Experts say Liberal counter-radicalization office should bridge, not drive, regional efforts

2015/11/04 Leave a comment

Not sure it is an either/or choice, some mix of the two approaches may be best:

The challenges, say security and radicalization experts, will lie in defining exactly how the office would work with regional actors: namely, whether it will act as a bridge or a driver.

“Is this going to be driven top-down by government or will it be government supporting more grassroots initiatives?” asked Michael Zekulin, a terrorism researcher at the University of Calgary. “I think most people would agree that it cannot be government-driven because part of the narrative is that government is part of the problem.”

During committee hearings on C-51, the Conservatives’ controversial anti-terrorism legislation, the critique given most often by terrorism researchers was that the bill ignored the need to nip radicalization in the bud, before individuals become inspired to commit violence.

Yet nothing in the legislation provided any kind of a plan for doing that.

The RCMP also promised to launch their own $3.1.-million program — initially called the Countering Violent Extremism Program but later changed to the Terrorism Prevention Program — which then-Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney admitted had no designated timeline and relies on “leveraging existing resources the RCMP already has in place, including frontline police officers, Integrated National Security Enforcement Team members and outreach coordinators.”

At this point, there are few details available about what the Liberals would plan to do differently or how a national coordinator would work with existing programs already being implemented by regional bodies.

There are various initiatives being launched by police agencies and local governments across Canada, said Lorne Dawson, co-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society.

In September, the City of Montreal was the only Canadian city out of 23 from across the globe that signed on to the Strong Cities Network, a forum for leaders to share best practices and community-based approaches for tackling violent extremism, while the Edmonton and Ottawa police departments are rumoured to be planning their own counter-extremism initiatives.

The York Regional Police are also in the process of hiring a “Counter Violent Extremism Subject Matter Expert” and just two months ago the Calgary Police Service launched ReDirect, which aims to prevent youth from becoming radicalized after several high-profile instances of local youth leaving the country to join ISIS.

One of those young men was Damian Clairmont, who died in January 2014 after going to Syria to fight with ISIS.

His mother, Christianne Boudreau, became an active proponent for stronger initiatives to prevent youth from becoming radicalized and in addition to launching her own family counselling network, Hayat Canada, also helped launch the the Extreme Dialogue video campaign earlier this year.

Boudreau says it’s essential to have someone who can coordinate efforts nationally and help integrate global best practices into domestic, community-based approaches. But she cautions that any coordinator will face the added challenge of having to earn the trust of organizations who may be skeptical of working with the government.

“I think the biggest difficulty is the diversity of the various organizations and helping them connect — there’s inter-faith, there’s the authorities and everybody else involved, and right now [there’s] the trust factor with the authorities, with the government,” she said, noting that any national coordinator should also be prepared to work with international partners as well as domestic ones to learn and adapt best practices.

“It’s integral to help bring the groups together to help cross those barriers, to help foster the diversity that’s there and help everybody get along.”

Experts say Liberal counter-radicalization office should bridge, not drive, regional efforts

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New anti-terror program for schools adds ‘radicalization’ to three Rs

2015/02/21 Leave a comment

Sounds like a better approach, given more personal, than some of the government media efforts:

The video series, which received $332,500 in funding, focuses on the tears and unanswered questions of Calgary’s Christianne Boudreau after her 22-year-old son, Damian Clairmont, was killed last year fighting in Syria’s civil war. It also features the regrets and emotional scars of Daniel Gallant, a former white supremacist who bounced around between British Columbia and Alberta but is now based in Kamloops, B.C.

Gallant, who recounts instigating random fights up to nine times a day as a way to manage the rage of childhood abuse, said the power of the videos is in their ability to show the effects of an extremist lifestyle on families, friends and victims.

There are plenty of similarities between the far-right hate groups and those being radicalized by religion, but the most important, he said, is that both are an extreme reaction to an individual’s social isolation.

“In the past I had conscious thoughts in the forefront of my mind that all I needed was connection with people,” Gallant said. “That’s all I wanted and when I wasn’t able to attain that . . . that’s when my violence progressed. I remember sitting on the streets and having thoughts about that.”

Boudreau’s plight may be more familiar to Canadians because of her activism and media visibility in the year since she learned of Clairmont’s death. She has spoken of the need to prevent young, radicalized Canadians like her son from leaving the country and also set up a de-radicalization program to support those efforts.

Despite her professional exterior, it is still painful to watch her sob and sniffle when she asks her dead son how she is supposed to find peace knowing of the violence that filled the final days of his young life and waits for answers she knows will never come.

“What did all this have to do with God?” she asks in the video.

Other Canadian families are still struggling because of children who are currently in Syria or Iraq, or those who are trying to get there, Boudreau said. That hasn’t changed since last October’s storming of Parliament Hill or the hit-and-run that killed a Canadian soldier in the Quebec town of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. In the latter case, Martin Couture-Rouleau, the author of the terror attack, had had his passport revoked after trying to travel to Syria last summer.

“Kids are still leaving on a regular basis. I don’t think people want to admit it or realize it but it’s still happening. Even with all the knowledge that’s out there it’s still happening and we’re still being blindsided,” Boudreau said in an interview.

New anti-terror program for schools adds ‘radicalization’ to three Rs | Toronto Star.

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Mother of fallen Canadian jihadi launches de-radicalization effort – Canada – CBC News

2014/09/10 2 Comments

Good grassroots initiative led by Christianne Boudreau, mother of Damian Clairmont, and Dominique Bons, mother of Nicholas and Jean-Daniel Bons, all of whom were Western converts and were killed while fighting in Syria.

No universal strategy but the more grassroots and community level “soft” initiatives, the better, to complement the “hard” security measures. Sheema Khan also advocates a strong role for mothers (Partner with Muslims to root out extremism).

And for the mothers themselves, likely part of the grieving and healing process regarding their sons:

After sitting for hours and sharing lovingly built photo albums of their sons as little boys, parsing their lives and deaths and constantly replaying the questions about signs they saw or missed, they got to work.

Canadian-born Muslim convert Damian Clairmont left Calgary in 2012 for Syria, where he was killed in during battle against a faction of the Free Syrian Army.

The pair decided to form an international mothers group, determined that there must be a way to intervene and stop the radicalization process before it’s too late. They are sharing best practices as they find them and are both poking at their respective governments to step up.

Boudreau has also set her sights on establishing the Canadian chapter of a German group called Hayat. That means “life” in Arabic, and its aim is to work with families to help de-radicalize young men and women.

Hayat is an offshoot of a German organization called “Exit,” which has had good success in deprogramming neo-Nazis; as if plucking them from a cult. Hayat adopts similar methodology and applies it to dealing with militant Islamists.

After meeting with its organizers in Berlin, Boudreau came away convinced that with the right funding and staff, a Hayat chapter could make a difference in Canada.

“Its a sense of reining them [radicals] back in so they are closer to the family again,” she said. “They work with them closely after theyve taken a step back and decided maybe this is not for me, and help them get reintegrated within the community, finding a job, so they focus on the normalities.”

Mother of fallen Canadian jihadi launches de-radicalization effort – Canada – CBC News.

Satyamoorthy Kabilan of the Conference Board has a somewhat naive view of government and social media and its potential to reduce radicalization:

Despite the risk of individual mistakes and the required change in mindset for bureaucracy, I would also argue that the risk of not being a core part of the conversation and simply remaining mute, is far more dangerous. The benefits simply outweigh the risks.

We have recently seen successful uses of social media by authorities in emergency situations such as the 2013 Calgary flood and the tragic shootings in Moncton. Organizations like the Toronto Police Service TPS have had policies in place for some time that allow members of the force to represent the organization on social media. TPS has also been very vocal in sharing experiences. Learning from these and continuing to build a social media presence can help combat the threat of violent extremism in the virtual world. We simply cannot afford to have the extremists leading the conversation on social media.

By quickly occupying the public space around social media before someone else does, we can prevent others from setting the agenda and grant ourselves the opportunity to tell our own story first.

Hard to imagine any federal government taking such risks, let alone the current one, given the need to control messaging. One thing for local issues like the Calgary flood, another for issues related to radicalization where government will be very risk averse.

Better at the community level where there is likely more credibility than government.

To beat terrorists online, let’s raise our social media game – The Globe and Mail.

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