A Victorian Muslim community leader has welcomed a call by United States Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson for better engagement with US Muslims.
Mr Johnson, speaking at a Countering Violent Extremism symposium, says that engagement helps counter the growing influence of groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
The United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, has called for calm in that country's fight against the threat of terrorism.
He has told a Countering Violent Extremism conference that people need to actively engage with Muslim communities, not shut them out.
"Efforts to vilify and isolate American Muslims are counter to our homeland-security interests and counter to our national security interests, given the nature of the global terrorist threat. We need to build bridges to communities, not vilify them, not drive them into the shadows, not isolate American Muslim communities. We need to build bridges, so dialogue, proposals ... Proposals for certain immigration policies that vilify and isolate American Muslims are counter to our homeland security interest."
Haras Rafiq is managing director of Quilliam Foundation, a British research centre focused on what it calls challenging extremism.
Now on a visit to Australia, he says closer communication is critical and Jeh Johnson is doing the right thing.
And he says Australia needs to heed that message, too.
"What he wants to do is to try and ensure that the very people that can help with some of the strategies and some of the intelligence and some of the actual combating of the ideology are, themselves, not (made to feel) as if they're outsiders and the Muslims that want to and can help feel very much part of the solution. Saying that the only way that the Australian government is going to engage with somebody is based on their faith, we're actually then saying that what the Islamists and the extremists are doing is actually right and that you can only have one identity. The majority of Muslims living in the West, they want to be measured and identified first and foremost as citizens, and then certain cultural values that they may have."
Haras Rafiq says he believes separating Islam, the religion, from Islam, the ideology, is vital to dealing with extremism.
"What we need to do is to not just focus on the counter-terrorism and the law and war. But what we, rather, need to do is to look at building civil society coalitions and isolate this particular ideology, this Islamist political ideology which is different to Islam, the faith, which is a faith practised by different Muslims differently around the world. So we need to isolate this particular political ideology in the same way that we isolate fascism, communism and any other theocracy and counter it jointly as a society, and Australia needs to do the same."
In the United States, Jeh Johnson has called on citizens to realise the differences between individual Muslim communities.
"I have personally witnessed that a Pakistani-American community in Boston is very different from a Syrian community in Houston or a Somali-American community in Minneapolis. So, the American Muslim communities in this country are as diverse as Christianity. There is no one neighborhood or ghetto or city that one could encircle or surveil to surveil American Muslims, contrary to some of the political rhetoric that is out there, some of the overheated political rhetoric out there."
Echoing his words, Islamic Council of Victoria secretary Kuranda Seyit says he agrees it is important to recognise each group's unique attributes.
He says a one-size-fits-all approach with Muslims will not work, regardless of where in the world a person is.
"The Muslim community is very diverse. Islam is a universal religion, and you can be from any ethnic background. So, it's really important to understand the complexities of each community and, also, to approach some of these issues from, I suppose, a nationalistic or an ethnic point of view, so that you can not only get closer and understand the community more effectively, you don't tar the whole community with one brush, and that each one is complex within itself."
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