Denmark: How Flipping The Script Helped Keep Young Muslims From Joining ISIS

2016/07/16 Leave a comment

Good example of a counter radicalization strategy:

One day in 2012 a group of policemen in a Danish town was sitting around in the office when an unusual call came in. This town, called Aarhus, is a clean, orderly place with very little crime. So what the callers were saying really held the cops’ attention. They were parents, and they were “just hysterical,” recalled Thorleif Link, one of the officers. Their son was missing. They woke up one day and he was gone.

The officers put together whatever clues they had about the missing person: He was a teenager who went to a local high school, and he lived in a largely Muslim immigrant neighborhood just outside town. But before they got any further with their investigation, they got another call, from another set of parents. Their son was missing too.

“Why is this going on?” asked Allan Aarslev, a police superintendent.

After talking to the parents and snooping around the neighborhood the police figured it out: These young men and women had gone to Syria. They were among the exodus of thousands of European citizens who were drawn to the call put out by ISIS, the Islamist terrorist group, for Muslims worldwide to help build the new Islamic state.

 

Link and Aarslev are crime prevention officers. They usually deal with locals who are drawn to right-wing extremism, or gangs. The landscape of global terrorism was completely new to them. But they decided to take it on. And once they did, they wound up creating an unusual — and unusually successful — approach to combating radicalization.

The rest of Europe came down hard on citizens who had traveled to Syria. France shut down mosques it suspected of harboring radicals. The U.K. declared citizens who had gone to help ISIS enemies of the state. Several countries threatened to take away their passports — a move formerly reserved for convicted traitors.

But the Danish police officers took a different approach: They made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society.

Their program came to be known as the “Aarhus model.” It’s been called the “hug a terrorist” model in the press, but this description never sits well with the cops. They see themselves as making an entirely practical decision designed to keep their city safe.

As they see it, coming down hard on young, radicalized Muslims will only make them angrier and more of a danger to society. Helping them is the only chance to keep an eye on them and also to keep the peace in their town.

Link and Aarslev were intuiting what scientists who study radicalization are coming to see.

“The original response was to fight [extremism] through military and policing efforts, and they didn’t fare too well,” says Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland who studies violent extremism. “That kind of response that puts them as suspects and constrains them and promotes discrimination — that is only likely to exacerbate the problem. It’s only likely to inflame the sense there’s discrimination and motivate young people to act against society.”

Their approach has a basis in research on interpersonal relations as well.

Christopher Hopwood, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, studies something called noncomplementary behavior. Complementary behavior is the norm. It means when you act warmly, the person you are with is likely to act warm back. The same is true with hostility. But noncomplementary behavior means doing the unexpected. Someone acts with hostility and you respond warmly. It’s an unnatural reaction, and it’s a proven way to shake up the dynamic and produce a different outcome than the usual one.

The nonviolent resistance movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are the most well-known examples of this tactic. The Aarhus model is another. How did it unfold in real time? Consider the case study of a young man we call “Jamal.” Jamal is not his real name, and we don’t usually use pseudonyms, but he asked us to not use his name. He doesn’t want to be known as a person who almost became a terrorist. He wants a job and a life now. But that didn’t seem possible for a while.

Jamal was born in Somalia; his family moved to Denmark because Somalia was in the middle of a civil war. His was the only black family in the neighborhood and the only Muslim family, and his childhood wasn’t easy. Kids called him names, asked him if he had the same blood as they did, and teased him. For a long time he just would fight back, but he knew he was disappointing his father.

When he was a little older Jamal decided to take a different tack. He tried to be the good kid. He studied and made jokes in class, and his stress eased. The teachers liked him, his classmates liked him, and he began to make Danish friends and even to feel more Danish.

Then one day in high school his teacher organized a debate about Islam. Jamal had just been on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, with his family, and he was infused with a newfound religious identity. And during the debate one of the girls started saying to the class that Muslims “terrorize” the West, and kill people and stone women. Jamal argued with her and eventually lost his temper, saying, “People like you should never exist.”

After that moment, Jamal’s life went off the rails. The teacher told the principal, who told the police, who questioned Jamal about being a terrorist. Jamal had to stay home from school and miss his final exams. The police cleared him, but it was too late for him to redo his exams so he had to redo some of high school. He was furious about it. Soon after the investigation his mother died, and he blamed her death on the stress caused by the investigation. He began to feel rejected by the West.

During that year he ran into a group of fellow Muslims who had experienced some of the same discrimination. One of them had an apartment, and the group spent a lot of time there talking, praying and watching videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, a famous English-speaking imam. The friends talked a lot about jihad and making the trip to Syria. Two of the guys in the apartment began planning their trip.

While he was living in that apartment, Jamal got a call from Link, who had heard about his case. Jamal cursed him out and tried to hang up the phone, but then Link did something Jamal didn’t expect: He apologized, for the ordeal his fellow officers had put Jamal through. Hearing a policeman take responsibility for his life getting derailed really moved Jamal. He agreed to come into Link’s office.

When Jamal got there, Link introduced him to Erhan Kilic, one of the first official mentors hired by the program. Kilic was a fellow Muslim who had also faced discrimination in Denmark as a child. But he had taken a very different path. He had decided to embrace Denmark as his country. He now had a wife and two daughters and a successful practice as a lawyer. Kilic relayed to Jamal the main message of the Aarhus program: If he chose to, Jamal could also find his place in Denmark.

This is what sets the Aarhus program apart. It didn’t use force to stop people from going to Syria but instead fought the roots of radicalization, Kruglanski says. “There are strong correlations between humiliation and the search for an extremist ideology,” he says. Organizations like ISIS take advantage of people who, because of racism or religious or political discrimination, have been pushed to the margins of society.

Link and Aarslev’s program showed people like Jamal that there was a place for them.

“Aarhus is the first, to my knowledge, to grapple with [extremism] based on sound social psychology evidence and principles,” Kruglanski says. What Link and Aarslev were doing was so unexpected that it created an opening for people to think differently about their ideology. “They expect to be treated harshly,” Kruglanski says. Instead, they got the opposite. “That kind of shock opens people’s minds to maybe they were wrong about their society that they perceived as their enemy. It opens a possible window into rethinking and re-evaluating.”

Starting in 2012, 34 people went from Aarhus to Syria. As far as the police know, six were killed and 10 are still over there. Of the 18 who came back home, all showed up in Aarslev and Link’s office, as did hundreds of other potential radicals in Aarhus — about 330 in total.

But the program is admired for another accomplishment: Since the initial exodus of young people, very few have left from Aarhus for Syria, even when traffic from the rest of Europe was spiking. Last year, in 2015, it was just one person.

The program is still precarious, though. One terrorist attack in Aarhus could undo much of the work that has been done. But the officers are willing to keep trying. As Link put it, there are still “strong forces” out there tempting young Muslims to leave their lives in the West and join the battle.

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‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Personally, I think it is a mix of the two elements – the individual and the structural:

What propels Islamist terrorism and attacks against France is more than an academic debate: The answer shapes policy toward blunting the threat.

So it is no inconsequential matter in a culture under attack, and one that so cherishes its intellectual debates, that France’s two leading scholars of radical Islam — former friends — have turned bitter rivals over their differing views.

“Madman,” “thug,” “illiterate,” “paranoid,” “ass,” “not a thinker” — these are just some of the choicer insults the two men have hurled at each other in a peculiarly personal quarrel with far larger stakes that has reverberated through the French news media and society for months.

The two distinguished academics, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, have long lists of books to their name, and years of field work in the Middle East, Central Asia and the troubled French suburbs. They are both eagerly consulted by the French news media and government officials.

But with France on edge and the continued target of terrorist attacks, their clashing analyses of the origins, development and future of jihadism have broken out of academic circles to present an important question for France and for all of Europe: Which man holds the key to understanding the phenomenon?

Mr. Kepel, 61, a professor at Sciences Po, the prestigious political science institute, finds much of the answer inside France — in its suburbs and their dysfunctional sociology — and in the role of Islam, angering many on the left.

Mr. Roy, 66, who as a bearded young man roamed Afghanistan with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, places greater emphasis on individual behavior and psychology in a jihadism he considers strictly marginal to Islam.

Mr. Kepel sees individuals as cogs in a system — part of a classically French, structuralist tradition that minimizes the role of individual human agency.

Mr. Roy, on the other hand, sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty.

The terrorists who have carried out recent attacks were mostly marginalized young men and petty criminals, he says, adding that they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence.

“They haven’t had a militant past,” Mr. Roy said of many of these terrorists, in a telephone interview. The problem they represent, he says, is the “Islamicization of radicalism.”

It is a signature phrase that enrages Mr. Kepel, who leans toward its opposite: the radicalization of Islam.

“That ignoramus,” Mr. Kepel grumbled in an interview this month in his book-lined office, offering some choice gibes about his onetime friend’s lack of Arabic.

Mr. Kepel testified for an influential 2015 parliamentary report, wrote a best seller on terrorism after the attacks in Paris in November, and has been omnipresent in television and radio studios.

“At the ministry, they tell me, ‘I saw Kepel yesterday,’ ” said Mr. Roy, himself a favorite of the country’s dominant left-leaning news media. His arguments, for the moment at least, appear to be winning in government circles.

As the jockeying has intensified in official circles, so has the falling-out between the old friends.

Today they cannot stand each other, and, with the passion that typifies intellectual fights in a country where nothing short of war is more serious, they contemptuously dismiss each other’s views.

“The King Is Naked,” read the headline on Mr. Kepel’s attack on Mr. Roy this spring in the newspaper Libération, in a play on the French meaning of Mr. Roy’s name.

In turn, while acknowledging a long and now broken friendship, Mr. Roy today offers his own less-than-friendly critique of Mr. Kepel as a kind of cloistered intellectual.

 “We were friends for 20 years,” Mr. Roy said in the interview. “I traveled with him in Istanbul. But I was very struck by his incapacity to talk to anybody.”

“He’s sincere the way a madman is,” he added. “He’s not a thinker. He’s not a philosopher.”

The French debate has echoes of Republican criticism in the United States of President Obama for his reluctance to use the word Islam in connection with terrorism.

But as is so often the case in contemporary France, the heart of the dispute here is a disagreement about the country’s relationship with Islam.

Mr. Roy sees a Muslim population that is relatively well-integrated.

But for Mr. Kepel, the murderous jihadism that struck France in 2015 is the expression of a slow-burning Islamist radicalization that took shape over decades because of a failure of integration.

Source: ‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

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I worked in the CIA under Bush. Obama is right to not say “radical Islam.” – Vox

2016/06/30 Leave a comment

Reprinted in its entirety:

The recent verbal attacks by the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his supporters on President Barack Obama for avoiding the phrase “radical Islam” in his public pronouncements are simplistic, racially inflammatory — and flatly misinformed.

Settling upon accurate and strategically nuanced terms to describe the post-9/11 enemy is not the product of “political correctness” (contra Trump) or a failure to understand the enemy (contra a much-discussed Atlantic cover story). Nor are objections to using overly broad terms like “Islamic radicalism” limited to Democrats. The Bush administration understood the power of words, too. It concluded that distinctions that may seem small to Christian-American ears make a big difference to the mainstream Muslims we need on our side.

When I [Emile Nakhleh] directed the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the CIA in the early 2000s, I frequently interacted with senior Bush administration policymakers about how to engage Muslim communities and, when doing so, which words and phrases to use to best describe the radical ideology preached by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Always, the aim was to distinguish between radicals and extremists and the vast majority of mainstream Muslims, and to make sure the latter understood that we were not lumping them in with the former.

Like the Obama administration, the Bush administration correctly judged that the term “radical Islam” was divisive and adversarial, and would alienate the very people we wanted to communicate with.

Trump and those who echo his views must realize there is no such thing as one Islamic world or one Islamic ideology — or even one form of radicalism in the Muslim world. Many diverse ideological narratives characterize Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries and the 1.6 billion Muslims across the globe. To paint them all with the same broad brush of radicalism and extremism is absurd, dangerous, and politically self-serving.

Trump and those who share his views on this question may truly believe, as they insist when pressed, that “Islamic radicalism” describes only a subset of Muslims. But to Muslims, or for anyone familiar with the many strands of Islam, the phrase connotes a direct link between the mainstream of the Muslim faith and the violent acts of a few. What’s more, Trump appears to be recklessly pandering to the uninformed part of the American electorate that does believe in such a connection between the mainstream and the fringe.

Like the Obama administration, the Bush administration knew words matter

The project of choosing words carefully must begin with knowledge. Al-Qaeda, and more recently ISIS, have mostly drawn on the radical Sunni Wahhabi-Salafi ideology, which primarily emanates from Saudi Arabia. How to describe that narrow ideology to a broader audience was the focus of many conversations and briefings I attended after 9/11.

Many in the West, including some senior policymakers, have had only a scant knowledge of this type of ideology, which has wreaked deadly violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I recall a conversation I had with a senior policymaker in which he asked me to explain “Wahhabism.” Since he had very limited time, I told him, “Wahhabists are akin to Southern Baptists.” That is: They read the holy text literally and are intolerant of other religious views. Wahhabists, like some Baptists, also abhor reasoning or “ijtihad” that would encourage them to question their religious brand. (Further complicating matters, Saudi Arabian officials, who generally embrace Wahhabi Salafism, describe those who use this ideology to justify their attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states as “deviants” from the faith.)

The roots of this radicalism go back to the Hanbali School of Jurisprudence, one of the four Schools in Sunni Islam, dating to the ninth century. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Saudi theologian, adopted the teachings of the Hanbali School as the authentic teachings of Islam. This Saudi strain of Islam has been further radicalized by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Sunni terrorist groups. The other three, generally more liberal, schools are the Shafi’i, the Maliki, and the Hanafi — also named after their founders in the eighth and ninth centuries. Adherents of these more tolerant schools live across the wider Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, from Turkey to South Asia.

Any terminology that the commander in chief of the United States settles on ought to reflect that we are speaking of Sunni-based radicalism — a strain that takes a particularly intolerant, exclusive, narrow-minded view of Islam and its relations with other Muslims and the non-Muslim world.

But there are at least two reasons why speaking of Wahhabism, while accurate, won’t fly in most public pronouncements: The word means little to the US domestic audience, and it could alienate Saudi Arabia, a complicated partner (to say the least) in anti-terror efforts. This is the one area in which the charge of “political correctness” carries some weight (although “political realism” may be a more reasonable way of describing the phenomenon).

Beyond ruling out “radical Islam” as overly broad, policymakers and advisors under both the Bush and Obama administrations have been careful not to accept the characterizations that violent extremists give to themselves, which inflate their role within their faith. That is why we don’t call them “jihadists” or, more obviously, “martyrs.”

The decision to avoid “radical Islam” is a strategic one

In short, both the Bush and Obama administration officials have refrained from using “Islamic radicalism” and its variants not because of “political correctness” but because of their nuanced knowledge of the diversity of Islamic ideologies. The term doesn’t enhance anyone’s knowledge of the perpetrators of terrorism or of the societies that spawn them, and it might hurt us in the global war of ideas. Policymakers refer to members of al-Qaeda and ISIS as “hijackers” of their faith in order to signal their support for mainstream Islamic leaders in an alliance against minor radical offshoots, not because they are unaware that some members of al-Qaeda and ISIS are theologically “sophisticated” (or “very Islamic,” as the Atlantic provocatively put it).

As our interest in Saudi Arabia’s oil wanes, some expect future administrations to take a tougher approach toward Saudi Arabia on the question of radical religious ideology. We may yet begin to hear talk of Wahhabi Salafism from a future White House.

But more likely, the next administration — I expect it will be the Clinton administration — will continue the policy the Bush administration began of referring to terrorists by the names of their organizations: Hezbollah, Ahl al-Bayt, the (Iranian) Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, ISIS, and so on.

Using such terms avoids demonizing majorities of Sunni Muslims who just want to follow their faith, devoid of politics or activism. Simple terms like “terrorists,” “killers,” and “criminals” are also quite effective.

Source: I worked in the CIA under Bush. Obama is right to not say “radical Islam.” – Vox

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Quebec: Contre la radicalisation, le «vivre ensemble»

2016/06/29 Leave a comment

Quebec’s first series of projects to reduce radicalization:

Pour lutter contre la radicalisation menant à la violence, le gouvernement Couillard vient de donner le feu vert à cinq projets qui cherchent à développer l’esprit critique des étudiants du secondaire et du collégial.

Ces projets visent à canaliser les idées radicales des jeunes avant leur éventuelle conversion à la violence, a expliqué la ministre de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion, Kathleen Weil, lundi à Montréal. Ces initiatives se veulent complémentaires au resserrement de la surveillance policière et à d’autres mesures mises de l’avant depuis qu’une douzaine de jeunes Québécois ont fui ou tenté de fuir en Syrie pour combattre les « ennemis d’Allah », au cours des derniers mois.

« Ces mesures visent à bâtir une société inclusive, à développer l’esprit critique des jeunes. On n’est pas en train de vous dire que les jeunes qui vont participer à ces projets de dialogue sont à risque de se radicaliser », a expliqué le ministre Weil.

Le mot d’ordre commun aux cinq projets est la promotion du « vivre ensemble », une expression citée abondamment par le maire de Montréal, Denis Coderre. Ils visent aussi à développer l’estime de soi et l’appartenance au Québec des étudiants.

Le théâtre Parminou montera une pièce faite par et pour des élèves de troisième, quatrième et cinquième secondaire. Ces jeunes pourront exprimer dans leurs mots leurs aspirations et leurs craintes. Une quinzaine de représentations sont prévues sur une période de deux ans.

L’Institut du Nouveau Monde organisera des ateliers et des tables rondes sur la participation citoyenne dans les cégeps de 15 régions du Québec.

L’Institut Pacifique organisera des ateliers et un forum dans trois écoles secondaires des arrondissements de Montréal-Nord et de Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc Extension, qui sont parmi les plus multiethniques de Montréal.

L’organisme Ensemble pour le respect de la diversité aidera des jeunes du secondaire à s’engager dans des projets mobilisateurs qui auront un effet d’entraînement pour les autres élèves.

Équitas organisera des activités pour les jeunes de Saint-Laurent et d’Ahuntsic-Cartierville, avec l’aide de mentors issus des communautés culturelles.

Éducation à la démocratie

Ces projets sont pertinents dans le contexte de l’offensive plus vaste que mène le gouvernement contre la radicalisation, estime Frédéric Dejean, chercheur à l’Institut de recherche sur l’intégration professionnelle des immigrants, affilié au Collège de Maisonneuve. Il a dirigé un rapport sur la radicalisation d’une dizaine d’étudiants du Collège, rendu public le mois dernier. Le chercheur a justement recommandé une forme d’éducation à la vie civique pour les étudiants.

« Le problème, ce n’est pas d’avoir des idées radicales. On est toujours le radical de quelqu’un d’autre. Mais à cet âge, entre 14 et 19 ans, il faut aider les jeunes à construire leur propre pensée. Ce n’est pas inné d’apprendre à écouter les autres, apprendre à exprimer et changer son opinion, apprendre à accepter le désaccord », dit-il en entrevue.

Source: Contre la radicalisation, le «vivre ensemble» | Le Devoir

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ICYMI: The Obama Doctrine: What the President Actually Thinks About Radical Islam – The Atlantic

2016/06/21 Leave a comment

Another good piece by Jeffrey Goldberg:

The fundamental difference between Obama and Trump on issues related to Islamist extremism (apart from the obvious, such as that, unlike Trump, Obama a) has killed Islamist terrorists; b) regularly studies the problem and allows himself to be briefed by serious people about the problem; and c) is not racist or temperamentally unsuitable for national leadership) is that Trump apparently believes that two civilizations are in conflict. Obama believes that the clash is taking place within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists.

In one conversation, parts of which I’ve previously recounted, Obama talked about the decades-long confrontation between the U.S. and communism, and compared it to the current crisis. “You have some on the Republican side who will insist that what we need is the same moral clarity with respect to radical Islam” that Ronald Reagan had with communism, he said. “Except, of course, communism was not embedded in a whole bunch of cultures, communism wasn’t a millennium-old religion that was embraced by a whole host of good, decent, hard-working people who are our allies. Communism for the most part was a foreign, abstract ideology that had been adopted by some nationalist figures, or those who were concerned about poverty and inequality in their countries but wasn’t organic to these cultures.”

He went on to say, “Establishing some moral clarity about what communism was and wasn’t, and being able to say to the people of Latin America or the people of Eastern Europe, ‘There’s a better way for you to achieve your goals,’ that was something that could be useful to do.” But, he said, “to analogize it to one of the world’s foremost religions that is the center of people’s lives all around the world, and to potentially paint that as a broad brush, isn’t providing moral clarity. What it’s doing is alienating a whole host of people who we need to work with us in order to succeed.”

Does Obama go too far in avoiding the terms “radical Islam” or “violent Islam”? This question represents a not-unreasonable basis for an interesting debate. However, given the realities of the battlefield—that most of the fighting against ISIS is done by Muslim-majority states, and Muslim organizations, and that the leaders of these entities would rather not see the U.S. overgeneralize its description of the fight—then it seems to me, at least, that Obama’s semantic prudence is justifiable.

Donald Trump, I believe, is not capable of making the sort of analysis Obama has made about the splits within Islam. Nor has refuted Obama’s analysis in a cogent fashion. But this is not Trump’s main sin; his main sin is to refuse to listen to experts on counterterrorism, including experts in the U.S. military and intelligence community, who argue that he is helping ISIS by demonizing Muslims. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph of Islamic State, argues that there is no place in the West for a devout Muslim. Donald Trump often gives the impression that he shares this view, and that he is advancing the cause of ISIS, by endorsing its premise that the struggle in which it is engaged is, in fact, civilizational.

None of this is meant to be an argument that Obama does enough, or does enough of the right things, in the struggle against ISIS. I could (and will!) write a critique of the administration’s tactical approach, particularly as it relates to Syria. And Obama could bring more emotional intelligence to bear on this problem: He is eloquent in condemning the fearmongers, but he sometimes fails to acknowledge the legitimate fears of non-racist, non-paranoid Americans who would prefer not to be killed by terrorists acting in the name of Islam. The United States is under intermittent attack from an organization called the Islamic State, which, as Graeme Wood has pointed out in this magazine, represents one, extreme, branch of Islam. There is no point in trying to convince Americans that what is happening is not happening. But neither is there a point in encouraging hysteria and division.

Privately, Obama expresses the deepest loathing for ISIS and other radical Islamist groups. ISIS, he has noted, stands for—quite literally—everything he opposes. Nevertheless, his approach to the challenge of Islamist terrorism is sometimes emotionally unsatisfying; it is sometimes insufficient to the challenge; and he himself is sometimes too fatalistic about the possibility of change in the Middle East.

Donald Trump’s approach, on the other hand, is simply catastrophic.

Source: The Obama Doctrine: What the President Actually Thinks About Radical Islam – The Atlantic

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The big problem with calling it ‘radical Islam’: McWhorter – CNN.com

2016/06/16 Leave a comment

Great piece by John McWhorter of Columbia on the semantics of what to call and not to call, terrorism and extremism carried out by Muslims:
Still, the right claims the two are ignoring the fact that a disproportionate number of men who perpetrate acts such as Mateen’s are Muslims infuriated at the West.
They assert further that as long as we say “radical Islam” rather than “Islam” alone, we are suitably specifying that we don’t hate Muslims. But that isn’t how it would appear to Muslims themselves, and — if we break the language down to its structure and meaning — they’re right.
In a sentence such as “We must eradicate radical Islam,” the object of the verb eradicate is technically “radical Islam,” yes, but the core object, the heart of the expression “radical Islam,” is “Islam.” Radical Islam is a kind of Islam. The object of the eradication in the sentence is “Islam,” modified — not redefined into something else — by “radical.”
That truth affects how one processes such a sentence. The adjective can come off as a kind of decoration — it feels parenthetical, even when talking about something innocuous. Take the sentence, “I’m thinking about one of those juicy steaks.” We process the speaker mainly as thinking about steak, not steaks with the particular quality of being juicy.
We must take heed of such qualities of language, especially when the object in question is already loaded with pungent associations. Perhaps if Islam were something most of us had little reason to think about, then qualifying its name with an adjective could qualify as neutral expression. “Restorationist Zoroastrianism” — OK, maybe.
But this is the real world. Let’s face it: These days, most of us need reminding that Islam is a religion of peace. Human beings generalize; we harbor associations. In such a climate, it’s particularly easy to interpret “radical Islam” as a summation of Islam in general. It’s how many of us might guiltily hear it, and how many Muslims would process it. Certainly Islamist terrorists would: Of all the qualities one might attribute to them, subtlety of interpretation is not one of them.
Suppose someone decided to battle “radical Christianity”? Note that whatever justifications that person offered along the lines of “We don’t mean all Christians,” they’d sound a little thin. Note also that in modern American English, “radical” can mean not only “extreme,” but also, by extension, “genuine.” After all, the “radical” Islamist considers himself to be the “true” Muslim just as the “radical” feminist might consider herself more devoted to her cause than someone who would shirk that label. Meanwhile, with the pop-culture exclamation “Rad!” thrown into the mix, there’s an even finer line between its connotation “Amazing!” and the implication “That’s the way it should be!”
There actually is room for terminological compromise here. “Radical Islam” is an unhelpful term because it sounds too much like “Islam” and has been used so much that it practically sounds like “Islam” alone at this point. However, one could get the point across with something like “violent Islam” as some have tried. “Violent Islam” actually sounds like a subset of Islam rather than the thing itself, and “violent” has no alternate connotation of “authentic,” as “radical” does.
It’s important to stress, however, that semantics — used one way or another — will not change any terrorists’ minds. Omar Mateen did not shoot up the Pulse because people said “radical Islam” instead of “Islam.” Accounts of ordinary, seemingly secular Muslims mysteriously but implacably deciding to leave comfortable existences in Western Europe to join ISIS in Syria likewise make it plain that word choice will not win or lose this battle for us.
Rather, we must maintain the cognitive equipoise that refuses to revile members of a worldwide religion because of the actions of a small band of amoral true believers. In doing so, we are embodying a more enlightened worldview than ISIS and its sympathizers.
We must resist overgeneralization — a tendency hardwired into human nature — not because we think it would have restrained an Omar Mateen, but because it makes us better human beings, and possible models for future ones. Virtue, Aristotle called it. And not in the sense of stalwartly refusing to call someone a dirty name a la Dudley Do-Right, but in the sense of cultivating personal excellence simply because, in the end, it’s a perfect foundation for an existence, especially if as many people do it together as possible.
So, the indignant right-wing columnists who yearn for America to express a more direct, religiously inflected contempt for terrorists are missing the strength in what they misread as a sign of weakness. In saying we are battling “terrorists” rather than “radical Islam,” we reveal ourselves as better than the barbarians who wish to harm us.
The alternative that the right would prefer would be a nyah-nyah contest, what we might euphemistically call a competition in the distance one can cover via the act of urination. Make no mistake: I detest what people like Mateen do — the mere thought of that man this week, for example, nauseates me. Neither Sykes-Picot, nor American support for Israel, nor brown skin, nor any other historical or present-day factor justifies actions like his. But that’s why we must do better than they do, including in how we use language. I’m glad that many of us are.
And I, for one, am not against using language that allows us to refer to the painfully obvious fact that so many of these attacks stem from a perversion of the doctrine of a particular religion. Those who feel that the mere observation of this reality constitutes racism or incivility carry their own burden of justification here.
However, I highly suspect that the people who despise the President and Hillary Clinton for not saying “radical Islam” wouldn’t be quite satisfied with “violent Islam.” Why? Because it doesn’t sound like an insult, and that would reveal, again, what these detractors are really seeking — to win a competition, not to solve a problem. Like I said, we can — and must — do better than that.

Source: The big problem with calling it ‘radical Islam’ – CNN.com

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

Making a mass murderer — the meaning of Orlando: Jebara

2016/06/16 Leave a comment

Good commentary by Imam Jebara of the Cordova Centre:

When I heard of the massacre in Orlando and learned something about the background of the gunman, I knew — before hearing any details — what the story was about. The young man evidently was struggling with a conflicted sense of identity. He was, apparently, gay himself. He felt ashamed of who he was and struggled to reconcile the conflicting — yet undiscussed — duplicity inherent in the ultraconservative religious culture of his family’s native Afghanistan.

His religious or political views may have had nothing to do with the tragedy; the professed vehement homophobia of his family’s culture most certainly did. When the father claimed that he was shocked by his son’s appalling act of violence, it was apparent to me that he — like too many other parents — had ignored how his son’s self-hatred had been the catalyst for his so-called “radicalization”.

It’s important to separate Islam, the faith, from the tribal systems that tend to be intertwined with it — tribal systems which consider their particular culture and habits to be indistinguishable from Islam itself. (It’s really not much different from the case of Americans affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan who consider their world-view and ideology as vital parts of their ‘Christian’ identity.)

I have witnessed several cases of young men coming from the same background as Mateen who had homosexual inclinations — young men who came from families that publically supported extremist groups, spewed anti-Western rhetoric online, in public and in the community, and supported extremist interpretations of Islam that embrace the execution of homosexuals, rampant misogyny and other self-destructive and violent forms of behaviour.

These families espoused these views because of the tensions created by the clash between their native cultures and their adopted one. Luckily for those young men, they learned to reconcile their religious identity with a candid assessment of their cultural identity, helping them divert themselves from the sort of mental and psychological breakdown that might have led them to violence.

Many cultural factors influence how we behave — and religion is interpreted as reflection of the culture in which it is observed, not the other way around. Most known extremists and terrorists are anything but spiritual and devout individuals. They tend to be broken people — empty shells with weak personalities and low self-esteem, carrying emotional baggage from childhood, from growing up in unbalanced families.

So what’s the solution? Rather than supporting generalizations against all Muslims, we should treat the various manifestations of violent extremism as we would any other mental health problem or crime. Steps should be taken to train and equip parents to recognize signs of mental illness, as well as the subtleties of unstable behaviour patterns, and to take the proper measures to have their child’s condition diagnosed and treated.

Fearmongering and victimization are counterproductive — they amount to sticking our heads in the sand regarding the effect of cultural pressures and alienation. Recognizing the influences of the various cultures from which we come can circumvent the development of more fringe psychotics and prevent future acts of heinous violence.

Source: Making a mass murderer — the meaning of Orlando

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with ,

Toronto 18 may have been shock for Canada, but it was not harbinger of a path to ruin: Gurski

2016/06/14 Leave a comment

Phil Gurski’s reflections on what we learned from the Toronto 18:

The event was a seminal one for me as a CSIS analyst and I’d like to reflect on what this meant then as well as what is means now. Much has happened in the intervening decade and much of that has been good in Canada. Firstly, the Toronto 18 investigation proved—or rather should have proven—to skeptical Canadians that terrorism was real and not just something that happened ‘”over there.” Truth be told, there were significant doubts about the real nature of the threat in June 2006 and whether this cell was that dangerous: many believed that CSIS and the RCMP had exaggerated the plot. I am happy to say that 10 years later most Canadians accept the fact that we have terrorists in our midst. This turnaround in public opinion may have had a lot to do with the attack on the National War Memorial and Parliament on Oct. 22, 2014, but in any event it is a step forward in our collective understanding and acceptance of the issue.

Secondly, the RCMP advised Muslim leaders of the impending takedown just before it took place to allow them to prepare their communities for the news. This was an outstanding decision at the time and the relationship between Canadian government officials and these communities has only gotten better since then (albeit with an unfortunate downturn at the end of the Harper years). All this shows that we do things differently in Canada and I know that many countries have sought our input as they seek to learn from our model. Are we perfect? No, but we are in a much better position than most Western countries on this issue.

Thirdly, the case demonstrated clearly that a group of Canadian Muslims can radicalize to violence entirely at home with no significant foreign input. This was not an al-Qaeda-led or—directed plot (Islamic State did not exist back then) but rather a terrorist act planned based on what is known as the al-Qaeda (or single) narrative—the notion that the West was at war with Islam and that “true” Muslims (self-defined) had to fight to defend the faith. The Toronto 18 sought to punish Canada and Canadians for their decision to send soldiers to Afghanistan back in 2001. In an era where we obsess about IS and their involvement in organizing attacks abroad, it is important to remember that most plots in the West are homegrown.

Fourthly, the case showed that CSIS and the RCMP could work hand in glove to successfully stop a terrorist act from occurring. The investigation started with CSIS and was handed over to the Mounties when it was clear a criminal act was being planned. CSIS sources became RCMP agents (not always an easy thing to do) more or less seamlessly and a serious terrorist attack was averted. There is little doubt that the CSIS-RCMP relationship has had its ups and downs but the two do work together well and Canadians are safer as a result.

Lastly, despite more foiled plots and two successful ones in the interim, Canada remains in a good position when it comes to homegrown terrorism. We are not in the same league as France or Belgium or the U.K., or even the U.S. Our government has done a much better job at understanding the threat and putting measures into place, both soft and hard, to deal with it. We had the five-year $10-million Kanishka research project which, although many thought it under-delivered (I am among that group), set the stage for a more robust and more mature academic environment to look at terrorism where none existed before. Public Safety Canada’s Citizen Engagement branch developed a community outreach program that was the envy of all our allies and the creation of the new Office of the Coordinator for Counter Radicalization and Community Outreach will hopefully enhance this effort. There is more work to be done but these are all enviable achievements.

The Toronto 18 may have been a shock to the system for Canada, but it was not the harbinger of a path to ruin. We are still a relatively safe country and while we must remain vigilant and ensure that our security and law enforcement agencies enjoy the necessary resourcing and public trust, we will likely remain so.

Source: Toronto 18 may have been shock for Canada, but it was not harbinger of a path to ruin |

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Federal study disputes claim diaspora communities breed extremists

2016/06/06 Leave a comment

The latest study showing that diaspora communities largely play an integrating role, similar to the Mosaic Institute study on imported conflicts (see Unpacking conflict: “We don’t import conflict. But we do import trauma.”):

Canada’s immigrant communities are not breeding grounds for terrorists, as some would argue, but should be enlisted to reduce any violent radicalization in their midst, says a newly released report.

The research, ordered by the Harper government in 2014, appears to repudiate Conservative measures that alienated Muslim communities in the months before last year’s election.

The authors examined four diaspora communities in Canada — Afghan, Somali, Syrian and Tamil — and found them to be willing allies for rooting out extremism among their often young and isolated members.

“More resilient diaspora communities represent the best line of defence against violent extremism,” says the March 30 report, obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act.

“Diasporas are not a threat, as some of the mainstream discourse on counterterrorism has often implied, but rather Canada’s most valued asset in the fight against terrorism.”

The authors found a mutual distrust between these communities and security agencies, driven partly by news media and academics who have “framed diaspora communities as partly complicit in terrorist activity, a source of threat for host countries like Canada.”

“It has fostered suspicion and even discrimination against certain diaspora groups.”

The research says security agencies such as the RCMP and CSIS need to build trust, especially among Muslim groups in Canada who can often alert police to potential terror activity.

“Dispelling Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination should be a centrepiece of any community engagement strategy surrounding anti-radicalization, as it has fuelled distrust of the state and wider Canadian society in Muslim diaspora communities.”

Helps restore balance

The $180,000 study for Public Safety Canada was carried out over a year by the Kitchener, Ont.-based Security Governance Group, a private consultant firm.

Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Phil Gurski, a specialist in homegrown radicalization, applauded the findings, saying they can help restore the balance between “hard security” — surveillance, arrests and charges — and “soft security,” or building trust within ethnic communities.

“We had the balance fairly good a couple of years ago, and then some unfortunate things happened towards the end of the Harper government that kind of maligned the trust we had built with communities and put us back a few steps,” Gurski said in an interview.

Among those setbacks was the government’s removal of Hussein Hamdani in April 2015 from the Cross Cultural Roundtable on National Security, after a Quebec blogger alleged Hamdani harboured terrorist sympathies.

The removal resulting from “baseless allegations” was “the biggest blow to the government’s relationship with the Muslim community,” said Gurski, who was Hamdani’s colleague and friend. “It had a chilling effect.”

The incident was followed by last summer’s niqab controversy, in which the Harper government pressed to have Muslim women remove their face covering at citizenship ceremonies, and the Oct. 2 announcement by Conservatives Kellie Leitch and Chris Alexander of a “barbaric cultural practices tip line,” allowing citizens to call RCMP anonymously with allegations about their neighbours.

Not too late

Gurski, who was a CSIS officer from 2001 to 2013 and then with Public Safety until retirement last year, said it’s not too late to rebuild trust.

“The communities are willing to play ball again, despite the disappointments they had toward the end of the Harper government,” he said.

Sara Thompson, who teaches criminology at Toronto’s Ryerson University, said the report’s findings parallel her own work with the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society.

“Our findings are remarkably consistent: on the whole the communities under examination should not be viewed as ‘suspect’ but rather as important allies in efforts to prevent radicalization,” she said.

“Community-based tripwires are often activated via a concept known as ‘leakage’ — the tendency among radicalized individuals to broadcast their views and intentions to commit violent acts in advance, typically to friends, family, acquaintances and/or community members.”

Source: Federal study disputes claim diaspora communities breed extremists – Politics – CBC News

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Sikh nationalist movement attempts to shed violent past

2016/06/06 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Advocates for an independent Sikh homeland say they’re looking to the future and pushing for a referendum in India within four years, but the Khalistan movement has been hit by a familiar controversy – an alleged link to extremist violence.

Hardeep Nijjar, a B.C. man who has collected signatures to have anti-Sikh violence in India in the 1980s recognized as genocide, was accused in an Indian newspaper report this week of running a “terror camp” east of Vancouver. Mr. Nijjar was also alleged to be the operational head of a group known as the Khalistan Terror Force and said to be linked to a 2007 attack on a cinema that killed six people. He denied wrongdoing and sent a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which he said he has never supported violence.

Sikhs for Justice, a non-profit organization with headquarters in Toronto and New York for which Mr. Nijjar has volunteered, rushed to his defence and accused the Indian government of trying to discredit the push for Sikh self-determination.

The incident highlighted the trouble the Khalistan movement has had shedding its violent reputation, particularly in Canada.

Khalistan proponents were linked to extremist violence in the 1980s, most notably the Air India bombings, which killed 329 people on an airliner and two baggage handlers in Tokyo in 1985. During the subsequent trial, the Crown alleged the bombings were carried out in response to the Indian government’s raid on the Golden Temple, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, a year earlier.

Since the report involving Mr. Nijjar surfaced, the RCMP has said little about his case specifically, or about the Khalistan movement generally. But a former analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said the movement appears to have quieted down in recent years and Canadian law-enforcement agencies have shifted resources elsewhere, such as Islamist extremism.

When asked if the Khalistan movement in Canada will ever be able to move beyond its violent past, Jatinder Grewal, the director of international policy for Sikhs for Justice, said he believes so.

“This idea that India can frame this dialogue solely in the aspects of violence and terrorism is false,” Mr. Grewal, who lives in Toronto, said in an interview.

“The fact is this is a peaceful movement. We just want to hold a referendum.”

Mr. Grewal said Sikhs for Justice, which was founded in 2007, is aiming for a referendum to be held in 2020. He said his organization would like the vote to be open to residents in the northern state of Punjab – which has a Sikh majority and would become an independent state. Mr. Grewal said those who have origins in the state but have since moved elsewhere should also be able to vote.

…Phil Gurski, who worked as a strategic analyst in Canadian intelligence for more than 30 years, including 15 years with CSIS, said it’s unclear how big of a security threat the movement is at this point.

Mr. Gurski, who left CSIS in 2013 and is now the president of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting, said there are undoubtedly fewer law-enforcement resources dedicated to Sikh extremism today than in the past.

“You put your resources where the greatest threat lies and as of today that threat lies with Islamist extremism,” he said in an interview. “It’s not rocket science that when you’re forced to deploy your resources in one direction, you’ve got to take them from somewhere else.”

Shinder Purewal, a political-science professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, said in an interview earlier this week that while the Khalistan movement in Canada has been linked to violence in the past, there have not been such incidents of late.

Source: Sikh nationalist movement attempts to shed violent past – The Globe and Mail

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