 So, now let's get started with our first session of speakers. We're going to start with Mr. Jesse Morton. Jesse Morton is the founder and head of Parallel Networks, an organization combating hate and extremism and research coordinator for the Institute for Strategic Dialogues Against Violent Extremism Network in North America. Once a prominent radicalizer in the West, Morton co-founded and was a chief propagandist for Revolution Muslim, a New York City-based active group in the 2000s, where he helped insert the narrative of al-Qaeda and Salafi jihadist ideology into the American ambit. He has lectured at prestigious universities around the world and has worked here in Washington a GWs program on extremism, and he has focused on issues related to jihadist propaganda. Morton was named in 2017 as one of foreign policy's global thinkers. Please help me in welcoming Jesse Morton to the stage. Excuse me, sorry. Good morning to you. This is Eunice, an alter ego and former self. Born Jesse Morton, I became Eunice gradually after suffering from abuse and trauma as a child, running away from home at the age of 16, taking to the streets and joining an ultra-liberal counter-cultural movement and finding Islam through Malcolm X. Before founding Revolution Muslim and going on to create the first organization that unabashedly promoted al-Qaeda's perspectives in the United States from New York City. Revolution Muslim operated in an era when al-Qaeda was becoming less an organization and more a brand. Its chief strategist, Abu Musa Basuri, was instructing jihadists around the world to convey al-Qaeda's message wherever they were to the best of their ability. For American jihadists, that had a tremendous impact due to the First Amendment and the right of free expression. So we could walk right up to the line of free speech and unabashedly, again, support the terrorists. We were connected to 15 terrorist plots. By the time I was arrested on May 23rd, 2011, two weeks after Osama bin Laden was killed and in the middle of the Arab Spring. In 2012, I was sentenced to serve 11 and a half years in federal prison. We imagined then that the war on terror was winding down and that the jihadists had lost. But just like al-Qaeda had understood that ideas are eternal and the template that we set up was sustained. And this is what that template looked like. First, I think it's important to understand that the offline feeds the online. What we grasped was that everything we did together, whether it was eat, whether it was communicated at a restaurant, whether it was study, whether it was workouts, whether it was protest and preach, needed to be shot on video and documented. What it showed was that we were a band of brothers. It showed that we were David and Goliath and that we practiced what we preached. We antagonized anti-Islamic activists and helped to polarize the political landscape. Every single time someone in the United States needed to point to an organization or an individual to justify the claim that jihadists wanted to implement sharia law in the US, they pointed to us. We were the first to use social media and the interactivity and interconnectivity it created. This is the first YouTube video that we made. It's been cross-posted and remains online. It has several million views and it can't be taken down because it craftily does not violate terms of service agreements. We also used a program called PowTalk in a similar way to how ISIS uses encrypt-to-encrypt platforms such as Telegram Today. We gave lectures in an open room and our adherents could chat with one another. We provided 24-7 news and ideological dissemination. Then you could contact us in private messaging where we could facilitate your trek from simply holding radical ideas to committing action in the name of terrorists. We created the first English-language jihadist magazines. The first edition was produced in 2009 contrary to popular belief. It looks exactly like a copy of Inspire or Dabakim Vormiyah today. These magazines were advanced by my colleagues, Samir Khan and Anwar al-Addiqi who eventually joined al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. They went on to radicalize thousands in the West and because they were now produced abroad with terrorists and propagandists that had traveled to join jihadist groups, they could expand beyond simply promoting the ideology and to providing recipes and formula for attacks. We were quick to manipulate the mainstream media and CNN leftist outlets like Russia Today, far-leftist outlets like Russia Today and anti-American outlets, even talk shows on public television. Of course, the overwhelming majority rejected our extremist views but for that small fringe subset, it facilitated a connection to our activity online. The other way that we look at things, I think. And this is Jesse Morton, my true self. I've returned back from where I came. Today, I'm no longer a jihadist but I practice and advocate for a more progressive form of Islam. It's incompatible with democracy and liberal values. My deradicalization can be broken into key themes. First, I had contact with Moroccan millennials during the Arab Spring. I fled to Morocco after threatening the writers of South Park and I taught Arab millennials there, English, interestingly enough. I realized in the context of the Arab Spring that they simply wanted values that I took for granted. Elections, right to speak and believe freely, less corruption from their political class. Second, I spent five months in a Moroccan prison after I was arrested with a preacher that had essentially deradicalized. Mohammed Fizazi, who was arrested in 2004, caused a Blanca attacks and was about to be released for his altered views. Third, I was returned to the United States and housed in solitary confinement after I was extradited. There, a compassionate and empathetic prison guard would take me to the law library for the duration of her shift to get me out of the cell. So for 10 hours a day, four days a week, I was located in a law library, but I had access to philosophical works, particularly from the Enlightenment, is there that I read Thomas Paine, Montesquieu, Descartes, Rousseau, Jean Locke, et cetera. I continued reforming. When I played guilty, I had to meet with an FBI agent to do what they call a debriefing process. She was also empathetic. She was a female figure that sort of facilitated an ability to tap into the root trauma that was my mother's child abuse. But we were also able to cooperate after it became apparent that I was altering my perspectives. And so we stopped several Americans overseas from plotting attacks here and from joining ISIS to the degree that they were carrying out violence there. I continued reforming my understanding of Islam while in prison. And then on March 1st, 2015, after originally being sentenced to 11 and a half years, a federal judge reduced my sentence and released me, March 1st, 2015, when ISIS was all over the news and it was apparent that the war on terror was far from over. They let me go early due to my cooperation and my altered perspectives. Re-entering and reintegrating in America was difficult to say the least. There was no re-entry program for people like me. I was one of the first convicted of terrorism related offenses to return to American society. I could not find work, could not get health insurance. I could not readjust after a prolonged period of solitary confinement. I lost my family and I was divorced. But to my honor, I continued to work with the FBI until in February of 2016, I was outed in the media as an operative informant. I then decided to go public as America's first former jihadist and served as a research fellow at a university here in Washington, D.C. While I had renounced the extremist ideology, I had failed to address the child abuse and trauma that led me to find meaning and significance with jihadism in the first place. I relapsed after 14 years of sobriety and thought I'd thrown it all away. But today I'm recovering and I'm going deeper into the root cause that facilitated my radicalization in the first place. I run a CVE organization called Parallel Networks Now, an organization that I co-founded with my wife and Mitch Silver, former director of intelligence at the NYPD. Mitch spent years monitoring me at Revolution Muslim, but our relationship continues to help me heal. Our Parallel Networks, however, Mitch and I view CVE a bit differently. Our Parallel Networks philosophy is based on the principle that only networks can counter networks. We live in a world where we are all connected within six degrees, but at the same time, when we map our interconnectivity, we realize that hyperpolarization dominates the day. This division is tearing at the fabric of our democracies everywhere. It's also threatening the international liberal order that I think a lot of us have come to take for granted. We need to create pathways to engage, particularly with those that we disagree with the most. I think hashtag shut it down and removing radical content on social media will prove ineffective. I actually think it will prove counterproductive and make things worse. Countering something is reactive. Instead, you have to build an antithetical network built on principles axiomatically opposed to those of violent extremism. Only once you have a network that rivals in size and scope extremist networks can you proactively insert a message that will actually resonate and not be drowned out by the noise. We don't believe in counter-messaging. As many have come to realize, but what is now promoted as alternative messaging we think also fails to realize that information alone is in suffice. People are irrational. They act on emotion. They're intuitive in connecting behavior and belief. Instead, we need to think in terms of parallel networks or alternative ecosystems that convey a comprehensive worldview built upon principles opposed and antithetical to violent extremism. Most importantly, I think, rhetoric, policy, and practice need to match. Quite frankly, we could have won a great deal from the way that we built the English language jihadist ecosystem in the West. So now we're actually building a parallel network of former extremists and their allies, just like me. To develop an alternative ecosystem that can turn radicalization into empowerment and shift the way we think in a tribal and a polarized world. Returning to Rumi now. The wound is the place where the light enters you. We're 17 years into the war in terror, but we must recognize that we are all tired and wounded to a degree. Not so much by words or war, but by sort of what resembles to us at parallel networks a global case of PTSD. Today I'm healing my own trauma in our struggle against hate. Today I can see on the horizon not post-traumatic stress, but post-traumatic growth, finally. The struggle gives me the same sense of purpose, meaning and significance that the extremist networks provided. But perhaps the most important takeaway, I think, is the imperativeness of grasping that in an age of intersecting extremisms in the plural, we all have an obligation to do something, to combat and to counter hate. This is perhaps the most crucial message, I think, that all CVE work should seek to convey. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, darkness cannot combat darkness, only light can do that. Thank you very much.