Professor Bennoune Interviewed on Violent Extremism by Radio Open Source
Professor Karima Bennoune was interviewed as a guest on Radio Open Source, a news program produced by WBUR in Boston. As part of a panel discussion of "Violent Extremism, East and West" that included Arun Kundani, a lecturer at NYU, Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, and Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo Prisoner and author of Enemy Combatant, Professor Bennoune addressed many of the misconceptions that exist regarding Islamic extremism.
Contrary to many in the West, people of Muslim heritage do not view the conflict "as a struggle between the West and Islam," Bennoune said. "They understand it primarily as a struggle between their own extreme right wing in their own political context and the rest of the political spectrum."
"If I could say something to President Obama, I would say the he needs to find ways to empower and to aid, and certainly not to undermine, the work that is being done by those on the front line who are combating extremism in a peaceful way through civil society," Bennoune said.
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company.