June 28, 2011 | National Post

How Much Should the State Intervene in Islam’s Internal Debate?

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, Western intellectuals and politicians spent a lot of time thinking about how to encourage Islam down a more “moderate” path. Our police agencies, in particular, made a pronounced effort to set up outreach programs with peaceable Muslim groups, while shunning their radical counterparts.

A decade later, there are second thoughts about this approach.

Earlier this month, I attended a Parliament Hill conference entitled “Terrorism in Canada: Threats, Vulnerabilities and Strategies,” put on by the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), featuring prominent terrorism experts from both sides of the border. During the panel entitled “Drivers of Homegrown Terrorism,” I noticed a strain of fatigue on the issue of lecturing Muslims about their own faith.

“I’m skeptical of the notion of having a ‘counter-narrative’ [for radical Muslims],” declared Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Senior Fellow at the FDD and a former CIA analyst. “If you look at France, which has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, and where problems of assimilation are profound, the French government hasn’t really spent a lot of time developing a ‘counter-narrative’ [for Muslims]. [Instead,] they have spent an enormous amount of time developing the DST [Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire] into quite a lethal counter-terrorist organization, used and directed by the juge d’instruction, which is probably the most effective bureaucratic apparatus to go after Islamic militants. I think the French might be onto something. You might spend a lot more time on professional counterterrorism, and a lot less time thinking about ‘hearts and minds,’ and how you’re going to win people over … I’ve spent many years studying the ‘root causes of terrorism’ – but I’ve come to question [whether] we shouldn’t instead just put more flics on the ground.”

“The greater ‘narrative’ is the one that comes out of the greater Middle East, not the one that comes out of Western countries,” he added. “It is the evolution of that narrative – the battle that occurs in that overseas theatre – that is really the most important battle … The real game is the one that is occurring over there, not the one that is occurring in the suburbs of Paris of Frankfurt, or elsewhere.”

In the Canadian context, David Harris, the former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, expressed doubt about whether even limited forms of community “outreach” were viable, given that governments generally have trouble distinguishing radicals from moderates: “In Canada, we’ve had a very uneven experience. The RCMP has a community outreach program. We have seen Muslim [participants] who seem to have had ideological attachments comparable to the Muslim Brotherhood. We had one episode in the Fall where an individual who is well-connected to Iran, who was the head o the Iranian cultural Center based at the Iranian embassy, sitting on this committee, handing an invitation to a so-called ‘peace conference’ that an RCMP uniformed officer than distributed to the committee and beyond. The conference consisted of senior Tehran faculty members, and the Iranian representative from a ‘peace’ organization who had a web site full of hook-nosed Jews. We also had an RCMP outreach session in B.C. that featured a ‘progressive’ young scholar who turned out to be the sort of ‘progressive’ who agonizes about whether to kill gays by throwing them over cliffs or merely crushing them under walls.”

“When I complain about this sort of thing, I’ve been told, ‘Well, we can’t really pick and choose between Muslim organizations,’” Harris added. “[But] If we’re not in the business of picking and choosing, then we’re not in the business.”

Naheed Mustafa, a CBC Radio producer and author with extensive knowledge of issues affecting the Canadian Muslim community, also critiqued the current approach – albeit from a different perspective. As she sees it, the constant focus on fixing Islam helps reinforce the incorrect idea “that religiosity is necessary and sufficient to create terrorism.” In her experience, many of the most radicalized individuals simply aren’t that religious; rather, they’re confused, deracinated people who glom onto a cultish interpretation of Islam for their own reasons.

“You can’t take a person’s religiousness as a marker for terrorism,” she warned the room. “This is the mistake that has created a lot of bad blood within the Muslim community.”

But is there a compromise solution? Matthew Levitt, a Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, agreed with the idea that government should not insert itself into the Muslim community’s internal dialogue about religious values – on the basis that this is simply not the sort of subject that any state can credibly pronounce on. But he also argued that Western governments should acquire the sensitivity and expertise to intervene constructively when they observe individual at-risk Muslims teetering toward Jihad.

On this score, he gave a particularly vivid example of a case that unfolded in Texas, where a Muslim family became aware that a young man was preparing to head off to the Middle East for jihad. Going through personal connections that had been forged with an FBI agent, they went to the government with the information. The FBI tipped off a family member in Cairo, through which the would-be jihadi was transiting. At the airport, the man’s sister met him, literally took him by the ear, and told him: “If you do this, you are literally going to kill mother. How do you think she is going to react?” The fellow ended up back on a plane to Texas where he was subsequently monitored and brought back into his community’s mainstream.

“But I emphasize that this example only worked because of the personal connections that had been forged with the local FBI office,” Levitt noted. Had the whole thing been done on an impersonal, institutional basis, the result may have been very different – and worse for those concerned.

– Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment of Canada’s National Post, and a Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Issues:

Issues:

Jihadism

Topics:

Topics:

Cairo Canada Central Intelligence Agency Federal Bureau of Investigation France Iran Islam Jewish people Jihad Middle East Muslim Brotherhood Muslims Paris Reuel Marc Gerecht Tehran The Washington Institute for Near East Policy Western Europe