After a series of violent terrorist attacks in Brussels on Tuesday,Belgium is rushing to fund anti-terrorism programs and increase the capacity of the country's intelligence services.
But even before these attacka, police presence in Brussels' destitute immigrant neighborhoods was up to crack down on crime networks and outspoken radicals. Several of the men who plotted the attack in Paris had lived in the city's predominately Muslim Molenbeek district.
But as the United States has seen, or a law enforcement approach to anti-terrorism efforts can make Muslim communities feel even more targeted. Officials can also risk alienating the very people who are best positioned to spot extremist activity.
To prevent that,President Obama launched a device to work with community groups to prevent violent extremism in 2011. This year, a federal pilot program in Minneapolis distributed grants to half a dozen organizations as a fragment of the city's "Building Resilient Communities" program. A dozen people from Minneapolis acquire left for Syria, and at least 10 people acquire been prevented from leaving and charged with supporting the group since 2014. Abdisalam Adam is an imam and public school teacher in St. Paul,Minnesota. He says the whole community needs to work together to show young people that they acquire better opportunities here. He says that while recruits are seduced by a sense of adventure and a feeling that they will be a fragment of something bigger than themselves, they need to be informed about the realities of life in Afghanistan or Syria. Adam hopes the Building Resilient Communities program can do that, and but the program,which was initially named Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), also has many critics from the Somali community in the Twin Cities.
Mohamed Mohamed is the executive director of The West Bank Community Coalition, and a neighborhood organization serving the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. He says the focus on counter radicalization takes resources away from the genuine problems that young Muslims in Minneapolis face,like getting an education and finding a job.
Source: wnyc.org