After dozens of young Somali men from Minneapolis fled to Syria to join ISIS, and as ten more are on trial for attempting to join the terror outfit, many “moderate” Minneapolis Muslims are beginning to blame the U.S. government and the FBI. Worse, they are spreading the word amongst themselves to stop helping authorities root out the terrorists in our midst.
The trial of ten Somali youths is without a doubt a sensation in the Minneapolis Muslim community as one of their own who turned informer for the government testifies about the plans his companions had to travel to Syria in order to become jihadis.
Six of the ten have already pleaded guilty. And some of those who previously made their way to Syria, perhaps upwards to 40, have been killed on the battlefields in the service of the terrorist armies.
As the trials go on, Minneapolis resident Abdirahman Bashi continues to testify about the hundreds of hours of ISIS propaganda videos he and his fellow conspirators watched, how they heard radical preaching from local imams, how they spoke over the Internet to residents of Minneapolis who had already joined the fight in Syria, and how they sat around and told each other how evil the U.S. was.
Bashi described in minute detail, backed up by hours of audio tapes from the FBI, how so many young Somali men in the Twin Cities region turned to view ISIS as the savior of the world. It is clear hundreds of young Somali immigrants in the area were being reached by a radical message and groomed for terror.
But as The Guardian reports, instead of looking inward to understand why their children have turned to terror, too many in the “moderate” Muslim community in Minneapolis are lashing out and blaming the U.S. government and the FBI for “entrapping” their children.
The paper quotes, for instance, a 23-year-old man named Hasan Ali who insists the trials have sewn “distrust” in the community, not distrust of radical imams but distrust of the U.S. government.
“Going back into the community, we’re not going to trust each other any more,” Alli said. “White people always look at us as terrorists, now the FBI is making things even worse.”
Another Muslim proclaims the innocence of the ten on trial and swears the government trapped them all into false confessions. This man, the father of one of the accused, insists his son is totally innocent and it is the FBI that is the culprit in the case.
Finally, despite the mountain of evidence against the accused men, U.S. district judge Michael Davis is looking to a program of actually returning these admitted wannabe terrorists back into the Muslim community in Minneapolis by “deradicalizing” them.
Judge Davis has brought in German de-radicalization researcher Dr. Daniel Koehler in order to help reverse the Islamist intentions of these admitted radicals. Koehler claims that instead of locking such criminals up for upwards to 50 years, the better bet is to put them in therapy then release them right back into the very communities in which they became radicalized in the first place.
“It would be very very unwise, right now, when you have the chance to stop this from spreading, to ignore that and to just lock them up for 50 years,” Koehler told the paper. “It does not help, we have seen that in Europe. It does not contain the threat. It will not stop it from growing.”
Koehler further claims deradicalization has succeeded in Europe and should be tried here.
Despite the researcher’s claims, Europe has suffered a string of deadly terror attacks that have killed hundreds of westerners the most recent of which was the blatant attack at an airport in Belgium that stole away the lives of 32 people in March of this year and the attacks in Paris that wiped out 137 people and wounded 368 in November of 2015.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston, or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.
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