How afraid should we be of Islamic State? 

Good piece by Mitch Potter in the Star regarding the over-blown hyping of the  threat and risks of ISIS:

Yet even here, some researchers doubt those risks match up with the warnings, given that the number of Canadians known to have joined ISIS is barely enough to mount a decent hockey game.

“The Islamic State is a threat to Canada — but it is wildly overblown,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow who co-directs a study of Canadian foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo.

“By our count, there are about 60 Canadians who went to fight, of which 15 are already dead. And not all are with the Islamic State — some are fighting for the Kurds, some are fighting for the Free Syrian Army, for nationalist reasons, not as global jihadists who would present a threat to Canada.”

A similar low-threat assessment for Europe emerged this week in a research paper for Holland’s Clingendael Institute of International Relations, which concluded that, “although concerns have run high following the recent attacks in Paris, the threat of violence carried out by foreign fighters to Europe, while present, is largely overstated.”

Co-author Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, goes further in his assessment, emphasizing that while Europe must provide “ongoing resources to security and intelligence services to keep the threat low,” it should also “avoid reactive policies such as systematic prosecution and imprisonment of returnees.

“Some returnees must be imprisoned immediately and others monitored, but governments should also channel resources towards community-led programs emphasizing the rehabilitation and reintegration of returned fighters,” Byman writes.

In the Canadian context, it is difficult to imagine the general public embracing such a nuanced approach when the government itself, with more than a little help from the media, is sounding the direst of warnings. But that too is addressed in the Clingendael recommendations, which urge governments to “take care not to overstate the threat of foreign fighters and take steps to reassure citizens that the risk is real but limited.”

To the University of Waterloo’s Amarasingam, that’s the missing piece in Ottawa’s approach to the problem: we get all the warnings, minus the reassurance.

“I understand what the government and CSIS and the RCMP are trying to do,” says Amarasingam. “They want to ensure that in the unlikely event that Canada ever experiences an attack like 9/11, it won’t tear apart the fabric of our society and have us turn on each other.

“They want to plant the seed of possibility in our consciousness to prepare us. But when you raise those warnings — when you say ‘We’re not a multicultural haven immune from this; we are at risk’ — you also need to temper that message and provide the context that the risk of that kind of attack on the streets of Toronto is actually quite low.

“That’s a key piece that Canadians aren’t getting. And the consequence is that the fear is ramped up out of proportion to the actual risk.”

via How afraid should we be of Islamic State? | Toronto Star.