Book presentation Edwin Bakker and Peter Grol: 'Dutch Jihadists'
Peter Grol and Edwin Bakker, professor of Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the University, presented their book ‘Dutch Jihadists’ for a large audience. The book tells individual stories of jihadists in Holland and of Syria-goers and should contribute to a better insight into their backgrounds and motives.
The book was written out of interest in the backgrounds of these people. For instance, Peter Grol described that Jihad and Syriagoers were in the beginning an abstract idea to them, limited to statistics. However, when they started to dig deeper into the stories of the individual persons, the big image of fear fell apart into sometimes unbelievably banal life stories.
