It certainly looks like that's what happened to the young man who became the notorious terrorist "Jihadi John":
Media reports suggest that the masked militant seen in numerous Islamic State propaganda and beheading videos is Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old who was born in Kuwait and raised in West London.
Asim Qureshi, research director at rights group CAGE, said Thursday that the group has had a case file on Emwazi for years because of his allegations of harassment by security agencies in the U.K.
At a press conference in London Thursday afternoon, Qureshi described Emwazi as a kind and polite young man who brought CAGE staffers treats in thanks for helping him with his case.
“You might be surprised to know that the Mohammed I knew was extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft-spoken,” Qureshi told reporters. “He was the most humble young person that I knew.”
He's a monster now, severing heads of hostages and holding them up for the camera to horrify the world.
Kind, gentle, humble young man becomes monster? How did that happen with all the national security apparatus that taxpayer money can buy doing everything it can to protect us?
Emwazi was born in Kuwait in 1988 and moved to the United Kingdom with his family at the age of six, the agency says. He was raised in West London and earned a university degree in 2009.
The Washington Post reported that his degree was in computer programming.
According to CAGE, Emwazi first approached them in 2009 after he said he was detained, interrogated and recruited by British intelligence agency Mi5. Emwazi said he was stopped upon arriving in Tanzania for a safari holiday with friends.
Emwazi said he was interrogated by an Mi5 official, accused of trying to travel to join terrorists in Somalia, and then asked directly to work for the agency.
When he refused, Emwazi said the agent told him that he would be followed and that “life will be harder for you.”
CAGE says Emwazi suffered “harassment and abuse” at the [hands] of U.K. intelligence until he tried to return to Kuwait “to start a new life.”
He was prevented by UK officials from getting on that flight to Kuwait where his fiancee and a job were waiting for him. He says they pressured Kuwait to deny him entry.
“But now I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned and controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace and my country, Kuwait,” Emwazi is quoted as saying.
As time went on he grew more desperate and more radicalized, more angry about the situation in which Muslims around the world found themselves. Until sometime in 2012 he vanished, apparently off to join ISIS in Syria.
Who could have known that if you harass people and treat them like dangerous and violent criminals who need to be constantly watched and corralled and reminded that they're different, that they may one day turn on you and become what you've projected onto them for so long.
Mr. Qureshi summed up the whole ugly mess with tears in his eyes:
"When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they're outsiders they are going to feel like outsiders and they will look for belonging elsewhere?"
Never, apparently, as long as it gives certain warmongers the justifications they need to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," as a
monster of another kind is known to once have said.