with Arno about this, like, I just, I’ve always been kinda scared of what I didn’t understand.” “So I made him [Arno] a promise that I would sit down and talk to you and you could explain some things to me.”
Heval didn’t push. “I’m not here to change your mind,” he said. “If you have still, you know, hateful misconceptions, that’s something that also happens with me. It’s hard to be a Kurd and not hate.” He told Chris about his father being tortured as a Syrian Kurd and that in a refugee camp in Germany “I was in a constant state of fear of being attacked by neo-Nazis. . . I just became hateful. It’s hard to let that go sometimes.”
In time, Chris and Heval and their families exchanged visits. Heval saw poverty up close in Lafayette. “Chris is like a reflection of the forgotten America. They’re living in a camp that’s got no borders. It’s called poverty. When people watch, and immigrants get successful, now I understand the other side and why they’re getting angry.” Chris’s eyes opened as well. “I’m learning a lot from you man,” he told Heval. “I was combating extremists over there and turned myself into one!”
Their friendship grew. Chris and his family attended a Ramadan iftar dinner in Clarkston, where Melissa proudly wore a hijab. Eventually Chris and Heval began speaking together to groups to share their story.
There are important lessons from their journey. Healing takes time. An extremist needs someone who believes in the potential for change – ideally someone who has left extremism behind and can use his or her lived experience to help. The organization Life After Hate trains and connects people to these “formers.”
An extremist has to take a first, often frightening step. Someone helping that person can’t argue them out of hating but can help them imagine a better life.
Each must be willing to listen to the other’s lived experience and find what they share. This can lead to friendship, part of the pro-social life a person needs to leave extremism behind.
As Heval said, “That’s what I learned from Chris. You really have to be willing to listen to something that you don’t want to hear. Everyone’s ready to defend themselves instead of, like, give me a second, let me just listen to what the other side’s talking about, digest that and then speak up.” Chris echoes that: “He’s helped me see that no matter how thin you slice something there’s always two sides.”
The media-sphere is filled with stories of hatred and extremism. We can lose sight of the fact that there are other people like Chris, Heval and Arno, with positive stories like theirs.
The lessons from Refuge extend beyond violent extremism. In our world filled with political polarization the importance of being open to and talking with people as human beings is essential to bridge the widening tear in our social fabric.
The film Refuge can be streamed. As is Life After Hate, Parents for Peace, co-founded by Melvin Bledsoe after his radicalized son committed domestic terrorism, is another organization aimed at helping people transition from violent extremism. One Small Step, created by StoryCorps, brings together people who differ politically so they can get to know each other as human beings, with politics off the table.
“I want to be somebody my kids can be proud of,” Chris had told Arno. Today he is.
Photo Credit: refugemovie.com
