A Bizarre Boycott

Mayor de Blasio is being pushed to skip a White House conference on combating violent extremism, because ... President Obama is mean to Muslims?

Twentyplus groups have written the mayor, begging him not to grace the Countering Violent Extremism meeting with his presence, because they expect the confab to stigmatize Muslim communities and feed public hysteria over terrorism.

“The premise of CVE programming is that the adoption or expression of extreme or ‘radical’ ideas [places] individuals on the path toward violence, and that there are observable ‘indicators’ to identify those ‘vulnerable’ to radicalization, or ‘at risk’ of being recruited by terrorist groups,” the Sept. 21 letter says. “This is simply not true. Despite years of federally funded efforts, research ers have not developed reliable criteria that can be used to predict who will commit a terrorist act.”

Funny, the extremism program seems designed to do just that — find reliable criteria. Or, as the Department of Homeland Security puts it, “to gain a better understanding of the behaviors, tactics, and other indicators that could point to potential terrorist activity.”

In fact, the complainers really have nothing to worry about. After all, it’s a “violent extremism” conference only because Obama refuses to even utter the words “Islamic terrorism” to begin with.

More important, most Americans know that the vast majority of those in Mulism communities are lawabiding — but don’t see how identifying potential threats before they can do us harm is a bad thing.