MCPD Representative with community social worker Shahnaz Baten

In light of the recent Boston terrorist attack, the Montgomery County Faith Community Working Group (FCWG) called leaders of faith communities, government officials, youth activists, gang prevention experts and journalists for a town hall forum on preventing violence on April 25th, 2013. The meeting was hosted by the International Cultural Center (ICC) and led by Rev. Mansfield Kaseman, Interfaith Community Liaison with the Office of Community Partnerships. Representatives from over 30 mosques, temples, churches and synagogues as well as other faith based and civic groups participated in the discussions.

Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett began the event with a statement of support for the FCWG’s efforts to build community and county-wide awareness of violence-related issues. Dr. Qamar-ul Huda, a distinguished scholar of Islam, and Religion and Conflict Management expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, commented on the need to educate ourselves and learn how to detect signs of anti-social and other deviant behavior. He also encouraged clergy to respond to potential at-risk youth with compassion and counseling, and assist in identifying intervention techniques in the prevention of violence.

Dr Mirahmadi, President of WORDE and the ICC and co-chair of the FCWG, further emphasized the significance of creating a well-integrated network of social workers, police, activists, youth violence preventers, school counselors and concerned families, to act as a resource for youth that are at risk for violent crime offenses. A “Call for Unity and Partnership to Prevent Violence” was subsequently signed by over 70 individuals; a solidarity statement calling for unity of all faiths and partnerships with all people seeking to live together in peace. Working groups were also then organized around three important areas: 1) solidarity event planning 2) the creation of a clergy response team to be available in times of crisis and for caring for victims of violence 3) the development of effective intervention techniques for community members, families and clergy.

The town hall forum was a perfect example of grassroots community engagement and partnerships amongst diverse community members and experts, who came together for a very productive meeting of the minds. The Call for Unity and anti-violence project is currently supported by the Montgomery County [MC] Executive under the Office of Community Partnerships; the MC Police Department, and MC Health and Human Services.

Read more on ICC’s website…(includes event video and photos)

Read Rand report entitled “Promoting Online Voices for Countering Violent Extremism”

WORDE Senior Fellow Mehreen Farooq with Munich Counselor General William Moeller, Public Affairs Officer Leyla Ones, and President of the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigations Peter Dathe at the Hans-Seidel Foundation (Munich, Germany)

In April, WORDE Senior Fellow Mehreen Farooq traveled across Germany to meet with Muslim communities, law enforcement and public officials in the Interior Ministries to discuss the issue of preventing radicalization. Farooq delivered several keynote addresses at the Hans-Seidel Foundation in Munich, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

Banner image: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (L), who has been charged by the FBI for “using a weapon of mass destruction against persons and property,” is seen with his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev (now deceased), in the crowd at the Boston Marathon, April 15, 2013. Photo courtesy of ABC.

Audio: Click to listen to interview.

Featured Speaker: WORDE President, Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi

  ]]> http://www.worde.org/publications/commentary/countering_violent_extremism/prosecuting-the-boston-bombing-suspect/feed/ 0 http://www.worde.org/publications/commentary/countering_violent_extremism/boston-suspects-demonstrate-the-thin-line-between-amateurism-and-terrorism-national-journal/ http://www.worde.org/publications/commentary/countering_violent_extremism/boston-suspects-demonstrate-the-thin-line-between-amateurism-and-terrorism-national-journal/#comments Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:57:30 +0000 shadi http://www.worde.org/?p=6190

National Journal: AP Photo

April 19, 2013 | National Journal
by Michael Hirsh

Based on what we know so far, the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were likely self-motivated terrorists who were probably not part of a larger al Qaida plot, but may well have been inspired and perhaps prepared in part by ideology and training from the global jihadist network. Based on police reports and witness testimony, the older brother, 26-year-old Tamarlan Tsarnaev, appeared to be disaffected and angry, a “loser” in his uncle’s words. He may have decided that his life in America wasn’t working and wanted to go out with a literal bang, inducing his more Americanized and integrated younger brother, Dzhokar, 19, to come along.

For U.S. Muslims, the revelation of the identities of the Boston suspects is the worst possible news, says Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Muslim community organizer who works at the International Cultural Center in Gaithersburg, Md., an area where many Muslims live—including an uncle of the two suspects. “It can’t get worse than this. It’s really a tragic day for our community. And for Americans,” Mirahmadi says. “The older brother seems to fit the usual profile of a socially alienated Muslim youth, and points to all the concerns we’ve had about the influence of radicalization, the markers we look for.  The younger brother, though, doesn’t. He was integrated. “

What’s scary now, she adds, is that many Americans will come to believe that even relatively “integrated” Muslims, like Dzhokar, are suspect for radicalization. “There’s an issue right now with young Muslims feeling a need for justice. That’ s not directed usually at America per se, but it’s distress at the condition of Muslims around the world.” In a statement delivered to the media on Friday, the two brothers’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, a native Chechen, called them “losers” who simply could not get “settled” and harbored “hatred to those are.” “I can’t imagine anything else to do with religion, with Islam. It’s a fraud. It’s fake. … Somebody radicalized them, but it’s not my brother,  who spent his life bringing bread to their table. Fixing cars.”

Quietly, working with the Obama administration, Mirahmadi, president of the World Organization for Resource Development and Education, which seeks to enhance understanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, and other American Muslim community leaders have been trying to identify signs of radicalization in young American Muslims and working to stop it before it leads to destructive acts. But Mirahmadi and other critics say the Obama administration has sought to gloss over the issue of purely Islamist radicalization so as not to offend Muslims, labeling its programs “combating violent extremism” instead. But seeking to do that while studiously avoiding the role of Islamism avoids the main issue, they say.

Even if the two suspects were not part of a larger jihadist plot, the bombings should not be seen as an isolated act. The global jihadist movement has brought under its umbrella many young men originally from Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan and other Caucasus republics, as the Tsarnaev brothers appear to be. Some of these terrorists have been trained at the same school near Peshawar that trained the Taliban, called  Darul Uloom Haqqania. Harvard terrorism expert Jessica Stern says she met two Chechens being trained there in 2000, and it is also known that nationalist movements in these countries in the Caucasus have been largely “coopted by the jihadists.”

It remains unclear what may have motivated either Tamarlan or Dzhokar Tsarnaev. The older brother, Tamerlan, who died in a police shootout, appeared far more upset with his life in America.  “I don’t have a single American friend,” he reportedly said. “I don’t understand them.” He was also reportedly arrested for assaulting his girlfriend in 2009.

Angry, disaffiliated young men lash out in different ways in different cultures. Adam Lanza, the Newtown, Conn., murderer, may have acted in the way he did because he had absorbed the sick culture of mass shootings. It’s entirely possible that Tamarlan Tsarnaev lashed out in the way he did because he was just enough of a jihadi to want to follow that path, while not being part of a larger plot. His act may well have been the product of an increasing trend: lone, self-motivated jihadis who have their own private grievances but find an outlet in the radical Islamist ideology that has gone viral over the past ten years online—and who are sometimes empowered by jihadist and explosives training, whether paramilitary or online. The amateurish nature of the Boston plot — the two men apparently didn’t even have an escape plan — points to a do-it-yourself plot.

In an interview in 2010, the former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs under George W. Bush, Scott Carpenter, said both the Bush and Obama administrations have fallen short in tackling the problem of radicalization. “There has to be a recognition that Islamist ideology plays an important role,” he said. “You can’t have an effective prescription without an accurate diagnosis. Part of the problem is because we haven’t figured out a way to talk about this in anything but a politically correct way, we don’t talk about it.”

The scene in Boston after the marathon bombings. (AP Photo/ Bruce Mendelsohn)

Until this week, Americans had been living in something of a bubble. Nothing like the Boston Marathon bombing had happened to us for a very long time—since around Sept. 11, 2001, in fact. Despite repeated waves of overseas terrorism from Europe to the Middle East, the United States had avoided the epidemic of IEDs. Indeed, in the nearly 12 years since 9/11, thanks to successful law enforcement, the only other well-known and successful domestic terrorist attacks have been the anthrax attacks of October 2001; the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan; and an incident in Austin, Texas, in 2010 when a man flew his plane into an IRS building, killing himself and one other person.

Yet the horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon, which left three people dead and injured nearly 200, was a terrifying reminder that—as our soldiers have found over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan—we still live in a dangerous world that can erupt in front of us at any moment. The same week, the attempt to send ricin-poisoned letters to President Obama and Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., delivered a frightening echo of the autumn of 9/11, when the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were followed quickly by anthrax mailings that left five people dead.

The Boston probe, especially, was revealing of just how many potential threats exist out there, from very different perpetrators, both at home and from overseas. Through most of this week, law-enforcement authorities—hounded by an overeager and error-prone media horde—did not know which way to point. Was it a lone jihadist inspired by websites that offer detailed techniques in making homemade pressure-cooker bombs? Was it a right-wing militant who might have been absorbing the same literature? Perhaps a Unabomber-type who, living an alienated life in some garret somewhere, had been stewing up some as-yet-unknown antigovernment ideology? Look on any street corner, as the movie line goes.

But the suspects seem to have ties to Chechnya.

We have been kidding ourselves. The relative calm at home until now has been largely an illusion, one that has been helped along by our dedicated FBI and law-enforcement authorities. It is belied by the growing rage and intent of extremist organizations, both U.S. groups connected to right-wing extremism and do-it-yourself jihadists inspired by Internet preaching. The U.S. has enraged Muslim extremists with drone strikes in countries from Pakistan to Yemen, and new strains of al-Qaida are “on the rise,” as then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned just before she left office.

Homegrown right-wingers are also angry. The timing of the Boston bombing, coming on Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts—sometimes deemed inspirational to militant groups at home—made some experts suspicious that the rage at Obama roiling just beneath the surface might have burst through. “The actual successful attacks have obviously died down, but there is a huge resurgence [of anger] since Obama was elected,” says Jessica Stern, a terrorism expert at Harvard University. “All these discussions about whether they’re going to take away our guns would be another reason to suspect antigovernment groups.”

Until this week, it was fair to say that law enforcement had been winning. In the years since 9/11, there had been many close calls involving bombing attempts, but all had been stopped in time—until Monday. Indeed, if there’s any area of almost total continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it is this: assiduous counterterrorism efforts at home.

Despite FBI sting tactics that have aroused the wrath of some civil libertarians, law enforcement has been fiercely successful in interdicting plots that could easily have resulted in as much or more mayhem than we saw in Boston.

“You have to applaud the efforts of our enforcement agencies to foil terror plots,” says Hedieh Mirahmadi, a Muslim community organizer based in Washington who has worked with federal agencies to interdict radicals. “We’ve had a large number of homegrown terror plots stopped. That’s a tremendous record. That began under Bush as well, and let’s be fair and say that.”

While we were hardly paying attention, authorities have stopped a stream of would-be jihadist terrorists in Washington, New York, and other cities in recent years. After Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani émigré, almost detonated an explosive-packed vehicle in Times Square in May 2010, Obama grew almost obsessed about the near miss and stepped up efforts to interdict domestic terrorists, aides said. “The president wakes up thinking about what he can do to stop attacks,” a senior administration official said then.

In fact, it now looks like something of a miracle that, until Monday, no one had gotten through. The illusion is over. Time to get vigilant again.

All Americans can help in that vigilance, more than ever before, as we are learning in the Boston investigation. Law-enforcement officials in Boston have been crowd-sourcing their way through streams of video from businesses along the marathon route, as well as cell-phone images from spectators, to identify the culprit(s). Once, the ordinary citizen was the hapless victim of the super-empowered nut. But this is also the age of a super-empowered public. It’s the bad guys’ technology versus ours. The race is on.

This article appeared in the Saturday, April 20, 2013 edition of National Journal.

(photo courtesy of Huffington Post)

April 18, 2013 | Washington, DC
WORDE extends its heartfelt sympathies to the victims, friends, and families of those struck by the Boston Marathon bombings. We join our fellow Americans in strongly condemning all acts of terrorism, and the loss of innocent lives. It is in these times of crisis that we come together as a nation to provide solace to those who have been affected, and to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Going forward, across diverse cultures, faiths and ethnicities, we must work together to identify the  psychological, social, and ideological precursors to violence. This synergy should also be used to build peaceful and resilient communities. We ask that our fellow faith leaders, analysts, social activists and academics join us in a collaborative effort with government officials to counter the rise of violent extremism-whoever the perpetrator may be.

Join us for Informational Events on Job Opportunities for Second Language Speakers!

From March 20th  through April 4th, 2013 WORDE is co-sponsoring events for job opportunities within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Various agencies within the IC are seeking a culturally diverse, technologically savvy and skilled workforce for a range of careers in a wide variety of fields.

RSVP for any of the events online

IC Lunch & Learn:
General Info on Government Employment
March 20, 11 AM-1 PM | Location: American Islamic Congress, 1140 Connecticut Ave, N.W. 3rd Floor, Washington D.C.

A representative from the Office of Personnel Management will provide information on U.S. Government employment. Topics will include: the hiring process, developing a U.S. Government resume, and effectively using the USAJOBS portal.  For additional information and registration, please visit iclunchandlearn.eventbrite.com.

IC Lunch & Learn:
The Security Clearance: Myths and Realities
March 27, 11 AM-1 PM | Location: American Islamic Congress, 1140 Connecticut Ave, N.W. 3rd Floor, Washington D.C.

An IC security official will explain the security clearance process, and detail the three primary evaluation criteria-reliability, trustworthiness, and integrity.  For additional information and registration, please visit iclunchandlearn.eventbrite.com.

IC Career Fair
Career Fair with Job Recruiters
April 4, 2 PM-5:45 PM | Location: American Islamic Congress, 1140 Connecticut Ave, N.W. 3rd Floor, Washington D.C.

Meet with agency recruiters in person to learn more about current job openings, internship programs, and future career opportunities. Representatives from many IC agencies will be on hand to answer questions and meet with potential candidates. Job opportunities range from information technologist programmers to public affairs analysts to language and security specialists.  For additional information and registration, please visit iclunchandlearn.eventbrite.com.

On Monday, February 4, 2013, in an effort to heighten public awareness of this critical issue, the Institute for World Politics invited WORDE President, Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi, to deliver a lecture about the global threat of violent extremism. In her presentation she discussed the avenues through which militant organizations seek to exert their power and influence in society and the challenges faced by communities to prevent radicalization.

Given the lack of lack of security, financial and material resources, and community organizing skills – there are an ever-increasing number of terrorist groups operating around the world beyond just the Taliban and Al Qaeda. These groups include the Jabhat Al Nusra ­­­­­­­­­in Syria, Ansar Sharia of Libya, and Tunisia, Lashkar e-Jhangvi in Pakistan, and Ansar e-Dine in Mali.

“The strategy of bolstering these groups should be a vital part of a robust program to counter violent extremism,” Dr. Mirahmadi added.

Related work: Read Dr. Mirahadmi’s article on crimes against culture in Al-Monitor

Photo Gallery

A traditional mud structure stands in the Malian city of Timbuktu May 15, 2012. (photo by REUTERS)

IWP

Jualiana Geran-Pilon

Dr. Mirahmadi with Chairman of the Washington Times

IWP Audience

WORDE President Dr. Mirahmadi

Dr. Mirahmadi and Ms. Pilon

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