 Good afternoon and welcome to the sixth annual Genocide Studies Conference at the U.S. Naval War College. I am Hayat Alvi. I'm an associate professor in the National Security Affairs Department. Pardon me. I am the organizer of the conference and I also host the conference, which is an annual event. We will begin with opening remarks from the president of the college, Admiral Garvin, and we are very honored and privileged to have him kick off our sixth annual conference. Admiral Garvin, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. And good day. I'd like to add my welcome to the sixth annual Genocide Studies Conference. And first, I'd like to thank you, Dr. Hayat Alvi, for organizing and leading this event. The Naval War College Foundation, I'd like to thank them as well for their generous donations, which have made this event possible, and to our many alumni for remaining connected on important issues like this. To our entire team who at hand in today's events, to all of our faculty, staff, students, participants and attendees, thank you. This group has crucially important work to do at this Genocide Studies Conference, an event that underscores the critical importance of understanding and preventing the horrors of genocide. This conference brings together a diverse group of individuals, scholars, practitioners, subject matter experts and advocates, all united by a shared dedication to confronting one of the darkest aspects of human existence. Your presence here today is a testament to your commitment, and for that I am profoundly grateful. Over the course of my 34 year career, I have witnessed the impact of genocide in different regions of the world. I've seen how understanding the historical context and the warning signs of genocide is critical for responsible military decision making. Our forces often operate in complex and volatile environments. We must be informed not just by strategy and tactics, but by an ethical understanding of the societies in which we are engaged. History, including military history, has much to teach us. It offers us insights into the root causes of conflict, the consequences of inaction and the moral imperative of preventing genocide. When we study history, we are reminded of our shared responsibility to ensure that such atrocities are not repeated. Today we gather to explore the relevance of genocide studies in the contemporary world, and in particular, modern informational tools on genocide. This is not merely an academic exercise, it is a call to action. A better understanding of genocide equips us to prevent it, to intervene and to help societies heal and rebuild. We recognize that this is not the work of any single sector, it is a collective effort that requires the collaboration of academia, the military, and numerous other stakeholders. The issues we explore here are not isolated within the walls of this conference, but rather have far reaching implications for global security, diplomacy, and military operations. Our United States Naval War College is committed to being a part of this collective effort. We are actively engaged in research and initiatives relative to genocide studies. We believe that a holistic approach, one that draws from diverse disciplines and sectors, is essential to tackling the profound challenge before us. As we conduct this conference, I encourage you all to engage in an open, respectful, and collaborative dialogue. Let us be humble in our pursuit of knowledge and resolute in our commitment to a world where genocide becomes a relic of the past. So thank you very much for attending and thank you for the opportunity to address you. Back to you, Dr. Admiral, thank you very much. We are very honored and humbled by those powerful words and profound insights. Thank you again. It is our great fortune to have with us some of the most esteemed scholars in interdisciplinary fields to discuss the theme of this year's conference, the informational tools of genocide. Their bios are in the conference program for which the link is provided in the chat. I encourage you to please read their bios. The itinerary for today's conference is also included in the program. This conference could not have happened without the generous support of the Naval War College Foundation. Also, I wish to acknowledge and thank the Naval War College Events Department, especially Sharla Fiori, who has worked tirelessly for this conference. Also, the graphics department, public affairs office, and the IT and audio visual departments who have worked very hard to make this happen. Thank you all very much. Before we begin, I need to cover a few administrative items. Please note that everything presented today represents the speaker's own personal views. The Q&A session will follow after all three panelists are done speaking. The conference is being recorded and a YouTube link will be issued afterwards. Now, before we start with the panelists, I have a very brief presentation to set the stage for the informational tools of genocide, which is the theme of this year's conference. The panelists will begin as soon as I complete my brief stage setting presentation. Allow me to share my slides. So I want to start by talking about some of the important quotes that relate to either directly or indirectly to this year's informational tools of genocide topic and theme. So for example, here's a quote from a professor at Georgetown University who deals with the field of communications. She says, right now, many people naively believe what they read on social media. When the television became popular, people also believed everything on TV was true. It's how people choose to react and access to information and news that's important, not the mechanisms that distribute them. An American famous American writer once said, at any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice. And then we have a neuroscientist and philosopher who says the prefrontal cortex, which hosts the logical part of the brain comes second in the process of reading the news. We are vulnerable to manipulation by those who appeal to our emotions with the intent to pursue their own agendas. I'm sure we all can relate to these quotes. The 10 stages of genocide you can find online there on the link provided below. This is something I teach in my genocide studies class. And we go through discussing each of these stages, one of which stage four, that is dehumanization is very much related to the informational processes in our brains. I should say the human brain. And it's shown scientifically that it's the amygdala that processes emotions such as fear, discrimination, dehumanization and the fierce protection of ideologies and beliefs. The amygdala plays a key role in how animals assess and respond to environmental threats and challenges. It also evaluates emotional importance of sensory information and it plays a role in prompting an appropriate response. The amygdala regulates emotions, fear and aggression. It also is involved in tying emotional meaning to our memories, reward processing and decision making. When it's stimulated electrically, animals show aggressive behavior and when it's removed, they no longer show aggressive behavior. There are neural correlates for maintaining one's political beliefs in the face of counter evidence. We're in the midst of all kinds of political and social debates revolving around this kind of process. So for example, data on any topic must first be successfully communicated and believed before it can inform personal behavior. The inability to change another person's mind through evidence and argument or to have one's own mind change in turn stands out as a problem of great societal importance. Both human knowledge and human cooperation depend upon such feats of cognitive and emotional flexibility. People often resist changing their beliefs when directly challenged. In some cases, exposure to counter evidence may even increase a person's confidence that his or her cherished beliefs are true. In other words, there is a mechanism in the amygdala that makes the mind and emotions fiercely protect the already entrenched beliefs. I attribute this to biases and prejudices, prejudices that we see today proliferating in personal expressions, social media posts, etc. So hate is given a definition here and hate is also what's involved in dehumanizing others. In other words, denial of human qualities to others. Hate depends on sufficiently dehumanizing others in order to permit their elimination. And that can result in withholding empathy from the devalued targets. As Nelson Mandela said in the quote below, no one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion. Hate speech online has been linked to a global increase in violence towards minorities including mass shootings, lynchings and ethnic cleansing. Policies used to curb hate speech, risk limiting free speech and are inconsistently enforced. The studies have shown that countries like ours grant social media companies broad powers in managing their content. This is also found in all kinds of debates and political discourse ongoing as we speak. Studies have shown like other countries like Germany do enforce companies to remove their posts within certain time periods. And you can see that graphic from studies conducted and surveys conducted and this one is in particular sourced from the Council on Foreign Relations. So to wrap up, our brains have mechanisms for processing information. We have particular areas of the brain that process the cognitive drivers as well as the socio effective drivers of information. I also want to point out that historically, even before the internet and social media, there have been very ugly propaganda campaigns to convince and persuade people about hate. Hating others and dehumanizing others. So I'm giving a giving an example here of a picture I took of an exhibit of a poster. And this is from Ravensbrook concentration camp. The poster is announcing a movie. It's a Nazi propaganda movie from 1940. It's a notorious Nazi propaganda historical costume drama depicting in the most ugliest way Jews and their behavior as perceived and promoted through the propaganda machine of the Nazis. There's a link there for IMDB. If you want to look this up. And it describes the story and the plot of this particular Nazi propaganda film of 1940. The photo alone, the picture of the person presented in the character of the film should tell you how biased and prejudiced this film is produced by the Nazis, obviously. So with that, I have set the stage hopefully appropriately for the theme informational tools of genocide for our panelists to present. And so without any further delay here now are our esteemed panelists. So we will begin with Dr. Tom Creeley. And again, I encourage you to go in the chat and click on the link for the program, which contains the bios of each of our speakers. Dr. Creeley, the floor is yours. Thank you, Dr. Alby. I appreciate you inviting me to participate on the panel to discuss informational tools of genocide. My presentation is titled The Soulless Nature of Technology Dataism, and hopefully the three of us today can stimulate your amygdala into action with the emerging technology challenges that we face in this society in this world. I'll begin by defining some terms. Then, secondly, discuss the nature of being a non-being. Third, explore digital totalitarianism. And fourth, what can we do. So the terms I want to begin with are genocide, information, technology and informational eradication. So genocide has been talked about and defined many times with Dr. Alby and her classes, as well as the seminars. But just quickly, it is the, including any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy a national, ethical, racial or religious group, such as killing members, causing serious body harm. Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculator bring about its physical destruction, imposing measures intended that burst and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This is from the United Nations definition. Now genocide is an evil. An evil is systematic privation of the good. Now what is information? We have grown up thinking in the center and the receiver and how it's interpreted. It takes a little bit different meaning this day and time. Information is meaningful data curated from surveillance actions and reporting. Communication with intent and reception with interpretation and information is powerful effect. And then what is the definition of technology? Most people say what is technology to you and they hold up their phone or they hold up their computer or point to some object artifact of technology. But French philosopher and theologian Jacques all author of the technological society says that technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency for a given stage of development and every field of human activity. The key words here are absolute efficiency in every field of human activity. And then the fourth term is informational eradication. Now, when Dr. Alvey presented this proposal to be a part of we looked at the informational genocide as a term, but I decided I consult with my ethics and emerging military technology students and get their input because this is new information. This is new challenges that we are facing. And so Navy captain is facing Malavik, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dave Snipes gave input. We massaged the term and then Navy Jag Lieutenant Commander Starling Spencer helped me to finesse the definition. We're all word smithers and so you can imagine with students and an academic trying to put this together. But the definition of informational eradication fits better. Because it is accumulated collection and assimilation of one's digital footprint in all its forms, resulting in the dehumanization of individual personhood and spirit to pure bits data eliminating the essence of being the person exists only to create data for data's own purpose of efficiency. So the informational tools of genocide led me to develop the term informational eradication with informational eradication objective morality immortality takes on a new meeting. All experiences and achieved values preserved and treasured eternally by the divine actuality are replaced with the algorithm. How do we know what is in the AI black box. That is a big question that we are wrestling with. Currently, the objective is to erase your perceived self and identity from collective data void of the human spirit. You and I become the medium for creating data for efficiency. We in essence become the technology. We spend a lot of time built building our reputation building our brand to expand our sphere of influence and personal power. Tara Isabella Burton's self made book points out that we create an image of ourselves that is in contrast to who we really are. Think about online social media, the post, the influencers, the likes, reposting and the images that we tried to create a persona beyond us and who we really are. And the 21st century social media has facilitated creating desired images of ourselves by looking into the black mirror of the cell phone on the tablet. Now, below the surface of our personal social media created persona. There's a deeper level of digital collection, which we are unconscious. Now, I teach a seminar in the program called pen opticon power the gaze and opticon is all seeing. And we begin with great mythology in the thousand eye guide that is always watching us and bring it all the way through history up to the molecular level of our humanity today. From the digital footprint to scrolling on social media to keyboard psychology, we become the information that is sought. The tools of information eradication or artificial intelligence, social media, online searches, DNA biometrics, human machine interface wearables, neuro technology, facial recognition, mood analysis and ambient intelligent technology. So we talked about how that this contrast our sense of being and non being philosopher Paul Tillich has given some insight into that. He says the notion of being is a philosophic notion that notes something that is existing the totality of really existing things being is existing in a community with one another. It has reflective depth of living in everyday life of existence with ourselves and with others. Being is to care for the other. Now courage can show us what being is. And being can show us what courage is. Courage to be. Is the courage to affirm our own natural rational nature in spite of everything in us that conflicts with it and union with the rational nature of being itself. So the power of being is identified with virtue that is human flirty. What are our values and virtue is consequently essential with nature. Now this is acting with one's own true nature. The will to power is self affirmation of the will as ultimate reality. So we must face challenges in life we must be willing to engage and embrace those challenges. If we're going to develop our sense of being. And it's a testing of the metal of who we are as individuals as people as a community and society. Too often today as Dr. LV pointed out we see people who get easily offended microaggressed people who don't have the courage to take a stand for who they are what they believe in and their beliefs. So technology flattens and narrows our lives. It separates us from nature and from God. Now the opposite of being is non being or nothingness. Non being is the other philosophic notion that denotes absence of something. All things non existent in reality non existent reality. So we face anxiety and anxiety is existential and cannot be removed. So courage is a self affirmation in spite of namely in spite of non being who he who she who acts courageously tapes in his self affirmation the anxiety of non being upon him or herself. So anxiety turns us towards courage, because the other alternative is despair. Perhaps we're beginning to see despair in our culture and particularly among young men and women who are so addicted and engaged in social media. Now as we look at that term data ism you've all know her worry. And it's really strategist has written several books. He wrote homo deus a history of the future. And he says most most interesting emerging religion is data ism which venerates neither gods nor man. Data ism takes a place of being human with authority and meaning. What's replacing that techno humanism techno humanism pushes humankind to develop technologies that can control and redesign the will data ism. It worships data. It is entrenched in computer science and biology. We're made up of biochemical algorithms. In essence, we are a machine. And that is valuable information. Humans are the tool for creating the all the Internet of all things. Each of us are a single data processing system. We are the chips. We no longer own our own data. It is overridden by the right of information. How many times do you give up your right of your information that you put online or at the doctor's office or insurance or other government agencies. You sign away those rights that they take your data, your information. And we have no idea what they do with it, but where it goes or who sees it or controls it. I think it's a term that he means for the prophecy or the heralders of the gospel of data ism believe experiences are valueless. We cannot find meaning in ourselves. It is the data the human produces that is important. Once the human dies, the information flow stops. There is no spirit. There is no future. There is strictly an instrument of technology contributing to the data flow. Data is among the minds our primary source of authority and meeting and heralds a tremendous religious revolution. We will be known by the data we create. We will be identified by that data. And that will be our existence. Not you and me as humans as spiritual beings are created by God. Convergence of biochemical algorithms and sophisticated electronic algorithms collapses the divide between animals and machines. Question is asked does data ism create amnesia. We are less connected to the past. Just this morning on NPR it was reported that 13 only 13% of young people. High school could pass world history. 20% could pass United States history. Remembering the past is essential to our future. Without a memory we are without an identity, which enables others to define us and dominate us. Human well experience must remain the supreme source of authority and meaning. Human beings seek to separate humanity from its desires, experiences, authority and meaning. It sidelines the human by shifting from the homocentric man as a center humankind to data centric. And that is the focus for the future. In my EMT program ethics and emerging military technology program. I show a film by James Graham of the Financial Times came out about two years ago. The title of it is we know what you did during lockdown. It is available on YouTube. It demonstrates the depth of being surveilled digitally unwittingly and interrogation scene explores how COVID-19 has exposed the tensions between the need for data to track and trace and the right to privacy injustice. You may say, I don't put anything on the internet or social media that can hurt me. I don't care what people see. I don't have anything to hide. But that's not the point. The arc of truth of you, your being can be manipulated to create another you based on digital bits of artificial intelligence, cyber biotechnology, neuro technology and on it goes. I have some examples here. Just received an article. Well, a couple of weeks ago about AI nudging. And it's from the Montreal AI ethics research. And in fact, one of the researchers in this is a colleague of mine who is spoken at the war college. She is a fellow at IBM. But it says AI nudging is a powerful tool used to influence human behavior in responsible and ethical ways. It is to improve performance and decision making. It has three systems to it. System one is quick, instinctive thinking, placing healthy food in an accessible place so that it can change our eating habits and live better and healthy. And system two encourages us to slow reflective thinking in our decision making. Then system three is metacognitive nudges prompt introspection and push pushes us to engage our confidence level and accomplishing a task, taking tasks beyond our capabilities. So this all sounds good. And for ethical decision making, as my friend and colleague from Yale says, and he wrote the book, moral machines that at some point machines can be more, more moral than humans. But it also, there's a risk there of how can the data be poisoned? How can someone infect that data to paint a totally different picture of you and me? How do we want to be nudged in our thinking in our beliefs and meaning of life. Another technology is the battle for your brain. That is a ton of a book by Anita Farahini, who is at Wake Forest. And she says that brain transparency is about peering into your thoughts by doctors, scientists, government and business. I'm talking about neuro technology. I asked a question when I'm speaking, I said, who do you think does the most research on evil? And people will say, ah, chaplains, clergy, no moral psychologist, who are at places like Neural Link, Meta, Google and other research institutions. The answers in neuroscience, hacking and tracking our brain impacts our free, our freedom to understand, shape and define ourselves. Another technological mechanism is active authentication. Each person's cognitive fingerprint for biometrical identification, we see that in the airport were clear. This is the definition of our brains for profit. You can go into a Kroger grocery store, and as you go down the aisle, there are cameras that can track your eye movements and calculate how long you look at a product. This helps determine their supply chain and your interest in the product. A psychological profile can be derived by how you type on the keyboard. Is it courty typer or are you a hunt and pack? Apparently that says something about you. And then my colleague, Dr. Tim Schultz in the EMT program and pointed out last week in our lecture that there's a new car that has a camera in the dash in front of the steering wheel that records the driver's facial expressions and eyes along with the driving habits. And for me, that's a way intrusive because I have a tendency sometimes to get upset with people who are cutting into the traffic or cutting me off or whatever. Another bio hacking. You can go out and buy a cans nine CRISPR team technology kit off the internet for a few hundred dollars and up. People here in the United States. That are in their basements are in the homes. Bio hacking. They playing with this technology of genetic manipulation. I certainly cast nine CRISPR team technology is a fantastic. Technology that helps prevent diseases and cancers and diagnoses and on it goes. And it's really important. But as we say in the EMT program technology is dual purpose, good and evil social media online digital footprint. The proximity is recorded advertisements. Connection suggestions, etc. What is the reputation of those that you're connected with that can affect your, your online identity. Neuroscientist Rafael you stay was at Columbia University. He advocates on neuro rights. He says that we need to protect our privacy thought. Ideas. And being by maintaining more authority. Now this brings to the question of digital totalitarianism. Mattias Desmond professor from Belgium. Last year published the psychology of totalitarianism. He says that it is a state grounded in the social psychological process of mass formation. The mass formation is group hypnosis that destroys individuals, ethical, moral autonomy and moral authority and roms them of their ability to think critically. Now we can see from the demonstrations, the people who have been caught up in the social media that are pro Hamas, those pro Israel, as well as the domestic issues that we have in our country. Asper Romana Gordini notes that since the middle ages, we have increasingly separated from nature, one another and guide from the Renaissance on forward, but this has occurred mass formation is insidious in nature. People fall prey to it unwittingly and without notice. A recent example is the public support demonstrations for Hamas slaughter of Israelis. Some of the LGBTQ community support the Islamic terrorist. But essentially just going to note that being LGBTQ is highly offensive to the religion of Islam. And is often punished by death. So we're critical thinking where is the analysis and examination of the facts. Are we emotionally hijacked by social media. That is one of the points that has been made that this is a social media conflict. The new digital technocratic totalitarianism is on the rise. That search T systems and eaves drops surveillance of society got cameras everywhere ring door bells tracking online activity and cell phone location. Increasing pressure on white privacy. Have you had Alexa to join in on your conversation. Government initiated actions. Citizens to snitch on others. Citizens citizenship and suppression of alternative voices. And loss of support for democratic principles. The process of digital mass formation can bring together socially fragmented populations. A human body is digitally monitored tracked and traced by a technocratic government. Bio nano neuro AI social media and other mass data collection of bits. Now could be 19 as Desmond points out set the stage for mass formation through digital tracing and surveillance on the largest scale ever. The US has proposed that the United Nations. Make this digital tracing in whatever in surveillance global. The next pandemic or global crisis. What are the benefits. One of the risks. The psychological conditioning occurs in informational eradication. The social isolation. Being on the internet in your room by yourself gaming, the addiction to the internet. Not interacting with other people other than online. Utopia, technological solution to human problems. The data and statistics blur the line between scientific fact and fiction is amazing. The articles that are coming out about. Esteemed universities and colleges that have fraudulent research. That's based on political ideologies or social ideologies. There's an epidemic fear and uncertainty. It produces a yearning for absolute authority. In fact, certainly last year came out that 40% of young people desire a soft totalitarian ruler to freedom and democracy. People want the government to protect them. They're willing to give up their rights for protection. Hannah address the book. Totalitarianism. Said the destruction of humanity, wherever it has ruled. A big gun to destroy the essence of man. So are we moving to a digital totalitarianism? What can we do? How do we go about. Containing this phenomenon of digital dominance. Well, digital platforms must be held accountable section 230 gives big data free reign. The European law restricts big data on privacy and tracking individuals and living having fines. So in a sense the United States is behind on this. We often look to government to solve the technological problems. It is not government which can call for accountability. It has to be you and me. It is a collective of humanity that calls for big data to be accountable. You know, what are the risks to the owners of big data of the leaders? Who are they vulnerable to? How are they protecting our information? And this is the global organization is not just the United States company. They see themselves as a global company. Also, there must be education. Education of technology principles, digital literacy and ethics. We do not have a gap between ethics and technology. We have an abyss between our receding ethics and the exponential development of technology. So we need international interdisciplinary thinkers to engage with democratic societies, our allies. And we must work collaborative and the way that brings about a mutual inclusive understanding and values for humanity. The diversity in solving this problem is essential through culture, through perspectives. And this is a global global problem which you and I can participate in. Thank you very much. Dr. Creeley, thank you very much for those profound insights. Next up, we have Dr. Don Thimi, whenever you're ready, sir. You need to unmute. Good afternoon, everyone. I just want to follow up on some of those excellent comments. I'm glad I didn't plan to use Hannah Arendt or slides of Yudhsus since those have already been taken. But I just want to highlight some of the personal experiences that we've all had over the years and then show how information relates to genocide, but also how it can be used as a tool to counter that. All of us have had conversations with parents, pastors, coaches, mentors, teachers and others that did not go the way we intended for them to go. With notable exceptions, all of us remember far more of the bad outcomes than the positive ones. Because while sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me, they do leave an indelible cognitive mark. We are all simultaneously producers, observers, evaluators and consumers of information. And based on that, we make decisions even when we decide to take no action because that too is a conscious choice. So today I want to cover two parts of this communication continuum as it relates to genocide, mass atrocities, ethnic cleansing and other assorted crimes against humanity. Now in the beginning there was the word and the word was made flesh. In other words, thoughts were converted into action. In the US Supreme Court, both Schenck v. United States in 1919 and Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, ruled that an incitement to violence constitutes a clear and present danger that can be prevented is not in fact protected speech. This tradition carries forward a line of logic from Athens and Rome where the greatest fear of democracy was demagoguery. And from Cleon to Coughlin, Robespierre to Hitler, Savonarola to Stalin, McCarthy to Mal, that fear has been proven justified time and again. One person's truth is another's outright lie. And if we were to have any hope of at least pursuing Kant's perpetual peace, then we must be discerning consumers of information and deciders of action. Now benign information is the daily flotsam of information floating about that might be important to some, but nearly meaningless to others. And you just heard Dr. Creely speak about some aspects of this. What one person believes is important on tic-tac or the front page of the Washington Post may be banal at best to others who are more interested in the long term winter weather forecast. Other people's stocks, your mother-in-law's favorite meatloaf recipe, the weather in Buenos Aires, what kind of parchment Beethoven wrote his sonatas on our to the vast majority of us, benign. But the provider of the information may intend for one effect and entirely another one may ensue. For example, if you took Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896, that put in motion a system of segregation that took Brown in 1954 to start unwinding that in a process that is at best and complete even today. A report to President Bush on the subprime issue led to a stock market crash in the so-called Great Recession. The U.S. decision to support Israel in 1973 led to gas rationing, long lines, and President Carter in the Oval Office in a sweater asking us to all turn down the thermostat. Time and again we see an intended effect that goes in an entirely different direction. Now it is true that modern technology can make this even faster and wider and deeper and more violent, but that does not make it as unique as one might think. Information itself is agnostic. It is the decisions on how to employ it, understand it, and act upon it or not that matter and they can spread and transform faster than the originator may have intended. Almost a thousand years ago in 1096, Pope Urban II gave a speech in Clermont, France that was intended to focus a tailor-made force of highly trained and disciplined military forces on reducing the internet scene squabbling in Europe and to focus on retaking the Holy Land and especially Jerusalem back from the Muslims. Now Peter the Hermit interpreted and broadcast that message a bit differently, gathering together what at best might be described as a focused rabble that began to make their way through German lands on the long march to the Levant. Evidently the message was interpreted in a different light as the Peter-led group turned into a riotous bunch that attacked and massacred the Jews and mains, verms, and column, inadvertent converted to malign. Now the spread of information that led to persecution and widespread killing of groups of people based on an ascribed identity did not stop there. There are three examples I'll highlight for you from the last four centuries that show this again and again. The first is King Philip's War, 1675 to 1676, in which the supposedly devout Puritans of eastern Massachusetts, what is today lower Maine and most all of Rhode Island, went on a killing rampage that was returned in kind and what was as a percentage of the population, one of the most savage and deadly wars in American history. There are many, many lessons from that oft forgotten, but for here, for us here at the Naval War College, a very local war. Jill LePore notes that writing about war is essential to winning it. She adds without irony that one man calls cruelty what another man calls justice. Words are used to inform and so doing seek to shape perceptions and thus define the geographical, political, cultural, racial, and national boundaries that are at stake. This in turn reflects the comment from Bishop Avila that he reportedly made to Queen Isabella in 1492 that war is a contest of words as much as wounds. And he knew of what he spoke, just ask the Spanish targets of the Inquisition. Here, even though Metacom, also known as King Philip, was assassinated and the war ended in 1676, one should note that increased Mather carried forth the same kind of invective, along with his son Cotton Mather, and the Salem Witch Trials scant 16 years later. Stacey Schiff notes that there was an enduring struggle to be first with the so-called truth. Even as words such as possession, witchcraft, and affliction were loosely tossed about in the jail cells, the trial rooms, and on the way to Gallows Hill where many were hung and another was pressed to death. Once the lies started to fly faster than the alleged witches and warlocks, getting that genie back in the bottle proved impossible until the fear-mongering and executions finally ran their course. That small satisfaction indeed to those involved, especially to those executed, although increased Mather, after fomenting much unrest, perhaps hoped to quell the proceedings when he said, I would rather judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman to be a witch. The second example comes from the 1930s in Central and Eastern Europe, no stranger to most if not all of us here. But the hate language of that region and era is now undergoing an update that we might call Hitler and Stalin's malign language 2.0. Over the last 20 years, with the opening of post-Soviet archives to a new generation of researchers, the horrors of the Hodomor, which is Ukrainian for death by starvation, have come to light where the targeted language of the Soviets all but guaranteed the starvation slaughter of millions of Ukrainians in a drive to collective farms, dehumanize people and destroy any potential cultural resistance to the ever upward alleged march of the people's proletariat progress. The Soviets invented or inverted words and ascribed class values to them where none had existed before, with Kulak being perhaps the most notorious example. In the aftermath of the attempted emancipation of the serfs by Tsar Alexander II in 1861, sorry, Mr. Lincoln, you weren't first, some of the better off serfs exploited the less fortunate serfs by loaning them money or renting them land, horses and tools at loan shark rates. These practices, combined with the memories of the lower Polish nobility, often shoeless themselves, known as the Schlakta, who extracted high rents from other peasants, was certain to unlock more than one the Roschka of dire consequences, exactly as Stalin Khrushchev wanted. The old Russian mantra of starve the countryside, feed the cities, now had the added value of a class war and a reduction through famine of the countryside, all while ensuring the proletariat had the agrarian resources to smelt steel. If you have not yet watched Bitter Harvest from 2017, read Ann Applebaum's Red Famine or Miran Dolot's Execution by Hunger, I commend them to your attention. Suffice to say, the use of information propagated from the center to the countryside was critical in the conduct of the campaign of state-sponsored famine. Now, all of us are probably more familiar with the use of words and information by the Nazi machine, primarily because of two factors. First, the Soviets were partners, not necessarily allies, and that's the way they wanted it. They made short work of anyone who wanted to be a fellow traveler and then discovered the ugly truth. If you have not yet watched Mr. Jones from 2019 about the Welsh Reporter, you ought to do so, but there's a spoiler alert. It does not have a happy ending. The second is that the Nazis were more effective at spreading their message through a combined arms campaign of radio, in-person rallies, and print media. Hitler was the first to use an airplane to fly from rally to rally in one day, ensuring that his message spread faster than any attempt to counter his arguments. He also made a practice of first targeting reporters, intelligentsia, and clergy to convince, coerce, compel, or capture them so as to ensure their silence. You have to remember that Dachau opened several weeks after Hitler came to power in 1933, and saw a quick round-up of any who might oppose him, publicly in print, radio, or otherwise. Six years later, when the Nazis invaded Poland, they did the same at the Cambridge of Poland, URD, arresting and silencing the Faculty Senate and other leaders first. As a result of these factors, there are more videos, recordings, and microfilm papers that document Hitler's unswerving message of angry bile focused on the Jews, first and foremost, but also including any and all of the Untermensch, who did not meet his perceived definition of Ariane Uwe-Mensch. Hitler, Giebel, Rosenberg, Streicher, and many thousand more echoed the talking points in the radical eliminationist ideology that led from Unterden-Linden and Pozztamaplatz to Himmelsstraße and Treblinka and the Selectionplatz in Burkinau. The original words found their final solution, and if the news reports from Germany over the last two weeks are accurate, there is at least a small strain of that evil virus that still endures, from 1096 through Nazi Germany to today. Assault Friedlander, in his exhaustive years of extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939 to 1945, published 16 years ago, provides numerous examples of continued words of malign intent and consequential action. For example, throughout occupied Poland, posters warned the Polish population that anyone providing material assistance to Jews, especially food or hiding, was liable to execution of themselves along with potentially their entire family. In the same year, Giebel's noted in his diary that we are so fully committed that there is no escape for us anymore. In underscoring this all along, Hemmler routinely presented the extermination of the Jews as an onerous, heavy responsibility, delegated to him directly by Hitler, that required, in his words, a steady devotion to their task and a spirit of self-sacrifice. By late 1943, by which time the tides of fortune had turned against Berlin and its murderous regime, and most of the Jews that would die in the Holocaust had already been slaughtered. Hemmler continued that the difficult decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth, which is a never written down and never to be written page of glory in our history. One cannot help but wonder if the ghost of Peter the Hermit was whispering in his ear. Now one should note that all were not quiet, despite what David Goldhagen might lead one to think. University of Munich, White Rose Group proclaimed in 1942 that the Holocaust was, quote, the most fearful crime against human dignity, a crime with which no other in the whole history of mankind can be compared. In Bishop Wem, a year later proclaimed that the ongoing genocide was in the sharpest contrast to divine law and an outrage against the very foundation of Western thought and life against the very guide given right of human existence and dignity. And when the German public learned the basic details of Tiergartenfuhr euthanasia program, the outcry from pulpits and pedestrians caused the Nazi government to at least conceal the program, if in fact not to cancel it. Now the actual implementation of the Holocaust and its attendant murder of others deemed Leben zum Wettesleben relied upon myriad tools and technologies of information. Telegraphs and telephones moved orders, delivered directives, ordered more trains, procured more building materials for the concentration and extermination camps, shifted resources and orchestrated the dance of death. When Auschwitz was found not to be in compliance with health and hygiene codes, a order came from Berlin that then set plans in action to clean up the place designed to extract valuables and extinguish life. After Hitler visited a shooting squad killing Jews, he issued orders to find more effective methods of killing mass numbers of people without the deleterious effects on what he called good German boys. Meetings, conferences, teaching and training all continued to resource the organs of destruction, even as the war might have demanded allocation of those resources and energy elsewhere. In May 1944, a battalion's worth of national socialist guidance officers met with Hemler and Hitler, both of whom underscored the nature of what Hitler called a life or death struggle with ruthless upholding and removing the Jews. The rapid evacuation and extermination of the Hungarian Jewish population in the spring of 1944 was information with action operating at its deadliest peak efficiency. They were rendering useless the Allied bombings of Auschwitz III or Monowitz, the advance of the Allied armies in the spring and summer of 1944, and any other intercessory help. Nazi forces might be short of fuel, ammunition, parts and personnel, but the trains would keep running with 12 to the 14,000 deportees a day in a choreographed chorus line to the crematoria of Birkenau. And then this brings us to the use of words, images, radio and information in Rolanda. It is well documented that the Hutu-led government used the radio to broadcast not only messages of hatred, but in fact incitement to targeted killings. This built upon prejudice and images, perhaps none so infamous as Leon Mugosata calling Tutsi's cockroaches in 1992. The various public and private radio stations controlled by the Hutus leveraged the radio network to spread their message. RTLM, the free radio and television of the Thousand Hills, was allowed to broadcast over the government-controlled radio Wanda until they could set up their own network of transmission and relay stations. These networks reached roughly 70% of the population and some scholars attribute roughly 10% of the deaths directly to the employment of mass media incitement to killing. How one would actually quantify this causation is debatable, of course, but there does appear to be at least a linked correlation. When two of the most popular songs played are I Hate Hutus and Sons of the Soil, a direct reference to the concept of Hutus as the true inheritors of the land and not the Tutsis, that then tends to reinforce other themes. This includes the idea of Bazungu, a reference to a 1% lifestyle of those who owned and controlled the vast majority of Orondon assets. Bazungu has been translated variously as the wealthy, the Germans, the whites, the Belgians and the outsiders. I can tell you after my time in Uganda and Tanzania, I know with interest the similarity to the word mozungu, which I was told means he who walks around on the noonday sun, which is a tongue-in-cheek jab at only mad dogs and Englishmen into the noonday sun to venture. Other emotive-laden words used in Uranda included faithful and mixed, which one should note is quite close to the use of mishling by the Nazis to refer to people of empty blood. Now, lest you think this is consequence-free, in the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found three journalists, two from radio and one from print, guilty of inciting genocide, the first time since Nuremberg that this had been done. At the same time, though, Scott Strauss notes that we should be careful on how much of the slaughter we consider is directly attributable to Rwanda. Cautioning that there is some evidence of conditional media effects, then some instances coordinated elites reinforced the connection between violence and authority and catalyzed a small but significant number of individuals to acts of violence. One should also note that while research is focused on the use of civilian radio in the Rwanda, to date I have found no research on the use of military and police forces use of radio. I can neither prove nor disprove its contributions, but I am willing to bet you a month's jump pay that there were parallel coordination radio networks employed by government organizations. Strauss concludes, with regards to civilian radio, that radio media effects were not direct or massive, they were marginal yet important in consolidating an extremist position. I would add that it allowed the government-led, sponsored and inspired forces to generate tempo, tempo that enabled killing at a rate that almost equaled the extermination of Hungarian jury at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, and exceeded the daily average of the Einsatzgruppen on all but their bloodiest days. Information becomes malign action. So the second part I want to focus on today then is how information is a battleground and how it can be contested. This is after all a war college, and we focus on the hows and whys of fighting to protect our interest, preserve a favorable peace, and project power when and where required. Long before the doctrinaires declared information to be a domain, the practitioners of war were already doing this, from Pericles' funeral oration to Lincoln's last full measure in Churchill's blood, toil, tears, and sweat orations. Today, as you heard Professor Krilley talk about, more than ever we are not only saturated in information, we are in fact incessantly attacked. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will give way to lethargy and laziness and letting others cherry-pick their information, feeding their confirmation biases, and assuring them false comfort of the sanctity of their convictions. This in turn leads to a cognitive culmination in a dissonance that can dissuade all but the most stalwart leader and seeker of understanding and competing truths. Perhaps the biggest challenge is how fast and widely information can move, and we have all experienced how fast a salacious slander travels compared to a carefully constructed accounting. So what is a senior leader, a task force commodore, or a company commander to do? I have pulled upon a library of doctrine and research that might help us to navigate the shoal waters of confusion and avoid the shattering sirens songs. Joint Publication 3-04, for example, information and joint operations was published last year and has several aspects that apply. Now for those of us who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are not too many surprises in that the battle of the narrative takes place and the doctrine captures some key points that apply here in attempting to counter-attack information in a mass atrocities or a genocide operating environment. First, we have to comprehend not only the grand theory of how information affects operations, but how it will affect operations in the place and time space where we are operating. Second, we have to use information, both the collection and processing of, and the distribution and employment of, information to support and enable effective decision making by our own commanders, as well as those of partners, and the targets of our information operations. Third, there is a tension between speed and accuracy. Commanders, reporters, and leaders all want to be first with the truth, but there may be widely differing definition of just what is the truth. Commanders have to assess and adjust their information operations as precisely as they would artillery fire with one critical distinction. It is possible to get fairly accurate damage assessments on the physical damage and the continued operation of a target of a 500 pound bomb. It is much harder to determine the effectiveness of a 500 word tweet, Snapchat, or CNN report. A bridge may be six meters wide. The informational battle space is six inches wide. Now, almost at the same time, our British allies released a handbook on the challenges of planning and trying to war game influence operations. And they start by noting that operational success depends on influencing attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors of different audiences. In operational environments that reflect the pervasiveness of information and the pace of technological change, platforms, means, and methods for gathering, processing, aggregating, audience targeting, and dissemination of information. To understand the audience, the Brits break this down into seven layers, cognitive, social, cyber, logical, physical network infrastructure, physical, and geographical. And to this I would add an eighth, the cultural aspect. My own experiences in Kurdistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, East Africa, and along the Thai Cambodian border lead me to believe you ignore culture with at least as much peril as ignoring your Cipro and taxi cycling. So the biggest challenge is that it takes time to build the counter narrative. So leaders are left with relying upon going to war with the narrative you have to borrow from a former Secretary of Defense, which may not be the narrative you need once the information fight begins and leads to acts of violence or deterrence competing for value in time space. The other aspect of this that I have seen, at least in my limited experience as a commander, a planner, and a military diplomat, is that by the time an organization decides what the message is, construct some sort of testing mechanism, be it a wargamer otherwise, adjust based on the lessons encountered from that exercise and then deploys the refined model, the informational ground has already moved on. A perfect message too late is no message at all. It is in fact better to act decisively and be criticized than to be perfect, tardy, and mourn the lives lost while seeking perfect instead of good enough. Anyone who has ever endured an ambush interview will know that there are times when you will wish you could get that back or say it better or perhaps not at all. But, as the experiences of ancient Athens and Rome demonstrate, legis silent enter armor, laws are silent and the presence of force, and the excesses of demagogues are truly hard to recover. More recently, the French Revolution, Armenia 1916, the Nazis and the Soviets, the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, and the societal discord of the last four years right here in the United States, all provide cautionary tales of failing to understand the enduring effects of information as received and perceived versus how it might have been intended and inadvertently conveyed or simply ignored altogether. There will be more. In the two centuries since telegraphs were invented, the increase in available information has expanded geometrically several times over. The ability to bulk distribute messages such as by cell phone during Ukraine's Orange Revolution means that technology is the new town crier. The examples of two wars right now in the Russo-Ukraine War and the Israeli Hamas War underscore the violent effects of information in the bitter battle of the narrative. Jammers, troll farms, false fronts, cyber interdiction, satellite deployments are all the norm. And if there is one constant in warfare, it is that change is constant and there are no constants in warfare. That leaves to the individual to be diligent and attempt to discern the facts while remembering is every cop, firefighter and infantry commander knows the facts are never, ever as good or as bad as the first report. Like Smokey the Bear, only you can prevent information fires. And if we are to succeed in holding together this fragile experiment in democracy and we want to endure like Athens but as long as Rome, we must handle information, mass atrocities and genocide with extreme care. Thank you. Dr. Thimi, thank you very much for those, as always, very thought provoking words and comments and observations and analyses. Thank you again. Next up we have Dr. Azim Ibrahim. Thank you so much, Hayat and thank you so much to Dr. Creely and Dr. Thimi. Much of what I wanted to actually present has already been covered. Dr. Creely's comments on technology and the role it plays in disinformation campaigns and how AI and other new technologies could simply supercharge that. And Dr. Thimi on the history on the battle of the narrative from the Holocaust to Rwanda and how one ignores cultural at the peril and the fact that creating the counter narratives is actually takes a considerable amount of effort. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at more recent kind of case studies in the application of the disinformation campaigns and the narratives. And a lot of my work recently has been done in Ukraine. My institution where I am a director produced this report on incitement to genocide in Ukraine, which has been used in 13 parliaments around the globe to vote for genocide determinations. And I'll just give you a briefing in terms of how that came about. So the word genocide is often used very loosely and is often used interchangeably with mass murder. If you basically turn on the TV today, you'll see the Israel Gaza situation, both sides accusing each other of genocide. And they don't actually mean genocide necessarily, but they're essentially referring to as mass murder. But the word genocide actually has a very precise legal definition. And that definition is presented to us in the 1948 genocide convention. And at the heart of this definition is intent, intent, its intention, the intent to destroy a group whole or in part a protected group. And this intent can be attributed to a state through the evidence of a general plan. So for example, an actual plan as the Nazis had, as Dr. T. Mee mentioned to eradicate the Jews, this was all organized and systematized very clearly in documents or it could be inferred through the systematic pattern of atrocities. So there's no actual evidence of a plan itself, but it's very clear in terms of what the intention of a particular group is in terms of trying to eliminate a. A group of people at the genocide convention also gives us five genocidal acts that is killing that is causing serious bodily harm or serious bodily or mental harm. There is deliberately inflicting the physical conditions to destroy a group and there is birth prevention. And finally, there's a forcible transfer of children. Now, if you look out of those five acts, only one of them is actually killing. And so that's very important. So how does this apply to Ukraine? So essentially the institution where I'm a director of the New Line Institute, we did a report a couple of years ago on the Uyghur genocide. We had 55 legal experts from around the globe look at the evidence that was coming out from Xinjiang and to try to attribute to examine whether a genocide was occurring there. That report was subsequently used by Secretary Pompeo to come to the genocide determination and the genocide determination by the State Department. And I was later told when I actually met with Secretary Pompeo, he actually told me that the key part which convinced the lawyers at the State Department was on the forced sterilization. The forced sterilization of Uyghur women and girls to ensure that they can't reproduce, they can't reproduce as a group. So it wasn't necessarily the killing. And in fact, that was a very small part of our report as well. But it was what convinced the State Department lawyers. So based on that report, when the war in Ukraine started literally two weeks after I was contacted by a colleague of mine in Brussels who told me that the Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine was asking if we could do a similar report in terms of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. So about a month after the war had actually started in March of last year, I went to Ukraine. I spent a considerable amount of time there. I spoke to lots of people on the ground there, clicked on lots of evidence. And on my return, I compiled three teams of experts. They were open source intelligence experts. They were language experts to translate some of the telegram channels. And they and those legal experts. So we compiled 35 top legal experts. So they include and they include former Attorney General's Justice Ministers, former ICC prosecutors and judges, et cetera. So they're all named in our report. And the conclusion they came to after applying all the evidence was threefold that the Russian Federation has breached the genocide convention, that the Russian Federation bears state responsibility for incitement to genocide, incitement to genocide. And the pattern of atrocities indicate an intent to destroy the Ukrainians as a national group, which is in breach of Article 3C of the genocide convention. Now, the reason this is important for today's seminar is because incitement to genocide in terms of the narrative, the messaging is itself a crime in itself. It's actually a standalone crime, even if a genocide does not occur. If you are inciting genocide, you are laying the foundations of a genocide, then that is a crime in itself. And the rhetoric that we had emerging from Putin's Russia was very clear for everybody to see. For example, in Putin in July 2021, he wrote an essay saying that Ukraine is an artificial creation. So he was denying that Ukraine had its own language, culture and history. To him, it was an artificial creation. It was completely manufactured and it simply did not have its own historical trajectory. In February of 26, the chair of the Duma, Vladislav Sarkov, said that there is no Ukraine, there is no Ukrainianness. This is a disorder of the mind. There is no nation. So he essentially laying the foundation, laying the narrative that there is no such thing as a Ukrainian. And then we had the former president, Medvedev, who said, we will do everything to make you disappear, what our grandfathers failed to do. He also said, I hate them. They are bastards and degenerates. I will make them disappear. So the rhetoric was very clear in terms of the information that was coming out of Putin's Russia, even before the invasion that they were laying the foundations of a genocide. So that in itself is a crime. And then we see now after the invasion that this rhetoric was translated into action. We have at the time of our report, we had reports of 180,000 Ukrainian children that were transferred from Ukraine to Russia. And if you remember that one of the five genocidal acts is the forcible transfer of children. And this is essentially they'll transfer into Russia. They will spread out, put up for adoption to stop them coalescing as a single identity group. We also have evidence that the message in going out from the Russian commanders was and I quote, rape the Nazi whores so they don't want to have Ukrainian children. The UN Special Rapporteur gave evidence of how Viagra was being distributed to Russian soldiers in the first frontline so they can rape Ukrainian women. Now, why is this important? This is important because, as I mentioned, incitement to genocide, the narrative, the messaging is a crime in itself. And it's also important because the genocide convention is there to prevent and punish genocide. The genocide convention, the first objective is to prevent genocide. So it is essentially a proactive, a proactive convention. So it's not there to punish people after the genocide. It is there to essentially prevent. And so that is the basis of the convention is a duty to prevent. And so it is not. So once the minimum threshold of incitement to genocide has been reached, the triggers have been reached. It is a duty and obligation of all states are signatories to the genocide convention, all 152 states to step in and stop the genocide from occurring. Now, our policy makers spend a lot of time looking at after the fact, you know, how do we collect evidence and how do we get Putin into the ICC, etc. And all of that is very important, but it is not the key purpose of the convention, which is to prevent the genocide in the first place. Now, let me just touch upon the ICC case at the moment. As you all know, there is a case in the ICC in which the Putin has been indicted. And this is one of the reasons why he's not traveling internationally anymore because every country that's a signatory to the genocide convention is obligated to arrest him when he arrives in their country. And so he simply doesn't want to take the risk at the moment. The ICC case is based almost entirely on the possible transfer of children simply because that was the easiest one to actually use because Putin and one of his ministers had telephones on TV in which they had Ukrainian children and they kind of distributing them and have these online adoption agencies, etc. So it's all done openly and then publicly and then in a very kind of all fair fashion. So the evidence was overwhelming and that's what the ICC used. Now it's interesting, you know, why would Putin actually do this? What is the purpose of transferring children in such a fashion? Obviously, one of them is to stop the new Ukrainians and coalescing as a single group. There's actually a strategic, a more kind of logical kind of explanation as well. And that's down to the demographics in Russia. You know, the Russian population in 1991 was 148 million. Today it's about 146 million. It's gone down dramatically. And by 2050 it's going to go down to 135 million. So Russia is actually going to be one of the fastest declining populations in all of Europe. And they have to replenish this. Russia needs 2.1 children as a replacement to keep the population at the same level. And they actually have 1.5 as a replacement. The average Russian couple have 1.5 children. So it's dramatically below. And they also have a very low life expectancy at 73. Whereas in Europe it's about 80, 80.1, the life expectancy. And then additionally to that, you have the war which is outward migration of tens of thousands of young educated people. And so Ukrainian children are ethnically Russian, they speak Russian and so they can be integrated into society. So that's the kind of logical thinking behind it. But irrespective of that, it is still a crime under the genocide convention. And this is what Putin is actually being pursued for. And we also have obviously cases in the Second World War in which Polish children were Germanized, they were brought to Poland. And over 10,000 of them were never returned. So that is the model of that. But the key thing is that in statement to genocide is the messaging is a crime. And so we've seen this in multiple genocide. Dr. Timi actually mentioned in Rwanda how the radio in Trahama was one of the key vehicles and mechanisms by which the genocide was actually the foundations of which were laid. And you see this in every genocide. Policymakers will tell you, we had absolutely no idea this was going to happen before this genocide happened. Whether it's Rwanda, whether it's Bosnia, whether it's the Yazidis or Ukraine. But in fact, all the signs are there because to lay the foundations of a genocide take a long time. You have to essentially convince the population that the other side are not human. So they'll be referred to as vermin. Cockroaches is in the case in Rwanda. In the case of Rohingya, they were seen as snakes and rats. So in the Rohingya case, for example, the Buddhist clergy played a very large role over decades, saying that the Rohingya were actually reincarnated from snakes and insects and rats. And that's when you kill them, you're not actually killing a human. You're actually killing just a vermin. And so you're actually doing a favor to all of society. And so this is and as a doctor clearly mentioned that a lot of this stuff has been supercharged by social media. Social media is able to get messages across much more effectively and much more efficiently. In fact, I believe Facebook is actually being sued at the moment because it was a primary vehicle for organizing the Rohingya genocide in terms of spreading this information. And it wasn't the fact that it was just the mechanism itself. It was the fact that they were warned repeatedly that this was going on and Facebook simply ignored it. So that case is actually in the public domain at the moment. And so essentially the bottom line is that incitement to genocide, the rhetoric, the language is usually there for everybody to see. You simply have to monitor a lot of the social media channels and monitor a lot of the language happening on the ground. And it's usually the indicators and the triggers are there before a full scale genocide actually erupts. And so none of this comes as a surprise to anybody. People claim it's a surprise, but it's not. It's usually down to the inaction by policy makers. And to give you an example of this, in the case of Rwanda, for example, there was a memo that was that has been leaked. And it was a time when the genocide was actually in full force and it went from the White House to the Pentagon to the Department of Defense. And it said, and Samantha Powers mentioned this in her book. And it said, be careful. Legal at state trying to classify this as a genocide will compel us to do something. So this is essentially the reason why policy makers will try to get out of this whole question of incitement to genocide and genocide itself is when there is no political appetite to actually intervene. But everybody actually knows all the signs are there. There's an early warning systems, you know, multiple ones that kind of let you know before the genocide occur. And so that's essentially the primary message I wanted to get across. And with that, I'll pass it back to Hayat, the chair. Dr. Ibrahim, thank you very much. Just like the other two speakers, very profound, very thought provoking, very insightful. And hopefully it makes us all think twice before we click on sending emails or posting things in social media. But thank you, all three of you for fantastic panel discussion and presentations. We now turn to Q&A. And at the moment, I don't see posted questions, but I'll take the privilege of being the moderator to present a question. This is open to all three of you. There's a tendency and we see it right now with the Hamas-Israel conflict to, on all sides, try to conflate with language in social media and maybe even language that is being used in other platforms to conflate what is going on. But the other side is saying, conflate it with some sort of assumption that that side is actually affiliated with the extremist views and beliefs of a given group, whether it's Netanyahu and his circle of very extremist policymakers. Or on the other side, Hamas. So this conflating of people and without substantiated proof that they're actually affiliated with or the mouthpieces for those particular sides, Netanyahu or Hamas in particular. To me, it's very problematic, but it's also very deliberate on the part of whoever's trying to present that side as being conflated with either Hamas or Netanyahu. How do you see that in terms of free speech, but also in terms of inaccurate information and actually inciting hate and maybe even violence towards the target group? Yeah, so I can come in there Hayat, if that's okay. So this is a deliberate campaign that happens all the time. It's essentially trying to lump people into a homogeneous group in which they may not share all the kind of attributes. And it's happening obviously in this conflict very overtly. So everybody in Gaza is a Hamas supporter, even though they've not been elections in Gaza for the last 17 years. And the majority of the people are actually under the age of 20. So there's simply no way they could have voted for Hamas. And in many respects, you could argue that many of them are actually victims of Hamas as much as anybody else. You know, they are now paying the price of Hamas atrocities, whilst most of their leadership are sitting in Qatar and luxurious kinds of surroundings. I've actually written about this, I wrote about this in 2012 when I went to Israel and I met with the Palestinian Minister of Prisons who told me that Hamas is deliberately provoking the Israelis for an overwhelming military response so that they will gain some more legitimacy against the Palestinian Authority. And on the other side, you have a situation in which everybody in Israel was attributed and linked to Netanyahu, despite the fact that he runs a very small minority government. And I've been to Israel a number of times. You know, I went on my last trip there, which was many years ago. I met with the Army Chiefs, I met with the Chief of the Intelligence Services. And in all of frankness, Netanyahu had very, very little support. He was just a very canny politician who managed to get, managed to kind of stay in power just through his political maneuvering. So to say that everybody, he represents everybody in Israel is just a misunderstanding. And in the same way, as you can imagine, as you can tell, you know, I'm originally from Scotland. And in the same way, you know, I travel around the world and people tell me, oh, how on earth could you have the British could have voted for Brexit? And the reality is, I don't know a lot of people that voted for Brexit to be quite frank. You know, I think most of the people that I, the circles I mix in were quite pro-European. But obviously, Brexit happened, but we're all kind of lumped together. And in the same way, I'm sure that you and many of your colleagues will, you know, travel around and say, oh, how could you Americans have voted for Trump? And you're all basically lumped together as well. Clearly he got to power. But the fact is, is that, you know, the circles that you may frequent, you know, you might not come across many Trump supporters or even the other way around, but everybody's just lumped together. And this is just not helpful. This is intellectual laziness to kind of identify all these really are in this position, all Palestinians that are in that position, all Americans are Trumpist, all Brits are, you know, Briggsiteers. And this is just, it's just not helpful at all. And I have to complete the issues and just trying to, you know, not think them through. Yeah, so I take your point completely. I think to me it's just intellectual laziness to kind of trying to, you know, attribute, you know, all of these things and lump them together. Thank you so much. That's my new bumper sticker, intellectual laziness. Who else would like to chime in on that particular question? I'll make a couple of comments. I think the objective of the mass formation of the groups is to capitalize and to exploit the minds and hearts of the people. And they know where they are philosophically, ideologically, and they know what the vulnerabilities are. And these are very smart people who develop strategies in psychological strategies. As Dr. Tim said, their target is six inches between the ears. And people don't have the depth of thinking, nor the moral or a reinforcement that people did 30, 40, 50 years ago and being able to analyze the situation and determine what moves are next. What is truth and what is the truth? You know, certainly the technology blurs those lines deliberately, because it is the loudest voice that is most repetitive that people begin to believe. And so the hearts and minds and in the psychological warfare is really what they're after. And so that presents a an advantage to people in their efforts to win the public information war in the conflict. Thank you. Thank you very much. Dr. See me. I would just add that part of the reason I brought up King Phillips war as an example is that once it started looking at the archives and the records that remain from afterwards as the fighting was raging. It appeared that people were writing more for how the history would be determined after the fight, then trying to influence the fight itself. So I would say that, you know, as we watch Russia, Ukraine right now, as we watch Israel, Hamas, you know, we have to think about both tracks. There is information being delivered, seeking to shape, change, bend perceptions and actions right now. But it's also being aimed beyond the target. You know, when you go to the rifle range and you shoot at a paper target at 500 meters, the bullet keeps going. It penetrates the paper when it keeps going. Same with information. Okay, that's going to go after the conflict. And you know, people will then go back and try to pull things and put them back together and try to understand, you know, so they're writing for the near target and the far target at the same time, which means that it's really, really hard to ask yourself, what's the intent of this message? Is there more than one intent? And then how do I apply that and understand it now? But at the same time, understanding that like King Philip's war, it will probably get worse before it gets better. And it's going to take a while to unpack afterwards. If that makes sense to your question. Absolutely. Thank you. We do have a couple of questions in the chat and I'll get to them in a moment. I want a follow up reaction from you or response from you. This goes again to all three of you. In regard to what you just said, and then there is what is your view of the role and responsibility of the media mainstream and otherwise what is their responsibility then because it doesn't seem that, and I have a journalism degree. So I know what what I call classical journalism was meant for. And that was mainly to convey information. But but what is in today's world 21st century, the role and responsibility of the media with regard to what we've talked about. So I can come in very quickly there. Hi, I think that's OK. Yes. So one of the challenges is that there is no actual media anymore in the traditional way that you know when you and I were probably growing up when we had the big kind of names that are respectable and credible. You know the BBC's and the CNN and so on. You know now people with the majority of people get their media and the news from social media from these apps and what those apps push to you is all dependent on algorithms. Because those algorithms what they're really interested in is keeping your online for as long as possible, keeping your eyes and how many eyeballs do they get. You know, so if you're interested in a particular theme, you're particularly interested in a particular topic, then that will be pushed to you irrespective of how accurate it is because they have a very different kind of motivation. And what you'll find is that with these social media companies, it is now possible to be completely cocooned in a self enforcing intellectual environment, which is your simple biases, they may be completely loony conspiracy theories, but they just continuously reinforced. So you can have very little kind of exposure to the actual mainstream news, which is obviously in many countries is quite heavily regulated in terms of defamation and accuracy and balance and so on, but you can be completely cocooned and completely isolated from any sort of reality. And this is one of the new challenges we have and I think as Dr Cleary mentioned that, you know, a lot of this is now being supercharged because of the new technologies and the eyes and everything else and you know you will come across people that have really bizarre opinions of the world, but almost everything that they'll see in their social media feed, you know, is based on that. And, you know, in fact, most of the people in the United States believe it or not get their news from Tiktok. Tiktok has now become and that is a Chinese government app, you know, which uses a very heavily influenced algorithm, which is just pushing stuff to people and in fact that's actually banned in China, Tiktok they have their own version, simply because of that they don't want their own people to be exposed to that kind of information, but in the United States they push it quite aggressively. And so this is one of the real challenges is that there is no actual media. It's, you know, there's multiple mediums now, and they're all competing with each other. Thank you. Anyone else want to chime in on that one. So I'll make a couple of comments here. I think it's important to recognize the fact that money is behind a lot of the media, whether it be, you know, the various platforms of social media or whether it be the traditional media sources, who gets the most views, you know, and in the Nielsen reports that come out. So money is to be made on the two conflicts that are happening right now, as well as there are some obviously we know that push their the ideology of a particular group and again we go back to the issue of supporting the the ideology and its initiatives. You know, if we fail to look at that money is a driver, then we fail to recognize the power of the influence that is going out beyond the actual conflict. So it'd be interesting to see, you know, if the dynamics of the conflict change, then how would the media respond, particularly the traditional media in that way. So that that's my thoughts on it. Dr. theme you want to chime in. Yeah, I. That's a really complicated subject. You know, where you spend your time determines how you shape your mind. And if, if you're swiping left instead of turning a page left to get your information. You know, as my mom used to say you get what you pay for, you know, and more recently you've heard people say if the product is free that's because you are the product. And so you have to think about, you know, do I want to take time to read the Atlantic and Al Jazeera and Haritz and Spiegel and Le Monde and Chatham House to try to really get a nuanced sense of what's going on. Or do I want a substack thread, you know that I can read 90 seconds while waiting for my instant coffee to brew. So, you know, it's it's hard work. And the example that I keep going back to is, you know, if, if you were to take Pericles funeral oration and change a few of the names in the words. You've heard that more recently. Okay. But when you just start angling for the sound bites, you know, the 15 seconds on tick tock the 30 seconds on CNN. And everybody wants what they think is important information faster and smaller nuggets. Sometimes you have to just literally walk away and listen and think for a while. And in this, you know, sort of speed driven popular culture that we've got it, you know, you think you're getting better information. But in fact, it's it's sort of like being on the beach after a hurricane it's just flotsam. You actually have to do something with it to make it useful. And if you don't put some time and energy in, well, it's just junk on the beach. You know, so I personally have like no social media accounts, you know, tried that I thought it ended up being just a huge time sump. And, you know, life is too short to read bad books. And my day is too short to wasted on tick tock and you're swiping up and down and left around my phone. So I think it's really important to actually think about where you get your information and then to give it some time. Okay, so I realize that may make me on pocket with any of my undergraduate students who are on here right now. But don't say you weren't warned. I was just about to say and we are not teenagers. Well, thank you, Dr. Thimi. There are a few questions in the chat. I'm going to not go in the order that they were posted because one of them is very much related to what we just talked about. So the question is, and anyone can take this. Why does the United States allow tick tock us government officials are not allowed to have it on their phones. Who would like to respond. So I've actually written an article on this, you know, why tick tock should be banned and it was aimed at UK audience. But the arguments are the same. Essentially, I don't think it should be allowed. I think it's a piece of information of warfare. And essentially, you know, tick tock claims as algorithms are, you know, completely open and they're not interfering at all. But the fact of the matter is when the Hong Kong uprising was happening, when the Taiwan issues happening, all of that news was actually suppressed. And you have over, you know, a billion people that have got the app. And it's essentially, you know, we simply would not have allowed the, you know, the Communist Party in Russia during the Soviet Union to have that kind of authority and power to be messages directly into the minds of young people at the height of the Cold War. And, you know, and I've always taken the position it should be banned. I suspect the reason why it's not being banned is because the lobbies in Silicon Valley are very powerful, very strong, very influential. And I think the second reason is that the kind of messaging that comes out is that we'll look at reband this and the Chinese and other authoritarian governments are going to ban all our kind of social media apps as well. And, you know, one thing with the Communist Party, I should point out is that they have their own version of Tik Tok, which is called Bayou, which is very different. So from the outside, it seems exactly the same in terms of the penis, but it's what's behind is actually matters. So the Chinese version that's allowed in China has very strict restrictions on it in terms of if you're a child, if you have a like a teenage account, you can use it for a number of, set a number of hours a day. And the focus is principally on pushing educational content, so science and, you know, natural kind of stuff. And it has a cutoff time as well at 10pm, whereas in the US, it's all about doing them these silly dance videos and challenges and dumbing down the, you know, the population. And so it's a very different approach and there's no restriction on it. So this is a piece of informational warfare that the Communist Party has developed. And, you know, the final point I would make is that, you know, they argue the Tik Tok leadership argues that well, this is an independent app, you know, it's not actually controlled by the Communist Party. But the fact of the matter is everything in China is controlled by the Communist Party by law, by law, it's actually in the law that if the government wants the information, then they must have it. So whether it's independent, you know, whether the claim is independent or not is of no consequence at all. It is a legal requirement that when the government wants information of the users of algorithms and they must have access to it. So I've always taken the position it should be banned because it is a very dangerous application. Thank you. Any other responses to that? If not, we can go on to the next question. Hey, can I, can I jump in on that for a second? Absolutely. So this is the media survival guide from the Joint Task Force Commander's Handbook for Peace Operations of 1997 that you would think they knew Tik Tok was coming. Because it talks about speed, profit motive, the fact that news organizations in general are either run by a government for informational advantage or run by a company for capitalist advantage. Either way, they're not run for truth advantage. They're run for information advantage or for marketing advantage. And so I think that when you take a look, if you know anything about digital forensics, okay, you look at how information moves. You look at all the lines of code that get written and everything else. You know, you would be bluntly speaking a fool to have the media application of a hostile entity with whom we are at informational war every day installed on your phone. So I mean, who do you think stole the 23andMe, you know, DNA data? I can make a wild guess. You know, so if you don't think that we're not just in competition, we are in informational and research and development conflict with the Chinese every day. And like, you know, Asim said, everything there in some way goes back to and touches the Chinese Communist Party. So why would you willingly give that away? All right. And every time that you allow Tik Tok to monetize something, they build another Renhai, they build another J20, they build another Tel. All right. So you are directly contributing to our adversaries when you support Tik Tok. And I find it hard to believe that any sane person who actually loves the democracy they say they love every year on the 4th of July would actually willingly contribute to the informational warfare of an adversarial power. So I mean, I just couldn't lay on that, you know, any harder if I tried. I'm not the world's greatest hacker. Okay, but I know a little bit about digital forensics. So, and I can assure you there's no Tik Tok on any phone or tablet in my house. Okay. And I would recommend the same for everybody else. Thank you. Another question open to everyone. In your opinion, how, how successfully or actively are social media platforms as the conduit of information filtering or preventing misinformation. Go ahead. So, yeah, so, sorry. Yeah, so as I mentioned, you know, you have to understand the role of misinformation is not necessarily to always, you know, mislead you. It's there to confuse you. Yeah, so the Russians are the key pioneers in this. I remember coming across an article in terms of how far this goes in terms of where the Russians were actually pioneering during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s in the United States. You know, there was a rumor going around in the black community that this was actually a disease that was manufactured by the US government. And it was designed and manufactured to eliminate black people. And it was journalist who actually did a whole book on this and tried to ascertain the source of this. And this was actually from a single op ed published in a Indian in India in a mid ranking Indian newspaper, and it was placed there by the by the KGB at the time. And from that point, you know, that it kind of just spread and spread until the information came to the US and it became like, you know, accepted wisdom amongst many of the black community. So just fascinating how the Russians have been pioneering this stuff and I've been world leaders in this, and now they have their own very effective platforms. You know, with RT and Sputnik and Sputnik Nadio and Russia today, and the way they operate is not to mislead you. They will essentially find cranks with the credible cranks with the PhDs with academic positions and give them the platform, which to kind of spout the conspiracy theories in terms of how the US was actually behind and, you know, and all this other kind of stuff. And the objective here is not necessarily to mislead you, but to essentially exhaust you until you come to the conclusion. Well, look, you know, we will never actually know the truth. You know, it's just, it's just too much going on. And that is the objective is to confuse and to essentially overwhelm you with all these different theories and different kind of strings that they'll push that, or maybe it was the US that brought COVID over to the Wuhan. You know, there was a military training exercise with US personnel just one week before and it's just all the different kind of theories. And so that's the last objective and social media plays a very important role in that in terms of propagating these views to confuse and to confuse and overwhelm you. Yeah, I'd like to add to Dr. Dean's comments. I'm a part of the special competitive studies project events panel, and one of the key concerns is the upcoming election and the power of disinformation misinformation and how that will affect or impact the election. The question that they've asked us to help provide if I can find somebody willing to take this task on in what ways can we mitigate the risk of disinformation on social media for our 2024 elections. And this is a really mind bending problem that we face. And we have to be futuristic and think about it and get the best minds working on this problem. So that is really important. Thank you. Dr. Sammy, do you want to chime in? Well, I was going to say for Dr. Crilly, the good news is we have a hard time getting more than 55% of the people to vote. So maybe it's not as big a problem as we would like for it to be. Um, you know, so yeah, I mean, is, is I, you know, all four of my children are in their 20s. I tell them and all their friends, you know, you get the future you vote for. Okay. And if you don't vote, you chose not to have a future. Um, so, you know, social media can can be powerful, but it's part of a larger span of factual counterfactual and not yet verified information. You know, so whether you're watching CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, TV five in Paris. In general, people are trying to be fairly accurate, because if the perceived as being an accurate, they lose market share, which means they lose money, lose money. So there's actually a financial incentive to at least try. But on the other hand, you know, I've got three public affairs officers in my family, you know, the span three generations, and all three of them will tell you if it bleeds, it leads. Okay. And so whatever is the most outrageous, whatever is the most shocking, you know, to go back to your first slide of, hey, it comes in your eyeballs and then it spins around your brain. Um, whatever gets that reaction. Okay, if that gets more clicks and gets you to stay there longer and look at the click bait scrolling up on the, you know, the right or left side of your screen, etc. You know, there's an incentive there. So when it comes to elections, I mean, I'll tell you this. So every time I go to vote with my family, they always laugh at me because I go in with, you know, a very precise list of exactly who I am going to vote for on every single issue. I do not vote blue. I do not vote red. I have a very precise target list of what I am voting for and against. You know, and I think that's, that's what we have to do, you know, this isn't a grab a big Mac and all the way from home, stop by and swipe some tabs or, you know, pick up your number two pencil and fill in some circles. You know, this is like the most critical responsibility you have in a democratic society, and it means you actually have to work at it. So if you can, if you can do like trend analysis and see where things are moving via social media, there's probably some value there. And if you're running for office, and I mean, this goes back to at least President Obama and probably even before him. I mean, these are very smart aggressive people. But I can tell you, I met President Clinton and his staff. Gosh, that was in 2002. In Australia, President Clinton, without referring to any notes, he knows where almost every single precinct in the United States of America is. Why? Because he knows how to shape votes and he knows where to put the pressure on. So social media is simply adding to adding to the smartness of people who are already aware of that and providing a platform. So there's a lot of powerful potential in that. Okay. At the same time, I mean, you know, there's a certain candidate for president who does not wear a red hat that I support, and I get at least half a dozen texts a day from that campaign. All right. Some of which I even read. You know, so there's there's a lot to be carefully considered here and we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Okay. I guess my core point would be, you have to think about what's the information I want to know, and then how to go look for it, and how to be diligent and discerning. Okay. And how you get that. And my whole point, listing off all the demagogues from Cleon to present was, you know, to create sort of a trend line of be careful what you listen to, to whom you listen and what you listen for. And for the love of all the toly, spend 30 minutes a day reading from a new source that you disagree with. Okay, you might, if nothing else, just be curious and discover something new. But that's probably the best way. You know, some of us here are old enough to remember when you had your choice between ABC, NBC and CBS. Okay. And so you got a fairly healthy dose of a variety of presentations. Now you can pick your echo chamber. And so it's confirmation bias on crack. So you have to be really, really careful, I think, and to, you know, Dr. Creely's point, maybe the first thing we do is, you know, take Nancy Reagan's just say no campaign we converted to put down your phone. Yeah. Thank you for that. When I first started at the college, we were very actively teaching something called strategic strategic communication. And then that kind of disappeared. I have a personal habit of this goes to what Dr. Ibrahim just said. When I travel overseas and I check in a hotel, the first thing I do is I see what news channels are provided in the hotel room, take television. So I go through the remote and just click through and see, do they have Russian TV RT, or the Chinese equivalent, I forgot what it's called CGTN or something like that, or, or others. And I was very shocked to see that in my last few overseas trips, they were there and present, but US channels were not there. And to me, it tells me that we are really behind the curve, the United States is when it comes to the information wars and the information game. Why is that why are we so behind in regard to that kind of astuteness to placing your channel in a hotel room. It sounds so simple, it sounds so simplistic, but having it there as opposed to not being there. There's a big difference in terms of reach and messaging capabilities. In my opinion, I think we're behind a curve in that anyone want to take that. Well, I guess I can jump on that. I just want to commend all you young people for looking at TV because some of the older people in the room. The first thing I do is go buy a couple of newspapers and periodicals. I only turn on the TV if I need to check the weather. Yeah, I that's a great question. I don't know. I'm actually going to send them a text. Yes, I actually do know how to do that. I'm going to send a text here in a few minutes going, Hey, how does that work? Because that's a great question. I don't know. I don't know. You know, how do the Gideons or the Mormons get a Bible in the bedside table? I don't know that either. But it's a really good question in terms of placement. You know, and I guess the other thing is, you know, just because you see it on TV or the Internet doesn't mean it's true, but the fact that they're being granted access. That's that's a really interesting question. So I don't know if the other gentlemen have got background or insight on that. I can tell you this though. I think I'm going to England, Scotland, Denmark and Germany here a month or so. I'm going to pay much more careful attention now to turning on the TV. Yeah, thank you, Dr. Theme. In fact, I'll just mention that where I observed this was not in Europe. So it might be a different story inside Europe, but outside of especially Western Europe is a different ballgame when it comes to what's being accessible in the hotel room televisions versus what's not. Yeah, when I was running around East and Central Africa, I was always amazed by the absolute dominance of Indian radio and TV. You know, I was like, wow, I mean, I had to really, really think about it, but all over East and Central Africa, whether you're buying motorcycle parts in the market, you know, or turning on the TV. It's India, India, India, which just, again, that was something new for me. And I don't know if that's because it's what's popular there. If their organization's paying for access. Whoops, Dr. Theme has froze. I'll mention that. Also, there are things like Turkish soap operas, Indian so and Indian and Pakistani soap operas that are very famous outside of Europe. And have quite a bit of influence. And I'll share with you a quick story that a neighbor of mine told me this is back in the 1990s, that his brother was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. And he reported to him that the most popular TV program there at that time was American wrestling, you know, the entertainment type. There's a lot of popular cultural biases that both positive and negative that are conveyed in those kinds of programs. Anyone want to chime in on this one? Go ahead. I think, Hayat, that one of the reasons I believe that these kind of alternative TV stations, you know, have traction, whether it's Russia today, whether it's press TV coming from Iran, whether it's Sputnik or CGTN from China is that for the viewer, it's giving them an alternative reality. It's a confirmation in many respects of confirmation bias. So you have the president of the United States, for example, giving an address to the nation, explaining his actions, you know, why we're going to war with Iraq and why we're doing this or that. And then you turn on Russia today and it's giving a completely different explanation, which is essentially a conspiracy theory. But the reason why people believe in conspiracy theories in the first place is because it makes them feel special. You know, here are like, you know, I actually, I myself really know the truth. You know, the masses are all stupid. You know, they just like sheep following, listening to watching CNN, believing what the president has to say, believing the message and coming out from the White House, I'm actually special. I know the truth. I'm a select group of people. And what these TV channels do, what the alternative media does is makes you feel that little bit special. That, you know, you're part of an elite group who kind of knows the truth, who really knows what's going on in the world. And people like to believe that. People want to believe that they're special, that they're part of an elite group. And it also absolves them from any responsibility at all. You know, when if you believe that an entire world's media is controlled by the Jews, then what can little old me do about this? You know, these are forces at work that are really powerful, really strong. So it's better to do nothing at all and not participate in the kind of democratic process and ask for, ask for change because these are forces well beyond my control. So I think there's a lot of ways down to confirmation by people want to believe what they, what they, you know, what makes them feel makes them feel different and special and the end group. That's kind of that has exposure to the truth, not the masses of people. You know, they're all they're all just stupid. Thank you. Dr. I'm sorry, Dr. Creely, I was my intention was to let Dr. That's right. Go ahead. I think he's thought because he froze. Yeah, that's right. Go ahead. Okay. Go ahead. Azim already covered it better than me. I was just going to follow up with the same thing of, you know, you get selective confirmation bias. And, you know, so you start to cherry pick and you sometimes that even realizing it, you eviscerate contraindicated evidence, rather than taking it all in and seeing how maybe that changes what you thought you know. So that that was it. Thank you. Dr. Creely, go ahead. Thank you. I've had a concept in recent months and years is the fact that we're more in a values war. Russia and China around those three in particular see them as morally superior to the United States. And I think that they think that, you know, we have a corrupt value system. Therefore, they, you know, we used to be known as the white hats, running to the rescue upholding the moral values across the globe and through democracy. Their PR campaign, their, their social media is to paint us as the black cats, and they are here to save the world. They are here to impose their values, which are superior to our values. And I think that is playing and I don't think our leadership pays enough attention to the cultural nuances and values. We look at it more from a strategic geopolitical and military perspective, then the different cultures and who believes what and then how we might kid. I guess you can say mitigate their efforts and also included into policy, you know, Congress, as we well know, is so divided in on such miniscule issues, rather than looking at the big picture. And, you know, they're asleep at the wheel. And so that presents significant problems and how we are perceived across other nations and what we value. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're going to wrap up very soon. I do have one more question in the chat. And it's for Dr. Creely. Our democracy through new laws provide a codified and requirements based distinction between fact based media and agenda based media that over time can be a global standard, or with the first amendment is this impossible. It's quick and simple with the first amendment. It's impossible. Secondly, we cannot make the rules are the ethical issues by ourselves along because we have to include many other cultures, many other nations, and get their input and we need thinkers, not so much politicians, but we need a multidisciplinary group of people to think about this. Now, interestingly, our minister in the UK came out in an article last night in this morning about looking at AI rules and biotechnology rules. President Biden is going to be releasing within the next two weeks. The AI policy for the United States, you know, how can we protect our democracy. How can we protect children, the last and only a legislation on children was in 1998 in the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. And how do we protect our privacy. How do we do all that without stifling innovation and freedom. It's a very complex issue. So it's the internet social media is Wild West. And not only if we even if we had the rules and the policies there. Not everyone is going to subscribe to it. And you have independent actors, as well as nation states who won't partake in it, that we have to be concerned about as well. As an ethicist, I think that we definitely have to appeal to take it to the moral high ground and appeal from a global humanitarian perspective for the betterment of men and women and children in this world. I mean, it is another mind bending complexity that we do have to engage with high level thinkers who have a diverse background in values and ethics. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anyone else want to chime in to that one. No. Okay, that's fine. So, in wrapping up. I'd like for all of us to think about some solutions, possible solutions to this dilemma and I'm here I'm particularly focused on hate speech and dehumanization of the others. Quote unquote the other target group that is very much proliferating in the world today and in various platforms and in in chats and forums, as well as even between groups on the streets as we see in demonstrations, shouting things at each other. How do you think we need to tackle some of these problems because, as I just said, in my earlier presentation, hate leads to dehumanization, which can lead to genocide or prolifer or facilitating genocide. What is, in your view, some of the ways that we can resolve some of these. Let's say facilitators in hate speech. I'll go first. I think education is really important that we have to show the impact of hate speech. And we have to help people to understand from a different frame of reference, the impact of hate speech. How do you turn that on to them that they are the victims of it as well. And then how do you generate a narrative that we can all sit down and discuss from different viewpoints. Now as again as an ethicist, we definitely need more ethics education. In fact, the National Security Commission on artificial intelligence strongly encourages ethics education and I education because most people are technology illiterate digitally illiterate. Now that's, that's a huge deliverable. Given our culture in situation. We have to find new ways of doing things and we have to put it in over drive. It just can't set in policy makers in boxes. Thank you. Thank you so much. Who's next. I think one of the things I would highly recommend is actually, it's actually something that's very, very difficult to do, and that's to have empathetic analysis. And it's easy to be, it's easy. It's very easily said, but it's actually very tough to do is to put yourself on the other person's shoes and try to figure out what is what is their motivations and why are they doing this. And I think a very good example of this is what we see in our TV screens today is, you know, between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It just seems to me a complete lack of understanding of what the other side is actually what's motivating them. You know, on the one hand, you have the, the Jewish community in Israel, which is, you know, a highly traumatized community, considering what they have been through. You know, many of them have members of family grandparents who survived the Holocaust, many of them, many of them died in the Holocaust, and that trauma still lives with them. The belief that, look, the world is going to repeat the Holocaust. And so any sort of infraction against them is seen within that framework. And many times the world is just unable to see that this is how the community actually, this is how it kind of sees itself. So on the other hand, there's a lot of, there's a complete inability to see that the Palestinians are no longer willing to live under the kind of occupation that they have that they aspire to have their own state. And so the inability, you know, from what I'm seeing in our conversations just happening at the moment, just put yourself in the other person's shoes and try to figure out, look, what is their motivation, why are they behaving like this. It's actually one of the hardest things to do. And I find myself in that trap all the time as well, because we are all emotional beings. We like to be, we only see the world through our own kind of perspective, but put yourself in the shoes of the others and try to imagine what's actually motivating them. And, and I think you'll find that quite an eye-opening experience. Thank you so much. Dr. Thimi. Yeah, that's, that's a really hard question. I'm going to have to go brew another pot of coffee. I mean, so, I mean, everyone has a good point here, right? Try to see things through somebody else's lenses, you know, my mom used to say, don't judge somebody until you walk a mile in their shoes, you know, and there is a lot to be said for that. But it's important not to confuse that with just making some hard choices. Sometimes, okay, you have to smack people. And I've spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East, a fair amount of time in Israel, you know, and I think, I think Azim hits it head-on for the people of Israel, for the Jewish citizens of Israel. This is existential. Whereas for, you know, Hamas, Hezbollah, whomever, okay, this is, you know, rage-filled, okay, but it's not existential. So, you know, to go back to your Klauschwitz and your Sun Tzu, you know, the value of the object is different. The stake is different. Same in Eastern Ukraine, okay, the Russians didn't make it to, not even to Kharkiv really, much less to Kiev, okay, but they don't see this as existential. The Ukrainians do see it as existential. And so trying to understand both of those is really hard. And I'd have to defer to Tom, but I think it's, you know, Mark Twain that said, you know, the ability to hold two wildly different mental supposition simultaneously is the mark of a first grade intelligence. But he also said, you know, the quickest way to destroy prejudice is to travel. And, you know, to, he didn't know there was going to be TV, so he couldn't check the channels. But, you know, and to the other point of education, I mean, what I see with my undergrads that I teach is that they are not stupid, but they are woefully undereducated. You know, and the idea that they should take a year of capitalist economic theory, okay, and that they should take a year of, you know, computer science. You know, that those are hard classes and you know, you don't get to have opinions in those classes, you have to have facts and answers. Okay, and a classical education would build upon that. But because that's hard teaching and it's hard grading and you might hurt somebody's feelings when you tell them that they failed. We've sort of gotten away from that. So we have to be willing to hold ourselves as the adults in the conversation accountable. You have to be willing to tell people, hey, you failed. Congratulations, you got a D plus. That's better than what you got last time. And you have to bring all those things together in a way that creates, you know, responsible, constructive citizens. You know, we're not meant just to float through this world. You know, TSL, it was right. We're not just lumps of clay. So it's to do something with it. And that's hard work. It means you have to get up every morning with a purpose. And before you go to bed every night, you have to ask yourself, have I done everything I could possibly do to in some small way make myself in the world around me a slightly better version than it was 18 hours ago. So that would just be my, you know, grandfatherly advice to all of the young people out there. Thank you, all the panelists. What a great success for this sixth annual conference. My personal takeaway from what you all three just said are the three ease education, empathy, and ethics. That's going to be my next bumper sticker. With that, let me wrap this up by saying thank you again. And Admiral Garvin, thank you again for kicking off this conference with your opening remarks. And gentlemen, thank you for your great presentations and engagement in Q&A. I will say in my last words, as I say goodbye, may our amygdalas help us make better decisions. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Your full day. Thank you, Dr. Abraham. And thank you, Dr. Timmy. Thanks so much. Thanks so much everybody. Thank you.