Source: The Guardian
Diplomatic editor
One of the leading counter-terror chiefs in the US warned against the blanket political denigration of Muslims, saying the integration of American Muslims into the country “has been a major boon to the law enforcement and intelligence community in disrupting the terrorist threat”.
John Carlin, the assistant attorney general for national security, made his remarks in London when asked if the recent attacks on Muslims by presumptive Republic nominee Donald Trump hindered his counter-terror work. Trump has suggested all Muslims should be banned from coming to the US, but has partially retracted the remark saying it was merely “a suggestion”.
Carlin said he was not going to discuss specific presidential campaigns, but then added: “It is key to the work of American law enforcement that it has retained the trust of the Muslim community.”
He said the fight in the US against Islamic State is “a difficult complex problem for us to face. The fact that we don’t have a community that feels in its entirety it has not been able to assimilate, the fact that as communities Muslims – along with other religions – feel quite integrated into American culture has been a major boon to law enforcement and the intelligence community in disrupting in this threat.”
He also called for the scale of the terror threat to in the US be kept in proportion. He said in the US there were probably “only hundreds” that have tried or are tempted to go over to Islamic State. “If we had the same scale of threat of some of our closest western allies, we would be looking at 30,000 to 35,000 people, so maintaining that context is key and having communities that trust us to the work is key to do our job going forward,” he said.
Carlin, also responsible for cybersecurity, was in London to intensify cooperation with UK intelligence chiefs including how to combat Islamic State propaganda on social media.
Carlin last year convened a group of Madison Avenue advertising executives, Hollywood film producers and Silicon Valley social media executives to do more to counter what he described as “the ‘crowd-sourcing’ of terrorism” – the slick Islamic State propaganda aimed at recruiting impressionable Americans.
Categories: America, Counter Terrorism, Europe, London, Muslims, The Muslim Times, UK, USA