The FBI has revealed one facet of its antiterrorism strategy by its handling of the high school girl deported (‘voluntarily returned’ under duress) to Bangladesh. They’re finding neoreligious Muslim kids, those who turn to religion as a way of rebelling against their more liberal parents. They’re zeroing in on those who listen to radicals like Omar Bakri Mohammed, an infamous North London imam.
Up to this point, I agree with their strategy. Here’s where I think they go wrong: they’re deporting them under any pretext without distinguishing between actual extremists and those who are just rebellious teens.
From childhood, Tashnuba embraced religion with a kind of rebellion. By 10 she was praying five times a day - and reproaching her more secular father, a salesman of cheap watches. At 12, Tashnuba even explored Christianity. But at 14, she adopted a full Islamic veil… Her parents… rejected… an arranged marriage to an American Muslim man… When Latif suggested an elopement to Michigan, Tashnuba impulsively agreed…… she had repeatedly tuned to sermons broadcast daily by Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammed… What mainly drew the agent’s eye, the girl said, were papers from an extra-help class for home-schooled girls that Tashnuba had joined to prepare for exams. On one page was a diagram highlighting the word “suicide” - her notes on a class discussion about why religions oppose it, she said…
Tashnuba said she believed she was singled out precisely because she is a noncitizen - allowing investigators to invoke immigration law, bypassing the familiar limits of criminal and juvenile proceedings. [NYT]
The most interesting part about this story is that the FBI agent who gets credit for the takedown of a confused 16-year-old is herself familiar with the North London fundies. Thirty-seven-year-old Foria Younis was raised a British Muslim:
Armed with her knowledge of three continents, and fluent in Punjabi and Urdu, she flies the globe with FBI teams… Younis won’t go into specific details of her work, which is often undercover, but admits to travelling to “South Asia” on missions, and to co-operating with officers from Scotland Yard. Flanked by an FBI press officer, she is allowed to confirm she has been involved in the arrests of several Islamic extremists…She knows that when she enters a Muslim household, even on a raid, the sight of her has an electrifying effect, especially on the women and girls of the home. In many households, women are “held hostage” by their men’s radicalism, she says… Britain has changed in 20 years, she says, especially the corner of the East End in which she grew up. “I grew up in a very South Asian community, so I didn’t get full exposure to all of what England had to offer…”
Sometimes, she will be sitting in a company waiting room when her interview subject enters. “They look around the room and ask the secretary, `Where’s the FBI agent?’… “I spent some time doing narcotics investigations and I could be sitting in a car right next to a drug deal going down, and people are just not looking for me. I’m a nobody.”She senses - again stressing she is speaking for herself, not the FBI - that Islamic extremism has more of a grip in Britain than in America. “I think the UK has heightened problems, more than what I see in the US. The young there seem to be a little vengeful in their feelings, more anti-Western.” [Telegraph]
After reading the details, I now have far more sympathy for the government’s position in this case — it’s intrinsically difficult to distinguish between talkers, like depressed kids who go through a heavy metal phase in high school, and doers. Bakri is one dangerous man — he reportedly encouraged two British Muslim boys to become suicide bombers in Israel. The government is trying to be proactive about identifying potential extremists. Imagine if they’d been able to do this before the Columbine killers had struck.
But their broad-brush tactics leave much to be desired. They’ve probably drawn up a psychological profile of talkers vs. doers, to sort out the small number of true extremists. Most security officials quoted early in this story said they didn’t consider Hayder dangerous. But they’re willing to overlook their analysis for political reasons, to give the appearance of doing something on terrorism. They’re exporting teens wholesale and ignoring potential blowback, just like the Saudis. To them, the confused high school kid was low-hanging fruit because she was deportable. But there are lots of kids like her out there, many who are American citizens. If Tashnuba Hayder had no gripe with America before, she certainly has one now, Dhaka’s rock scene notwithstanding.
