Loading ...Why Cable News Makes Dearborn's Police Chief 'Feel Bad for the Community' Lately
By Alan Stamm
Deadline Detroit
A vast disconnect separates the reality of Muslims living in Americas from the campaign rhetoric of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. (We know — shocking, right?)
For an in-depth look at what Politico calls “the FBI’s secret Muslim network” of tipsters, national editor Michael Hirsh interviewed specialists in Dearborn, Washington and Rutgers University.
Superficially, he notes in an ominous first sentence, “Dearborn may be the closest thing America has to a Mollenbeek, the seething, Islamicized neighborhood of Brussels believed to have harbored the terrorists involved in both the metro and airport attacks this week and last fall’s slaughter in Paris.”
His 2,400-word “cover story” at Politico’s site tells how Dearborn and Brussels are dissimilar, and how Muslims help law enforcers here and around America. Excerpts:
Dearborn and Mollenbeek, in fact, could not be more different, which says a lot about the very different ways that the United States and countries like Belgium and France have approached the problem of radicalization.
In a city where nearly a third of the approximately 95,000 residents are Arab-American or of Arab descent, [Police Chief Ron] Haddad’s department has a deep network of contacts in the community and makes regular visits to Dearborn’s 38 schools and its many mosques. He sponsors a program called “Stepping Up,” which includes an annual awards ceremony (the next is April 12) for residents reporting crime.
At least twice in the past several years, fearing influence from ISIL or online propaganda on their children, Haddad says, Muslim fathers have turned in their own sons. In another case, it was students at a largely Muslim high school calling about a troubled peer.
That’s partly because they have a place to call, and because they’re connected to the larger Dearborn, Michigan and American community, says Haddad.
The outreach-and-informant program he runs is considered a model by U.S. law enforcement and counter-terrorism authorities. And it’s just one piece of a little-known but widespread effort nationwide to build networks within Muslim communities. The effort spans state and Washington agencies, and is about to get a boost with a new federal clearinghouse.
Few Americans are aware it’s even happening. Certainly, Bill O’Reilly doesn’t appear to be.
Police Chief Ron Haddad of Dearborn: “I feel bad for the community” when candidates stoke fear about Muslim Americans: “People are very misinformed.”
Politico’s national editor writes that “anti-Muslim sentiment” from Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz “has distressed U.S. law enforcement officials actually involved in the counter-terror effort.”
In fact, they say, U.S. Muslim communities already are highly wired by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence. And contrary to being “radicalized,” they have proven astonishingly cooperative on the whole.
Numerous sources in U.S. law enforcement and national security interviewed for this story drew a picture of a largely sub-rosa but widespread effort in American counter-terrorism: The deep embedding of federal counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering efforts in Muslim communities like Dearborn (“The FBI has been great,” says Haddad) uses an approach less driven by “patrolling” and surveillance than by using sophisticated — if sometimes intrusive — outreach and informant programs.
The result, U.S. officials say, is that Muslim neighborhoods here are cooperating against Islamist terrorists to a degree that can’t be found among their counterparts in Europe. . . .
For Haddad of Dearborn and other U.S. law enforcement officials, the fear is that this new wave of openly Islamophobic politics could resurrect the radicalization they have worked to neutralize. . . .
The political rhetoric, Haddad said, “is more frustrating for the community than for me. “I feel bad for the community. Those kinds of things are hard to ignore when they’re all over the 24-hour cable networks. People are very misinformed.”
Source: www.deadlinedetroit.com