THE WAR AGAINST ISLAMIC STATE RECRUITMENT OF YOUNG PEOPLE IN
THE UNITED STATES
February 20, 2015
This morning I listened to this
morning’s “Allsides” interview program at http://wosu.org/2012/allsides/isis-recruiting-tactics-3/. It was stressed that only 12 young people in
the US have gone to Syria. At the same time,
one interviewee stressed the need to report young people who were reading IS
messages for early intervention, declared prosecution and punishment for those
who return, declaring these offenders to be a potential source of intelligence
on the IS, while agreeing with his counterpart that recruits in the US would
never be allowed access to significant military information. The other interviewee, to his credit, pointed
to the Danish response to “returning jihadists” as described, for instance, at http://www.newsweek.com/denmark-offers-returning-jihadis-chance-repent-277622
, which reads in part:
The Danes are treating their returned jihadists as
rebellious teenagers rather than hostile soldiers beyond redemption.
“Jihadists have chosen a path that’s not OK, but the key in the Aarhus model is
recognising that these people are not that different from the rest of us,”
reports Bertelsen, who now counsels a number of returned fighters. “We’re not
stigmatising them or excluding them. Instead, we tell them that we can help
them get an education, get a job, re-enter society.” Counsellors tell the
jihadists that it’s OK to become politically or religiously radicalised, but
that using violence is not.
It shouldn’t take much of a social worker’s time at
some level to meet the individual needs and interests of the few young US
citizens returning from the Islamic State.
They could for instance be put in the care of religious and national
service groups as they returned home.
Instead, we promise punishment, like the French, from whence the recent
jihadists had come…for such a small threat.
“Threat intervention” is the bigger problem. When I heard the one interviewee propose that
parents turn in the child who visits IS on the internet, I was taken back to
the Red Scare I lived in in Central Ohio in 1959, when as a 14-year-old I
assembled a shortwave radio from a Knight kit.
I went straight to Radio Moscow broadcasts, even as I heard how the
Russians were trying to block our transmissions, because they were afraid of
free speech…how un-American.
In today’s climate of threat and surveillance, I
myself avoid looking at IS sites to avoid the hassle, but I am curious to know
people there as they would be known themselves.
(I’m no more interested in watching beheadings than I am in witnessing
any execution anywhere, my home state included.) I would welcome a climate now, as I sought
during the Cold War, where IS news could be open to free reading and
sharing. Now there are calls for Muslim
community centers to educate youth about the reality of life in the IS, and to
point out violent realities and invite critical discussion. Discussion about how they see us, placed
beside what we see in them. Not only
Muslim community centers. As between
parents and children. In religious
settings and education at all levels. So
that we would no longer have to be afraid of listening to people in the IS, who
have been there, and who have considered or tried going there speak
openly. Instead, we fear most what our
children might see and speak about, that which we dare not know for
ourselves. We dare not consort with the enemy we will not
let ourselves get to know. We insist on
remaining our own war propagandists, at the expense, as always, of the free
flow of information we claim to represent, and the peace that can only be made
there. Love and peace, hal
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