By Sam Westrop
Thursday, September 03, 2020
Despite media attention currently being focused firmly
elsewhere, it is desperately important to remember that multiple
terrorist attacks by both Islamist and far-right fanatics have killed and
injured numerous Americans over the last year, and there is certainly no
shortage of other terrorist
plots in the works. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in March the
Trump administration quietly brought back
the Obama administration’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, three
years after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) effectively shut it down.
While an enormous amount of national media outrage
accompanied the initial closure of CVE, no media outlet seems to have noticed
that it has now been re-established, except for two Qatari regime-linked publications,
the Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera. Both outlets argue that the new program,
named Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, or TVTP, is identical to the
CVE program it has replaced. They are right. The only difference is a shiny new
name. And as with its predecessor, it is deeply flawed.
Trump’s TVTP, Obama’s CVE, and countless other programs
countering extremism across the globe all operate on a long series of faulty
premises. They operate without data or metrics for success. And they carefully
avoid facts that are patently uncomfortable.
In a new white paper from the Middle East Forum, “Rethinking
Counter-Extremism,” I investigate the fallacies peddled by the global CVE
industry and explain why they are so dangerous. The paper explains what government
should be doing instead, beyond law enforcement’s counter-terrorism work, to
counteract Islamist radicalization.
Extremists at the Helm
Currently, government efforts to prevent terrorism focus
on terrorists who have already embraced violence, and not on the extremists who
engender this violence and are busy radicalizing the next generation. In other
words, the government spends its time fighting the symptoms, and not the cause.
This is not an oversight; it is the CVE industry’s prescription. And the Trump
administration’s TVTP program, as with every other Western government’s CVE
program, appears committed to this ineffectual course of treatment.
One of the most interesting and damaging reasons for this
nonsensical approach is the conviction, peddled by CVE advocates around the
world, that there is no link between ideology and ideological violence. The
vast majority of the CVE industry rejects the common-sense “conveyor belt”
theory of radicalization, which — at its most simplistic — holds that those who
espouse radical beliefs are more likely to commit radical acts. It is true that
nonviolent extremists may not directly advocate violence. But they are
nonetheless a key part of the radicalization process because they teach a
worldview from which violence may emerge, and in which violence can always be
justified.
The CVE industry does not accept this. In one prominent
September 2016 report
funded by the European Union, its authors claim, while discussing Islamist
terror, that there is “no causal, predictive link between ideology and
violence,” advise against using the word “Islamism,” and warn against
“alienat[ing] potential allies, including Salafi and Wahhabi religious
orientations.” They even argue “non-violent Islamists” are “a vital asset in
the struggle against violent extremism.”
Who, then, are these non-violent Islamists who might
ostensibly be able to help us in the fight against, well . . . Islamism? Among
an array of proffered Islamists, the authors particularly recommend the work of
Tahir ul-Qadri, a prominent Pakistani cleric from the Barelvi sect, who
recommends that blasphemers should be “murdered and kicked like a dog into
hellfire.” In fact, Qadri introduced Pakistan’s current capital-punishment laws
for blasphemy, which are used to persecute (and kill) Pakistan’s minorities.
The 2016 report also endorses Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, a Syrian cleric who has
endorsed attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq. The CVE industry authors neglect
to mention these clerics’ well-known views.
Perhaps the inclusion of Qadri and Yaqoubi is not merely
an oversight. One of the report’s authors is Abbas Barzegar, who currently
serves as the director of research at the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), a prominent Islamist-founded civil-rights group named by federal
prosecutors in 2007 as an unindicted coconspirator in America’s largest
terror-finance case. Barzegar is an unabashed supporter of Jamil Al Amin, a
violent Islamist currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a black
police officer. And while Barzegar has condemned the West for not engaging with
“democratically elected Hamas,” the genocidal terrorist organization, he has
elsewhere attacked a Muslim student group for daring to engage in interfaith
dialogue with a branch of America’s largest Jewish student organization.
Although Islamist anti-Semites such as Barzegar and CAIR
claim to be also critical of the CVE industry, many have long been closely
involved in its development — carefully encouraging and exploiting CVE
academics’ delusion that Islamist violence has nothing to do with Islam or even
Islamism. There may be no actual internal discord at work here. It appears that
Islamist participants in CVE and Islamist critics of CVE often
work
in tandem, with a single radical network both enjoying the value of government
rewarding them with funds and legitimacy while also being seen by their own
supporters as opposing an ostensibly “Islamophobic” industry.
Nonfundamentalism
CVE industry academics have repeatedly embraced these
ideas unquestioningly. One widely cited report by the Brennan Center for
Justice, found on DHS’s own website, nonsensically argues that “extremist
beliefs do not cause terrorism.” The report does not bother to explain much
further, instead simply offering a few equally uninformative, two-bit quotes
from other CVE voices.
It all seems to boil down to this: Because there may be
other factors driving someone to terrorism; or because not all extremists
become terrorists; or because not all terrorists understand the extremist ideas
they are now fighting for — because of all this, we should reject the relevance
of extremist beliefs to terrorism. But this is nonsense. As inquiries by
European governments have concluded, and as simple common sense tells us,
extremist beliefs absolutely lead to terrorism. As British prime minister David
Cameron explained in 2015: “When you look in detail at the backgrounds of those
convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were first
influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists.”
To help avoid discussion of ideology, most CVE
publications carefully avoid mentioning Islam or Islamism at all — a policy
adopted by the Obama administration in its own rhetoric on the issue. One of
the few prominent CVE studies that does touch on Islamism, a study commissioned
by the federal government, states there is “no conveyor belt from [Islamist]
activism to terrorism.”
Outside the CVE industry, studies of the links between
Islamism and Islamist violence reach rather different conclusions. In 2017, the
Tony Blair Institute for Social Change published a study that found 77 percent
of a random sample of 113 British Islamist terrorists had been “associated with
non-violent Islamist groups and networks before turning to jihadism.”
There are additional internal inconsistencies. The CVE
industry applies all its dogma to other sorts of terrorist threats far less
often. Few CVE professionals claim that white-supremacist ideology does not
lead to white-supremacist violence. No one suggests partnering with a lawful
fascist movement to temper the threat of violent neo-Nazis. And no one suggests
the best way to challenge the growing number of far-right terrorists is to
improve the “resilience” of white communities.
Turning to Islam
While the CVE industry denies the link between ideology
and ideological violence, much of it operates on the confusing, wistful belief
that terrorism is an inexplicable aberration that can nonetheless be tackled
with better political or theological “messaging.” This is one of the CVE’s
industry’s most curious features. Despite denying the relevance of Islamism to
Islamist terror, much of the CVE industry is keen to treat the Islamic faith as
a fundamental part of the solution, focusing on issues such as “religious
literacy” and “theological counter narratives.” In doing so, this moves
attention away from Islamism and onto Islam itself, turning a clear-cut threat
of a totalitarian political ideology into a vague theological question — all
while trying to avoid mentioning Islam in the first place.
All this delusion suits lawful, nonviolent Islamists just
fine. Organizations tied to the Muslim Brotherhood (hardline sects such as the
Salafis and Deobandis and South Asian Islamist movements such as Jamaat-e-Islami
— all thoroughly active and organized across the United States) are happy to
provide the “theological counter-narratives” and “religious literacy” programs
that CVE asks of them, especially as it affords them credibility and distracts
attention away from their own extremism.
Recognizing Failure
In practice, all this delusion produces unsurprisingly
pathetic results. In Minnesota, for example, one CVE program backed previously
by federal monies allows violent extremists to have “completed” a deradicalization
program merely by taking part in the course. It came as little surprise when
one of its products went on to radicalize children at a local Islamic school.
Similar examples can be found around the world. In just
the last few years, Usman Khan murdered two people at an “offender
rehabilitation conference” in London, after completing two deradicalization
programs. Khairi Saadallah, who launched a deadly knife attack in Reading,
England, was “assessed” by the British CVE program and found to pose “no danger.”
As former Al-Qaeda operative Aimen Dean has noted, how
can we possibly believe anyone has been “deradicalized” if they haven’t “sung
like a canary and provided damaging intelligence on the networks that recruited
them”? And yet CVE programs require no such contributions from their subjects.
When the CVE industry’s self-reporting is disregarded,
and CVE programs are judged at least somewhat objectively, one study by the
British government found that 95 percent of government-funded programs were
“ineffective.” One of the cited reasons for such failure was that program
officials often refused to discuss the question of ideology.
CVE legitimizes Islamists as representatives of Western
Muslim communities, thus sidelining genuine moderates. CVE perpetuates
radicalization by ignoring or even rewarding the extremists that contribute to
the threat. CVE lets government boast of a careful, thoughtful effort,
independent of law enforcement, to preempt the threat of terrorism, despite
decades of identical programs and hundreds of millions of dollars achieving
almost nothing. CVE is an international, multi-million-dollar delusion, in
which Western governments, Wahhabi
Arab states, the European Union, the United Nations, and far too many
sociologists and other “soft science” academics have long been complicit.
We can only fight the dangers of extremism and
radicalization when we acknowledge that radicals, moderates, and the
considerable array of Muslim sects and movements in-between all actually exist.
By denying Islamism, CVE denies the diversity of Islamic thought. In doing so,
they deny moderates and reformists the ability to speak out, to gain back
control of their communities. CVE denies Muslims the chance to contribute to
the fight against the extremists who have hijacked their faith — some armed
with a Kalashnikov, others with a fiery sermon, and still others in a suit,
with an extensive D.C. address book and an invitation to yet another
taxpayer-funded CVE luncheon in their pocket.
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