WASHINGTON (Sputnik) “The CVE initiative raises a lot of questions, and is predicated on a track record of single-focused bias… with the bulk of the attention focused on the American Muslim community,” said Nathan Lean, research director at the Bridge Initiative, a project to counter Islamophobia and promote Muslim-Christian understanding at Georgetown University.
The government is mulling a number of options to counter violent extremist messaging, which includes creation of a $40-million office within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to counter extremists messaging within the United States, as it is suggested in a bill.
The proposal comes as the US officials warn of probable ISIL-inspired attacks, as well as a rise in right-wing extremism similar to the recent killing of nine African Americans by an alleged white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina.
Critics express their skepticism on whether setting up a new government bureaucracy is the most effective means to counter hate propaganda.
They also charge that the CVE initiative lacks any metrics to measure success.
“Because of the fact that it’s seemingly impossible to quantify the success of a project like this, there is more leeway for government officials to steer it in the direction of their choosing, which can become quite dicey,” Lean told Sputnik.
Susan Szmania, National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism researcher told Sputnik that the CVE initiative was necessary.
US policymakers were sensitive to civil rights and free speech issues and were correctly “quite narrowly focused on people mobilizing and plotting violent behavior,” she said.
“Radicalization across ideologies is a real phenomenon, there are similarities between right, left and Islamic-inspired groups and those kinds of similarities and differences between groups can help us understand how to counter them,” she said.
Szmania suggested community organizations and online activism could be effective tools to counter extremist messaging.
“While there are people who feel stigmatized, the issue of extremism is something that all of our communities face and should be concerned about,” she noted.
The role of the government could be to counter violent extremist propaganda with facts, such as the Department of State has sought to do with foreign audiences, the expert argued.
“If the United States is able to relate any facts about misinformation about foreign policy that is something the US government can do. Not only the government has to do that but also the communities,” she said.
Lean warned that many acts of violence carried out by Islamist extremists were often the result of US foreign policy.
“So much extremism carried out on the part of Muslims results from their animus over American foreign policies. Countering that animus with a domestic program such as this takes a self-righteous view by ignoring the possibility that it is our policies that may actually be contributing to extremism,” he said.
On July 15, 2015, the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security approved a proposed legislation to set up an office devoted to countering extremism within the DHS.
Data on acts of violent extremism reveals that what are described as right-wing groups have carried out more terrorist attacks in recent years and killed a larger number of people than Islamist extremists.
