Ex PAP MP: Preventing radicalisation of youth must be done years before it happens

SINGAPORE: Amrin Amin, a former People’s Action Party Member of Parliament, weighed in on the issue of the radicalisation of young people, saying that nothing justifies extremism or violence, and asking whether more should be done in Singapore to prevent it.

Mr Amrin, who served as MP for Sembawang GRC from 2015 to 2020 and had been Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Home Affairs and Health, shared a link to an Aug 11 Straits Times report on youth radicalisation, which quoted experts as saying it can happen within a matter of weeks.

The issue is one of growing concern for Singapore. The Internal Security Department (ISD) said that three young people aged 14, 15, and 19 had been detained between April and June. They had been radicalised by organisations with far-right extremist ideologies, as well as by Hamas and Islamic State (ISIS).

The 14-year-old had planned a stabbing attack at his school, but was arrested a month before carrying it out. The 19-year-old, meanwhile, had intended to carry out knife attacks against his LGBTQ classmates, as well as Singapore Armed Forces personnel at Sembawang Air Base.

Building resilience to combat radicalisation

In an Aug 11 social media post, the former MP acknowledged how young people are idealistic and passionate, and that there is much in the world that they are dismayed at.

“They see stated principles applied unevenly, on Gaza and Iran, for instance. Principles trumped by principals. Increasingly so. Anger and disillusionment are hardly unusual in youth,” he wrote.

Mr Amrin, a lawyer and perhaps more significantly, a parent, added that what is crucial is for the adults around youth to be able to handle difficult conversations, where they can “hear anger without validating hatred, challenge ideas without dismissing the person, and allow disagreement without treating dissent itself as dangerous.”

On the part of young people, they need to learn to hear criticism, be able to disagree and accept complexity “without reaching too quickly for certainty.”

The danger of extremist communities, he added, is that they take advantage of the anger, isolation and grievance young people experience and transform them into more appealing forms of belonging, certainty, and identifying someone they can blame.

“Understanding that appeal is not excusing extremism. It is part of preventing it. But engagement has boundaries. It cannot mean accepting harm,” he wrote, adding, “If radicalisation can take weeks, perhaps prevention begins years before.”

This prevention can and should take place within families, where members are unafraid to express difficult views, in schools, where hard questions are welcome, and also in communities, where disagreement does not result in estrangement, the former MP added.

“Radicalisation may be fast. Resilience is built slowly,” he wrote. /TISG