Bill Would Create New Homeland Security Office for ‘Countering Violent Extremism’

Friday, July 3, 2015
By Paul Martin

The legislation relies on dubious theories about “radicalization.”

Jesse Walker
Reason.com
Jul. 1, 2015

Remember when the Justice Department announced last year that it would be launching some pilot programs devoted to “countering violent extremism”? Now Rep. Michael McCaul wants to create a federal Office of Coordination for Countering Violent Extremism and house it at the Department of Homeland Security. Under the Texas Republican’s Countering Violent Extremism Act, introduced late last week, the new bureau would be responsible for a range of activities, including “identifying risk factors that contribute to violent extremism in communities in the United States,” “assessing the methods used by violent extremists to disseminate propaganda and messaging to communities at risk for radicalization and recruitment,” and “establishing a counter-messaging program” to push back against extremist ideas. The office would receive $10 million a year for the next five years, and a new post—the “assistant secretary for countering violent extremism”—would be created to run it.

The bill is worded broadly enough to attract support both from liberals worried about domestic right-wing terror and from conservatives (such as McCaul) whose chief fear is jihad. That’s because it rests on a belief that has taken hold in both parties: that fighting “radicalization” is a good way to root out terrorism. But this is a dubious idea, and many scholars have subjected it to withering criticisms. Most radicals do not become terrorists, and clumsy counterradicalization efforts may be as likely to push people toward terror tactics as to pull them away. (As the security analyst J.M. Berger once put it, “there’s more than a little risk that efforts to re-program people who are early in the radicalization process could create more terrorists, not fewer.”) Furthermore, empirical studies of actual radicals and terrorists, such as this paper from the British think tank Demos, do not show a neat path from ideas to violence. Nonviolent radicalism can be a stepping stone to terror tactics, but it can also discourage them; meanwhile, many factors that help draw people into terrorism don’t have much to do with ideology at all.

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