Muslim groups work to keep youth safe from ISIS, entrapment

With terrorist organizations like ISIS seeking to recruit Muslim youth online and via social media, Chicago-area Muslim groups are taking steps to keep their children safe and help them avoid the nightmare a Bolingbrook family is now living through.

The Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago and schools have been holding programs on online radicalization and Internet and social media safety at mosques and schools for parents and youth. The programs, which have attracted hundreds, come on the heels of the arrest last year of 19-year-old Bolingbrook resident Mohammed Hamzah Khan, charged with attempting to join ISIS and alleged to have recruited his younger teen siblings to join him. They’ve also been spurred by concern over the risk of law enforcement entrapment.

“This is the third arrest of a young Muslim in the Chicagoland area in the last three years,” said Gihad Ali, youth programs director with the Council. “You can say there have been only three arrests, or you can say there are three arrests too many for sure.

“Across Muslim schools, administrators were contacting us. We were contacting them trying to see how we could be supportive.”

Meanwhile, Khan’s mother, Zarine Khan, recently issued a stern message to ISIS social media recruiters to “leave our children alone” after her son entered a not guilty plea in court.

While there’s plenty of online safety information available, none dealt with some of the unique risks Muslim youth can face, so the Council created its own workshop tailored to their needs, Ali said.

It was “born out of the common factor of the Internet being a key issue in all three of these cases as well as other cases we’re seeing around the country involving young Muslims, not just the Internet, but social media,” she noted.

The Council also has held seminars on online radicalization with experts targeting primarily adults to discuss “different aspects of this issue, the media aspect, religious aspect, psychological aspect,” Ali said. “A lot of people were asking what would make a young person want to do something like this.”

And in Washington, a three-day conference on radical extremism wrapped up Thursday. There, too, the discussion included terrorists’ targeting of young people in cyberspace.

Thomas Durkin, the attorney representing Mohammed Khan, said parents have cause to be concerned about organizations like ISIS’ online recruitment tactics.

“I have spoken out on several occasions with respect to the slickness of their advertising material,” he said. “If someone were to Google and get a copy of Dabiq magazine, they would realize how skillful these people are with using social media. It’s an online color magazine that’s very well done and does not reference violence at all. It references a caliphate, a utopian lifestyle that is very seductive to young adolescents in their late teens who are struggling with their identity.”

Syeda Rasheed has attended Council workshops with her 16- and 15-year-old sons. She said while her sons have attended “generic” workshops on Internet safety at the public school they attend, she felt her children needed to hear the Muslim perspective.

“I thought they needed that extra touch on how to be safe as a Muslim on the Internet because there are so many predators, not just ISIS-like groups trying to recruit, at the same time I understand law enforcement agencies are also throwing out bait to see if kids will take it.”

Some Muslim youth may be vulnerable as they try to navigate their way in an era where they see “people who identify as Muslim being a terrorist” and misusing verses in the Quran to justify violence, and in an environment where Muslims are portrayed negatively in the media, said Aliyah Banister. A youth counselor at the Islamic Foundation School in Villa Park, Banister has a master’s degree in clinical social work and has spoken at the seminars along with Omer Mozaffar, Muslim chaplain and adjunct professor of theology at Loyola University.

For many Muslim youth, who’re growing up in a post 9/11 world, most of their lives the U.S. has been at war with Muslim countries, Mozaffar noted.

The teens can be confused and have questions and concerns about injustices they see, but many [Muslim adults] “are scared to even talk about this stuff,” Banister said. She added kids want answers to their questions and as they see ills in society, want to help make positive change.

“The answer in the Muslim community is community service, but there are essentially vultures on the Internet who are trying to lure young Muslims into a wrong direction,” Mozaffar said.

At the Islamic Foundation School, Principal Omar Qureshi holds school assemblies discussing passages in the Quran that have been misused by radical Muslim terrorist groups and misinterpreted by some media, he said.

“We have had experts look at specific verses of the Quran and specific incidents in the life of the prophet that are frequently quoted and presented by radical groups and presented here’s how some radical groups understand them and here’s how scholars of Islam understand them, so our students can understand how serious their [radicals’] misunderstanding is of these verses,” he added.

In the assemblies, they’ve also stressed the importance of understanding U.S. laws, working within the law and “keeping the law in mind with who you interact, and making sure the things you say are within the legal limits,” Qureshi said.

At one of the Council’s workshops, a parent shared that her child was given a school assignment to do an essay on ISIS.

“She asked how can my child search the Internet to find information about ISIS without getting caught up within a web of trouble,” Ali said. “What we’ve said to them is it’s all about the source. I said go to FBI.gov. because it’s a government website. It’s legit. Don’t go to isis.org, or howtojoinisis.com,” if such sites exist, she said.

Mozaffar and Ali advise parents of the importance of being engaged and involved in the lives of their children and stress the importance of teaching youth critical thinking.

Ali stresses to teens: “When you post something, ask yourself is this something I might regret in one week, one year, five years. What would my parents think if they saw this. What would law enforcement think if they saw this,” she said. It’s just become a culture of very liberal information sharing. . . . Sometimes they may see something that they think is just funny. It’s not ill intended, but it may be ill interpreted.”

Ali also drills into them: “You can’t trust anybody online, especially people you don’t know. It doesn’t matter how pure your intentions may be, you don’t really know who you’re talking to.”