counter-extremism as counterinsurgency: an interview with arun kundnani (part 2)
counter-extremism as counterinsurgency: an interview with arun kundnani (part 2)
"In the United States, the main organization intervening in what they call the pre-criminal space is the FBI."
Monthly Round-Up
No NSA Reform Can Fix the American Islamophobic Surveillance Complex — “This is what real fear of surveillance looks like: not knowing whom to trust, choosing your words with care when talking politics in public, the unpredictability of state power.”
Parallels Between the Central Park 5 and the Minnesota “ISIS Trials”, Ramla Bile — “We live in a community that frequently and fundamentally sees its Black, Muslim youth as a threat, as evidenced by local efforts that promote Countering Violent Extremism and other surveillance programs specifically targeting Black youth.”
Beyond the Glittery Façade: Examining the UAE’s role in the global War on Terror, Asim Qureshi — “When considering both the domestic and foreign policy concerns of the UAE, the picture that emerges is not of a state that is merely complicit in the ‘War on Terror’, but one that is actively involved in the increased militarisation and securitisation of Muslim communities.”
two weeks ago, i published part one of my interview with arun kundnani, author of The Muslims Are Coming!. it went through some of the underlying assumptions driving not only the United States’ Countering Violent Extremism (and its iterations — Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention and the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships) and the United Kingdom’s Prevent but global counter-extremism policies as a whole.
if you missed that first part, here you go:
the second half of the interview will go into more detail about the early developments of counter-extremism in Europe. before y’all get into it, though, i want to highlight one of the suggested monthly readings. i don’t expect everyone to read every single article. but without spoiling the contents of this interview too much, i highly encourage you to at least read Ramla Bile’s Parallels Between the Central Park 5 and the Minnesota “ISIS Trials”. (the original website is down so i’ve pulled it up on the wayback machine.)
for those unaware, the so-called ISIS Trials of 2016 centered five young Somali men — between the ages of eighteen to twenty-one at the time of their conviction —connected to the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis. this area has been repeatedly targeted by counter-extremism efforts including the Obama administration’s piloting of CVE.
in the previous newsletter, kundnani outlined how counter-extremism policies are not about actions but thoughts. the Somali youth put on trial were accused of plotting to commit murder overseas and conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization. in other words, they were arrested for thoughts.
of course, these thoughts don’t spring up out of nowhere. while dominant media narratives honed in on ISIS’ social media campaign as the source of radicalization, they often neglected to mention the role of the U.S. government itself. as Bile wrote, “…the investigation, which led to their arrest and eventual sentencing, was fraught with problematic practices, such as the use of paid informants and agent provocateurs. The prosecution's key witness was a young man who was paid about $100,000 by the FBI to entrap friends.”
as i mentioned, Cedar-Riverside and the Somali community in Minneapolis more broadly were (and still are) common targets of counter-extremism efforts. Kafia Ahmed, an organizer who grew up on Minneapolis’s south side, once told me for the Progressive, “The FBI and the Obama Administration were already working on criminalizing Somalis in Minneapolis [before CVE piloted]. I had FBI agents coming to campus at the University of Minnesota interrogating young Somalis during classes so it grew out of that larger context.”
for those who don’t know, the University of Minnesota’s campus pushes up against Cedar-Riverside.
in part one, kundnani mentioned that counter-extremism exists in a pre-criminal space where the government assumes it can predict what pathways communities are going down. this moves beyond mere prediction, though. because why would the federal government bother predicting the future of oppressed communities when it can simply craft its own futures itself?
You mentioned that the UK was influenced by the Dutch when it was developing Prevent. I was wondering if you could talk in more detail about that?
…what happens in 2004 is that the US [officials] suddenly say, "Well, you know what? These Europeans have a point. We've been focusing too much on military solutions and defeating particular organizations and governments rather than thinking about this broader problem of ideology and radicalization." The US thought to do the same. Then a key moment happens in Holland in 2004. You have the murder of the filmmaker Teddy van Gough by a Dutch Muslim.
Before that event might have been interpreted as, okay, this is just another murder. Another criminal incident, you know, the person is to be investigated, prosecuted, through the courts. In the context of all this discussion about radicalization, that murder becomes the anchor around which policies are developed in Holland that are really the first iteration of what will later become Prevent.
What they're saying in Holland at that time is, “We could have prevented this murder if we had seen the warning signs.” What were these warning signs? He was getting into certain kinds of ideology. Youth workers noticed it, teachers noticed, but no one had the knowledge to say that the interest in this ideology was something that needed to be responded to. In retrospect, we now see that if we had trained these youth workers and teachers to know that an interest in this kind of radical ideology is something that needs to be reported. And then we have some kind of unit that takes all these reports coming from teachers and youth workers and says, “We can use this information to identify who's at risk of becoming a future terrorist.” Then, we can have youth workers, mentors, and people actually engage with young people to stop them [from getting] radicalized.
That happens in 2004. That becomes a Dutch policy — they call it an information house. It's based in Amsterdam. An information house is this hub that teachers, youth workers, and everyone else interacting with young Muslims, is supposed to pass information to if they think that they're seeing signs of radicalization [to] tailor individual interventions. Also, they share information with the police and with intelligence agencies as part of their general surveillance of Dutch Muslims.
A lot of what you see with Prevent in Britain is basically counterinsurgency thinking applied domestically — for the first time really — within mainland Britain to a minority population.
That's the model that the Dutch were starting to introduce in 2004. In Britain, the key event is the bombing of the London Transport System in July 2005 in which 52 people are killed. After that, the government starts to think about something similar in Britain and Prevent policies are introduced, I think the following year. [It’s] somewhat influenced by the Dutch model and sort of influenced by stuff the British were doing in Northern Ireland.
One way of understanding [these policies] is as counterinsurgency policies. Counterinsurgency is a doctrine that comes out of colonial wars. When you're fighting a colonial war to to colonize a country, you can't just win by force alone. The phrase that people use is: “You need to win the hearts and minds.” What that actually means in practice is surveillance of the whole population. You need to have propaganda. You need to have some way of isolating the radicals from the mainstream of society and making it very hard for radicals to break through into the mainstream. In order to do that, you find mainstream leaders who are supportive of your colonial project, you throw money at them, empower them, make them the official faces of these communities. You play that game.
A lot of what you see with Prevent in Britain is basically counterinsurgency thinking applied domestically — for the first time really — within mainland Britain to a minority population. In this case, Muslims. People forget this now but when Prevent was first introduced — this was kept secret, but this is one of the stories I broke at a time when I was reporting on this — [it] was in a way so that the money allocated to each local project was directly proportional to the number of Muslims in each local authority area. Which, the government knew because 2001 was the first time that the government asked your religion on the Census. In other words the policy was financially organized in such a way that being Muslim was considered a proxy for risk of being a terrorist and it was as simple as that.
That makes me think of how you mentioned earlier that CVE and Prevent operate differently due to the society structure. So the separation between church and state, that data you referenced. Could you talk more about specific ways you can see those differences between CVE and Prevent?
When CVE was first introduced in the United States, there was much more of an effort in the way it was presented to say this isn't just about Islam. Whereas in Britain, it was always about Islam from the beginning. Only much, much later did they start to say, "We're equally interested in right wing extremism." That was very much an afterthought. In the United States, at least in the way they presented it, they did say this is as much about right-wing extremism as it is about Islamist extremism or radical Islam or whatever.
But then you look at the projects — at least the ones they began with — and those all focused on Muslims. There was a different presentation but not a different reality on that point. The way that the project was presented around what it was doing was much less about trying to support a particular version of Islam. That's how it was presented in Britain. But in the United States, they never put it like that. You can see why just because of the different way that religion works in its relation to government. So what they did is they would talk about violent extremism as an ideology problem and not talk about it as a religion problem. Meanwhile, they were entirely funding projects directed at young Muslims.
In the United States, the main organization intervening in what they call the pre-criminal space is the FBI.
When you look at the British one, [it's] so pervasive. It's kind of across every part of public life in Britain, especially in areas where there's significant Muslim population and Muslim community. Prevent is everywhere. Now in the United States, it never feels like that because CVE has always been quite a marginal part of how the United States government interacts with Muslim communities. It's never decided the relationship. Going back to what I was saying earlier..If you believe that there is this thing called a pre criminal space...in Britain that's overwhelmingly [monitored] through Prevent. In the United States, the main organization intervening in what they call the pre-criminal space is the FBI.
Because what the FBI is doing is putting informants into Muslim communities in huge numbers. And having those informants attempt to push vulnerable Muslims over the threshold so they go from being in the pre-criminal space into the criminal space — as a result of FBI encouragement. It's the FBI that radicalizes. That's the main solution to the problem that the government thinks there is interven[ing] to stop terrorists before they've even become terrorists. Which is what they think the problem is. For them, you have the FBI informants accelerate the process that you think they're on so that you made them into the criminals you need them to in order to prosecute.
That is a much more significant part of how the government is doing counter-radicalization in the U.S. than CVE. CVE is this thing that never really took off in a big way in the United States. But in those particular communities where it's been introduced, it needs to be opposed. What's so dangerous about it is that it becomes a way that people in Muslim communities are recruited into being part of the surveillance system without them being aware of it — effectively becoming spies on other people in the community. Not even spies who are aiming to identify people who are actually going to do things like hurt fellow citizens. But people who simply have an ideology that the government wrongfully believes is some kind of precursor to terrorism.
Because it's so vague in how it defines that ideology you're bound to end up with a large number of young people in Muslim communities who are identified to the government as in some way dangerous — even though what they're really doing is some kind of dissent. Or, they're angry at the world for good reason. It ends up being the most dangerous way of thinking about young people who look at the world, see all kinds of injustice, see all kinds of oppression of their own community and other communities around the world, and want to go online to explore what they're feeling and thinking.
To me, what you do is say that's an incredibly healthy process. That's called being an active citizen. That needs to be encouraged. The moment you say that's a warning sign that this person's going to become violent, you actually make it much more likely that you're going to get conflict going into the future. That's what's kind of insidious about it.
Thank you. Those are my questions. Is there anything you want to add that didn't come up or I missed at all?
Again, this is a global thing. It's everywhere. We've been talking about what this looks like for Muslims in the U.S. and UK, but imagine what this looks like somewhere like Kenya or the Philippines. All these countries are expected to introduce CVE policies by global entities like the UN or other global counterterrorism networks that distribute funding and so forth around the world.
That's how this has spread to every corner of the world. And what it ends up doing inevitably, apart from I talked earlier about the impact on local communities in terms of recruiting ordinary people to effectively be spies, is it inevitably reinforces and institutionalizes Islamophobia. Everywhere that you introduce CVE, that's gonna be the consequence. Because you're saying we're gonna spend a lot of money and train a load of people to deal with this problem in Muslim communities. The way the problem is defined as "problem ideology" is absolutely bogus. Just from the scholarly point of view, political violence is not caused by someone having an ideology. That's been debunked completely.
The intellectual assumption behind the program is completely flawed. The effects of it is to institutionalize Islamophobia by training people in that idea. To train people that there's this dangerous radicalization in Muslim communities. That's inevitably going to institutionalize Islamophobia when you do that. You give those ideas the authority of a government policy program. There's a big difference between some random dude on Facebook telling you there's a problem with Muslims and radical Islam compared to someone from the government who's seemingly got access to all kinds of intelligence and national security analysis and so on telling you the same thing. Suddenly, it's a lot more plausible to someone who's just an ordinary person. That's what's so dangerous.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.