MSNBC guest Mubin Shaikh stated on Wednesday that the U.S. “can’t keep flipping off the Muslim community” while expecting intelligence from it.
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Shaikh, a former Islamic extremist, told MSNBC, “Look, self-radicalization, I mean what we’re trying to say is that these are people who radicalize not in traditional groups like before. They go online, they get most of their ideology, but, this is something that they’ve already decided to engage in. A person doesn’t go online and read something and decide, ‘Oh, I‘m going to be–oh, I believe this. I‘m going to go and act on this.’ They already have this going on inside them before they turn to the internet or somebody like in a real human network.”
“What we need to look into is why this person even feels they need to look that way. And one of the things is hatred–is hatred, and alienation, and marginalization. Think about it this way–when you tell a kid that he’s dumb, he’s stupid, he’s going to amount to nothing, what do you think is going to happen with that kid? He’s going to take that, internalize that, and externalize it by acting it out onto other people,” he continued.
He concluded, “So, it does require a number of steps to be taken complimentary but simultaneously. Not just the domestic law enforcement piece, not just the intelligence piece, especially from these communities. If you keep flipping off the Muslim community, and then demanding they give you the intelligence, the reality just doesn’t work like that.”