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Can
Politically Correct Puppetry Win the War on Islamic Extremism?
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Originally published under the title "The FBI Launched A
Tool To Fight ISIS Online, But The PC Police Made Them Remove References To
Islam."
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The
FBI's "Don't Be a Puppet" website has been largely scrubbed of
references to Islam.
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On February 8, 2016, the FBI launched
its "Don't Be a Puppet" website. Designed to resemble a video game, the website
is an interactive tool for the nation's schools to prevent susceptible youth from getting recruited online
by terrorists. Unfortunately, the released version appears to have suffered
from politically-correct retooling that blunts its original purpose of
protecting teens from Islamist recruitment.
The website had been scheduled for release last November, but was delayed by
complaints from the Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) and others. By asking about participants' religious
beliefs, according to CAIR, the program reinforced anti-Muslim stereotypes
and promoted bullying of Muslims students. CAIR's subtext, which it
has repeated many times, is that Islam has nothing to do
with ISIS/Islamist violence.
CAIR also argued that the website failed "to deal with the main threat to students, that of school
shootings." This is another regular CAIR trope that translates roughly
to (a) Muslims are victims-in-chief of "Islamophobia" and (b) the government should focus
on "right-wing extremism" and downplay Islamist
violence. This theme has been ably aided and abetted by administration
allies like the New America Foundation, but it is untrue. In effect, this criticism appears to assume
that every government tool employed to prevent terrorists from harming
Americans must target every enemy, foreign and domestic; that otherwise it
is "discriminatory."
Finally, CAIR asserted there was no correlation between the website program and
preventing or stopping radicalization. Did CAIR assume this to be true
because the website was new and therefore had no track record? Every
defensive strategy was new once; why is CAIR opposed to trying?
The website has diluted its focus on
Islamism to address all kinds of extremism - like militant Chinese animal
rights activism.
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The only strategy CAIR has endorsed to counter violent
"extremism" is a vague call for "community-driven solutions." In other words, the
government should butt out and let CAIR et al. police the American-Muslim
community for terrorist threats.
As released, the Puppet website appears to have diluted its focus on
Islamist recruitment to a broader focus against extremists of other varieties.
For example, the original version included a question asking the user to
identify which of four or five social-media posts should raise alarm:
Among the choices were a person posting
about a plan to attend a political event, or someone with an Arabic name
posting about going on 'a mission' overseas. The correct answer was the posting with the Arabic name.
In the current version, the correct answer has been
transformed into an animal-rights activist with a Chinese surname, writing:
"I'm heading over to that awful animal testing lab – going to send
them a 'powerful' message and shut them down once and for all!" A
similar question included a suspicious
apps post by someone with a non-Muslim sounding name (Sean S) suggesting,
"I know we haven't met, but you should come join our fight
overseas."
In fact, the current version does not mention Islam, Muslims, or any
particulars of Islamist ideology or targets at all, aside from the usual
disclaimers that ISIS does "not represent mainstream Islam,"
that "the vast majority of Muslims are horrified by [its]
actions," and that Muslims are its chief victims; and in descriptions
of Al Qaeda and Hizballah. The website doesn't bother mentioning that the
Al Shabaab movement terrorizing East Africa has any connection to Islam.
It does mention specifics of other types of extremism, such as a "white
supremacist rally" advocating the superiority of the white race
and the necessity of attacking and destroying others. The website is also
empty of Islamist symbols, such as the ISIS flag, although it does include an American flag
in its white-supremacist illustration. The closest the website comes is a
reference to nondescript "religious"
extremists. The studied neutrality on the subject of religion does not
prevent Puppet from referring explicitly to "white supremacy"
rather than racial extremists. In what appears to be another bow to evenhandedness,
its list of international terror organizations is not
complete – for instance, it excludes the Kurdish PKK – but it lists the
marginal Israeli group Kahane
Chai.
The end result is a website whose original purpose has been blunted
beyond all recognition. Small wonder initial reviews have been mixed.
Johanna Markind is associate
counselor at the Middle East Forum
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