It was about six years ago that I first realized I was a Muslim living in the West. My seventh grade class was embarking on the standard American pilgrimage to Disney World from the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I was among the last to pass through the metal detector. As I crossed the threshold, not having heard an alarm, I instinctively continued walking toward my peers. “Not so fast,” said a security officer standing a few feet away. He grabbed my arm and yanked me to the side, his other hand fastened firmly to his Taser. “You’re not done yet.”
Over the next 10 minutes I was questioned on everything from my birthday to my occupation (I was 12) to my plans for the summer, before being allowed to continue to the Magic Kingdom. The questions were straightforward, yet I was still utterly perplexed as to why I, a middle school student from West Bloomfield, Michigan had to answer them. After some cursory online research, I came to a simple conclusion: I was pulled aside because I was Muslim. At first, the supposed arbitrariness of my selection upset me; after all, I knew I wasn’t a terrorist. Nevertheless, as I grew older, read more of the news and sat through more questioning, anger gave way to understanding.
Western states are faced with the frightening and very real prospect of their own citizens becoming violent Islamists and jeopardizing national security. As of June 17, an estimated 2,000 Europeans were bearing arms for militant Islamist groups abroad. Yet, though this threat is widely recognized, even experienced counterterrorism officials struggle to find a solution. How can a government effectively combat extremism at home without making Muslim citizens feel arbitrarily targeted? This question has become even more pressing with the emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as a global terrorist network with perhaps the most effective recruitment campaign of any radical Islamist organization to date. An examination of the counterterrorism strategy enacted by the United Kingdom, which is largely similar to but more clearly outlined than those of other Western states, reveals that locally oriented campaigns against radicalism are the key to fighting homegrown extremism in Europe and the United States.
The English Dilemma
England is no stranger to seeing its own people join terrorist groups. The country estimated earlier this year that 400 Britons had aligned with ISIS, a number that has probably grown. In 2007 the United Kingdom’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office announced an overarching strategy named CONTEST to protect the nation against what it called a “severe” threat from international terrorism. The plan broadened the government’s power to engage in antiterrorism efforts both abroad and at home. The “Prevent” section of the initiative, which addresses the need to fight radicalization within the nation’s borders, has two major components: restricting the flow of individuals and material promoting extremism into Britain, and challenging the radical messages of those who nevertheless manage to infiltrate the country.
Both are important tasks, but the latter is inevitably more critical than the former. Terrorist organizations, which typically have extensive experience operating covertly, can often easily sneak affiliates past international borders despite immigration regulation. In an interview with the HPR, Bruce Hoffman, director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown, also pointed toward “ISIS’s well-orchestrated use of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other social media [platforms], which has made them much more effective in spreading their messages.” ISIS has been successful on this front even though many governments, including that of Great Britain, have designated special police forces to track and remove such web-based propaganda. Therefore, the focus for Western states must rest on countering, as opposed to seeking to eliminate, extremist ideology.
Addressing Inefficiency
Governments have two available avenues when it comes to pushing back against extremist ideology: they can either directly engage in ideological counterterrorism campaigns themselves or aid community organizations in initiating their own localized efforts. The United Kingdom, under CONTEST, has experimented with both approaches and has thoroughly investigated the relative efficiencies of each. Nevertheless, national officials have failed to recognize the superiority of the latter over the former.
The more direct approach to fighting radicalization involves the Channel program, a subset of CONTEST through which the national government corresponds with local law enforcement to identify those supposedly vulnerable to radicalization. Once these vulnerable individuals are found, neighborhood police, schools, health services, and other institutions establish support networks for them in order to prevent future extremism. Ultimately, however, both the processes of identification and of establishing support networks seem overly tedious.
The Dutch Institute for Safety, Security, and Crisis Management has isolated certain factors that can make an individual prone to Islamist radicalization: attendance at certain mosques, socioeconomic background, and spiritual upbringing, to name a few. Nevertheless, it is virtually impossible to distinguish between those who will actually turn toward extremism and those who will not. Hoffman explained why it is becoming increasingly difficult to pinpoint future radicals. “There is no one parallel between the people who are going to join these groups,” he said. “They aren’t from any one community. They aren’t from any specific demographic.” Thus many of the people that Channel identifies as “at risk” will probably never turn toward extremism, whether they received government support or not. In other words, focusing on such individuals would be a waste of taxpayer money.
Moreover, the strategy is by nature inefficient when it comes to accessing existing extremists. Potential radicals have to agree to meet with representatives of support systems, but those who have already begun the shift toward extremism will naturally be resistant to deliberately anti-radical messages and therefore won’t participate in Channel. This means that the program can do little to reverse preexisting fundamentalist sentiment, even if it does manage to target the right participants.
In order to avoid the shortcomings of these government-directed strategies, countries like the United Kingdom must turn to community organizations to spread anti-radical messages. Mosques, schools, and other local establishments are intimately familiar with their surrounding communities. They can easily investigate the grievances of the area’s youth and can subsequently determine and address factors that might lead to radicalization. Eleven people convicted on terrorist charges in England have been under 20 years old, and dozens of others convicted on such charges had first come into contact with extremist groups in their late teenage years. Counterterrorism efforts should operate through the institutions that shape the way young people think every day. Instead of wasting time trying to pinpoint at-risk individuals and tailoring specific programs to their needs, community-based strategies focus more efficiently on making the general local climate more resistant to extremism.
A More Accessible System
Even putting aside Channel’s specific strategic problems, there are fundamental drawbacks to any direct government activity in anti-radicalization efforts. Many Muslims living in Europe and America harbor deep-seated mistrust of Western government and society. A 2008 Gallup poll showed that more than 50 percent of Muslims worldwide believed that Muslims in the West were not treated as equal citizens. In 2011, another survey revealed that almost 40 percent of British citizens felt that their communities did not respect Islam. Western states cannot expect Muslim citizens to respond positively to anti-radical messages coming from governments that they believe see them as the enemy.
Farah Pandith, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and former special representative to Muslim communities in the U.S. State Department, explained why it is easier for citizens to trust community-oriented counterterrorism efforts. “Governments cannot speak with the credibility and authenticity needed to persuade a young person away from going in a certain direction,” she said. “But local, organic voices can speak credibly and in an informed way to the ecosystem in a given place.”
Small-scale anti-extremist campaigns are much more accessible to young Muslims than impersonal, large-scale programs launched by state authorities. Individuals at risk of radicalization trust the advice of their imams and teachers over that of nameless government officials whom they’ve never met. Agents of radicalization in Western states, according to Hoffman, “are often people whom [the targets] know from their own backyards.” Thus, agents of counter-radicalization should be familiar faces as well.
Time for a Change
In recent years, the British government has, to its credit, increasingly prioritized funding of locally based campaigns against radicalism. Nevertheless, it continues to persist with more direct approaches as well. Perhaps the reason the United Kingdom has failed to commit to the former over the latter is based on its desire to make executive decisions grounded in hard data. Hoffman explains why trying to measure the effectiveness of anti-radicalization efforts is so difficult. “The problem with these programs,” he explains, “is that they’re not amenable to metrics. How do you measure if you’ve prevented someone from becoming a terrorist?”
Nonetheless, according to Pandith, the time is ripe for a shift in government policy toward supporting grassroots counterterrorism efforts. “We are in a new phase of a public awareness of the seriousness of this extremist ideology,” she says. “I absolutely think this is the moment in time to build the types of preventative measures born and bred by communities like no others we have seen before.” Without considering community-based campaigns that counter radical ideology, Western states’ counterterrorism policies risk inefficiency and ineffectiveness, and their citizens will remain vulnerable to the ever-increasing threat of radicalization.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
