A site developed by the FBI to help keep kids from joining radical terror groups has been put on the back burner, halted due to outrage from a couple of Muslim rights groups and complaints from the civil rights crowd.
"The greatest threat facing American schoolchildren today is gun violence," said Arjun Sethi, a Georgetown law professor who tested the FBI program over the summer, to the New York Times. "It's not Muslim extremism."
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The FBI's website was titled, "Don't Be A Puppet," and it was supposed to go live this week, Breitbart reported. The site was set up like a game, where players would participate in certain activities to identify potential terrorists and extremists. As the FBI defined it, to the New York Times: "[It's] a website designed to provide awareness about the dangers of violent extremist predators on the Internet, with input from students, educators and community leaders."
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But Muslim leaders invited to test the site in its beta phase expressed outrage at the Islamist ties.
The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, or ADC, said through its policy director: "If this is shown to middle and high-school students, it's going to result in bullying of these children."
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And the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or MPAC, said in a press release: "While we welcome efforts to promote the safety and security of our nation, tools like this that improperly characterize American Muslims as a suspect community with its targeted focus and stereotypical depictions stigmatize Muslim students (or those perceived as such) and cna actually exasperate the problem by leading to bullying, bias and religious profiling of students."
MPAC, a group funded in part by Muslim Brotherhood members, also said in a letter to the FBI that agents should not be "educating our youth on countering violent extremism" and such programs "can lead to bullying, bias, misperception, as well as racial and religious profiling of students."
The Council for American-Islamic Relations also expressed outrage that the program would turn public-school teachers into law enforcement, "stigmatize Muslim" students and increase bullying.
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