In the early hours of Sunday June 12, 2016, a madman perpetrated the mass murder of 49 people in a nightclub considered a safe space for Orlando’s LGBT community. 

Politicians quickly went into gear to exploit this tragedy to push their own agendas. Glaringly silent on the civil rights of LGBT communities, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz repeated their calls to ban, deport, and more aggressively prosecute Muslims in the wake of this attack. As if Muslims in America are not already selectively targeted in counterterrorism enforcement, stopped for extra security by the TSA at airports, and targeted for entrapment in terrorism cases manufactured by the FBI. 

Other politicians reiterated calls for Muslim communities to fight extremism purportedly infecting their communities, all while ignoring the fact that domestic terrorism carried out by non-Muslim perpetrators since 9/11 has had a higher impact than the jihadist threat. Asking Muslim American communities to counter violent extremism is a red herring and a nonstarter. 

In 2011, the White House initiated a countering violent extremism (CVE) program as a new form of soft counterterrorism. Under the rubric of community partnerships, Muslim communities are invited to work with law enforcement to prevent Muslims from joining foreign terrorist groups such as ISIS. Federal grants and rubbing elbows with high level federal officials are among the fringe benefits for cooperation, or cooptation as some critics argue, with the CVE program. 

Putting aside the un-American imposition of collective responsibility on Muslims, it is a red herring to call on Muslims to counter violent extremism. An individual cannot prevent a criminal act about which s/he has no knowledge. Past cases show that Muslim leaders, or the perpetrators’ family members for that matter, do not have knowledge of planned terrorist acts. 

Hence, Muslims and non-Muslims alike are in the same state of uncertainty and insecurity about the circumstances surrounding the next terrorist act on American soil. 

CVE is also a nonstarter for a community under siege by the government and private acts of discrimination. CVE programs expect community leaders and parents to engage young people on timely religious, political, and social matters. While this is generally a good practice for all communities, it should not be conducted through a security paradigm. Nor can it occur without a safe space for honest dialogue.

After fifteen years of aggressive surveillance and investigations, there are few safe spaces left in Muslim communities. Thanks in large part to mass FBI surveillance, mosques have become intellectual deserts where no one dares engage in discussions on sensitive political or religious topics. Fears that informants and undercover agents may secretly report on anyone who even criticizes American foreign policy have stripped mosques from their role as a community center where ideas can be freely debated. Government deportations of imams with critical views have turned Friday sermons into sterile monologues about mundane topics. And government efforts to promote “moderate” Muslims impose an assimilationist, anti-intellectual, and tokenized Muslim identity. 

For these reasons, debates about religion, politics, and society among young people are taking place online outside the purview of mosques, imams, and parents. 

Meanwhile, Muslim youth are reminded in their daily lives that they are suspect and their religion is violent. Students are subjected to bullying at school. Mosques are vandalized in conjunction with racist messages.  Workers face harassment at work. Muslim women wearing headscarves are assaulted in public spaces. Whether fear or bigotry drives the prejudice, government action and politicians’ rhetoric legitimize discrimination as an act of patriotism.

Defending against these civil rights assaults is consuming Muslim Americans’ community resources and attention. Worried about their physical safety, their means of livelihood, and the well-being of their children in schools; many Muslim Americans experience the post-9/11 era as doubly victimized by terrorism. Their civil rights are violated by private actors and their civil liberties are violated by government actors—all in retribution for a criminal act about which they had no prior knowledge, and which they had no power to prevent by a criminal with whom they had no relationship.

To be sure, we should not sit back and allow another mass shooting to occur without a national conversation about the causes of such violence. But wasting time debating ineffective and racialized CVE programs is not constructive. Our efforts are better spent addressing gun violence, the rise of homophobic violence, and failed American foreign policy in the Middle East.

We all have a responsibility to do what we can to prevent more madmen from engaging in senseless violence that violates our safe spaces.

This article was originally published in the Huffington Post.

Event Information

With the violence in the Middle East continuing, and further attacks on American soil in the name of Islam, the election campaigns have paid significant attention to policy issues related to the Middle East. But as both Republicans and Democrats prepare for their national conventions, how do Americans prioritize Middle East issues compared with other global priorities? Have public attitudes shifted in light of recent ISIS-inspired attacks overseas and at home and in response to heated campaign rhetoric? If so, in what direction?

On July 11, Brookings launched two new public opinion surveys focusing on American attitudes towards the Middle East, conducted by Nonresident Senior Fellow Shibley Telhami: One was conducted just two weeks before the Orlando shooting, the other taken two weeks after—thus providing an opportunity to evaluate any shift in public attitudes. In addition, some of the same questions were asked in Telhami’s polls the previous two years, thus providing a further opportunity to evaluate trends. One of the polls also includes a significant oversample of millennials (18-34) for further demographic analysis.

Telhami was joined in discussion by William Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at Brookings. Tamara Cofman Wittes, senior fellow and director of the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #AfterOrlando

Video

• Orlando, the Middle East, and the U.S. election

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• Orlando, the Middle East, and the U.S. election

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

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• 20160711_orlando_middle_east_opinion_transcript

The United States needs to bear down on a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS globally in the aftermath of the terrible June 12 tragedy in Orlando, Florida. To be sure, no such effort can reliably prevent all such future attacks. But moments like these require that we reassess and reinvigorate our strategy against a serious, global threat to our nation and our allies.

Some will say that ISIS overachieved here, or that Omar Mateen was more a deranged individual than an ISIS operative, or that recent battlefield progress by the United States and its partners against ISIS in Iraq and Syria will soon lead to the group’s demise. None of these arguments is compelling as a case for complacency. What Mateen did, even if the bloodiest single shooting spree in U.S. history, is entirely repeatable by well-trained individuals with access to weapons like the AR-15. Mateen was perhaps deranged, but he also was apparently pushed over the edge by the allure of joining a broader ISIS-inspired movement that finds legitimacy in doctrines of hate, and takes purpose from creating mass-casualty events in the name of some perverted interpretation of Islam. It could, and probably will, happen again.

Yes, a combination of Iraqi forces, U.S. and coalition airpower, Kurdish fighters, Sunni tribesmen, and Shiite militias has taken back perhaps 40 percent of Iraqi territory and 20 percent of Syrian territory previously held by ISIS. ISIS may have lost up to half its revenue in those two countries as well. But the cities of Raqqa and Mosul remain firmly in ISIS hands. Over the last year or two, moreover, ISIS has deepened its roots from the Sinai Peninsula to Libya, established tentacles from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan and into Southeast Asia, and gained a powerful affiliate in the form of the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria. It may be down, but it is hardly out. 

[ISIS] may be down, but it is hardly out.

Mapping the threat

Several crucial aspects of the anti-ISIS campaign are lagging. Country by country, an agenda to address them might be summarized as follows:

Iraq. Here, government-led forces are making headway, but the pace is slow, and most worrisome of all, there is little reason to think that Mosul in particular will be well-governed once it is retaken from ISIS. We need to find a way to increase U.S. leverage in Baghdad to create the kinds of “hold” forces that can lead to a stable peace—as much a political problem as a military one. That may require a larger aid and assistance package from the United States—especially relevant given how much Iraq depends on oil revenue and how much oil prices have fallen.

Syria. Here, the political strategy does not really hold water. Peace talks are moribund; Bashar Assad is on the march, with Russian help. We need to lower our political goals—confederation, with protection of minority rights, may be a more appropriate standard for success. But regardless, we need to step up our game at helping not only Kurdish forces, but moderate Arab forces too. Quite likely, we will need to relax modestly our vetting standards on whom we help, and increase several-fold the number of Americans involved in the training and equipping efforts. Certain types of retaliatory measures against Syrian government aircraft that bomb declared no-go zones may be appropriate as well. Only by moving towards solving the civil war can we properly target the ISIS menace there.

Libya. With the unity government perhaps taking shape, the West now needs to be preparing an intensified aid and training program for a Libyan government force that can gain the strength needed to consolidate control, at least in ISIS-occupied areas in the country’s central coastal regions. This will require perhaps hundreds of Western advisors in the country when the moment is right.

Nigeria. With President Muhammadu Buhari making progress against corruption, it is time for an expanded American assistance program that may even, if Nigerians so request, involve deployment of small mentoring teams to the field to help the army in its fight against Boko Haram.

Afghanistan. President Obama should not make any further reductions in U.S. troop levels for the rest of his presidency, and should allow U.S. commanders considerable flexibility in how they employ airpower there against the Taliban.

The Homefront. ISIS is in fact a three-headed monster—with its core in Iraq and Syria, its various provinces and affiliates (or wilayats) around the broader region, and the global network that binds the pieces together. It is against this global network, both domestically and internationally, that we must double down, for it will be this network that will generate the attacks upon our homelands. Encrypted smart phones have complicated this effort when cells of extremists are actively plotting attacks. But the net effect of technology can still probably help us—if we intensify our pressure on the network through vigilance, rigorous investigations that blend law enforcement and intelligence, and disruptive, timely actions against suspects. New York City, London, and increasingly Paris have done this, but the methods are not yet generalized. This requires aggressive and unequivocal American leadership.

It is against this global network, both domestically and internationally, that we must double down.

These efforts would be significant. Yet none would be enormous. The overseas components, taken together, would involve no more than several thousand additional U.S. personnel and several billion dollars a year in additional aid of various types to groups that are doing the real fighting and dying in common cause with us. We must strike all three heads of this horrific creature, simultaneously and relentlessly. The United States and its coalition partners have made a modest amount of progress against ISIS, but now is a moment to intensify the effort before the next, possibly much worse, attack occurs.