Curbing Recruitment of Terror Groups in the United States

Curbing Recruitment of Terror Groups in the United States
From a wide perspective, terrorism refers to the intentional use of indiscriminate violence to achieve a religious, ideological or political aim. It is a form of brutal crime which is classified as a fourth generation warfare. Terrorist groups such as ISIS and the Al Qaeda with jihad fundamentals, wrongfully mainly use religion to justify their criminal activities. According to a report by the National Journal, recruitment by ISIS has reached unprecedented levels and this presents a significant problem to the future of national security.
Terrorism is such a complex matter that cannot be handled by a single disciplinary approach and hence the necessity to involve different approaches and stakeholders. For this study, philosophy and religion, psychology and criminal justice will be discussed as among the appropriate approaches to resolving recruitment of American residents into various terror groups.
Philosophy and Religion
Religion has been used to legitimize specific violent acts, motivated by a belief that the Supreme being has commanded application of certain violence for the greater glory of faith. On the other hand, philosophy of nationalism has become a principle source of political violence that has catalyzed emerging terrorist organizations such as ISIS. For example, ISIS terror group has developed the ideology that world policies such as democratic elections and international security are against their nations’ cultural and religious beliefs.

A typical example is the sharia law which seems to be pro-monarchical as opposed to democracy. This motivates American citizens with their origins to these nation to support their ideologies and activities.
Other Americans sympathizing with terror groups and with the urge to gain more knowledge in the teachings of Islam religion drives the people with less knowledge of recruitment networks. The recruiters, on the other hand, can manipulate potential recruits because they have adequate knowledge about the philosophies they have developed and relate them to religion. The state should focus on educating its citizens on the difference between Islam as a religion and terrorist groups such as ISIS, that have their agenda of destabilizing nations. There should be a careful way of handling the matter to prevent blanket condemnation of Islam as a religion.
Psychology
Psychology tries to explain what drives people to commit terrorism violent act. It is relatively difficult to understand the motive since these criminals aren’t willing to provide information on the matter or act as experimental subjects. Terrorism when observed from a psychological perspective, it draws different views depending on the side that one is from. Suicide bombers are regarded as freedom fighters by some Arabic nations while the rest of the world treats them as criminals with hidden agendas. However, many psychologists have agreed on the matter to classify terrorist groups as people with a political agenda.
These groups thrive a lot since there are many people with the desire for seeking personal significance and meaning and thus they can go an extra mile of even committing suicide attacks to develop terrorist’s agenda. To prevent recruitment to this terror groups, peaceful dialogue among the people with conflicting ideologies is important also ensuring none of them should be victimized in the process. This can only be achieved by extensively studying psychological aspects which influence terrorism and new converts to terrorism. Moreover, de-radicalization programs are important in explaining that terrorism is like chasing a pipe dream.
Criminal Justice
Criminal justice system involves the legislation, law enforcement, and judiciary. Law enforcement units’ ability to investigate and prevent recruitment into terror networks is critical. However, that is challenged by the current criminal justice system that is greatly focused on actual violent terror activities. To tackle the problem, there is a need to enhance the general criminal justice system. One way that the criminal justice operations can be strengthened is by improving the relationship between Arab-American communities and the law enforcement agencies. The law enforcement reaction to the 9/11 events fuelled by increased media attention escalated the levels of suspicion by the public on the Arab-American communities.
Allegations of these communities being victimized by Federal policies and practices are of concern. It is necessary to have these concerns addressed so as to get some goodwill from Arab-American communities in giving information on potential recruitment networks. New legislation to tackle the new threat of locally bred terrorism is another way in which the criminal justice system can be improved. Legislation must incline the role of prosecutors from investigating and prosecuting criminal offenses; this will be aiming at the emphasis on the collection of intelligence and greater attention to precursor crimes such as recruitment, documents forgery, and Identity thefts. This will go a long way in wiping out recruitment networks of ISIS and other terror groups.
Conclusion
From this discussion, it can be seen that all these three disciplines are necessary for efforts to reduce recruitment of ISIS and other terror groups in the United States. It is, therefore, paramount to adopt a multidisciplinary approach that may also include other disciplines such as Political Science and History.