The Italian news site ANSA reported Wednesday that a convert to Islam who calls himself Muhammad Santamato “posted material praising jihad,” and is now, authorities said, to be “deradicalized.” Italian authorities could just as well have said that they weren’t going to do anything to stop Santamato from carrying out a jihad attack, since one of the most obvious but little-noted aspects of the West’s catastrophic response to jihad terror is the abject failure of “deradicalization” programs.
ANSA noted that “Alfredo alias Muhammad Santamato, 42, was flagged as a potential threat, perhaps using his truck to target civilians as in recent attacks in Nice, Berlin, London and Stockholm, police said.” But relax: “his license has been confiscated and he now has to report to police while doing a special course aimed at erasing his Islamist beliefs, sources said.”
De-radicalization programs have been implemented elsewhere, notably in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia’s deradicalization program is worse than a failure: terror analyst Paul Sperry wrote in the New York Post last November that “counterterrorism experts have long suspected Saudi Arabia’s ‘rehabilitation’ center for terrorists does a poor job of de-radicalizing jihadists. But a Saudi detainee at Guantanamo Bay now reveals it’s actually a recruiting and training factory for jihad.”
Sperry reported that
According to recently declassified documents, senior al Qaeda operative Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi told a Gitmo parole board that the Saudi government has been encouraging previously released prisoners to rejoin the jihad at its terrorist reform school, officially known as the Prince Mohammed bin Naif Counseling and Care Center.
The record shows that al-Sharbi was right. UPI reported in February 2009 that “eleven Saudis released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are on a list of 85 wanted terrorism suspects made public by the Saudi Interior Ministry, officials said. Saudi officials said the 11 former Guantanamo Bay detainees underwent a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists and are thought to have fled the country, joining terrorist groups elsewhere.” In June 2010 a Saudi official revealed that twenty-five graduates of the Saudi deradicalization program had returned to jihad.
That same month, Indonesia’s Minister of Justice and Human Rights, Patrialis Akbar, admitted that his country’s deradicalization program was a failure: “We have to say that generally the program has failed. There are convicts who have successfully been re-integrated back into society, leaving behind their old ways. But successes are few compared to those who remain unreformed. It is extremely difficult to reform terrorists because we are trying to destroy years of indoctrination and misinterpretation of Islam.”
One wonders why it is so difficult. If their misinterpretation of Islam is so clear, one would think it wouldn’t be all that hard to explain that to jihadists, who are generally very devout and anxious to the right Islamic thing.
Unless, of course, the “misinterpretation of Islam” that the jihadists use to justify their actions and make recruits is based on a broad, mainstream tradition in Islam — a tradition that is yet to be successfully challenged on Islamic grounds by self-proclaimed moderates.
And in the West? The Washington Post reported in February that the French government’s deradicalization program was, according to a French Senate report, a “total fiasco.”
This universal failure is no surprise. Deradicalization programs are based on a false premise: that jihadis are misunderstanding Islam and misinterpreting the Qur’an, and can simply be shown the error of their ways. If the true teachings of Islam are peaceful, then all that needs to be done is show the jihadis how they’re overlooking all the peace, and all will be well. But since the Qur’an and Sunnah are full of commands to make war against and subjugate unbelievers, the idea that jihadis can be “deradicalized” by reference to them is just a myth told to infidel authorities to lull them into complacency.
We’re likely to be paying for this myth for a long, long time.
