 Thank you for coming to the New America Foundation. We're really thrilled to have this panel today to discuss online radicalization. We've got a great panel starting on your left with Peter Newman, who is a professor of security studies at the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He's also director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization. He's an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, teaches the National Security Studies program there as well this summer. The author of multiple books. Next to him is Muhammad El-Bari, who is the founder of Lone Star Intelligence. He's advised numerous federal state and law enforcement organizations, including the Texas Department of Safety, the National Counterterrorism Center Global Engagement Group. He worked for a time at DHS on the advisory council under Secretary Napolitano. And then here next to him is Rabia Chowdry, who is a fellow here at the New America Foundation. She's also an attorney. She's had a great deal of experience working with the Muslim community. She's the president of the Safe Nation Collaborative. She's a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. We're really pleased to have you here to do this as your first public event at New America. Next to us is our co-host. Next to me is our co-host, Harris Taren, who's currently the director of the Washington DC office, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Next to him is Imam William Webb, who is currently working with the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. And finally, we have Rashad Hussein, who's currently the US Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is the largest intergovernmental organization after the United Nations. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Harris. And each of the panelists will speak for a few minutes. Harris will engage us in some Q&A, and then we'll throw it open to you. Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you for agreeing to co-host this very timely and relevant conversation. It's something that definitely impacts the American Muslim community. And that is why we at the Muslim Public Affairs Council believe that it's an imperative for our community, our institutions, our leadership to engage in this very, very relevant and timely conversation, and to be very public about it. We have taken on this topic for the past decade. We think that this topic addresses, whether it's online radicalization or countering violent extremism in general, is a conversation that impacts our community disproportionately. And it is therefore imperative for us to speak to both policymakers, to the American public, and also to American Muslims themselves so that we put this perspective as this threat, as the president said last week, into proportion and address it in a way that is both good for our national security, but that also takes into consideration the foundations of our country and our society, which is that built on a constitution, on civil liberties. And so that is why this is very important for us. We think that this is a very public conversation that needs to be had, and we are happy that we had such a great turnout today and that people are very interested in having this conversation with experts, with community leaders, with government officials, with individuals who are on the forefront of dealing with this topic, whether it be online or in communities. And so, again, we want to thank you, Peter, and the New America Foundation for co-hosting this. The format, as Peter said, will be each individual will speak for about three to five minutes, talk a little bit about their perspective and how they see this topic, and how it impacts communities, how it impacts governments, and how also it impacts the relationship between various countries and societies. They'll be speaking for about three to five minutes, then we'll open it up. I will ask an initial question from each panelist, and then we'll open it up to the audience and have a conversation with you as well. Our first panelist is Peter Newman. Peter, go ahead, please. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Well, so since I've only got five minutes, I thought I'd take the title of this event, which is Online Radicalization Myths and Realities. And let me give you one reality and a couple of myths. And let me begin with the reality. It is true that the internet has profoundly changed the way that people, especially in the West, have come to embrace violent extremism. So nowadays, for example, we're talking a lot about so-called lone wolf attackers, lone attackers, people who carry out terrorist attacks without being linked into formalized command and control structures of terrorist organizations. Now, I believe it's not a coincidence that we're seeing this phenomenon increase at this particular point in time. And it's also not a coincidence that a lot of the people who we call lone attackers have been very active on the internet. The lone wolf phenomenon and online radicalization are fundamentally linked. The latter has created the former, and you cannot understand one without looking at the other. That's just, I believe, the most striking and most obvious example which online radicalization has changed the nature of radicalization processes. Another one is that we're seeing terrorism cases pop up in places and locations where we never expected them. The assumption, the traditional assumption by academics, policymakers, officials used to be that terrorism comes out of communities. The fringes of communities may be the extreme margins of communities, but so it was the product of a particular physical place. You had to understand the place, the people, the organizations in that place, relationships between people in that particular physical place. And only that would tell you how people became radicalized. And that is no longer always true. You now have cases of violent extremism popping up in places where there isn't really a physical community to speak of. Why? Because you can be part of an enormous, vibrant, active, exciting virtual community even when there is no physical community. The internet has made that possible. If I was a sociologist, which I'm not, but I would argue that some would pompously, I would say that the internet has loosened the spatial constraints within which radicalization was taking place. So online radicalization really is in the process of turning upside down a number of long-held assumptions. But they are also myths associated with online radicalization. Here's two of them. One, there is nothing exceptional about terrorists or violent extremists being on the internet. They are on the internet because everyone else is on the internet. We're in the 21st century. It would be very strange if terrorists were the one group of the population that were not on the internet. And nor is there anything fundamentally strange, surprising, or exceptional about how terrorists are using the internet. In fact, like everyone else, probably like everyone else in this room, they're using the internet to disseminate their ideas, to promote their causes, to search for information, to connect and communicate with like-minded people often across great distances. What makes violent extremists different from the general online public, from all of you, is not how they use it. It is the purpose for which they use it. That's what's different. A second and very persistent myth, with which I'm gonna close, by the way, is that you can get rid of violent extremism on the internet by shutting down websites. This comes up again and again. Let's shut down a couple of websites. The problem will go away. We've heard a lot of that, in fact, in Britain over the past weeks in the wake of the incident in Woolwich. Let's remove Inspire magazine, the Al-Qaeda English language online magazine. Let's remove that from the internet. Let me just say a couple of sentences about how that is a flawed argument. And let's take Inspire. Typically, when a new edition of Inspire magazine comes out, there isn't just one place where you can download that magazine. The magazine is simultaneously published in a dozen of places, and within minutes of it being published, the readers of that magazine will not only download the magazine, they will repost it in even more places. So within a couple of hours of this magazine being published, you can download it not just from one location on the internet, not just from dozens of locations on the internet, but literally from hundreds of locations. So it's very difficult, if not impossible, and certainly pointless, to try to remove Inspire from all these places. In my view, rather than removing stuff from the internet, we should become a lot better at challenging that kind of message and these kinds of contents. And we should also become better at monitoring what happens online, at understanding the networks that exist, how Inspire is being passed around, for example, who are the key nodes and hubs in Violent Extremes Online. Because while Violent Extremes Online is a big challenge, it is also an opportunity to state that cliche. When Violent Extremes are online, they're revealing a lot of information about themselves. They leave a lot of traces. In my view, it's about time we stopped laughing about the fact that terrorists have Twitter accounts, but rather started understanding what they use them for. Thank you. Thank you. Muhammad al-Bari? Hi. Let me first thank New America Foundation and MPAC for the invitation. This is a great opportunity for me to participate here today. And though I was mentioned in my role in the Homeland Security Advisory Council of the Secretary, it was mentioned in the intro bio, I am here speaking officially, obviously, only on myself, so nothing I say should be construed otherwise. Now, having gotten that out of the way, in online radicalization, myths and realities, to save some time and open up more time for Q and A, I'm gonna go ahead and wholly endorse Peter Newman's report at the Bipartisan Center that came out last December on this topic. And so, if you haven't read it, I recommend you read it. Now, the perspective that I bring on this subject is I personally had the opportunity over the past several years to do a number of these community-based partnerships with law enforcement for interventions. And they span the gambit from people who haven't really wrapped their minds around doing any kind of violence, but they're just kind of flirting with the idea of joining this virtual mosque community, or a Muslim community online that's interested in the same issues as the Salafiyah Jihadiah movement is, to folks where I've honestly been requested and have traveled overseas to countries where the State Department give you directions on you can stay in these three hotels, these are the people that you can get in a cab with, and you sleep under armed guards. So, that's a pretty borrowed range. And what I've seen is that there needs to be a lot more capacity building so that more people enter this struggle, so to speak. The counter-narrative, I think there is ample resources out there in communities all across the country as I've traveled and worked with community leaders on building relationships with law enforcement agencies. But what I've seen is a struggle inside of different departments and agencies on what role, how do you divide the labor? How do you handle the nuances? Where do you get the funding to pilot programs for interventions in that kind of thing? And that's where I personally like to kind of close in my intro comments is actually we have to, as a country, I think be able to recognize the good progress that we've made in community engagement all across the country. But we've also need to kind of chastise ourselves a little bit because we could have done more over the past several years. We have roughly 16 cities where you're gonna find approximately 60 to 65%, about two thirds of your counter-terrorism resources across bureau offices. We need to kind of concentrate on where we can kind of train community leaders or allow them the opportunities to partner feeling a little bit more comfortable at the regional, local levels. And that, unfortunately over the past couple of years, from here in D.C., that has not really been executed properly. The CVE initiative at the FBI headquarters office did not produce the results that a lot of us two and a half years ago were hopefully would win the FBI assigned a CVE coordinator. And that's a very important agency because that's our lead agency that's gonna know about the tips in the Joint Terrorism Task Forces structures. Other agencies like the Department of Homeland Security have done a great work in the CVE training for local and state law enforcement to elevate their sensitivity that this is a new area that they should be more proactive in helping to build up preventative infrastructure in their towns. But still, we haven't really gotten, I think, enough piloted of an architecture across a lot of our major states across the country. And I hope that was good enough. Great. Just because of the C-Span audience, I mean, we should avoid using CVE and talk about countering violent extremism, just so. We'll do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I wanted to just begin by stating maybe what's obvious and that is because perhaps it hasn't been said and a lot of us work on this issue on a policy level in other ways, but is that the internet is a highly successful tool that's being used by violent extremists because it very quickly and effectively and very broadly disseminates certain narratives. And somebody else has mentioned the word narrative and I think it's important to understand what those narratives are. Some narratives that are propagated online are things like Islam in the West are not compatible. You cannot be a good American and a good Muslim at the same time that America is at war against Islam. And right now we're seeing a shift which is encouraging in that we're asking Western Muslim communities to step up and become engaged and be partners in bringing their voices online to counter these narratives. But I think it's important to take a look at this a little more broadly because those narratives are not just being propagated by violent extremists who are Muslim, but also they are being reinforced and replicated by anti-Muslim bigots and activists too, which is an interesting phenomenon. So you have two extremes that are agreeing on the same narratives. What's problematic even more so for the anti-Muslim bigots and activists who also want to spread the idea that Islam and America and Western values are not compatible, is that it leaves Muslims in the West feeling more alienated and it can have a negative effect on Muslim youth, quite frankly, who might become more disaffected than they already are feeling after 9-11, which then helps them become more vulnerable to violent extremists online. Secondly, what I find problematic is that these folks have been more influential on policymakers, on media, on politicians, and we see that when, for example, a local elected official wants to bow out of an event because there's pressure on him to not associate with certain Muslim individuals or groups, or we have highly respected Muslim scholars who are now asked to please not be a part of an official event and not make remarks. So these things all play into that same idea of there are suspect Muslims and non-suspect Muslims. So I think as we look at Muslim communities to engage online and counter these narratives, I would broaden that call and say that we also need the general public, media, politicians, policy people to push back on the anti-Muslim narratives that are propagated by Islamophobes. People don't like that term, but it's an easy term to use. Secondly, most of my work is done primarily in grassroots communities and a couple of observations I've had about that, just like Mohamed said, is that these discussions tend to stay here. They don't filter very well downstream. When I'm speaking to a mosque, parents in a mosque, they have absolutely no idea what's happening online. They have no idea that their kids can access certain kinds of videos so easily. They don't know how to filter that. Is there a filter for it? Probably not. And then local law enforcement has no idea either. So we have to identify a better mechanism to get this information and make it actionable on the ground. I'm gonna end with, do I have a minute to end? Is that when we are asking Western Muslims specifically to counter narratives that are couched in Islamic scripture and Islamic ideology by violent extremists, we have to remember there are certain kinds of voices they're gonna have more credibility and it's not gonna be what you might understand as progressive or more liberal voices. They're not gonna have the kind of street cred to counter these voices. It is going to be conservative Muslim voices and conservative Muslim scholars who will have the kind of credibility it takes to counter a lot of these ideologies. But part of the problem is that we're stuck in a space where when we say conservative Muslim, we think Salafi, when we think Salafi, we think Jihadi and Taqfiri. And we really have to get to a place where we are more nuanced about understanding these distinctions and not clumping people together who themselves are trying to distinguish between their creed and the Jihadis. So I think that's all I wanted to contribute. Thank you. Great. Imam William Webb. First I want to thank the New American Foundation Impact and everyone for being here. It's a wonderful experience. As an Imam in Boston who was there during the tragedy and then coming back to America after around seven years of training overseas and dealing firsthand with some young people who were impacted by some of the online efforts Inspire Magazine and other maybe websites. My conclusion as well as other Imams is that the way to combat this is through building coalitions in a community involvement with policymakers that's led by the Muslim community and really should focus, I think, from a government perspective and a local perspective asking us to be responsible for leading this effort but then advising others to really be aware of the falling four points. Number one, information needs to be based on credible resources. I mean, I was labeled on Fox News as a Kaida operative, a Muslim brotherhood sympathizer. My mother from Oklahoma lost her mind when she heard that her baby boy had joined a Kaida on Fox News and that was an attempt to undermine any credibility that I may have had here or in other circles whereas if you were to ask the Muslim community to find me it would have been a very different definition. And I think that was mentioned by Rabia earlier that we're finding our communities defined by people on two extremes, neither of which are very beneficial in making effective policy moves. So there needs to be, I think, some leeway given to the larger Muslim community to define who we are, who our leadership is and who represents us. I think, for example, the word Salafi, you know, all Salafis aren't radicals and jihadists. The majority of our Salafi community might be more conservative than say some of us are but they're law-abiding citizens and wonderful people and community members. The second is that we need to respect, I think, civil rights as well as cultural nuances. And I think both of those sometimes get kind of turned on their heads when it comes to our community. The third is that we need to avoid a securitized relationship with the Muslim community exclusively. When you tell people that our relationship is strictly based on surveillance, mapping your community, questioning imams about potential jihadists in their community, then suddenly turning that into are you a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? The investigation becomes confused. So the imam is not part of an investigation who was initially trying to help an investigation. Creating a securitized relationship creates tension, especially in immigrant communities where if the FBI of a certain country would show up at your house, you're basically over. And when you show up in America and you create our first point of introduction through government and through communities is a legal introduction. I think that really stigmatizes the potential that we have. It should be, I think, a broader-based approach. The last is that the counter-extremism narrative needs to be led by the Muslim communities. And there are three areas. Number one is an intellectual theological area. For example, now we just released a book, Ella Collins Institute that I run, a seminary in Boston by Imam Ibrahim Rahim, who was Bostonian imam, base-sitter for many years back, wrote this after the bombing, countering terrorism and extremism, one of the most important roles of an imam. This is written by an imam and the Muslim community as a handbook for imams and even parents, websites that your children should not be surfing, websites that we try to avoid our youth from going to. And that also means that imams and scholars within the community need to be given some leeway to engage this problem. The fact that the Sniah brother wasn't able to sit down with an imam and go through counseling, I think, is a problem on our community's side of the fence. We need to be able to, I need to be able to sit down with someone and not worry about being subpoenaed or held as a material witness in order to kind of counter that issue. Every young man that I've met, and I've never met a woman, so let's hear it for women, who has been influenced by extremism, every young man that I've met and been able to sit and offer pastoral care to has changed for the better. I've never had one who wasn't affected by a positive message. I heard statements like, I can't believe I hated people like this. One of them opened a soup kitchen in his city and said this is my jihad now, it's to serve poor people. So they're influenced by pastoral care, but if that relationship is against securized, I can't function, I'm scared to talk to these guys. And that might be why he was pushed out of that mosque in Boston instead of someone bringing him in. The second is at an institutional level, Muslim community still suffers from institutional mediocrity. I think we have to be honest about that when people say where's the Muslim voice? I don't think they're aware that we're still prepubescent in 501c3 building in American, excuse the analogy. The third is through efforts that involve far more opportunities than just theological, right? Community-based efforts serving, I would say answering, for example, urbanization. And our community is a big issue, gun control in Roxbury, Massachusetts. It's an issue that young Muslims are involved in. Drug abuse, delinquency, doing programs that involve them outside of just the church-based kind of mode. So those are areas I think we really would have to focus on in dealing with or countering the extremist narrative. Thank you, Mama Rashad. Thank you so much, Aharis. Thank you to the New America Foundation and to MPAC. As part of our efforts to deepen and expand our partnerships with Muslim communities around the world in a wide range of areas, one of the issues that's come up in Muslim communities often raises themselves is the issue of terrorist radicalization, including in the online space. And part of the reason that Muslim communities around the world are concerned about this is because they're fearful of their own families, their own neighbors, perhaps being recruited by terrorist networks and perhaps being killed by terrorist networks. We've talked to people around the world in Muslim communities who have family members that have been killed in a must-hit, for example, on a Friday prayer in a suicide bombing. And so this is an issue that comes up quite often. And part of the challenge that we're facing is that extremists online are producing materials that use creative means to target youth and draw them to their warped ideology. And in some cases, they've been able to do so in ways that are more emotionally appealing than what our imams have done or others have done with direct-to-camera statements or the fatwa that's issued condemning terrorism or a terrorist attack, which Muslim communities, of course, have been at the forefront. So they're using these images online. And oftentimes, their narrative is that the disbelievers are killing your brothers and sisters around the world and oppressing your brothers and sisters in different ways. And it's your obligation as Muslims to defend the worldwide Muslim community. And they'll sometimes use emotional hymns or nasheed. They'll use verses from the Quran, which they've taken out of context and portray a situation which, if they act, then they're rewarded for actions that they take, including violent actions. So in addressing this challenge, we, of course, recognize that the government has a role to play by partnering with local communities on a wide range of issues. There's layers of interventions at multiple levels. When you talk about social intervention, there's a law enforcement role. There's an intelligence role. There's a work that we're doing to defeat, to help to work towards defeating and dismantling Al-Qaeda. And as the president spoke about last week, one of the most important partnerships that we have is with Muslim communities in the United States, who, as I said, have been at the forefront of condemning terrorism, condemning terrorist attacks, and have been working themselves to address radicalization. Because, as I said, they are concerned that terrorists are killing innocent people. They find it to be something that's totally repulsive to their religion or any religion. And they're concerned that Muslims have been the largest victims of Al-Qaeda around the world. And so they've been taking the lead in a couple of areas in some of the conversations that I've had. We've talked to Muslim communities who are developing materials and messaging that may address some of the same grievances that Al-Qaeda and others raise. But at the end of their messaging, they say the way to address these grievances is not violence, but is to address it in the way that Islam prescribes. And of course, that narrative is something that's best coming from imams, and not something that comes necessarily from the government. And they've also talked about the punishment, for example, and that Islam prescribes for those people that would kill innocent people, Muslim and non-Muslim. And that's been a consistent part of their messaging. And I think in the online space, Muslim communities are doing more to make sure that their voices are heard. They're also working in trying to disseminate images that show what terrorists are doing in places like Iraq and Pakistan, where you see after a Friday prayer, even in Ramadan, for example, that Muslims have been killed. And they've been talking to former radicals, they've been talking to family members of those who have been killed and working with internet service to providers to make sure that when disaffected youth is online, they wanna make sure that some of these, some of this material they're producing are some of the hits that come up at the top. A final point that I wanna make is that of course, as a government, we've created a number of partnerships in working with Muslim communities, and we've done a number of things on the policy level. We've ended the war in Afghanistan, we've ended the war in Iraq, we're winding down the war in Afghanistan, we've been supporting the Middle East, the transitions in the Middle East and North Africa, we've been continuing to work towards Middle East peace, and we do all these things because they're the right thing to do. Now, one of the themes that I've heard a lot in traveling overseas from Muslim communities is the idea that but not for many of these policy concerns, this radicalization problem would go away. And I think this is dangerous and something that we really have to be, we have to be careful about. Because as you know, many of the terrorist attacks that we've seen have been against Muslims in Muslim places of worship, and the overwhelming majority of victims have been Muslims themselves. We have to ask the question, how is it that engaging in a terrorist attack in a Masjid, perhaps in Ramadan against Muslims, how does that in any way address any of the foreign policy grievances that they've outlined? And so I don't think it's productive to fall into this way of thinking that the problem somehow stems from the foreign policies of certain countries. We are aware of the fact that terrorists use those, some of their arguments to exploit youth and as part of their radicalization efforts. But at the same time, we wanna be clear that there is an ideological issue here that goes far beyond that, and that's made even more clear by the fact that the overwhelming majority of victims of terrorist attacks have been Muslims. Imams, I've been in places of worship around the world. You hear the Imams talking about wars that are going on in various parts of the world and even offering prayers for those places. But it's less common that you would find the same Imams when they're going through those issues or those grievances, say things like we wanna pray for Muslims who are trying to use violence as a way of addressing their grievances. And this is an important development, which Imam Sahab has pointed out, that there's further training that Imams are undertaking in order to understand how to address these arguments. Because I think Imam Sahab is one example of this, but we've talked to many people around the world who have said that when you actually sit down and make clear that the motivation that a lot of these young people are using for their actions is actually totally false and the religion actually tells them that they need to promote safety and peace and wellbeing in a number of different ways. Then many of them have actually said that they are not hateful of the West or their targets who are actually hateful of their own actions, which they were engaged in. And I think that's gonna be a critical part of what we do going forward. Great. Well, thank you Rashad. Peter, can I have you please kind of respond to some of the comments that have been made? Sure, thank you. Just picking up on what Rashad Hussein said, it's interesting to me that one of the documents that was recovered in the bin Laden compound in Abtabad was a letter from the leaders of al-Qaeda to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Haqq-e-Mulam Masood, saying basically stop attacking Muslim places of worship. So even in the upper reaches of al-Qaeda, there's a recognition that there is unacceptable behavior that is going on, people motivated by this ideology. I wanted to ask, make some, basically ask them questions as much as make observations. I mean, is the concept of the lone wolf, does it make any sense in the internet age? I mean, when Major Nadal Hassan was in contact with Anrara Laki asking him for religious permission sanction to kill fellow soldiers, he wasn't really acting as a lone wolf. I mean, when you think about the kind of classic lone wolf, it was somebody like Ted Kaczynski, who was living in a shack and didn't have even phone, let alone internet. So the whole concept seems to be perhaps worth reexamining. I also wanted to endorse Peter Newman's really brilliant study for the bipartisan policy center on this issue, which I think the basic theme is we can't take down hateful speech, we have to provide alternative speech. And Rabia Choudhury, who is sitting here, is working within your America Foundation to do some of that. We've had a partnership with Google and Facebook and Muslim community organizations to basically help people understand better how to have the internet actually operate so that you can put up alternative messages, alternative narratives. A question for the panel is, would countering violent extremism as an idea, would that have stopped Boston? It didn't seem to have, I mean, the older brother, Tamalane, seemed to be, you know, he'd gone beyond the point, but could, what kind of intervention might have worked with Chaukha, the younger brother, who seems to have just been, you know, basically just following in his brother's footsteps rather than being a true believer in a sense. I was interested in your observations, Mr. Al-Bari, about the disappointing efforts of the FBI to do countering violent extremism. I mean, I'd like you perhaps to elaborate, was the bureau the wrong place to locate this effort? Picking up also on Rabia's observation, I mean, conservative and Salafi Muslims are gonna produce the most credible alternatives to the messages of al-Qaeda. And a very concrete example here is Salman Al-Aida, who was a very influential cleric in Saudi Arabia, who was one of the first clerics to basically, in a very public manner, kind of critique of Salman bin Laden, not just al-Qaeda as an idea, but bin Laden by name. Another, I think, interesting observation that the Imam made is that we need a broad-paced approach, and certainly the British have had an attempt that they call prevent, and they've also had something called channel, which, you know, I think there was an understanding in this country, and perhaps Rashad could comment on this, that we don't wanna over-securitize the U.S. government approach to this problem. On the other hand, if it's just the whole of government, you know, who's really responsible, which is kind of a problem there, potentially. One final observation, the New America Foundation maintains a database of every terrorist incident, both on the right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, eco-terrorists, and people motivated by jihadi ideology, and we found that the Muslim community is as likely to provide information about somebody in their community who's perhaps turning to violence as any other community. That's just a factually-based statement. So the just general premise here, that it is the Muslim community at the end, that it's gonna be the solution, is not only sort of intellectually seems to make sense, but it's also factually true. We've seen Muslim community in multiple cases sort of drop a dime or reach out to an organization like MPAC or law enforcement, and say there's something about, something that's going on that needs to, somebody needs to pay attention to. So we've seen this already working, and there's no reason why this approach shouldn't work in the future. Thank you so much, Peter. And I think what I wanna do is, I think those are all important questions, and I'm gonna kind of have each individual address the question. One thing that I wanted to ask you, Peter, while you mentioned what Peter Bergen put forth to you, can you also talk about the extent of the threat? Is it an overwhelming threat? I mean, that's a question that we're asked in, within the American Muslim community quite a bit, because this is not a dinner table conversation that takes place in American Muslim homes. American Muslims are talking about tuition, they're talking about the economy, they're talking about jobs, but what is the extent of the problem so that we put it into perspective, and we're proportionate in our response, both as a government and as a community. If you and Muhammad al-Biari can both address that a little bit. Okay, I wanna, so two points, really. The first is responding to Peter, who made a very important point, which is the sort of vagueness of that concept of the lone wolf. It is certainly true that only a very small minority of so-called lone wolves are actually socially isolated. So when we're talking about lone wolves, typically we're talking about people who are extremely active and extremely social, but precisely, and this is today's conversation, they're actually often very active online. They're very active, for example, in online extremist communities, et cetera, et cetera. So they are not socially isolated. We would maybe as older people, I consider myself to be middle-aged now, but as older people, we don't fully get the idea that you can hang out and develop social ties to people online, but that's what these people do. They're hanging out in online extremist forums for 10, 12 hours a day, and if you ask them who are your best friends, they would give you five names of people they've never met and whose real names they actually don't know. So the first step towards countering this threat is to recognize that online is also a space. And when we're talking about community engagement, we also need to recognize that we need to engage in that space, too. It's not only the mosque. It's not only the physical places. It's also increasingly the online spaces because the people that we're concerned about consider these places to be places. That's the first point. The extent of the threat is that in terms of the online threat, I would say that if you look at most biographies and radicalization trajectories of people who've radicalized over the past four or five years, online has played an important role. So in that sense, online is important, undoubtedly. But again, and again, it's not only about numbers. We've just seen in London what a single person can trigger. And so it's not about the number of people killed. I always hear this, oh, more people get drowned in bathtubs and et cetera, et cetera, we've heard all these statistics. You know, the thing about terrorism is not necessarily the number of people killed is the amount of terror that you create. And a sense of community polarization that even a single killing like in London can trigger. And the negative impact, a single action by a lone individual in London can have on entire communities. So that is the kind of impact that we have to consider. In that sense, the threat is great because even a single person can cause a lot of damage to communities. Mohamed? I agree with everything Peter Newman just said. You can start every, I like that. I think the way I've summed it up, in March 2010, my testimony in front of Jane Harman and Michael McCall's committee on working with communities to disrupt terror plots was this wasn't a pandemic, but it is a problem. And it should be addressed. You do want to nip this. And actually, the more capacity building we do for this, the more it's actually we're building resiliency in our local communities, which is after all, the goal of Homeland Security on the macro level is to get communities more resilient. I will, in answering Peter Bergen's question about the Bureau and the prevent and channel programs, I actually learned a lot from the prevent and the channel folks back in 2008. I see there's a few government officials in the audience here who were actually involved in an effort back then by the National Counterterrorism Center to see what we can draw from the UK models and their experiences. And I also flew to, at the time I was running a community nonprofit and I flew a cleric who had actually helped advise in the creation of the Saudi program to my office in Dallas and spent a whole day learning about their model. So I did try to kind of shop around in order to find out how do you do these kind of interventions? And then there's the Bureau, I have found a lot of success in engaging and building relationships with local field offices, Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisors that have been on the job for 10, 15 years. They've kicked down doors, they've arrested bad guys, they've built up a credentials and now they're interested in doing something a little bit strategic to the environment around them to shrink the haystack that they have to go find needles as opposed to some of the other law enforcement techniques that were criticized earlier on the panel. Those folks at that point in their career are interested in examining well what kind of substantive partnerships a countering violent extremism partnerships to build preventative and prevention capacity in their cities is possible. Now my recommendation to the FBI folks that FBI headquarters when they first started looking at creating a CVE or countering violent extremism coordinator position was that it needed to not be in the community relations office. So they did move it out of the office of public affairs overseas community engagement and they took it out of there and they put it into the directorate of intelligence which I thought was a better place. Then there was an effort to another recommendation that I had given them was you need to interconnect it with the Joint Terrorism Task Forces because it's the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that get the tips and the leads on people who are teetering on the edge of potentially becoming violent extremists. So there was an effort to look at that and another recommendation I gave them that they decided not to take was that I felt just like DHS went through a public transparency process where they brought a lot of communities, local and state law enforcement, academia, Muslim communities, other faith communities and basically kind of created a framework strategy for doing countering violent extremism. Instead of going down that approach so that everybody understands their role and how it's gonna get operationalized at the local field office level, instead they decided to kind of pilot a couple of cases where they were taking the bureau was trying to do this stuff on its own and that did not work out too well. That effort I think kind of collapsed towards the end of last year. At the moment, I don't know where it is exactly today but as of a few weeks ago, it had moved to the National Joint Terrorism Task Force which is located in the National Counterterrorism Center and that's where the CVE operation or the assignment of that desk was. Now it presents us with an opportunity to look at the question that Peter asked Peter Bergen which is, is it right to house it in the FBI? The FBI has had a mission very clear for 100 years and with the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act, it gave it an assignment to preempt so basically the disruption role in terrorism plots. The prevention capacity building involves a lot of social science stuff so in some field offices like Houston for example, I've interacted with folks, they might have PhDs as sociologists as was mentioned earlier but that's kind of rare, those resources for folks that are joined the bureau to get bad guys and build cases. Instead, by its location and the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, there is a possibility of partnering, building a partnership paradigm where the private sector can potentially have a role, local and state law enforcement can have a role, maybe the prevention stuff is actually done with the police departments. Those are a little bit other aspects that we can explore later but hopefully that answers a little. Thank you Mohammed. The next question I wanted to point to in my million web, I think there was this common theme amongst all of the panelists about the counter narrative that there needs to be a counter narrative as strong, as graphic, as emotive as the jihadists or the violent extremists put out online and just kind of the video face of a cleric sitting down and condemning this, we're not necessarily work in that way. I know you've got a couple of efforts. I know in 2010, we actually worked together to bring American Muslim scholars and sit down and actually produce a video called Injustice Cannot Defeat Injustice but then you've got suhebweb.com and then you've got a virtualmosk.com which is basically, and you've had multiple conversations on the issue of radicalization and violent extremism. How do you see, number one, the role of communities, the role of imams and then also the role of government because there have been attempts by various other government, foreign governments who have actually gotten into the counter narrative space which in the US at times, we've got the constitution and that's not something that we can get into but where do you see those roles and responsibilities lying? So that's a lot of questions. Yes. Let me address a few issues. In 2004, a group of imams, we were studying together in Egypt and imamats, I guess would be the name for our women scholars, realized that the, as we mentioned earlier, that the internet was becoming a mosque for the Moskulus and it was initially called suhebweb.com because it wasn't founded by me, I would not call myself .com personally and with a group of people as activists, scholars, imams and training, we devised the name, the virtual mosque. What we realized is that looking at our community millennials in general no longer define religiosity vis-a-vis institutional commitment. They begin to define themselves actually and I would say in some ways people could be actually part of society but then lone wolfs theologically. The Sinaiya brothers had a lot of friends but no one really knew the theological aspirations of these people. So we decided to create something called the virtual mosque which now suhebweb.com will soon be virtual mosque.com already purchased to allow people that don't belong to institutions and the Pew study shows that the majority of American Muslims don't attend mosques but to allow them to engage in an open, free, transparent environment. We had an article recently written by a gay Muslim that talked about his experiences with homophobia in the Muslim community. We had an article written by an ex-Islamist some years back, his personal thoughts and then we hosted if you recall in 2009 or 10 an online forum on youth radicalization before it became kind of this cool word now that we can all hashtag with people like yourself, people from care and others and the outcome of that is that we're able to attract other scholars who shared in that vision and wanted to respond to those things. Number two is that we're able to reach as I mentioned earlier some young people who are affected by and even older folks affected by the jihadist message. Advice to, I think policy makers in government is to give Muslim leaders and policy makers and especially imams. We don't need to be too close to each other because that undermines our street cred. In 2004 the British government before it was these are all new programs. I was involved with the radical middle way project. They labeled me as a moderate Muslim leader. They undermined my ability really to work at a street level with a lot of people. Now I was seen as the great white hole sell that guy from Oklahoma. So I think there needs to be an implicit relationship that recognizes that this is a dynamic problem. It might not represent the larger body of the Muslim community but an act of terror is impactful on society in a way that it demands a response sometimes that ignores the majority of our community. In order to do that we need to be able to see as free, transparent leaders who are born and bred within the community and haven't been influenced by other people trying to shape how that community moves. In other words being seen as sellouts. So it needs to be an implicit relationship there for sure we need to model partnerships with government, with policy makers, with people like yourselves. But at the same time we need people to trust us. I think Muslim matters does an incredible job of really Yasser Khadi of really equalizing the Salafi community in a very positive way. I think Sheikh Hamza Yusuf Zaituna offers the traditionalist community an awesome opportunity. But they're both given freedom to do that, which is crucial. That's a very interesting insight. And Rabia I want to come to you and talk about the issue of resources because I know you at New America and Safe Nations address this issue. A lot of the Imams and local communities that I talk to they say you know what I just don't have the resources to deal with this issue. I have to worry about divorce and pastoral issues and funerals and just the basic functioning of a place of worship that all communities have to deal with. I don't have the resources to sit down and study some of the countering violent extremism and national security and all of these issues especially as Amam William Webb said most of these institutions don't even have full time staff. They're still at their nascent stages. Can you talk a little bit about the resources both the policy makers and the communities and how they can kind of come together and address this issue by resources? I think the challenge of resources I mean for local Muslim communities is not just limited to CVE or countering violent extremism issues. I mean it's limited to a lot of different, I mean it affects a lot of different issues and you see a lot of young people who are not attending mosque because of the limited resources, the limited programming that's available. I think what's the easiest way to get around this challenge is just to provide information and that doesn't require a lot of resources necessarily. A lot of it can be done electronically. It can be done through community roundtables. When you provide the information to parents, right? And you say that we're not gonna talk about this in terms of transnational jihadist networks. We're gonna talk about this in terms of you being parents just watching what your children are learning. It becomes a manageable issue. So telling parents that look, if you are not gonna talk about political issues or violence or certain passes in the ground with your children, then you have to think about who is gonna have that discussion. If they're interested, which many young Muslims are not, but if they're interested where are they gonna have that discussion? Is the local imam equipped to have it? No, well they're gonna go online. Do you know how to tweet? No, they don't. I mean so they have to understand if they can manage these problems. And I also make the analogy, I mean I'm the parent of a young teenage girl, online sexual predators. These are also part of national and transnational gangs. And so as the parent of a young girl who's online, I feel it's my responsibility to make sure that she's safe online. And it's very much the same issue. So if you frame it like that, it takes away this overwhelming feeling of like we cannot deal with this problem. Make it very local. It affects your family. It affects the community. For local law enforcement, I'm sure imamsahib can speak to this after Boston, for local law enforcement. It becomes a very, very local issue. And Peter, so you want to add something? As far as the virtual mosque goes, what we did in less than four or five years, we have now 60 almost full-time volunteers, 13 editors, all young people from in the Muslim community. We mentor 37 high school youth. So giving those outlets that are transparent and seen as legitimate attracts people that want to work in the community and do very positive things. We did recently the prayer for Syria, which attracted more than 300 mosques all over the world. Everybody gathered together and prayed for the security of Syria. I received a letter from someone from Dagestan who said, you know, I'm from the area that they're claiming radicalized this man. We've gathered in a mosque to pray for Syria. Warsaw, Poland, three mosques in Islamabad, 11 mosques in LA. So I think having transparent, trustworthy alternatives is where you're gonna be able to redirect people towards positive influences. That's really interesting. And so Peter, I just want to add two questions to you. The first is, this is conversation a lot about surveillance versus partnership. And that, you know, there are individuals who say that we need to increase the amount of surveillance on communities. You've had the whole controversy with the NYPD and what happened there. And so within the American Muslim communities, there are apprehension in terms of engagement. They say, you know what? Do we engage, will engagement work or are we just going to be surveilled by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies no matter what? And is there a point of diminishing return? If you surveil a community, if you go into hookah bars, if you go into Muslim Student Associations, are you going to get, as Mohammed said, the needle in the haystack? Are you gonna really create more work for yourself? That's the first question and the second question. The president last week tried to put this threat into perspective and he talked about the proportion of the threat and he also talked about understanding the evolving threat. And you've been around the block on this issue for many, many years. Can you talk about where you see this threat evolving and where is it going in the next five to 10 years even? Well, I'll leave the question on surveillance to other people on the panel. And in fact, I just note that Adam Goldman who broke the story for AP is in the audience broke the NYPD story. On the question of the scale of the threat, I mean, I think President Obama was exactly right. The threat is threats to our overseas diplomatic facilities and businesses, a significant but not as lethal threat from al-Qaeda affiliates and some degree of homegrown extremism. Going back to the database that we maintain here at New America, I think it's factually interesting because we haven't discussed it yet that the number of deaths caused by right-wing extremists who are killing people for political reasons, this is not just straightforward murders. We calculate to be 29 deaths since 9-11 and the numbers of deaths by people motivated by jihadi ideas since 9-11 in the United States is 21 deaths. And Peter Newman is absolutely right to say, of course, a particular event like Boston or what happened in London has huge political consequences far beyond just one murder. The fact of the matter is the threat from right-wing extremists in terms of the number of people who've been killed since 9-11 is basically the same as from jihadist terrorism. And it's an interesting question that I don't have a very good answer for but why is it that we tend to overvalue, as it were, the threat from jihadi terrorism when it's really about the same as right-wing extremism? Obviously, 9-11 is a big answer to that in part. But the fact is that al-Qaeda and groups like it cannot pull off at 9-11, which is why the president on Thursday gave that speech. I think it's a speech that he'd probably been wanting to give for some period of time. It's a very hard speech to give politically because what happens if you're even 1% wrong and somebody comes along who's got links to al-Qaeda, kills, let's say a dozen people in some major American metropolis, the political cost is very, very high for a politician making a statement that we all know basically is true except for people who are on extreme fringes. We know that the threat has been much reduced and I think it was a very welcome speech for the president to make and there's no reason why the United States needs to be in a permanent state of war. It's never happened in our history before and I think he's setting the political grounds for a discussion about basically taking America off of wartime footing as a permanent matter which has a lot of policy implications from all sorts of issues from whether it's the drone program, Guantanamo, and the way we organize our national security and I think it's a long overdue conversation. That doesn't mean of course that homegrown extremism has gone away. It is a sort of serious, a significant problem and it is one that's why we're having this discussion now but it is I think a problem that largely has been managed. What's actually almost surprising is how few Boston's we've had, right? I mean that was the first attack by people motivated by al-Qaeda's ideas in the United States to pull off something significant, that had a sort of big political impact. Obviously Major Nadal Hassan was one, not insignificant, but there's a whole set of reasons why these attacks are actually pretty infrequent. I'll come back to the surveillance question and maybe I'll put that to Muhammad, Rabia, or Peter. But Rashad, I wanted to ask you a question regarding the impact of this and our relationship with other countries. I mean you as a representative, the special envoy of the president to the OIC, you engage Muslim communities abroad and I know you're out constantly engaging them. How has this focus of CVE of national security impacted our relationship? And the president last week talked about our relationship with Pakistan being strained and the fact that one of the ways that we can get around this is to ensure that we have a strong relationship and partnership with Muslim-majority countries, especially those who are coming out of the air, those of the Arab Spring. How do you see that playing out? Well, since the beginning of the administration, we've recognized that like other faith communities, Muslim communities in the United States and around the world have been key contributors in many areas. And so our partnerships have been comprehensive in areas like education, job creation, health, science and technology. And that's the bulk of the work that we do when we're engaging with communities that have on a day-to-day basis the same concerns as any other people around the world. They wanna make sure they have access to education, they have access to healthcare that they are doing whatever they can to bring economic security to their family. At the same time, it's often Muslim communities themselves for the reasons that I mentioned that have raised the issue of violent extremism. They're concerned about their family members. They're concerned about their neighbors being recruited by terrorist networks in some places. They're concerned about being victims of violent extremism. And so it is an important conversation. And we have had partnerships to counter violent extremism for some time now. But part of that strategy is to make sure that we are contributing to the efforts of local communities, that we're sharing information that we collect at the federal level to make sure that local communities know about the latest threats, that we're having these types of briefings that you've participated in with local communities, that we're increasing our cooperation and engagement so that communities have opportunities to brief us on their efforts and to identify threats in their communities which has led to this disruption of terrorist plots in a number of places. We also have a convening role. I mean, there's so many people that are working in this area. You have imams, you have actors in business, you have internet companies, you have governments. You're so many people that are concerned about this problem and we have the ability as government to convene people that might not ordinarily sit together to come together and address this issue. Now we have to be clear that although we have engagement based on a comprehensive set of issues and we continue that work, that of course there is a real terrorist threat and our responsibility first and foremost is to protect the American people and if there are certain actions that have to be taken from time to time because those that we're partnering with might not have the ability to respond or those in some parts of the world might not be willing to respond we have to take those actions to protect our security and inevitably there are going to be instances in which that has an impact in our relations but we've been clear that the basis for our action is for the protection of people around the world and it's not somehow motivated by what terrorists have labeled as a war against Muslims or a war on Islam. We've been clear from the beginning that Muslim communities of the United States are the greatest rejection or the counter to that argument because they have been successful at such high levels and the American people and the resilience that they've showed in response to terrorist attacks have also made clear to people around the world and in many places we go to people say how can you still allow this type of freedom of worship and freedom of religion and if this type of thing was happening in our country there'd be all kinds of restrictions going on so communities also take note of the fact that still you can go into a grocery store or a subway station you find a Muslim at one of their five prayer times making their prayer and this is something that sometimes you won't even find in certain parts of the Muslim world so they've recognized that our resilience has been strong and that by staying true to who we are as Americans and keeping to our values that that's one of the best ways that we can defeat the ideology that terrorists are putting out there. Well thank you Rashad what I wanna do now is open it up to the audience so if you do have a question please stand up state your name and please ask a question and keep it as short as possible. And you're gonna have to wait for the microphone so Annie are you doing the microphone? Yeah okay so let's start at the back and move forward. Great. Can you raise your hands please? In the back go ahead please. Hi my name is Maryam Jamshidi. Hi Harris. So thank you first of all to all the panelists for their comments many of which were really interesting. I'm a member of the American Muslim community and I struggle with this sort of idea of violent extremism in our midst quite a bit and as I listen to you guys and as I also obviously think about the issue it seems to me that there needs to be a shift sort of in the frame in terms of how we talk about this and I think it gets to Rabia's point about the connection between Islamophobes and violent extremists. So there's a narrative that says Muslims are responsible for crimes that happen in this country and when we take sort of responsibility as a Muslim community unfortunately we feed into that narrative which can ultimately lead to more alienation among American Muslims. So what I'm thinking is that you know we need to think about this issue within the broader context of violence in this country because this is happening in America not abroad and America as we all know is a country with some serious issues when it comes to violence. I haven't heard any of the members talk about this but I'm wondering whether or not you have any comments about addressing this issue within that broader context of violence within the United States. From my point of view it creates opportunities for collaboration and coalition building with other communities impacted by violence in this country including the urban communities and allows for coalition building that can perhaps address some of the resources issues that you mentioned as well. And finally it still allows for particularized culturally sensitive interventions to happen within communities but gets away from that sort of stereotyping of race, ethnicity and religion in terms of the propensity to commit violent acts. So sorry for the long question. Do we have any takers, Mohamed? Okay I think part of this question in my career basically kind of stay out of the political activism in the Muslim community around this issue. So I'm not dismissive of the symptoms that the questioner raised because obviously as a member of the community I don't want to see stereotypes out there but there's a fundamental question that Muslim community leaders who get involved in this sphere have to answer for themselves which is when you look at these kids do you see them as a problem and you are given by God maybe some insight into how to address this and how to save them? Are they part of what you should go and do in your ministry? Or it's not your problem frankly if it's a political problem because of overseas foreign policy or because of stereotyping by policy makers of one sort or another. I personally took or made the decision a long time ago that just I kind of adopted, virtually adopted a lot of these kids. I saw them as potentially people who can contribute to the community and strengthen it but they're going off the rails too early in their lives instead of building a family and actually accomplishing something. That is a decision that I've seen other clerics do. Muslim Matters was mentioned earlier and Sheikh Yasser Khaldi is an example of a person where we've had many hours discussing these issues many years ago and he ended up, him and others ended up saying, you know what? I am privileged to be in a position where I can draw these kids, these keyboard jihadi so to speak in their mother's basements that are kind of living in this virtual world. So as an example of one thing he did was he did a reverse sting operation so to speak. So we wrote an op-ed for foxnews.com a few years ago taking issue with putting Awluki on the drone kill list and I basically chastised Awluki's disingenuous and I gave it to Sheikh Yasser Khaldi who turned around on Muslim Matters and posted his response. He's critiquing, separating the theology from the ideology, the political activism of Awluki from what actually theologically the issues of Jihad are. And at the same time he's chastising me as for having bad manners so to speak of by speaking about Awluki that way. That drew folks out of their basements so to speak who actually would come to the comment line and he'd be able to engage them. That was later relayed to me from an official at the National Counterterrorism Center that they actually loved seeing that. And I'm like, well that was something that the community did on its own because community leaders felt they needed to adopt these kids. They didn't, we didn't sit there and look at the macro national political discourse around violence and discussions that have been going on in America for well over a century about violence by different parts of our society. We just went to solve the problem short term and address it. We left that political macro stuff maybe for academics who could maybe put some data to how many cases there are. But we just frankly couldn't just leave it out there and say until it's solved on the big level political discourse wise, it's not our problem by ourselves. Okay, we have 15 minutes left and a lot of questions so I'm gonna get one up here. We have to make questions short and answers short given the number of questions. Yes, thank you. I noticed even Peter Bergen, you used the expression jihadi terrorism. I'm reacting to the word jihadist. I know it's in the vernacular, it's probably inevitable that that's gonna be used as a synonym as a terrorist to say jihadi jihadist. But what my comment is even in today's paper, the use of the word jihad was used as though it were a negative. And I'm wondering if there might be a way to as an encounter narrative to let people know like Eugene Robinson today in his column in the Washington Post use jihad. Almost in the negative. Is there, couldn't he have said it's a misuse of the concept of jihad? And how can we get a counter narrative out there that when the word jihad is used, it's being misused if it's used as a negative? Peter, yeah, good question. I mean, I think one of the reasons people use this term is the term that people involved use themselves. And so it's a relatively, everybody accepts your point. I mean, I think it's uncontroversial. Well, I think also in the contemporary setting we need to take jihad beyond an abstraction so that people are doing jihad and doing great things like the guy who opened the soup kitchen that I mentioned earlier. A good example of that is the myjihad hashtag on Twitter. There was this massive campaign of young Muslims who started saying today I took my mom to the grocery store hashtag myjihad. Today I weeded out my parents' garden slash tag myjihad. Today I didn't go to the club and blow my dad's credit card on Shisha slash tag myjihad. So that actually exploded metaphorically, of course. Maybe exploded is not the best word to use here, but it exploded and what happened was you started seeing everyday average Muslim people as well even non-Muslims got on board saying, today I went to church hashtag myjihad. And that actually defined without scholars having to come and use our big legal classical language that no one understands, that actually gave the masses of the community an opportunity to say this is what jihad means to me as a 12-year-old Muslim kid in Georgia. And it's till now and the Islamophobes actually tried to high-check the myjihad campaign and started putting alternative messaging on there. And then you had the younger Muslim community reacting and galvanizing themselves a la Alinsky model here, Obama folks, and saying let's define jihad according to how we live our daily life. And that was a really beautiful example of kind of countering that now at a media level. I think people who are talking about jihad even Osama bin Laden are not scholarly and able to define it. And clerics across the board in America, and I got to keep this short, I apologize, agree that in the American context, violent reaction to foreign policy or to other grievance doesn't fall under that definition of jihad as we look at it, orthodox Islam. Assalamu alaikum, my name is Saba Ahmed. I'm from Portland, Oregon. I wanted to talk about, ask a question about at-risk Muslim youth that we do report to law enforcement. They end up getting targeted. And I'm talking about a case in Portland, Oregon where we had like a 15-year-old that his father had actually gone to the FBI to get some help with his radicalization ideas. And instead of helping him get some counseling to get out of it, they actually made him a target. And then in the last three years, we've had over 400 prosecutions of young Muslim boys from 15 to 25-year-olds that have been actually convicted. And I have some numbers about the arrests of, in 2010, we had 663 arrests. Of 2011, we had 380 terrorist-related arrests of people from special-interest countries, which is mostly Middle East and South Asia and stuff. So I just wanna talk to you, ask about, what are we doing? I mean, how can we trust the law enforcement if we go to them for help and they actually turn around and just use them against us? Robby and Mohamed, did you guys wanna- I think Mohamed's supposed to- Mohamed? So by the time I finish here, the FBI is gonna, frankly, be really upset with me. But that's an issue I've been working on for many years. Eventually, in 2011, they did give me their top award for actually participating in these cases to create an off-ramp, essentially, for these kids. We have a model, we have a history in American policing here in this country where in gang interventions, where we've given off-ramps community-based off-ramps as a way to get these kids disengaged from the track they're on. I agree with you that sting operations, as they're commonly referred to in the Muslim community, have been overused, that technique. There are a lot of folks in the FBI and a lot of field offices that have come to the realization that another tool in the tool chest is actually good for everyone. Can I ask you a question about that? Sure. Is it, I mean, the incentive structure, presumably, if you're at an FBI field office, is to make cases, right? I mean, that's how you get promoted, and so, I mean, is there a way, is there a recognition at the Bureau that, you know, that a case not made in the right kind of circumstances, this 15-year-old kid in Portland, that that's also something you get some recognition for, or is that kind of pie in the sky? No, there is some recognition in, you know, Director Mueller, frankly, the special agent in charge of the FBI field office in Dallas, frankly, in 2006 is who encouraged me to frankly start down this track. He retired now. So, Bob Casey, and he did have some clout back at headquarters to have those conversations behind the IC kind of curtain to be able to say, and then you had several folks at the NSC and NCTC who were also advocating for this, who had credentials in that world. So, yes, multiple field offices, frankly, had to come together though, outside of the three, you know, the New York and the WFO world, and push headquarters and say, we have some piloted cases, like the ones I worked on, that we should kind of look to create. Unfortunately, like I was saying earlier, we kind of spun our wheels, frankly, for the past two and a half years, where on the national level, we never really got a national countering violent extremism policy across all of the FBI's 56 field offices. Therefore, you did not get the training, frankly, for the new agents as they're coming in. So, you have some folks that are in the field offices that can rattle off a few who are trying to continue to pilot that and to try to push that messaging and to create another tool being deployed Can I just one very quick thing? Because what you said is perhaps the biggest problem right now. And in Britain, this led to the creation precisely of the channel program that was mentioned before. So, what happens when someone comes across the security forces in Britain when they are 15, 16 years old, they haven't done anything, but they know that this guy is very active in online extremist forums, talks about going abroad, et cetera, et cetera. He's not being led to participate in a sting operation, but there's an intervention constructed around him. And it's framed very cleverly. The frame is that people say, this is your last opportunity and we want to help you prevent, we want to help prevent you from committing a crime. So, take this opportunity. If you don't, if you choose to go on, then obviously a CT comes in and counterterrorism and you will be charged with something, but there is a last stop where people are being told, take advantage of this and maybe this gets you off. And that sort of tool doesn't exist in the United States right now. Right now, the only opportunity is, the only choice is between not doing anything at all or basically involving that person testing operation. And I think that would be an interesting thing to look at. Exactly, the informant part, but I was going to recommend the framework document on CVE. The first one that came out was the 2010 H-SAC CVE recommendations at DHS, at the Department of Homeland Security. And in it, you will find three different sections where this issue is mentioned and how the government, frankly, needs to coordinate the soft intervention tools and the deployment to the hard intervention tools. And the president was actually briefed on that document at the Oval Office. So there are a lot of people in government that are well aware of the need to get this done. Mr. Rashad, I wanted to... I mean, there are people that have pointed a number of cases and I'm not going to go into any individual cases where they say that essentially people from the government are going in and provoking youth. And then you have cases like what we just witnessed in Boston where you see that this is an actual threat where there are individuals that are becoming radicalized online. And there are instances in which, despite the best efforts of communities, communities can't be in the basement of everyone's home, Muslim communities included, to reach all of these youth. So it's important that we use all of the tools at our disposal. It's also important that we have productive partnerships with local communities that are best placed to identify these threats as youth might be drifting towards radicalization to make sure that local communities have all the intelligence and the information that we have at the federal level to make sure that in some cases where there is a strong and ongoing partnership and dialogue between local Muslim communities and US Attorney's Office, the FBI field office, that if the community feels there's a problem that they can themselves come in and say, look, we're worried about three or four youth in our community. This has happened on a number of occasions. And there's cases in which local law enforcement, if they see a problem that's happening, they can speak to someone in the community, the Imam, not necessarily the Imam, and say, look, we've noticed that there's some disturbing behavior going on here. And members of the community themselves can go in and identify their intervention program, which they're using to deal with this problem and to deal with the situation at hand. So it's important to recognize that it is obviously a very difficult situation. It's a very difficult balance to manage between knowing when you've reached the trigger point where the law enforcement, traditional enforcement action is necessary and when there's still opportunity for the social intervention that the community is engaging in to be most effective. My name is Mohammal. I am a counselor community of yours in Pakistan, embassy. I have one observation and one question, sir. My observation is that while dealing in the community, I have observed that almost 100% of the Pakistan community, they have migrated to America for socio-economic reasons. So basic targets of all the families is to earn their livelihood, social respect, good earning means. And none of them is interested to have radicalization of their youth, except they only require is their Islamic identity. That is my first observation. And what does that mean? The bottom line is that family as in institution is not encouraging to be radicalized. Now, what I have observed in my stay for one and a half years is there are individual instances of radicalization and these are motivated because of personal grievances. And when a person has some kind of personal grievances with the American institution or other communities or law enforcement agencies, like my sister said, FBI or something like, then they find a refuge in finding some kind of radicalization because they have understood for the last one decade that radicalization is a mean to revenge from this institution. Similarly, now my question, none of our scholars has, I mean, critically evaluated the Boston incident from another angle. What is that, that the person, the elder brother, what I have learned through the media, that the elder brother was aspiring to represent America in some boxing competition. And even to aspire for a boxing competition on a national level requires at least one, I mean, one decade's workout. And if a person is so committed to make his career as a professional boxer, turned against America why, to me it is the FBI's noting on his record that he has been ridiculized or he has been submitting with the, in his own, I mean, country. And that's why they did not allow him the legal documentation or legal status over here. That shattered his dreams. And to me that was the moment he got indulged and then he find something on networking, on internet and then he turned against them. Thank you. I think the question is the social impact or the impact on him, the fact that he was not able to become a citizen and represent the country, that social impact on him becoming radicalized. I think that's a hypothetical. I don't know if we can really address that with any real means, but what we do see at times is that people who are, and I think Muhammad and I have talked about this in the past, radicalized, it tends to be something outside of the theological realm. It could be problems at home, it could be criminality, it could be delinquency, there could be another set of variables that cause that person to go down that way. That's a hypothetical I couldn't answer to. It's not always, in fact what I've noticed is usually their ignorance of theology that empowers them to act in a radical way, not their knowledge of theology. So there are problems at home, delinquency. It appears that maybe he was a drug dealer prior to this. So those are also areas that need to be, and that's why, for example, in Boston, not to tour our hornet, our mosque, we have a delinquency intervention program that deals strictly with gang violence and delinquency and drug usage in the Muslim community. I don't think we can take one last question before we. I have Goldman and we're good. We can take two questions. And also the gentleman behind it, we're bound to these questions together. All right. All right, my name is Barry Ali-Riza. My question is, on the panel, Mr. Ware, I mentioned the respect for civil rights. Right now, in Guantanamo Bay, there's about 130 inmates that are starving themselves and they're basically protesting because their civil rights are not being met, and that's 130 out of 160. It's been constantly going up. It might be even higher now. And about 86 of them, I believe, have been cleared of all wrongdoing. Why are they not being let go? There are some of them that are waiting there for about five, 10 years. I know at least one inmate has been there waiting for about 11 years for their civil rights to have a day in court where he can be represented with an attorney and in front of a court of justice. Why is that right not being given to? Adam, do you wanna also ask a question as well, please? This is for their mom. What outreach have you had with the Boston PD? And are you concerned they're gonna be taking a more aggressive approach in the community? Does anyone wanna take the Guantanamo? We're gonna have, we've had multiple lengthy discussions of this issue here in this room. It is like, that is a good question, but we can't deal with it in 30 seconds. Boston PD, I mean, for the last 10 years, we've had what's called Bridges. 2010, Muhammad was in our community doing some work with us on radicalization, which is actively involved with interfaith leaders, mosques, Boston PD, the FBI, the Office of District Attorney Carmen Ortiz is involved. So our relationship, Lieutenant Hussain is one of my congregants, with the Boston PD has been pretty healthy. And making sure that using the language of mapping, when you tell a community we're gonna map you, it's a pretty terrifying kind of terminology to use. We're going to survey you, we're going to watch you, and they've been very, very receptive in creating that partnership. Thank you, everybody. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you, Harris, for organizing this. Thank you.