 Good afternoon. Welcome to New America. I'm Peter Bergen. I run the International Security Program here. Thanks for coming this afternoon. And thank you for those on C-SPAN who are watching this today. This is the launch of a very interesting paper from Revolution Muslim to Islamic State, which was co-written by Mitch Silber, who was an investment banker on 9-11, and saw the planes crash into the towers and decided to do something different with his life, which to go to Columbia and do an MA in Middle East Studies. After that, he joined the New York Police Department, where he became the head of intelligence analysis. And one of the most important targets that he had was this group that no one knew much about called Revolution Islam, which Jesse was Morton, who's one of the other co-authors of this report, was intimately involved in founding. And so they will talk about the big themes and ideas in the report. And then Candace Rondo, who was a senior fellow at New America, also a professor of practice at Arizona State University, was involved in the resolve CVE efforts when she was at USIP and is a valued colleague of ours here. We'll make some observations about the report. Then we'll open it up to a wider conversation. So I'm going to hand it over to Mitch, then Jesse, and then Candace. Great. Good afternoon, everyone. First of all, I'd like to thank New America and Peter for not only hosting us today, but more importantly, when approached about the idea of a paper written by a former jihadi extremist and a former counterterrorism professional, was willing to back it and support us. Sort of an unconventional request. So I appreciate your willingness to go along with this. And to David Sturman at New America, who's a tremendous editor and resource for us as we advance our efforts writing this paper. It's sort of interesting timing that we're here on June 4, because really the impetus for this paper and, frankly, the collaboration between Jesse and myself was triggered really a year ago yesterday. And what that was was there was an attack in London on the London Bridge where three individuals in a van, as you probably remember, drove the van on the bridge knocking people into the river, jumped out of the van wearing fake suicide vests, had ceramic knives, and then proceeded to enter Borough Market attacking people. They injured 48, and they killed five before they were subdued. Now what attracted my attention beyond obviously the horror of this attack, and they did it in the name of the Islamic State, not operationally controlled by the Islamic State, but that the leader of this group was an individual, Curran Butt, who was a member of a group called Almohajaroun. And this is a group that is well known in the UK, an Islamist group, a Jihadisalafist group that's garnered great attention for their provocative demonstrations. In the UK, they often talked about the black flag of the caliphate over 10 Downing Street over Parliament, but more importantly, at various times, as many as 30%, when we were talking to British security services, and Rafael Pantuchia, UK, terrorism analyst says as many as 50% of UK terrorism suspects at some point in time passed through Almohajaroun. Now why was that of interest to me? Well, it turns out that in the United States and in New York City specifically, there was a group called Revolution Muslim, which was led by Jesse. And this was essentially a spin-off from Almohajaroun. And inside the New York City Police Department, we looked at as many as 15 different cases of individuals both in the United States and overseas who were directly radicalized to violence by following Revolution Muslim either actively by interacting with Jesse, who was Eunice Abdullah Muhammad at the time, or passively by observing what Revolution Muslim was doing. And you see Curran Butt right there in the bottom left-hand corner. What's interesting is that, and what struck me, was that this has been going on since 2001. And the fellow on the top right-hand corner is an individual in New Yorker, Muhammad Jenaid Babar, who while the World Trade Center were still smoldering after 9-11, that fall, he left New York and he had gone to Military Academy. He was in St. John's Pharmacy School to go essentially be the first post-9-11 foreign fighter. And what group had he been radicalized by in New York City? Almohajaroun in New York City. So we only were 16 plus years later, Almohajaroun and its affiliates still causing death and destruction around the world. And the elements of the New York story had not been told. And in thinking about writing this, the idea is, well, what about writing this with the individual who had actually been at the heart of this group in New York, Jesse Morton? So I reached out to Jesse and he was interested and I also wanna thank Jesse for his hard work on this effort, couldn't have done this without him. Now Muhammad Jenaid Babar didn't actually see action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but he did provide material, sleeping bags, night vision goggles to Al-Qaeda. And in fact, he participated in a training camp in 2004 where some of the 7-7 bombers as well as a member of plot called Crevice in the UK were involved. So again, Almohajaroun and its spin-off deadly connections. So in talking a little bit about Revolution Muslim, you have to understand that in the United States, first there was Almohajaroun and then there was a spin-off from it called the Islamist Thinker Society in New York City. And then Jesse and one of his colleagues left the Islamic Thinker Society to found Revolution Muslim because frankly, Islamist Thinker Societies, all they did was talk, they weren't radical enough, they weren't provocative enough and as a result, they spun off into Revolution Muslim. In our paper, we talk about the origins of Almohajaroun and you have to go back to his batarier and frankly, the 1950s and the Middle East, but that just provides some of the background for it. Why we think this topic was so important and what was always on my mind in thinking about Revolution Muslim and essentially somewhat of the unknown story was that Revolution Muslim was responsible for these 15 different individuals or plots around the world, many of you that you've heard of but may not have understood what the connection to was with Revolution Muslim. So some of these that I mentioned were and we've got a column there that says active or passive. So active meaning they actually were interacting with Jesse and his colleagues in Revolution Muslim and talking about should I do this, should I travel abroad, Jesse was helping to radicalize them and then some of them were much more passive. Some of these individuals wanted to travel overseas like Carlos Almonte and Muhammad Alessa from New Jersey who wanted to join Al-Shabaab and Somalia. Then there was Samir Khan who was killed in a drone strike with Anwar Alaki who slept in the NYPD Undercover's apartment in New York City after meeting with Jesse and the Revolution Muslim guys before he left for Yemen. You also have Daniel Maldonado who was connected to the group while he was overseas fighting with Al-Shabaab. But then not only were there foreign fighters, there were individuals in the U.S. who plotted terrorist attacks, individual named Jose Pimentel who tried to build a bomb in the kitchen of his mom and then wanted to attack the New York City subway system with it. So following directly from Inspire Magazine, you had an individual like Reswan Ferdaus who wanted to fly a drone into the Pentagon and had been an interactive relationship with Jesse and his colleagues. But it wasn't only in the U.S. Ambit. You had people like Jahad Jain, a passive follower who wanted to travel overseas and kill Kurt Westergaard and you also had individuals in the U.K. who had a plot against the London Stock Exchange. So all these different plots around the world come back to Revolution Muslim, Eunice Muhammad Adallah, now Jesse Morton. And from the NYPD stamp that this was the Jesse, this was the Eunice Abdullah Muhammad we knew demonstrating in New York City, in Times Square, if I believe, yeah, this is actually May 1st, 2010, which some of you may remember is the day that Faisal Shazad drove his vehicle into Times Square and attempted to explode it. It had nothing to do with Jesse and Revolution Muslim in particular, but there he was that day, two blocks away, earlier in the day, doing his provocative Dawa demonstrations. We've talked about it in another piece, West Point Sentinel, about NYPD using undercovers, informants, civilian analysts, and digital undercovers to be able to thwart Revolution Muslim and their plots around the world. So that's a little bit on the policy side of it. We'll talk some more about that in the Q&A, but let me just leave that as a setup and hand it over to Jesse from there. So thank you, Mitch, and thank you, Peter, and New America for having us. The primary complaint that Revolution Muslim had with Al-Mahajir Eunice and the Islamic Thinker Society when we split from them was pretty much twofold. One, we felt that they hadn't recognized the growing influence of the internet and the role that it should play in radicalization and recruitment, and then number two, they were unwilling to unabashedly support and endorse Al-Qaeda publicly. So we differed in that. For them, street demonstrations and real-world activity was a means of relinquishing yourself from the sin that would be associated from not calling for the re-establishment of the caliphate. But for us, the internet was a means of creating a globalized network that could sort of run parallel to identifications that are associated with the nation state, the West, or whatever. So you could say that the efforts that we engaged in were essentially the onset of a virtual caliphate. We recognized the importance of offline activity, and we would shoot everything that we did, including eating, talking passively on subways, training, working out in the backyard, ideological question and answers with the scholar that was associated with our website, Abdullah Faisal, and we shot everything that we did. So we gave this whole counter-cultural perception to our followers and were able to basically impart the message that the online echo chamber that we created was not just about the ideology and disseminating adherence to the ideology, but it was about putting the ideas that we were disseminating into practice. So an important principle that we sort of utilized was that the offline activity that I was discussing feeds the online. So we were essentially founded on September 25th, 2007 when then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to Columbia University's campus while he was there in New York City for a General Assembly United Nations event. I was at Columbia at the time and actually started that day in class with Lisa Anderson who went on to become the Dean of American Institute in Cairo, but by the mid-afternoon I was embedded with Yusuf Okotab in the second picture there, my associate who had gone on to become the co-founder of Revolution Muslim inside pro-Israeli and anti-Ahmadinejad protesters holding a sign that said, may Allah make a mushroom caught over Israel. And this was photographed and it appeared the next day in the New York Post. Thereafter it also appeared all over anti-Islamic websites and we saw very quickly the power of creating controversy. So we were consciously polarizing society. It was one of our primary agendas and I think that it wasn't just us, but we do see that that has continued to evolve until today. So every time there was a need to point to evidence that Muslims in America wanted to establish sharia law, they had but one proof and piece of evidence and that was always us. So we benefited from that and the other side benefited from that as well. Our online activity was supported by recording everything that we did together, as I said, and so that was the way and the manner in which the offline fed the offline. We would radicalize you online before we would encourage you to act in the field. That's mainly what distinguished us from El Mahajirun. One of the other things that was very important and very, I think, okay. That was very important for us was to manipulate the mainstream media. For us it wasn't so much about what's going on in your closed little echo chamber online, but it was an effort to be controversial so that the media would cover you. So it gave us a sense of legitimacy and it gave us ability to reach a wide audience. We were frequently covered on outlets such as Fox News and CNN where we were constantly covered as a group that was very small, but the way that they covered us made us look larger than we actually were. For our followers, it made us look like we were actual legitimate activists. So apart from CNN and Fox News, we also appeared regularly on anti-American outlets such as Russia Today, Press TV, which also gave us the veneer of intellectualism and including public television talk shows. The longest running public television talk show in America right now is the Harold Shanner Show. You can see Eunice Abila Muhammad sitting there discussing that with him and that really allowed us to solidify the notion that we were a legitimate movement inside the minds of our adherents and also a major means of recruiting new individuals. Another of our efforts that ISIS, I think, has since mastered was our utilization of social media 2.0. So at the time that we launched in 2007, there was a major transition from the internet discussion forums, websites as the core through which the jihadist ideology and propaganda was disseminated and we were migrating at that time, I guess everyone was looking at new outlets like YouTube. So in early 2008, I received a DVD from Abdullah Faisal, the cleric in Jamaica, and he sent me a DVD of him on national television in Jamaica on a show called Religious Hard Talk. It was an hour and a half long debate, but a segment of that showed him telling a cleric, a Catholic cleric, that Jesus himself preached jihad and then asking the cleric to look up a piece of evidence for it, which was an allegory in the gospel, one segment of that allegory and the cleric did not know that it existed, so he was essentially humiliated, the talk show host ends up laughing and it was a very interesting exchange for a minute and a half. I experimented with digital editing software for the first time and made a movie or a YouTube clip, approximately nine minutes in length that announced Abdullah Faisal's return because he had recently been released from incarceration in Britain and after that I showed the clip. That clip went essentially viral and we realized very quickly the power of social media 2.0, you might say. So this was essentially the start of revolutionism's YouTube channel which grew in popularity and became a major means of our radicalizing efforts. To this day, that particular video has been cross posted to YouTube all over because it doesn't violate terms of service agreements, something we have to look at going forward. It can't be taken down or it hasn't been taken down and it has millions and millions of views if you add them up, over five million views in its totality if you add all the times it's been cross posted. So we really knew that the YouTube channel and social media 2.0 was powerful when we saw the Jihad Jain case that Mitch mentioned because Jihad Jain was covered as someone who had subscribed to our YouTube channel and was influenced by it and it was that case that really set off this idea that we were transitioning away from a primary concern for a tax plotted and planned and ordered or directed from overseas more into a leaderless lone wolf style threat to the homeland. So once Jihad Jain was covered as a subscriber to our YouTube channel, essentially that was the time when Anwar al-Adaki was able to make that transition and give his famous quote where Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea. So this continued to happen in case after case and for example, a particular importance was the case of Roshan Arashoudri who stabbed a British member of parliament, Stephen Timbs, at our college campus in 2010 and it was in her interview with law enforcement agencies that she said the two primary means of her radicalization was revolutionmuslim.com and listening to Anwar al-Adaki lectures are associated who by then was living in Yemen. So this continued to happen as I said time and time again where we saw the internet facilitating a progression from radicalization into actual action and violent extremism. So it wasn't just YouTube for sure, the eventual indictment against me read that apart from over 10 internet domains, revolution muslim used social media platforms including Google groups, blip TV, PowTalk, YouTube, Scribb, the slide share, Facebook and Twitter. We were really probably the first Jihadist organization in the English language or in the West generally to access all of the new social media sites that were pretty much transitioning into becoming the primary source for information as opposed to websites, online forums and et cetera. The other template setting effort that we engaged in was the design of the very first English language magazine. One of our key connections and associates at revolution muslim was Samir Khan who Mitch said traveled to join al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula with Anwar al-Adaki. But before he left for Yemen, we started what was called Jihad recollections and it was authorized by Anwar al-Adaki according to Samir Khan and I wrote the lead article for the very first edition. It ran for only four issues but when you compare as you can see in the image there, when you compare Jihad recollections inspired, Dabak in the Rumiya today, you can see the template is almost identical. It hasn't changed hardly at all. That's both in design and pretty much in content. It also is interesting to consider that the evolution associated with Samir Khan and Anwar al-Adaki's combining together in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula represented pretty much the very first time where you had this opportunity to become a virtual plotter. So now Americans embedded with Jihadist overseas like al-Adaki and Khan had come equipped with fluency in English, tech skills and experience radicalizing and propagandizing in their home countries. So English language propaganda was therefore not so much an import to the West from Jihadist organizations but very much an export in an American style to terrorist organizations overseas. This is an image of a program that most people aren't necessarily aware about. It's called Pal Talk. And in 2009 we used Pal Talk to set up our scholar Abdul-Faisal there to preach and to hold online classes essentially. And influential preachers such as myself would coordinate sessions with him and we would discuss religious principles, follow that up with discourse about current affairs. Our administrators who were mostly female would type the notes to the students in the room and give links to propaganda and articles on the revolutionism website. So listeners could chat during the discussion, then there would be a Q&A session where they could ask questions and get responses from the preachers that were preaching. And then for those that had interest in donating, contributing in one way, shape, or form to the movement, asking more questions or engaging in one-on-one discourse, the administrators would screen them and then forward them through into their Pal Talk's instant messaging platform. And this was not at all unlike, it is not at all like the way that Telegram is using, that ISIS is using Telegram today, essentially holding online classes with the scholar, facilitating discourse in those closed rooms and then migrating to encrypt to encrypt channels and then from there going off to other less monitored channels as well. It's not that much different. ISIS developed its own powerful online English language radicalization and recruitment efforts by drawing upon the foundation revolutionism had developed. That's one of the claims that we make in the paper. And there's a lot that could be discussed with regard to that. A lot of the details are mentioned in the paper in some elaboration, but one of the key concepts that we imparted was called open source jihad. A term that was coined by Zachary Chesser, my co-conspirator and the one that helped to threaten the South Park writers for portraying the Prophet Muhammad. So in March 2010 on an article on revolutionism, he utilized the term. And then the following month, when we threatened the writers of South Park for portraying the Prophet Muhammad, it caused a lot of controversy to the point where a woman in Washington started a Facebook page called Everybody Draw Muhammad Day. That led Indonesia and Pakistan to threaten the shutdown Facebook and in that opportunistic moment, Samir Khan and Anwar al-Adhaki launched the first edition of Inspire coming from the heart of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That edition of Inspire, that first edition includes a fatwa that allows the woman or permits or calls for the woman who started the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day Facebook page to be assassinated and then is followed up with a section that has been included in every edition of Inspire since then called Open Source Jihad. And that first initial article included the article that Mitch referenced called How to Build a Bomb in Mom's Kitchen, a recipe that has been utilized in several attacks up until today. I mean, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula just launched a telegram channel that was pretty well viewed. And the very first thing that they launched was every single edition of Inspire magazine in the English language that happened recently. So basically Inspire defined Open Source Jihad as allowing Muslims to train at home instead of risking a dangerous travel abroad. So in the same manner that IC suggested, five days after Abu Muhammad al-Adhani's death, they transitioned the name of their English language magazine from Dabak to Rumia, and immediately they included a section of that that's titled Just Terror Tactics, but it's essentially a replication of the Open Source Jihad model. Finally, as ISIS loses territory, the threat from ISIS will increasingly resemble that posed by revolution Muslim. You can see a few of the slides on the screen show examples of ISIS supporters picking up the model and the template for radicalization that revolution Muslim use. Basically translating in an American or in a Western way content that they're finding coming from ISIS core, but doing it in the English language so that it can maintain its influence. So as ISIS becomes a virtual caliphate, they will likely replicate what al-Qaeda did in the aftermath of its own territory loss in Waziristan and Afghanistan after 9-11. And also in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when a lot of people assumed that al-Qaeda threat would diminish, we had Osama bin Laden issuing posthumous messages that said we should endorse it, that the jihadists should embed inside of it, change the ideology so the next wave of mobilization could become truly Islamic. So during this time in the 2011 era, al-Qaeda and groups like the Islamic State in Iraq became essentially a brand. They became an idea and that's how they were able to maintain their influence, waiting patiently in what they considered to be a war of attrition ultimately trying to bankrupt us so that we can no longer interfere in the Middle East. Meanwhile, after my disbandment, my arrest in May 2011, revolution Muslims shut down, but the authentic Tauheed page on POW talk, the collaboration with Al-Mahajirunist in Britain and across, including Sharia for Belgium which went on to play an outsized role in recruitment there, continued. And so while there was no caliphate, there was still the dissemination of the ideology and that is what really I think made a lot of Westerners who were pre- indoctrinated with this idea of a caliphate flock to the announcement that the caliphate had been resurrected. So today I think we have an opportunity to attack the roots of radicalization and recruitment. And I think that's associated with the territorial losses. But I think that in order to go further and to attack the idea, to come up with effective means of countering violent extremism, I think that we have to understand better the template and the methodology of recruitment and radicalization. And that's really the reason that Mitch and I really wrote the paper because these are, this is a historical progression. I mean, I think when ISIS came out with its big social media apparatus and its ability to tap into mainstream coverage, I think that it was assumed that this was something new. In truth or point, it's a product of a long evolution. And I think that one very interesting quote that I think is applicable to the context we exist in now is one from Michael Rappaport, who of course developed a very famous model for waves of terrorism and started his religious wave in 1979. So in a model that basically expects waves to last generation of 20 to 30 years, surpassing that significantly. And Rappaport says that a wave of terrorism is composed of organizations, but waves and organizations have very different life rhythms. Normally organizations disappear before the initial wave associated with them does, but when a wave's energy cannot inspire new organizations, the wave disappears. Resistance, political concessions, changes in the perceptions of generations are critical factors in explaining the disappearance. So as jihadists transitioned to a virtual caliphate, run in large part by supporters, like Revolution Muslim and not actual operatives, addressing the variables that Rappaport explained in this quote I think is key to ending the war on terror. So why military operations must obviously continue. I see this as territorial loss and a potential lag in domestic terrorist attacks and arrests must not lead I think us to complacency. I think that that's a pattern that has occurred since the post-911 era. So that was the mistake we made after Osama bin Laden and while out of key myself, Revolution Muslims, Meir Khan were removed from the playing field to coincide into other geopolitical situations, when the United States and its allies sort of pulled out of Iraq, got less concerned with engagement in the Middle East and also at the same time, failed to effectively implement the countering violent extremism initiatives and to advance them. So the revolution was in template and ideology and methodology might have evolved from a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, but it still is hardly different and that's why we need to understand it. So in a period of contraction, I think this paper intends to help us focus on attacking the ideas and also by attacking the ideas and by better understanding the networks, methodology and the template, being able to break up those networks so that individuals that were associated with revolutionism cannot continue to resurrect themselves and there's a lot of examples of that also included in the paper. So I thank you very much and look forward to the discussion that ensues. I just want to say to Mitch and Jesse that it's obviously a big deal to kind of put together a paper like this. It takes A, a lot of courage and B, a lot of patience and perseverance to kind of untangle all the strands. So congratulations on doing that. For me, I think the most striking part of the paper, I guess there are a couple things that sort of just stand out sort of on the tactical level. The first is just how quickly the Twitterverse has mushroomed all the different iterations and variations of the jihadist and Salafist ilk over the last decade or so. But I think probably even more striking than that is the sort of classic struggle between the bureaucracy and innovation which is the story of all intelligence failures. It's the story of all security threats in many ways and so there are some things that are just sort of templated in any way. But I think the NYPD clearly showed that it had learned some lessons from 9-11 that it wanted to innovate by A, taking on recruits who could get out there and collect information in communities where you have Arabic speakers, Bangalore speakers, Urdu speakers but it turned out that the surprise was really that the English speakers were the ones to look out for. So again, another lesson to learn there certainly for the bureaucracy that actually innovation comes in surprising and small packages sometimes. On the policy side, obviously here in Washington the discussion has been very dominated by these concerns particularly from DHS from the Department of Homeland Security around homegrown jihadists and how to get ahead of the curve online. I think what this demonstrates is very difficult to do especially if in fact there's a sort of unwillingness to engage with some of the key issues around the potential for radicalization in prisons. The need to kind of have some sort of pre-intervention methodology. There is I think a fundamental challenge that's pointed up around the need for assessment tools particularly psychological assessment tools and I know that there are some specialists here in the crowd who could probably speak to that much better than I but clearly there are some deficits that I think the paper points up and just in terms of what the bureaucracy is able to do in handling the problem of what seems like actually a relatively small group of people in the US context but actually as we know in the French and Belgian context it's quite large, it's quite pronounced even in the German context and in the UK as well. I think there are some pretty severe policy implications going forward in terms of now as Jesse pointed out that ISIS core is diminished at least physically and territorially speaking and they may float back on online and mushroom there. There is this challenge around a homegrown terrorist foreign fighters who will return back who come back with clean passports who may not have been detected who'll be coming back from Iraq or from Syria. That's real, I don't know how big that threat is but I think it's certainly there and certainly the bureaucracy is not quite prepared for that. When I talk about the bureaucracy here I'm talking about the sort of combined bureaucracy of Homeland Security, the State Department, USAID and others in the sort of national security apparatus. One of the reasons for that is the typical response of bureaucracy is to throw money at a problem but in a sort of relatively kind of unintentional or sort of unfocused manner. And I think that that's kind of where we're at right now unfortunately but there are some lessons to be learned and it doesn't really come out in this paper but I think we talked a little bit about the fact that the UK example, the Scandinavian example with right-wing extremists presents certainly an opportunity for the United States and its bureaucracy and DHS and others to learn how to deal with those coming back from Iraq and Syria but also to create opportunities for those who are exiting those who leave prison, as Jesse did, to reintegrate. And then that's the other big challenge that we don't want to talk about is the return from prison after serving your time and how difficult that is for a whole swath of people, not just of course former jihadists, gang members, others all struggle with the same thing which is a deep lack of a social safety net for those who have been incarcerated and served their time. In fact, I think our system generally, I think we all can acknowledge is one that embraces the idea that the punishment continues even after the sentence, right? And that you'll be deprived of mental health care, you'll be deprived of the basics of transitioning back into the social fold. So those are some really big issues that I think Jesse and Mitch kind of elude to in the report that are very important to grasp onto but most importantly I think for the bureaucracy now is it struggles, the national security apparatus here struggles to kind of grapple with this problem. There's a great temptation to throw a lot of money at the online problem but there's still a huge, huge offline problem in terms of potential returning foreign fighters as well as of course the reintegration process which is critical because I think we can see in the case of the troubles in Ireland, in other instances where those who decide to leave the fight can be actually very constructive in managing the reintegration process, become peers, become resources for those who are getting out. Thank you, Candace. You know, I think what's interesting I guess is it's hard to make predictions about the future as Yogi Berra famously said but let's try. And so, because I do think that what your point, the point of the paper is absolutely true which is there was this template. I think AQAP obviously kind of took it and then that became the ISIS template. So let's accept that the kind of fractured nature of the Middle East is gonna produce a son of ISIS or a grand son of ISIS. We don't know what it's gonna be called and it could be, it could link up with romp elements of Neustero. There could be a lot of different ways that will come but it will use the ISIS template to a letter. The question is what will it do with it that is different? Let's assume that it won't be able to take over a territory the size of the United Kingdom and population the size of Switzerland for all sorts of reasons that we know. But one area which I would, so it's a question and one idea which is these groups have always taken whatever the latest technology is. And for Al Qaeda, you know, at the beginning it was like, even before it was Al Qaeda it was a color magazine. It was a color magazine called G-Had. Then for Abu Masab al-Zikari it was broadband video. So the early adopters or whatever is available. So right now the most interesting technology is virtual reality technology. And so, you know, is it relatively possible relatively soon for a jihadist group because it encouraging people not to come and join the G-Had and all the costs that come with it but to kind of set up virtual reality training camps? Was that kind of an X wave? It's certainly a fascinating idea to think about and you know, just recently been listening like probably everybody else to the Caliphate podcast. And you know, I can't help but think about in one of the episodes talking about the trainees being in a room and the fact that ISIS had their, you know, detailed diagrams, entry and exit points for particular landmarks around the world. From that point it's not much of a leap to say, okay, and now make that available in some type of encrypted way to people who have virtual reality goggles or enhanced reality goggles who can then walk themselves through how do they get into that building and what is, you turn right and you turn left and as we've seen different terrorist groups take hotels and hostages, that doesn't seem that far-fetched. If already the Islamic State had diagrams and sort of the floor plans and the ability to walk people through, walk potential operatives through that. The counter to it is, I haven't got my mind around that but the idea of it is fascinating. I remember Mitch when you started looking into revolution Muslim and I was very skeptical because I thought people like Jesse and I didn't know Jesse personally or obviously at that point or I just thought like these were a bunch of clowns. The Islamic Thinker Society seemed to be like oxymoronic statement. These were not a bunch of great thinkers and they would like just making a lot of noise in New York and I didn't, everyone really didn't take it seriously. And I mean you were paid to take it seriously and you had to, it was in New York. So what made you think, because I mean it was easy to kind of dismiss this group as potentially marginal. You mentioned Rosh Hashanah Shoudry and I thought that she was, I mean it's a really classic example of somebody who never met anybody, completely radicalized in her bedroom and through revolution Muslim and Alaki. So how did you see this coming or did you have some foresight that most other people didn't have or was the ambient white PD really? And how did that work? You know I remember those sort of conversations and we weren't the only ones to have that with you in terms of what is the real threat of these guys? Are they just provocateurs, right? Are they just sort of fabulous sort of making a lot of noise out there? I'd say two things. Number one, we had a phenomenal analytic cadre who I won't embarrass. We've got a few of them here in the audience today. Go ahead and embarrass him. Maybe after. But they were very keen to look at what was going around the world and sort of look at it at look at revolution Muslim, look at Islamic thinker society and sort of see how they operated but also we not being part of the Washington bureaucracy and not being around since 1947 and white PD sort of came to this a bit of humility and we said look, we're new to the intelligence world. Let's go out and meet with the French and the British and the Germans and the Dutch. And meeting with the British and UK intelligence hearing about what they were seeing members of Almohage around or people who were associated with it seeing that and sort of looking at that in the US ambit we sort of said, okay, this is really just a mirror image of that. We haven't seen the people travel overseas to Pakistan yet, really, beyond this Mohammed Jenaid Babar which seemed like a one-off but it certainly is plausible. So maybe the group itself isn't gonna commit an attack but it's the people who spin off from it who say you know what all these guys do is demonstrate in Times Square and make a lot of noise. I actually wanna do something. I wanna get into the fight and it's the people who leave those groups are the ones that keep an eye on which ended up being very much the case. Jesse, so you mentioned Zachary Chesser. I mean, just to remind the audience, he was, he's still, he's in super max right now in fact but he was inciting violence against the creators of South Park because of their portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed and of course we live in a First Amendment society you can say all sorts of things about the Prophet Mohammed but what you can't do is incite violence against people, you can't incite violence with people who might actually go and do something about it. That was basically the point of this. But so you've said something very interesting and Candice said something very interesting about, we have hundreds of people who are gonna get out of prison because we're 20 years, John Walker Lind is getting out of prison pretty soon. I mean there were people's sentences are coming up. Now we haven't actually seen a large based on the data that we look at in New America unlike in France or in Belgium there isn't that much prison radicalization that we've seen in the past. The question is, when people come out and just, what's your view on this which is, do some people kind of become more radical in prison as a way of sort of way of protecting themselves emotionally and physically? Or do they, for the people, I mean I was in communication with Zach Chester, he wrote me a hundred page letter when he was in jail. And it was fascinating. He said I lied at my sentence hearing. I'm much more radical now. And I took that to some degree to be partly bravado. Not necessarily, I mean maybe it's true as well. But like how are you gonna deal psychologically with 20 years in prison? One way is to become the baddest guy on the block. So just talk about what you think about what happens when these guys and they are overwhelming guys, when they get out, what are the problems they're gonna face? What did you face, what can we do? So I mean Zachary Chester, I think is a very interesting case because essentially here you had an individual who was born in a very affluent background, educated at a private school. So suddenly gravitates towards jihadism. Aco mates himself with revolutionism and becomes one of our prolific writers. But again, like Mitch said, he was rather adamant to a degree where he felt like action was necessary rather than just speaking. And so apart from just threatening the writers of South Park, he went on to try to travel, to join Somalia and certainly shows when he writes 100 page letters and I've read letters from him as well that are, let's just say there's, I'm not a psychiatrist, but there's indications of serious narcissism there. His case is a little bit different because these serious offenders I think will get out much further down the road, the exception being John Walker Lind who some information has come out about the present state of his radicalization. I think the way that we dealt with it after 9-11 was very problematic from my perspective with regard to communication management units and housing most of the terrorism-related offenders in communication management units because essentially I think we created an echo chamber where we assumed that communication because we were monitoring it would not occur and... Explain in more detail what these units are. Okay, so communication management units are essentially isolated units for people that have, I guess, extremist affiliations, not just jihadists, sometimes environmentalists, sometimes far right wing extremists, but predominantly jihadists. So you could give many examples where they're supposed to be essentially monitored in all of their communication, but somehow some way that clearly is not the case. And why is that? I mean, what's the theory of the case here? Why people put in these units? The idea is essentially that if you were to put jihadists across the federal prison system in any community that one radical individual could radicalize an entire population, that's one, or that they could coordinate planning with other inmates that are about to leave as happened with an LAX plot. I think it's problematic because these individuals, a lot of the individuals that are in communication management units probably have a, let's say, a sentence of seven years. But you're embedded with a John Walker Linn or Zachary Chester who has 20 years. One of the biggest propagandists inside the communication management unit was Ahmed Musa Jibril, who also played an outstanding influential role in cases like Karambat and particularly in the era when there was a lot of conversation about the Syrian jihad and how it needed to be cleansed with the proper jihadist ideology came out of prison and radicalized a series of individuals. So I think that when you put them in an incubator or an echo chamber, I think it's problematic because you will definitely experience just basic social psychological effects of further polarizing and further radicalizing the individual. But the people that are coming home, typically now they've moved away inside of the BOP from housing individuals in communication management units and now they're dispersed. There was a great chart in the New York Times a couple of years ago that showed where they're being housed. People like Jesser are in ADXs in Florence. The other Florence. Yeah, yeah, Colorado. So yeah, I mean, I think this is problematic but that's why we need, I think, to get something in place now because there's less risk associated with the nature of the material support charges that got reduced sentencing to come home and there's more of an ability not just to monitor than provide them the support services that they need. One of the interesting things is we're communicating with people that have been released as part of trying to come up with a methodology and a sort of pragmatic program that can help. But the most important aspect is the fact that you're unemployable, you're tarnished inside of your society. It would be very easy to hypothesize or speculate that an individual might come to the realization that there's no future for me and may revert back to violence or research. Where are you at? My process is the case in point. I got out of prison in March of 2015, worked very hard to de-radicalize and thought I had de-radicalized while I was incarcerated on my own with no formal program, worked with the FBI's and informant online and offline for a time being while I worked for a location to become America's essentially first former jihadist. That was a very long process and the process of that I was outed as an informant and this is certainly not what will be the typical case but associated with that in my real world I could not get regular employment. I had to work through a union and I found myself with a degree from Columbia University digging ditches. It was humiliating but in retrospect I did relatively well with it. Then I got a social service job and I was fired once my identity was revealed. Ultimately through a long process of hiring I was affiliated with Think Tank in DC that I went public in August of 2016 and then blew up. Totally reverted back, not realizing that I had only addressed the intellectualization of my radicalization and needed to go further. I think in the academic literature where we distinguish between disengagement and de-radicalization I actually was not de-radicalized. I had disengaged and reverted not back to jihadist ideology but went to pre-radicalization stage of behavior which included a relapse on drugs and alcohol for the first time in 14 years and ultimately a re-incarceration for a time being. And where are you today? And today I am in a very much better spot. I have finally accepted that I have a mental health diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I take medication to balance that. I work with, luckily I have a pro-bono therapist who treats my trauma and I've finally been able to talk about some of the things I experienced with regard to abuse and early running away in life. So I address that component as difficult as it is. I think I'm in a good space. I'm able to write again in a memoir style which is really healthy because I couldn't touch that part up until very recently. And I think that, you know, contact with Mitch and the process that it took to write this paper has been very beneficial. Well, tell us about that. So with regard to Mitch, as he said, grand bud attack happens. All of a sudden I realized that when I was in informant upon my release monitoring. So when I was released in March of 2015, we actually came up with a methodology to experiment with whether or not Geodas would believe that I had been released due to my cooperation with law enforcement or due to my appeal process. So I went and made a YouTube video and said that I won my case, that my sentence was changed and that I was free. And essentially, I don't think anybody ever would have believed that Eunice Abdullah Muhammad would have de-radicalized. So I was immediately embedded in Authentic Taheed, the Palatoc Room with Abdullah Faisal and long story short, Quran but's presence was there and he was somebody that we had identified at the stages of revolution Muslim. So that was sort of brought to the table with regard to the fact that with Anjum Shadri Abubara and it's very akin to what might happen going forward, the charismatic preachers that were associated with the Umahaj Room were now removed from the playing field, which led an individual who was an adherent to say, well, I can no longer protest. I can no longer express my grievances. Maybe I should just commit an act of violence. And that may or may not have played a role. Well, in the context of that, I appeared in a New York Times piece discussing the identification of Quran but, apart from that, it was recognized that British law enforcement community hadn't also been aware of Quran but's radicalization. And I think that for Mitch and I, as we were watching, it was a very different experience. It's like, this is still a remnant of an ideology and an organization that is supposed to be defunct. But how did you hook up again? Mitch called me and, no, not called, Mitch emailed and said, hey, I know you've seen what happened. And if you're up to it, we could probably give a very enlightening report that would be beneficial. And of course, I was open to the idea and we just started to collaborate, share drafts, craft outlines, contacted you. One of the most amazing things was that even though I had destroyed my ability to function in the space for the time being when I came home, I contacted Peter and David and they were willing to have a discussion with me at New America. And I mentioned that Mitch had called and we started to talk about possibly working on this paper. And it was the process of that unfolding through David Sherman's excellent editing advice and the process of sort of making sure that this paper included what needed to be included. Did you disagree about things? What were they if you did? Or were you a violent agreement throughout? Maybe. I think it's surprising how much we've been in agreement. And for me, this is just, I never thought the project would sort of go to where we are sort of a year later in the sense that we really were adversaries and the team of analysts and myself at NYPD and the undercovers, I mean, Jesse was a marked man for us. Yunus Abdullah Muhammad, he was the boogeyman. Not only were all these people flying, wanting to fly to Somalia or Afghanistan or Pakistan. There he was dancing on the first amendment line in a way that for five years, we couldn't nail him. You're both graduates of Columbia. I mean, was that kind of a commonality or is that, you both went to SIPA, is that correct? Yes, we went to SIPA, yeah, different times. Well, did you overlap? We did not, we did not. But maybe that made us worthy adversaries, I don't know. We haven't appeared in the SIPA marketing material yet. But you know, so it was very, Jesse was a challenge for us from a counter-terrorism and intelligence standpoint. We happened to have undercovers and informants tremendously well placed and online human assets, so we knew what they were doing, but nevertheless, Jesse was still propagandizing and radicalizing and recruiting people to mobilize toward violence. And frankly, you know, my belief is if it hadn't been for Chesser and what I believe is his, you know, mistake, you know, I'm not sure how the story changes because it was really, and U.S. attorney's offices in New York didn't want to touch the case. They said, freedom of speech. It was only when Zachary Chesser crossed the line and the specificity of his threat at the South Park creators what was allowed the Gordon Cromberg, the prosecutor's district of Virginia, to sort of, you know, be out there on a line and say, listen, I think we can prosecute this and everything fell into place from there. Well, dig into that for a minute because in the United Kingdom, inciting racial hatred is a crime. In Germany, Holocaust denials a crime. But you can say anything pretty much about anybody in this country. What was the line that revolution Muslim crossed Zachary Chesser? What was specifically what he did that made the difference? So I guess the First Amendment law does, of course, allow you to say anything you want unless it directly calls for or provides an access to attacks to harm an individual. So my ultimate charge was communicating a threat. And what Chesser did was he posted a picture of Theo Van Gogh who was killed in 2005 in Amsterdam dead on a street with a knife in his back. And he said that it is likely that the South Park Raiders will ultimately end up like Theo Van Gogh. And remind us who Theo Van Gogh is. So Theo Van Gogh was an individual who, alongside of Ayan Hirsi Ali, made a video that was deemed to be inappropriate or defamatory against Muslims, particularly Muslim women. And a Moroccan in Amsterdam found out how to access him and sort of took it upon himself to attack him on a bicycle on the street and killed him in cold blood in the middle of the street. So this was a clear reference to a threat, but that alone was not even sufficient to make a communication of a threat. What Chesser did was he followed it up by not only just predicting that they would be harmed, but justifying why they could be harmed under an Islamic theological argument and then posting the addresses that might or might not be where they were located. So this is where it entered into the realm of the communication of a threat. Specificity of the address. And I think that that model in and of itself was adopted because one of the key people that migrated to join ISIS and had tech skills, such as Junaid Hussein, they were very, very, very keen to post the addresses than the names of officials. And it's a very effective means of sort of intimidating, even though the attack might not be likely and the probability of it happening may be almost minuscule. It's still an effective means of propaganda to show that you have this cyberspace capability and an ability to locate people. Okay, if you have a question, raise your hand, wait for the mic and identify yourself, please. The gentleman here in front. Let's wait for the mic, for the rest of the mic. Thank you very much. Fascinating, Alexander Kravitz from Insight. Maybe I'll address the question to Jesse. If, let's say you were the CNN version of online jihadism when you were running in revolution, who was the fox of, in other words, the anti? Who were your competitors? Who were the ones online that were, that had a anti-radicalization presence? And perhaps a question to- I'm not sure I like this comparison. I just thought of that. Let's say ABC, CBS. And then maybe to Mitch, since this is gonna be obviously from the discussion, an ongoing problem, or to both, what can be done online in terms to counter? So if you were to consider revolution, Muslims' efforts to the CNN, and then this sort of fox opposition and de-radicalization message of Fox News or a separate entity, I think it's a very important point that you make because at the time there was no such thing as CVE, in Britain they were implementing experimental programs, prevent, contest, et cetera, but here the American Muslim community's leadership chose not to give us attention in order to not amplify our voices. And that's when the whole criticism started of the Muslims in America unwilling to denounce the terrorists or the radicals. They felt as though giving us attention, and it happened several times. Hamze Yusuf sent us a publication. It was great for our audience because they come from a very different epistemological reference, so we just showed Hamze Yusuf crying for William Wilberforce in a pro-British event, and basically labeled him a hypocrite, refuted his theological argument from our own perspective. Same thing happened with Suweib Webb, and they really backed off. And there really wasn't much of a counter voice. The greatest amplifier for us was the far-right extremists, and we very well knew it. Like Yusuf Al-Qutab, my co-founder, was essentially designated. Like he records in his sentencing transcript, he says, you know, the UNICEF of the Muhammad introduced me to Abdullah Faisal, and we're walking down the street on Madison Avenue one day, and he says to me, I want to start this organization called Revolution Muslim. And he says, you have an Ivy League education, I'm just a clown, what do I have to offer you? And I say, you're a clown. That's great, just be the clown. And that was more effective than anything UNICEF of the Muhammad ever did, because if you wanted to get on Fox News or CNN, all you had to do was have Yusuf go out and do some provocative stuff, and then the right-wing bogs would pick it up, and you'd have further polarization and argumentation, and that's exactly the way we wanted it. American Muslims being portrayed in that manner. So it wasn't until people started to develop systems and ideas of counter violent extremism, 2011, Barack Obama launches his strategic implementation plan, but by that time, there wasn't a lot of support. So it wavered with regard to its implementation, depending upon context. And so there wasn't much of an opposing voice, not one that was willing to engage us directly for fear that they would amplify our voice. When we went on CNN with a viral interview, which I said that Allah commands us to terrorize the disbelievers in the Quran, the Muslims came out with this suggestion that the sensationalism that was required to get ratings in the mainstream media, we were manipulating it, and that they weren't showing enough positive voices. So that was one thing that, and I think we've learned a lot from that at the time, from then, but it's important. How do you react to the Graham Wood argument that ISIS has got a fair amount to do with Islam? I'm kind of summarizing this argument, but what do you make of that? He says that ISIS is not Islamic, it's very Islamic essentially. And I think that it caused a lot of controversy. Truth be told, I think it's unnecessary controversy. I think all religions have their interpretations in every interpretation of religion because it should be considered valid, regardless of how illogical and irrational it is. I think that ISIS's ideology and their adherence, even worse than al-Qaeda's, is a strand of religion that needs to be addressed and understood. There's this ability, you see the downplaying of the ideological role in a case like Omar Mateen, who goes into a nightclub, polls nightclub, and calls 911 operator, pledges allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, says that it's about a higher level operative, it's revenge for a higher level operative that has been killed. But then you see this massive amount of reporting that says no, it had nothing to do with ideology at all. Until the transcripts were released, it was his homophobia, or in other coverage of it, it was because he was a latent or a outright homosexual. I think that Graham Wood is absolutely correct to say that that's what ISIS represents, a very Islamic interpretation. Because they refer to texts more so than 99% of the moderate Muslims know of, it's the way they skew the texts. And in order to counter that, you have to understand the particular nuances of the ideology. And I think that this is where we make a mistake with relying on mainstream imams who weren't necessarily schooled in the same epistemological reference spaces that they were and don't necessarily know how that epistemological basis is, a thorough understanding of that is needed in order to refute the ideology. Not saying that ideology, one of the realizations that I came to was that I thought it was all ideology and an objective assessment of wanting to find the truth, but now I realize that it had a lot more to do with personal issues. But ideology is really what transitions you from adhering to cognitive radical ideas and acting upon them. So I think Graham, what is essentially correct? I don't know about that. I'm not totally convinced actually that he's correct. I mean, I think that you've raised a couple of very important issues. First, there's a very deep theological debate going on in the Muslim community here in the United States also abroad around whether you're talking about ISIS or Daesh, right? And I think this divide, you know, even in my own sort of work and writing about ISIS, I rarely refer to ISIS as ISIS because I don't, you know, subscribe to the idea that it was ever a legitimate caliphate or ever a legitimate government, right? That's not what was represented there. It was essentially sort of a cooked up version of tyranny with a lot of trappings, you know, that were very attractive to people. So that debate is really a very important one in the sense that I think the Muslim community here, A, is not monolithic, has a lot of debates internally about where they sit with regard to the legitimacy of some of the argumentation that theological debates are very, very real. But I think the other piece here is you have to remember that, you know, even prior to 9-11, there was always sort of an anti-Muslim cast to a lot of the way we sort of talk about the Muslim community here. But obviously afterwards it became even more virulent. And certainly I think the Arab Spring unleashed a new torrent of debates around sort of where does the Muslim community really sit inside the United States. In the meantime, of course, we know very well from the coverage of the NYPD case in court, racial profiling or religious profiling as it were that this is a very real concern that, you know, does walk up to that line around sort of freedom of association, freedom of speech and protection from undue search and seizure, all of those issues are blended in here in the U.S. context. Hard to ignore, very hard to ignore, but even more hard to ignore I think the Muslim community, you know, feels profiled, feels, you know, that it doesn't have a space and that it is assumed to be monolithic and therefore can be profiled in some way or another. So I mean, there's a real twist here that I think that in the U.S. case there's a wrestling but there are some parallels I think in Belgium in particular and in France. Belgium is a very special case. I know this personally having lived there for a long time where you have, you know, a tripartition of the culture along linguistic lines and even along religious lines and I don't know actually in that case that may be the more dire case than even the United States or France in terms of how to grapple with the issue of Muslim identity in the European context and what that means for the Muslim community who are, you know, sort of in this situation where if they take ownership, right, of jihad and jihadi debates, then they're responsible for everything, right? And I don't know if the law enforcement community is grappled with that. I guess Mitch, you probably would be better positioned to speak to that. In terms of a political role for the Muslim community? I think in the US it's really early days. You know, I was actually in Belgium two weeks ago and it was explained to me that in the Brussels state legislature or political division, 25% of the legislature is Muslim. So, I mean, in the US, you know, we've got one or two people here and there so it's really not even registering on the scale but I imagine that's gonna require some more adjustments but I think, you know, something that's clearly on the positive side is you have the UK where now the head of the home office is Muslim, London's mayor is Muslim and I think, you know, it's gotta be the best argument to rebut the idea that there's no pathway forward for Muslim in the UK is that, well, wait a second, you can be, you know, home minister, you can be the mayor of London and, you know, that level of achievement and, you know, participation in society is ultimately a good thing because that's the best counter-narrative there is, I think. And I would say that it's not necessarily the political role of American Muslims or Muslims in Europe that's ultimately important. One of the greatest things is the realm of entertainment and the realm of sports, right? Because politics and participation in politics from anybody that he's even been remotely radicalized. One of the very first things that we impart upon a person is that democracy is shirk or polytheism that essentially participation in democracy and it's very, one of the earliest lessons and it's very easily disseminated in one way, shape, or form or another. So it's not just Salafi jihadists, Salafis also and even your more progressive Salafis denounce any participation in politics. So showing someone who's successful with regard to there's boxers in Britain, particular people that even use kickboxing as a means of de-radicalization initiatives. That raises a very sort of big question which is, you know, one of the consistent American policy goals has been to kind of put Wahhabism back in the box. Now we have somebody who's moving Saudi Arabia from a kind of consensus-based absolute monarchy to a secularizing, totalitarian dictatorship minus the gulags, but he is also, you know, really pushing back in a very real way on the religious establishment. I think the very big thing that he's done is if you're a woman in a divorce case, you can retain your kids without going to court. Now that is, and this is a new thing which is way ahead of most Gulf states, most Arab states. So, I mean, how big a deal is it that you have Mohammed bin Salman and accepting he's done a lot of things that most liberals would find abhorrent. But he's also done a lot of big things on this religious issue. I mean, being on the, you know, to what extent did you see Wahhabi ideas as being part of your radicalization or did you mention these ideas as being part of the problem in New York City? And if the Saudis are able to put this toothpaste back in the toothpaste holder, is that a big deal or not? So, I don't think it's gonna be effective, that effective in preventing radicalization into the adherence to Salafi jihadism because I think essentially at this point, understandings of Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam are fundamentally different than the political grievance that coincide with Salafi interpretations of Islam and the reinterpretation of the text of Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. So I don't think it's a genie that can be put back in the bottle. I think Mohammed bin Salman will actually prove to be more counterproductive than he was effective in attempting to do so. I wrote a recent piece in War on the Rocks that basically says that there's a coming war between the crown prince of Riyadh versus the crown prince of Jihad. For the son of Osama bin Laden, Hamza bin Laden, is now propagandizing against and utilizing Mohammed bin Salman's proposed reforms in order to counter the idea that this man is in any way, shape, or form defending Islam. They just had a release from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as well, which discusses the fact that they've allowed a 10 year contract with the World Wrestling Entertainment Association to wrestle in Saudi Arabia and how this is clearly had on because now women can see men in tights and all of the reasons that the Wahhab is. So that framework is important, but a lot of times what goes missing when conversations about fundamentalism and Wahhabism occur is that Saudi Salafists can be the biggest deterrent from adherence to Salafi Jihadism. And their narrative is incredibly powerful. You might like to think about as maybe they can induce de-radicalization, but they certainly should play a role in promotion of disengagement. So I'm not so sure removing that will do anything other than induce a new saqwa, which was a movement where previous king, king Fahad tried to sort of modernize Saudi society and in turn allowed American troops to occupy themselves on the Arabian Peninsula. And this really induced bin Laden's transition into accepting the ideas that the foreign enemy, doctrine was the most appropriate through criticizing first the king, denouncing him a kafir, that's authorizing rebellion against him. And then transitioning into making his population or his audience aware that because they had partnered with the Americans, there would be no way that we could overthrow Saudi Arabia as Jihadists, unless of course the Americans were reduced to not playing the role of global quote unquote imperialist. Bitch. You know, clearly from the New York perspective, Wahhabism and Salafism and the two often intermingled, the those who were sort of imbibing the ideology, these in the earlier stages weren't sophisticated enough to be able to understand the differences where they existed. But I think the toothpaste is out of the tube. I think there's enough material online, published that can't be taken off the field. And for those who are interested in that, that is something that they can ingest and sort of metabolize and use to justify political actions that they may have with a religious veneer and legitimacy to it. So maybe a little bit more hopeful about MBS in Saudi Arabia, but on the ideological standpoint, I think too much is already out there to pull it back in a meaningful way, at least in the short and medium term. Other questions? Gentleman here. Jeremiah Young, New America. My question's mostly to Jesse. You mentioned the mediums you use to transmit your message, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. I have my questions more about the means you use to propagate it. Were you more passively waiting people to spread it for you or are you doing outreach to market your message to other groups? So I mean, I think that's a very important point because what we would do is anybody that expressed an interest in us in order to give and satisfy their need to be embedded in our network, we would give them a position. So people were literally assigned just to share our information on Facebook, YouTube and to spread and disseminate it. Not only did that allow our message to resonate and to be reproduced many times over and at different layers, but it also gave the person a feeling like they were really embedded in a part of our movement. I mentioned in the presentation that our Pal Talk discussions, we deliberately recruited females from Britain who were living off the welfare state to administer our Pal Talk. Why would we do that? Because men love women. Number one, and number two, by making it aware that women were participating in much the same manner that ISIS does today, we were able to say that this is just about everyone, right? So it doesn't have a gender bias and women have a role to play as well. So it was a very, it was an ability to insert everybody into active engagement. It was a totally decentralized movement that anybody could participate with no matter where they were from the world. Pal Talk could be downloaded in any country except. By the way, on Wednesday at noon, we have the head of global content and policy, Monica Bickert speaking here for Facebook, and she's the head of global content for Facebook and basically counterterrorism is a huge part of her kind of remit. How would you assess the job that Facebook has done in countering these kinds of messages? Better than YouTube and the takedown approach. So I think that whoever's involved at Facebook's headquarters has some more innovative approach. Well, actually it's Brian Fishman who's a new American fellow who runs the counterterrorism, you know. But the one, go ahead. Isha Ambotan Middle East Broadcasting Network. I was born in Mosul and I get my education in Mosul. What I learned, most of what I learned about religion was similar with what ISIS teaching their member. Also in the summer when I was went to Mosque to learn about religion, same thing. I learned same what ISIS now teaching their religion. Because of that it was unsurprised for me, ISIS occupation Mosul. And most of people in Mosul actually welcomed ISIS and I was at that time working with non-profit organization. We did focus group inside Mosul with some youngs. Actually for first weeks ISIS occupation Mosul, we did this focus group with young people. Some of them still I have the record. Some of them felt so happy because this is first time they living under justice of Islamic State. Now because of my work, every day I'm facing people who post on social media, post that similar with ISIS idea. When I engage with some of them, tell them, do you believe in ISIS? Their answer be no, ISIS is terrorist group. How you are posting ISIS idea and you think ISIS is terrorist group? My question for all of you, how should we stop these ideas? Because my belief if we don't stop these ideas ISIS will repeat and happen again everywhere and every time in this story. Thank you. So can I ask real quick what years? I don't know how old you are but with regard to your education, your upbringing, can I ask what time frame we're talking about? It's so personal question. I'm so sorry, you don't have to answer. I was born in 1978. Okay, yeah. So I mean coincident to sort of a transition with regard to the role that religion played in the Iraqi state apparatus, particularly the military too. So there was and also coincident to the rampant promotion of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam by the Saudi government. So these things were trickling in all over the world I think in becoming the dominant framework through which to interpret religion. But I think that it's not just about the ideas like Catherine Zimmerman at the American Enterprise introduced to Sezu and I think she's correct that in order to counter the threat we don't just need to counter the ideology or break up the network but we need to understand that Salafi jihadism has become a social movement and the way that it pulls its resources particularly in areas of conflict is to make a base and they formulate relationships with this basic Sunni community. And when you live in a situation like in Mosul where you had the control of the government in the hands of predominantly Shiite individuals the military personnel there may have been Sunni but that probably explains why there was very little resistance when ISIS marched onto Mosul. So I don't think it's just about the ideology. I think the ideology itself can be countered at the same time that we think in terms of addressing the grievances that are valid. So there is a serious dearth of democracy. There is a serious diverse, I mean one of the papers that New America recently published called all jihad is local shows that in some places it can be about socioeconomic variables while in other places it's primarily ideological drivers that allow people to join ISIS. From the other point I also think that what you'll see now is what social movement theorists call radical flank effect. ISIS was so barbaric that people will accept organizations like Tahrir al-Sham, like Al Qaeda. I think that you'll see an increasing resurrection but I think it will be beneficial for the jihadist movement as a whole. It's just like Al Qaeda became a brand, basically a corporation with offshoots a franchise model. Competition is good in any way that you want to allow yourself to experiment and innovate jihadist organizations alongside every terrorist organization. They're a learning institution. And so the benefit now is that the general population in the Middle East may be very frustrated with ISIS's message and their barbarity. They may be more willing to accept a more Salafist and jihadist narrative that drive and I think that's why you see that. They may denounce ISIS altogether but still adhere to the core ideology that drives Salafi jihadism. And that presents a serious barrier that has to be dealt with from a holistic angle. It's not just the ideas in that case at all, particularly when we talk about the Middle East. But holistic is kind of hard, isn't it? I mean, holistic is very difficult when, I mean, you point out quite rightly that the social movement is real. It's growing, it's virulent, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, look, the black elephant in the room, it's big, real big, is poor governance. And what we know about Iraq, what we know about Syria is people turn to religion often for ideas about social justice when there's deep inequality, when the security forces and apparatus are targeting populations that are part of the underclass when there is deep corruption in a government. So of course, there's this kind of great temptation to kind of talk about grievance in the abstract but it's really, really important to understand that one of the biggest investments that we're kind of duty bound to make is in re-growing and reconstructing governments in places like Mosul in such a way that there's much less appeal in some of the Salafist arguments. Which at this point might prove to be impossible. And this is a very key point and I'm not going to venture into a very long discourse on how we might do that, but I do think we need to think of the problem multi-dimensional and recognize how adherence to ideology and people turn toward religion in areas like this is largely a consequence of underlying socio-political and economic agreements. Is there are ways, of course, innovative ways that we can deal with that. I don't know if current policy is trending in that direction. I think it is a good idea to stay in Syria and to have a true presence in Syria but in the same way that we train military leaders and operatives in the field, I think that there's conversations that can occur that can improve an awareness inside of countries like Iraq and then Eastern Syria with regard to a big role for the Kurds and stuff like this that can understand the importance of giving people freedom and that it's okay to do so, that the power structure doesn't necessarily have to concern itself as long as they're providing effective governance to the people. One of the most interesting things that Rumi Nekalimachi's recent work has covered apart from the Caliphate podcast is that because ISIS was able to effectively collect trash and as an individual who lived in the Middle East, I know how big of a problem that is, they were welcomed by a large number of the people and so at the end of the day, governance is important. The complex problems of how to solve that, the issue is totally different. Returning to the question at the beginning about trying to detect people who are radicalizing and what they might do, there's lots of radicals, very few people become violent. But so there would be lots of legal impediments to using AI to sort of look at people and say who is likely to radicalize. But I don't think, I'm curious about your view, I think AI could be a very useful tool if you wanted to create a totalitarian state and actually start assessing because over time you could, I think you could do a pretty good assessment, right? On this issue? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple of things. I'm not sure that Facebook and YouTube aren't doing this. I think in fact, they are in a sort of self-regulatory manner. I think at the NYPD we were doing it manually. We had an analyst who had figured out what was the online model. We knew what in-person radicalization looked like. If we re-engineered Umar Farooq Abdul-Muttab and who he was online and Samir Khan when he was a kid in Queens before he became who he became, we could sort of see steps and visible tells what they changed their name to, what they were talking about and you could see it and it was manual. So there's no doubt it could be done in terms of seeing someone change over time. The question is, what's the point of intervention? Is that informational available open source or is it something that's behind some type of privacy setting? I think that's maybe where the legal part is, but you could very clearly re-engineer Samir Khan and Umar Farooq Abdul-Muttab when he was a student in London at UCL to him- And there would be no legal impediment for you to engineer this manually but just have a lot of cases. Let's say I'm making this up but suddenly you had 10,000 cases and that you applied AI too. There'd be no legal impediment to you doing that. If someone was showing this, if it was part of their profile that was visible, it wasn't behind your privacy settings at Facebook. Theoretically there shouldn't be a legal barrier to be able to do it because you're allowing- And as a law enforcement official, in fact, social media was very useful for you to arrest people or to start detecting, right? I mean, because we always think about social media as being this sort of great radicalizer but it also would turn out to be rather useful from a law enforcement's perspective because people are dumb on social media and they say stupid things which sort of indicate what they're thinking, right? And they don't, maybe they're getting smarter now but what was your experience? Yeah, look, there was an evolution where it used to be, quote unquote, everybody met in the mosque and that's where they radicalized. And that was for a short period of time after 9-11 until wanna be jihadist realized that probably wasn't the smartest place to be a conspirator. But then it moved online and it became virtual mosque where it became Pal Talk, what Jesse showed there and Pal Talk became that medium where individuals could talk and interact and that was an area where people over-repeated participation might change over time. So yeah, so there was an element of exploitation. I would say, I mean, I left NYPD in 2012 but I would imagine that now that is probably the primary place that leads are coming for. What people are presenting themselves on social media? When are they putting up the black flag of Coruscant on their Facebook page and show them real years on horses and swords? Maybe worth a second look. Other questions? Okay, David Sturman will last one since David was instrumental in making this paper happen. Thanks. Editor. So my question revolves around in the report you do does great job on the tactics and also on sort of showing there's this consistent goal of an Islamic State or Caliphate in some form, obviously big differences in what that means going back decades. I'm wondering what was your strategic vision of how what you were doing tactically on social media would contribute to getting to the Caliphate? And relatedly, did you see yourself as having a strategy or were you just identifying and encouraging others to identify with figures abroad who had more knowledge of the strategy? But for you it might have been more about signaling solidarity or living up to a religious value. Thanks. Very quickly, I think at the time that we launched we were basically left at, like Peter said, largely because there was this idea that there was this American exceptionalism amongst the Muslim community that due to socioeconomic variables that were far different from people in Europe they wouldn't be receptive to the message. But we knew very early on that as we started to disseminate that message there was an interest for it here and I think that what ensued in subsequent years was proof of that. But essentially we had the same ideology of al-Qaeda at the time and the worldview and we were actually abiding by a dictate by Abu Musa Bursuri which is essentially that al-Qaeda needed to become an idea and everyone everywhere had an obligation to disseminate the idea because of the contraction phase of their ability to fight in the field. And so we saw ourselves as fulfilling that in the United States. We also, I don't think our message was that different but we translated it into an American way. And the way that we did that was we made it very provocative. We had a very different approach. Like we would literally go scream at the American Muslim community as you know outside of the mosque every Friday. Fundraise, hand out, Abdullah Faiz was DVDs and then we had a piece of literature we called the Radical Review an incredibly good means of propaganda but then with Yusuf as our sort of figurehead or sort of public persona we just did American type stuff that was loony but it's great when you look at a world that is now predominated by cat videos on YouTube, so. Well, thank you very much Mitch and Jesse for a very brilliant presentation. Thank you Candace for the very brilliant discussion. Please read the paper and just give them a big round of applause. Abu Masab al-Suri took me to see Osama.