Trump Seeks to End Obama's 'Countering Violent Extremism' Scam

He and a Somali-American mentor began to work through an extensive reading list, which included Richard Wright’s Native Son, a novel about growing up poor and black in the 1930s, and an article by Native American author Sherman Alexie about how poetry freed him from the “reservation” of his mind.

McKinley would not say how often Yusuf met his mentor.

“We met with him regularly, I don’t know the number of times a week,” she said. When pressed on whether they met weekly, biweekly, or at a different pace, McKinley would not clarify. “We met with him regularly.”

Court documents also reference Yusuf meeting with religious leaders, but McKinley wasn’t sure about that.

“I don’t know if he’s met with any religious leaders,” she said in response to a question about meeting with imams. “I mean, he’s an adult, he can get any visitor he wants.”

That first client was sent back to jail after a search of his room at a halfway house found a box cutter.

The Obama administration’s CVE programs have a lengthy history of failure:

• As I reported here at PJ Media just a few days ago, an Associated Press investigation into the Pentagon’s $500 million WebOps program to counter Islamic State propaganda found widespread incompetence and corruption. According to whistleblowers, civilian Arabic specialists with no understanding of Islam tried to defeat complex religious justifications for terrorism, resulting in the program becoming a laughingstock in jihadist circles.
• In December 2014, the New York Times reported that the then-head of Special Operations Command, Major Gen. Michael Nagata, convened a series of conference calls with outside experts attempting to understand why the message of the Islamic State had grown so dangerous. But after the Obama administration’s counter-terror training purge, Gen. Nagata was forced to admit that “we do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it….We have not defeated the idea. We do not even understand the idea.”
• In September 2011, Obama signed an executive order creating the State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC). One of their early failures was a graphic video produced called “Welcome to ISIS Land,” targeting would-be Islamic State recruits. The center’s director was quickly replaced. Then a Twitter campaign, “Think Again Turn Away,” was largely panned by terror experts who claimed the effort was largely ineffective and was actually legitimizing the terrorist narrative. A panel of outside experts convened by the State Department agreed, finding that the CSCC was so counterproductive to its mission that they questioned whether the U.S. government should be involved in counter-propaganda at all. The center was promptly closed.
• One of the first CVE guidelines produced by the Department of Homeland Security in 2011 was to instruct federal agencies to avoid using “trainers who are self-professed ‘Muslim Reformers,'” and yet documents uncovered regarding meetings with DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano show the agency soliciting advice from known extremist groups and controversial Islamic leaders. Some of these extremist leaders even held official positions advising DHS. Last June, when the DHS Countering Violent Extremism Subcommittee released its recommendations urging $100 million in new CVE funding, it urged banning the use of “jihad” or “sharia” in training — two very common terms used by terrorist recruiters. One of the subcommittee members, a Syrian immigrant, had previously said that the 9/11 terror attacks had “changed the world for good.” And in December, DHS teamed up with the State Department to bring in the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that the Justice Department had argued in federal court had supported terrorism, to teach a CVE course for French officials. Even though the State Department programs have been universally panned, it was reported last August that they had tripled the budget.
• In implementing the Obama administration’s CVE agenda, the FBI had conducted a wide-scale purge of its terrorism training curriculum at the request of Islamic groups claiming it was biased. In a move questioned by members of Congress, the FBI classified the identities of the outside experts brought in to censor the material. A subsequent review of the censored terror-training material discovered suspect and inconsistent standards in purging the curriculum. More recently, a FBI website and video game (“Don’t Be a Puppet”) intended to target youth vulnerable to terrorist recruitment was launched, and then suspended after just a day in response to complaints of Islamic groups, terror experts, and even teachers unions that the effort was biased, ineffective, and encouraged students to inform on each other. Some of the criticism came from the FBI’s own Muslim outreach partners that were brought in to advise the bureau on its CVE policies.

So it’s no great mystery why the incoming Trump administration began discussions about scaling back and ending Obama’s CVE program.

Others contend that the CVE grants were political payoffs to groups to enlist their aid in scuttling counter-terror programs and to silence any possible criticism of the Obama national security and foreign policy agenda.

The chairman of one group that was scheduled to receive a $400,000 CVE grant, Life After Hate, has publicly launched attacks on the incoming Trump administration and even called for the violent removal of President Trump one day after his inauguration.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, as Ka Joog declines the $500,000 in announced DHS CVE grants the group has quickly transitioned from attempting to deradicalizing area Somali youth to publicly declaring that President Trump is engaged in “an official war against Islam” — parroting a standard terrorist narrative.

But as mentioned previously, the nephew of the executive director who had participated in Ka Joog programs was still recruited to join the Islamic State.

In another instance, an Islamic State recruit from Alexandria, Virginia, later captured by Kurdish troops and currently facing federal charges, lived less than 50 yards from one of the Obama administration’s top go-to CVE experts.

If these so-called CVE “experts” can’t prevent their closest relatives or neighbors from joining terrorist groups, why should the Trump administration continue to entrust them with our national security?

Despite all the media hand-wringing, it seems that questioning the effectiveness of Obama’s CVE program is entirely in order given its constant track record of failure.

Yet in light of the current media climate, the new administration should expect that it will come under fire for whatever they eventually replace the failed CVE agenda with. And the Islamic State and other terrorist groups continue to recruit and encourage supporters to conduct attacks inside the homeland.

Ending the CVE scam would be a good first step in reversing the corrosive policies established by the Obama administration that have hampered and sometimes punished our law enforcement and national security professionals for doing their job.