Muslim activist in Minnesota struggles as one-man counter against lure of terrorism - The Washington Post

 

Unless we figure out a way to stop this soon,” he said, “we are headed for disaster.”

Bihi’s next morning began, like most of his mornings, with a series of momentous decisions that kept his life and his work from collapse. His wife, Shukri Yusuf, decided not to take their two young daughters and leave him — yet. The landlord, who supports his work, decided to give him one more day to pay $1,700 in overdue rent. He decided to press on with his counterterrorism work, despite the chaos it continues to create in his life.

 

 

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Bihi’s voice-mail inbox stores 38 messages, and it is always full. He had 15,000 unread e-mails, some from counterterrorism experts around the world and marked urgent. He works from 6 a.m. until midnight so his business hours overlap with allies in Canada and Somalia. On most days, he smokes two packs of cigarettes and forgets to eat breakfast, so now his size-small dress shirts drape off his shoulders like garbage bags. He had burned through $20,000 in donations and $10,000 in savings to pay for his community program while his family scraped by on his wife’s salary as a teacher’s aide. Recently his wife had forced him to sign a contract requiring him to make money or continue sleeping on the couch.

“I’m tired of you being a charity worker, like Mr. FBI-slash-Mother Teresa,” she told him.

Officially, Bihi is the director of the Somali Education and Special Advocacy Center, but in truth he is the center, aided only by a Samsung cellphone and a donated desk in the offices of Mo’s Building Maintenance. His program is part of an emerging movement that Washington officials refer to as “CVE,” or “countering violent extremism.” The idea is simple: Inoculate young Muslims against the risks of radicalization by making them feel entrenched and happy in their communities. The execution is much more complex.

 Despite four congressional hearings and dozens of meetings involving the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House, the U.S. government has yet to reach a consensus on how, exactly, counter-radicalization should work. Some Democrats argue that focusing on Muslim extremism alone is discriminatory. Some Republicans argue that the country’s security leaves no room for political correctness. And many officials on both sides are wary of funding community-run counter-radicalization programs, for fear of accidentally partnering with extremists.