U.S. Muslim communities develop their own counter-radicalization programs

U.S. Muslim communities develop their own counter-radicalization programs

Published 6 May 2015

 

 

Almost fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks, young vulnerable Muslim youths are still subject to surveillance by law enforcement agents who have been given a mandate to identify radicalism within America’s Muslim communities. Muslim community leaders across the country are looking to provide an outlet for vulnerable youths to express their radical views, in the hopes that the community will take care of itself. “Heavy-handed tactics don’t work,” says one community leader. “The fact is that for many people, there needs to be a third option between locking them up in jail and just doing nothing if they might be a danger to themselves or others.”

Almost fourteen years after the 9/11 attacks, young vulnerable Muslim youths are still subject to surveillance by law enforcement agents who have been given a mandate to identify radicalism within America’s Muslim communities. In some cases, FBI agents, through the use of informants, have pushed troubled and in some cases, mentally ill youths, to plan and attempt to carry out domestic terror attacks.
FBI director James Comey recently commented that the agency has “investigations of people in various stages of radicalizing in all 50 states.” A 2014 Human Rights Watch report found that the FBI now maintains a network of 15,000 confidential informants throughout the country, the most at any time in the agency’s history.
The Intercept reports that Muslim community leaders across the country are looking to provide an outlet for vulnerable youths to express their radical views, in the hopes that the community will take care of itself. “Heavy-handed tactics don’t work,” said Mubin Shaikh, who worked as an undercover agent for the Canadian Security Intelligence Services in several terrorism cases, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in the psychology of radicalization. “The fact is that for many people, there needs to be a third option between locking them up in jail and just doing nothing if they might be a danger to themselves or others.”
The Muslim Public Affairs Council launched the Safe Spaces Initiative after a series of cases involving what is seen as government entrapment of troubled Muslim youths. “The program was inspired by the case of Mohamed Mohamud, the purported Portland bomber,” said Alejandro Beutel, who helps run the program. “He was a 19-year-old kid who came from a broken home, had substance abuse and mental health issues. He started saying some things which alarmed his father, who then called the FBI.”
“But the FBI didn’t ‘help’ Mohamud,” Beutel said. “They introduced him to an informant who aggressively pushed him even further in a negative direction, ensuring that he would spend the next several decades of his life behind bars. If his father had gone to the community, and if they had the tools and confidence to deal with troubled youth like this, Mohamud might not have had his life destroyed as it was.”

Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, said while some sting operations can be legitimate and not considered entrapment, the cases involving “mentally ill people — or people who would have otherwise been unable to mount an attack on their own — create a sense in the (Muslim) community that they are being unfairly targeted.” He adds that programs that seek to identify at-risk individuals can be faulty. “The risks of making mistakes are very high given that there is no consensus as to the indicators of someone who is going to become a terrorist.”
Shaikh, the former undercover agent, said part of the issue is that counterterrorism agents often feel that they need to be producing some level of results in response to the FBI’s efforts to “counter” extremism. “Part of the reason that 14 years after 9/11 we don’t have a handle on this problem is that we continue to focus almost exclusively on things like ideology and religion, instead of grappling with more complex questions about community engagement, mental health, and how aggressive foreign policies inevitably generate terrorism,” he told theIntercept.
Programs like Safe Spaces also aim to help communities understand their rights and ability to discuss politically sensitive issues without fear of government retribution. “Our goal is to treat Muslim communities like any other communities, not as something unique. We treat this as a public health program, not so-called ‘countering extremism’ in a way which stigmatizes an entire group within society,” said Beutel.
Since 9/11, members of the Muslim community have been hesitant to engage with individuals perceived to exhibit anti-social or near radical behavior. Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was ejected from his local Boston mosque the year before the attack for making anti-American political statements. An attendee of his mosque told theIntercept that the pervasive fear of government agent provocateurs among the congregation led many mosque members to disengage from people who expressed radical views.
Programs in Europe meant to intervene before vulnerable youths take radical actions have had mixed results. A program in Denmark has been successful with rehabilitating returned foreign fighters and other individuals perceived to have been radicalized. The Prevent and Channel programs in the United Kingdom attempt to identify vulnerable individuals and recommend either the help of law enforcement or social services, but some Muslim communities have compared the programs to McCarthyism. Beutel said Safe Spaces takes a different approach. “We need to provide guidance to communities about how to deal with law enforcement,” he said. “The FBI are not our friends, but we are taxpayers, so to some degree we are their bosses. They have to be responsive to us.”