What do you do when one of your own travels to Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, or Somalia, joins ISIS (or other jihadi group) and then returns home? According to Irfan Saeed, director of the Office of Countering Violent Extremism at the State Department, we need to rehabilitate them and reintegrate them into society.
Sure. Because after "Chad" becomes "Muhammad," travels to Yemen to learn every verse of the Quran and the fine art of plastique explosives then returns to the U.S. to practice his "art," we should sit him in a therapist's chair, maybe get him a painter's easel (to get out the frustration) and, soon, a front-of-the-house job at the local IHOP. Maybe there, through the sheer joy of watching patrons scarf down flapjacks, he will find fulfillment and re-learn to love the West -- and not want to blow it up.
CNSNews reports the details of the department's latest planning meeting on countering "violent extremism":
Irfan Saeed praised Denmark’s strategy of rehabilitating and reintegrating foreign extremist fighters into society, asking, “What happens when they come back? You have to be able to rehabilitate them and then re-integrate them back into society.”
Speaking at a National Academy of Sciences’ panel on “Ideologically Motivated Violence,” Saeed described rehabilitation and integration as a strategy area of focus for the State Department.
“We’ve seen a large number of individuals travel overseas to foreign conflict zones, places like Iraq and Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan,” Saeed said. “So what happens when they come back? You have to be able to rehabilitate them and then re-integrate them back into society.”
He cited the program in Aarhus, Denmark, “where they’ve really struggled with this issue, but they’ve come up with a comprehensive way to try to rehabilitate these individuals once they come back and then reintegrate them into society.”
For the record, this is how the NY Times describes the Aarhus program Saeed seems bent on emulating:
...in Denmark’s second biggest city, the young man, a 21-year-old of Turkish descent who spent 13 months in Syria fighting in the name of Islam, passes his days playing soccer, working out at the gym and waiting anxiously to see if he has secured a place to study engineering at a well-regarded local university.
“I feel at home. I have no problems here,” the former jihadist warrior, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only as Osman, said. Since his return to this tranquil port city from the battlefields of Syria, he has been part of a pioneering program that treats onetime fighters not as criminals or potential terrorists but as wayward youths who deserve a second chance. The program, closely watched by authorities around Europe, involves counseling, help with readmission to school, meetings with parents and other outreach efforts.
Saeed, too, said he wants to employ "something as simple as offers or alternatives to prosecution."
“It’s one thing to throw everybody in jail and figure it out later,” he said, but officials “understand that we can’t arrest our way out of this problem.”
We suppose barring these enemy combatants from re-entering their home countries on the basis of treason never crossed the minds of our Western leaders.
The video posted above discusses yet another "terrorist rehab" program, this one in Saudi Arabia, which provides lavish accommodations, saunas and swimming pools to jihadis.
