Your thoughts? #auspol #BSWNBPM #sameoldlabor #Green15 -GOVERNMENT and religious leaders are going down the wrong path in tackling extremist Muslim youth, anti-terrorism academic Anne Aly insists. She says governments that frame the problem largely as a security issue miss the point that it “has far more in common with other social issues like drug use and dangerous youth behaviours”. And she says religious leaders have little influence over radicalised youngsters. Dr Aly, a Curtin University researcher who set up non-profit body People Against Violent Extremism, says she communicates with several young men via social media. “If I post a ruling by a moderate Muslim cleric or scholar that says murder is forbidden and we should be saving lives, they’ll write back ‘He’s not a true believer, he’s a pig, he kisses the arse of the Westerners’. They abhor clerics who speak any kind of sense about what they are doing. The true Islam, in their eyes, is this narrow violent version. “With religious fanatics, you cannot give them facts because they will completely dismiss you. The important question is why did they become involved in the first place.” She says PAVE makes contact with disaffected Muslim youth to find out. “For a lot of them, it could be empathy with Muslim victims in the Arab world. “Or it’s intergenerational conflict, lack of education or feelings of disenfranchisement. “So someone will go in and make contact with the young man and their families, and ask what they need. They’ll report back, and we’ll sit down and discuss ‘How are the parents coping?’ ‘Do they need legal advice?’ And we pull together the resources that are already out there to deal with family conflict, youth crime and gang behaviour. “The single most useful thing we could all do is open up the channels of communication between intelligence, law enforcement and the people who are out there to help. If this is only seen as an issue for law enforcement and intelligence, and only they know who they are watching, then we can’t go in and help.” An Egyptian-born Muslim, Dr Aly says PAVE — which received $110,000 in federal funds last year to create Walk Away from Violent Extremism social media advertisements — is working on a new set of podcast messages. The group has also sought input from non-Muslim extremists such as “Matt”, a former white supremacist leader, “because ... the narrative about fixing an injustice is the same”. Matt, 35, says he was a “dangerous” youth in the 1980s when he led an anti-Asian group in western Sydney. “I recruited other kids to vent my personal frustration against the minority group I identified as being responsible, the Asians. I’d start the fight and then stand back — I let my ‘followers’ take the flack.” The group’s most extreme plan was to “take out as many Asians as we could … But before that, I got into a fight with a bunch of white Australians, and an Asian man beat them up and came to see if I was OK. That was it — I left the group.” Dr Aly said: “We need to understand that radicalism is a symptom of a range of social ills. What pushed them towards this particular narrow ideology of Islam? That’s what you treat.”- theaustralian.au/in-depth/terror/governments-miss-the-point-in-tackling-extremism-academic/story-fnpdbcmu-1227187620060?nk=5cdbb740f6cf57423d605034f79bf47d
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 03:01:14 +0000
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