President Barack Obama delivers a statement on the first US bombing of the Islamic State group(IS) and Al-Qaeda at the White House in Washington, DC, September 23, 2014, before departing to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York. President Obama said Tuesday the coalition of Arab nations involved in the first US air strikes in Syria, showed the United States was not alone in combating the Islamic State group. ; Credit: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
Bahrain, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia joined the U.S. last night in coordinated airstrikes targeting Islamic extremist militants in Syria and “destroyed or damaged” multiple IS targets, according to the Pentagon. Domestically, the airstrikes follow the federal government’s launch of a pilot program last week that will focus on countering violent extremism in young American Muslims who may be radicalized by events overseas.
Yesterday the Los Angeles Times reported that Los Angeles, Boston and Minneapolis are the three cities where this pilot program will be rolled out. It sounds strikingly similar to the Safe Spaces Initiative started recently by the L.A.-based Muslim Public affairs Council (MPAC). The program is the first of its kind to be proposed, and would provide 2,100 mosques nationwide with training and resources to create an open environment for political discourse on sensitive topics. Salam Al-Marayati, president of MPAC, says that many mosques are “underfunded and led my foreign-born Imams unfamiliar with American culture,” and that they need help dealing with young people and providing religious counseling and mental health resources. The proposed program is based on the same kinds of gang intervention used in Los Angeles by Homeboy Industries. The LAPD has expressed its support of an intervention program -- the police already monitor visits to radical websites and say instances are more common than one might think.
How should L.A. approach homegrown terrorism? What are local groups like MPAC already doing to prevent the radicalizing of young people and how might this federal program bolster that?
Guest:
Salam Al-Marayati, president, Muslim Public Affairs Council
Jeremy Herb, Defense Reporter, POLITICO
Brian Michael Jenkins, senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation