EXPERIMENT WITH TERRORIST
REHAB FAILS 1ST U.S. TEST 'De-radicalizing
the jihadists doesn't work', by Leo Hohmann, 5/8/17, WND
ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
declared the existence of an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria and all ISIS
fighters are required to swear an oath to support him as their caliph. Is it
possible to ‘rehab’ an ISIS terrorist? The federal government thinks so and is
trying to test the concept out on a Somali man who tried to leave Minnesota to
join ISIS.
After six Somali refugees were
convicted of plotting to board planes and join ISIS in Syria, a U.S. federal
judge in Minnesota decided to enroll one of them in an experimental
terrorist rehabilitation program.
The program was developed in Europe
and operates on the principles of the “countering violent extremism” or CVE, which is also part of the global, United
Nations-supported Strong
Cities Network.
Rather than going to prison,
Abdullahi Mohamed Yusuf, 21, was sentenced in November to a 20-year supervised
release. He was granted time served and sent to live in a halfway house. He
receives counseling, reports to a probation officer and wears an ankle monitor
but is otherwise free to come and go.
Abdullahi Mohamed Yusuf same to U.S.
as a child refugee from Somalia but tried to leave and fight for ISIS.
But less than six months from the
time he was released, Yusuf has already hit a road block.
He was returned to federal custody
last week for allegedly failing a polygraph test and watching a documentary
about ISIS in Europe.
According to a report by a U.S.
probation officer, Yusuf failed a polygraph while under questioning, then admitted
to watching CNN’s “ISIS: Behind the Mask,” a film about a Belgian ISIS soldier
that was on TV April 18 at his halfway house, the Star-Tribune
reported.
The terms of his 20-year supervised
release include a provision that Yusuf not “possess, view, access, or otherwise
use material that reflects extremist or terroristic views or as deemed to be
inappropriate by the U.S. Probation Office.”
It’s all part of a “unique approach
to supervising federal terrorism cases,” the Star-Tribune reports. This
approach was approved by federal Judge Michael Davis and the U.S. District
Court’s Probation and Pretrial Services department, which chose the Minnesota
case to introduce the country’s first terrorism “disengagement and
deradicalization” program. In essence, they would try to “deradicalize” the
young jihadist.
The program is based
on evaluations and training from German researcher Daniel Koehler, who
concluded that Yusuf had “a medium to low risk of future offending and a
comparatively advanced stage of disengagement,” according to court filings.
Almost everyone in Minnesota law
enforcement is not on board with the controversial program, sources tell WND.
And groups that try to educate police on the religious underpinnings of jihad
are typically closed out of the discussion.
Even citizens find it hard to get
the ear of their local sheriff or police chief, says Debra Anderson, the ACT
for America chapter leader for Minnesota.
“It’s CVE at the highest level down
to the local level and even though the grassroots activists are trying to train
our law enforcement it’s almost impossible to even get these guys to have a meeting
with you,” Anderson told WND. “I get doors shut in my face every day.”
Philip Haney, who spent more than a
dozen years screening for jihadists at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
before retiring in 2015, told WND that Minnesota is not the first to experiment
with the idea that terrorists can be rehabilitated.
He says it’s been tried many times,
in many places, including the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.
The concept, that religiously
motivated terrorists can be reformed, finds its roots in the “countering
violent extremism” movement – an approach that began in Europe and was brought
to the U.S. by the Obama administration.
“Rehabilitation is part of CVE. In
fact, the idea that terrorists can be rehabilitated is woven into the overall
CVE concept,” said Haney, co-author of the book “See
Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s
Submission to Jihad.”
“But the bottom line is these
programs have been demonstrable failures,” he said. “They started with Saudi
Arabia rehabbing Gitmo prisoners, and it’s actually achieved the opposite
results.”
According to data released in March,
the intelligence community has confirmed a total of 121 former Gitmo detainees
have re-entered the battlefield. Another 87 former detainees are suspected of
rejoining the ranks of their brother terrorists. The total of 208 confirmed and
suspected terrorists makes up 30 percent of all those released from Gitmo.
Sweden and Denmark have also engaged
in a concerted effort to rehab their jihadists. “They’re trying it out in
Denmark now, but there’s no real quantifiable way of demonstrating the program
is effective because they universally overlook the real source of what they
call ‘radicalization,’ and no program will ever work if you overlook the source
of what is causing this violent behavior,” Haney said.
Such attempts completely ignore the
original source of inspiration for Islamic violence – the Islamic texts, which
include the Quran and hadiths – the reported words and deeds of the prophet
Muhammad, Haney said.
Rehab in Denmark
Morten Storm, a former Danish
al-Qaida member, told
Newsweek he dismisses the experiment on
its face.
“It’s completely ridiculous,” he
says. “It means disregarding the life and dignity of the people the jihadists
have been terrorizing – simply because the jihadists happen to be Danish. And
deradicalizing the jihadists doesn’t work, because they’re religiously
motivated. Yes, some may enroll [in the program], but then they’ll go back to
the front lines.”
Danish leaders, like Obama’s former
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harp, are striving to pin the causes of
terrorism on something other than Islam. Harp famously said it was a lack of
jobs in the Middle East that led young men to become terrorists.
But what about here in the U.S. or
Europe, where jobs are plentiful and education is often free? “One school of
thought is that the jihadists feel excluded, versus the reality that
assimilation into a non-Muslim society is counter to the teachings of Islam, so
we’re blaming the host nation for not being inclusive enough and enabling the
[Muslim] migrants to be a part of our country when in reality they don’t want
to assimilate and be a part of it,” Haney said.
United Nations Secretary General
Antonio Guterres recently blamed
“Islamophobia” for “fueling the rise in
global terrorism.”
Strong Cities Network
On Sept. 29, 2015, former Attorney
General Loretta Lynch announced the launch of the Strong Cities
Network at United Nations headquarters
in New York.
“At that point, CVE went global, it
morphed into this Strong Cities Network, part of a much bigger agenda to
enable, or refuse to acknowledge, the threat that we face from Islamic
terrorism,” Haney said. “The White House all but admitted it didn’t work and
yet they tripled the budget for CVE as part of this attempt to provide
alternative narratives that transform how we think about terrorism. The focus
of law enforcement went from ‘Islamic terrorism’ to ‘violent extremism in all
its forms.'”
The U.S. State Department even
launched a Twitter
campaign in February 2016 to try to
deny the Islamic role in terrorism. It was a bust. The year 2016 was the most
Islamically violent year in decades with terrorist attacks launched across
Europe and the U.S., from Orlando to Paris, Normandy, Nice, Bavaria and Berlin.
And Minneapolis, with its large
Somali refugee community admittedly struggling with ISIS and al-Shabab
“recruitment problems,” was one of three cities the Obama administration chose
in 2014 for CVE
pilot programs, along with Boston and Los Angeles.
Minneapolis and L.A. would go the
extra step and join the global Strong Cities Network, or SCN.Minneapolis was
one of four initial U.S. cities to sign up for SCN, along with New York, Denver
and Atlanta.
Jordanian Prince Zeid Raad Zeid
al-Hussein, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, came to New York to
help roll out the SCN in September 2015 at the U.N., standing beside Loretta
Lynch and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Since then, six more U.S. cities
have joined the global policing network – Aurora, Colorado; Chattanooga,
Tennessee; Los Angeles; San Diego; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Louisville,
Kentucky.
So the CVE and Strong Cities Network
are inexorably linked, both tracing their U.S. points of origin into the heart
of the Obama administration and its effort to take the heat off of Islam and
place it onto “right wing” terrorists.
Draining the swamp?
All of this was done without
consulting Congress, or with any apparent consideration of states’ rights, or
the Constitution itself, says Haney.
Part of the U.N.’s focus is to
cultivate global governance through cities, bypassing nation-states. This was
made evident in the New Urban Agenda adopted by the Obama administration and
more than 100 other world leaders at the Habitat III Conference last year in
Ecuador.
As for the Trump administration, it
has shown little awareness of the power of these programs, nor has it signaled
any sense of urgency in reversing them, Haney said.
“I don’t think they really are aware
of how much is really being done [through the U.N.], I think Trump is on a
steep learning curve, and he’s touching some of these issues and I give him
credit for it,” he said. “The question is whether he has the political courage
to go forward, because if he’s going to drain the swamp these are the kinds of
programs that need to be drained. They put our sovereignty subject to an
outside international body.”
Ignoring history
Most of the government attempts at
deprogramming jihadists focus on poverty or some other “subjective” cause that
deflects attention from the central issue, Haney said. They also ignore the
broad sweep of history.
“Islam is not a subjective ideology,
but they’re using subjective terms to try to define a religion that is
objectively very well defined … poverty, colonialism, lack of inclusiveness, it
has all existed well before modern times,” Haney said. “The ideology existed
before the times we live in. We saw it in their crossing the Straights of
Gibraltar in 711 A.D. [into Spain]. And we saw it in 732 A.D. exactly 100 years
after Muhammad died, when they were invading France, only to be driven out by
Charles Martel.”
Another incursion was made in 1683
at the Gates of Vienna, only to be repelled by the Polish King John Sobieski. The West has been in a 1,300-year,
on-and-off war with Islam. It seems the war is back on, but few in the West are
aware.
Anderson said the Obama policy of
playing nice with terrorists has had a severe impact on her state, which is
home to so many Somali Muslims.
“They have fundamentally transformed
counter-terrorism from a law-enforcement-based approach, which treated them as
criminals with all the rights of normal defendants and that in itself was the
subject of great debate, but Obama took it a step further and transformed the
U.S. system from a law-based approach to a civil-rights and civil-liberties
approach. So they’ve basically paralyzed our law-enforcement system,” Anderson
said.
Gov. Dayton tells detractors:
‘find another state’
Meanwhile, Minnesota Gov. Mark
Dayton, speaking openly at a community forum in St. Cloud in October 2015, told
residents that anyone who cannot accept living alongside Somali immigrants
“should find another state.” Less than a year later, in September 2016, a
Somali refugee went on a stabbing spree at the Crossroads Mall in St. Cloud,
injuring 10 people.
“We have a governor who doesn’t
listen to us and our mayor in Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, signed us up for
Strong Cities Network, so we have it bad here,” Anderson said. “We’re just a
sinking state.”
“On the one hand the grassroots is
getting it, we’ve circumvented the hostile media, and we’ve traveled around and
what I’m learning is the surrounding states are recognizing Minnesota is ground-zero
for jihadi training,” Anderson said.
Waleed Idrus al-Maneesey is a
radical imam who heads up the Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minnesota,
attended by at least six known terrorists and terrorist supporters.
Dar al-Farooq in Bloomington is one
mosque that draws suspicion. It operates under the guidance of imam Walid Idrus
al-Maneesey, who is also a member of the Assembly
of Muslim Jurists of America, the
organization responsible for issuing fatwas in North America.
The mosque supports the Islamic
University of Minnesota, which turned out its first graduating class recently
with intense training in Shariah law, the Quran and Islamic jurisprudence. At
least six Somali terrorism suspects have
been known to attend al-Maneesey’s mosque.
And now the Minneapolis police are
tolerating an Islamic Shariah cop who patrols the Cedar Riverside neighborhoods
looking for violations of Islamic dress and food laws, as well as social
interaction deemed inappropriate between the sexes. He has recruited 10 others
to work under him and police have not arrested any of them.
Another example of Minneapolis
police backing off of Somali Muslim criminal activity occurred last June in the
Linden Hills community on Lake Calhoun. For three straight days a gang of
Somali thugs terrorized the neighborhood, riding vehicles over lawns, shouting
threats of rape and pretending to shoot people on the beach. One neighbor’s dog
was beaten. Not a single arrest was made and the police chronically showed up
“too late” to catch the thugs when they were called by residents.
“They are more interested in
protecting their civil rights and civil liberties than protecting the local
population,” Anderson said. “What the average citizen does not
know is they no longer have reliable law enforcement,” she added. “They don’t
know that. Linden Hills is a perfect example of that.
“So this is a country gradually
surrendering to Islamic sharia law. We are, already, incrementally
surrendering. Former Obama-appointed U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Andrew Luger,
several times made public statements that showed his bias toward Muslims and
against non-Muslims in Minnesota. After the Somali arrests, and after the
Brussels, Belgium, terrorist attack he said ‘we’re here to protect you, our
Muslim friends, from Islamophobia.'”
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