While Islamic terror attacks have been more problematic recently than, say, urban Asian gangs or the White Power movement, Rep. Peter King’s radicalization hearings have been criticized for only focusing on the Muslim community. Some opponents of the hearings have said that King should have included other religions and races.
And now the Council on Foreign Relations and Google Ideas are teaming up to do just that. The two think tanks are convening a conference to study the roots of radicalization by bringing together 50 former extremists to tell their stories, Josh Rogin reports at The Cable.
According to Rogin, the conference will focus on “troubled youth who have not only left their violent organizations but also speak out against them publicly.”
The conference will feature “formers” from urban African American gangs, rural white power gangs, neo Nazis gangs, Latin American gangs, Asian gangs, and former nationalist extremists from Ireland, Europe, and Asia, as well as Islamist extremists from the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.
The head of Google Ideas Jared Cohen told the Cable that the diversity of the participants is based on a “hypothesis” that the think tank is exploring about the “root causes” of extremism.
Cohen said they’ve seen “anecdotal evidence of similarities across different types of violent organizations, from gangs to right wing extremists to religious extremists. We know they target young people, we know they are comprised largely of young people, and we know they use similar tactics. But there’s a lot of exploring left to be done.”
The conference is an interesting concept, and it’s great to see two major think tanks working on ways to combat the growing problem of radicalization. But while the Google Ideas/CFR event seems to be more focused on the academic, King’s hearings are firmly focused on the practical. Muslim extremism isn’t a theoretical problem in the U.S., it’s a very real problem with deadly consequences. And while its important to investigate the root causes of radicalization, that should come secondary to figuring out ways to protect Americans from the imminent threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism.
[...] HERE’S A DIFFERENT Sort of Conference on Homegrown Radicalization …. [...]