 So, my name is John Philson. I'm a senior policy manager at the Alliance for Peace Building. And this session is called Who Are You Calling Extreme? It really explores issues of governance, radicalization, religion, and terrorism. And thanks very much for being here. Before I introduce our panelists, I wanted to ask you a question if that would be all right. Raise your hand if you are a parent. Maybe you can picture a child that you have had when she or he was maybe between the ages of 16 and 22. If you have younger children, maybe imagine a time when they will be that age. If you don't have kids yet, maybe put yourself in the future. You've loved them their whole life. You've sacrificed in so many ways. They have special personality and charm, and you love them more than life itself. Imagine you are making dinner one day, and your closest friend frantically calls you on the phone and says, there's been a bombing at the Boston Marathon. And you say, that's terrible. And they say, no, go look. They're saying it's Jahar, or picture your child who you love dearly. They're saying it's him, or they're saying it's her. And you're incredulous. You don't believe it. You say, well, I'm sure they're mistaking, and you race to the television, and you look, and there's the media cycle, flashing the picture of your child. And you just can't believe it, and your world is over. The world is different today. There's something happening here. And it's very important for us to have real conversations about what's happening in the world today and what we collectively are doing about it. So because of technology and globalization, we are so interconnected today than ever before at any other time in human history that any single person who is really determined can create massive harm and massive destruction. It's not only terrorist attacks, but a story of one disgruntled air traffic control employee in Chicago has a very micro dispute with his boss, destroys some air traffic control equipment, and hundreds and hundreds of flights are canceled, lives disrupted, funerals you can't go to, weddings you miss. We're just interconnected. That is a reality of the world we live in today. And all of us, including governments, are trying to figure out what to do. So the Obama administration in February rolled out a plan for countering violent extremism at a CVE summit in February. And this new strategy really focuses on root causes of extremism and radicalization. And on the one hand, if we look at where we've been since 9-11 in terms of policy and engagement, our community, our peacebuilding community, certainly would say this is a positive step. The theory goes that if the drivers of exclusion and marginalization are addressed, if people have the democratic space and the freedoms to believe openly in their faith or to pursue the things that they want in life through nonviolent means, then people don't become terrorists, right? If young men and young women feel respected, if they feel included, they don't become terrorists, or so we think. But how much do we really know about extremism and where it comes from? I'm so glad we had a panel prior to lunch about the neuroscience of conflict and its implications for conflict. I think it's so relevant. There are so many unconscious processes that tell us what's happening in the world, tell us who we are, who others are, who our relationship is to them that we're not even conscious of. And the problem is we don't know each other very well. And so whether it's global jihad, or whether it's a global war on terror, whether it's student activist movements, or whether it's state repression, our approaches to this issue in this situation are based on misperception and mistrust because we don't know each other very well. So what I would like to do is have an honest conversation about extremism, about governance, and especially about intercultural understanding or lack thereof. So I just wanted to set the tone briefly for our discussion, and again I really appreciate you being here. And I'm very pleased to be joined by four excellent panelists. You'll see in your program that Imam Johari Abdu Malik, the outreach director at Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center, is on the ticket, but he wasn't able to make it. He has the flu, unfortunately. But someone you don't know from your program is Michael Nabil, who I will introduce in a moment. On my left is Ms. Suleyma Hadawi. She is a visiting researcher at Georgetown University. Her work is focused on the experience of American Muslims post-911, and more recently on the recruitment of women and girls to ISIS. Next to her is Ms. Susan Hayward. She's the interim director of religion and peace building at the U.S. Institute of Peace's Center for Governance, Law, and Society. And she really leads the institute's work where peace building intersects with faith and faith-based actors. And Mr. David Hunziker is a senior conflict advisor at the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. He has worked around the world in USAID missions, in religious peace building, and development approaches to countering violent extremism. And finally, our bonus, Michael Nabil is an activist and blogger from Egypt. He was the founder of the No to Compulsory Military Service movement in Egypt. He has been a political prisoner there for his beliefs and his activism in the democracy movement. So with that, I would like just like our panelists to speak with you for a few minutes. And then what I would really like to do is have a genuine conversation with our panelists and all of you about some of these very important themes, because it really matters. So thank you very much for being here. So first, Ms. Salema, please. Thank you very much, Sean. Hello, everyone. Thank you, the USIP and AFP, for having me. It's a great privilege to be in this panel. I would like to begin with the fact that women committing acts of violence or joining terrorist groups is no news. And I think to better understand this phenomenon, we need to step out of the narrative according to which women don't commit violence, or that specifically in the case of ISIS. Women are targeted by the group and victims of brainwashing. The women I followed are actively involved. The ones who joined clearly made the first step in getting in touch with ISIS. What we know about ISIS is limited to what they want us to know. So analyzing why people joined this group consists of making a risk assessment in the context of imperfect knowledge. It is critical that we see this phenomenon away from sensationalist and journalistic narratives. For security reasons, what needs to be examined is not so much why people join, rather why or how they become supportive of the group, since the US comes forth in top-claimed locations among ISIS supporters, according to a Brookings report. For the purpose of this research, I created a special account to follow over 200 Twitter profiles of which 155 are women. I also looked into Tumblr accounts and analyzed over 40 of them, along with some ask and Facebook pages when available. So my first preliminary observation is that there are two categories of Twitter accounts, revealing some of the strategic hierarchy in the use of multimedia. Accounts that belong to women who seem to be part of the leadership and others that spread the messages transmitted by the leadership accounts. The second preliminary observation is that there is a difference within the narrative, depending on whether women are in ISIS-controlled territories or are still in the West. The ones in ISIS-controlled territories diffuse more propaganda material, whereas the others reinforce the dichotomy between living in the West, or what is called Dar al-Harb, versus living in Dar al-Islam or under Islamic ruling. So I'll go quite rapidly because I know where it's not working. So I could sum up four major themes in looking at all their narratives or discussions. The first one is that they twist the war on terror into a war on Islam in order to inflame feelings of isolation. Often in the media, we hear that actually ISIS attracts people who are out of job, and this fails to explain how socially well-off people join as well. Extensive sociological research on Jihad has shown that lived humiliation and discrimination favor alienation, which in turn encourages radicalization. Another reason for young Muslims to turn to Jihad is their difficulty to reconcile living their faith with belonging to a nation state. This addresses both, and online supporters of ISIS issued, for instance, two Twitter campaigns through the hashtags war on Islam that we just saw, in which they tweet several messages and news explaining how the West is fighting, incarcerating, and humiliating Muslims. And the other hashtag is do not vote, make bayal, through which they argue if Muslims participate in politics, they are betraying their religious principles, all of which only inflame pre-existing feelings of disenfranchisement and alienation. My second point is that they promote violence and see it as a sense of empowerment. So they use, for example, these Japanese anime in the Twisters, so you have Aya the Liberator fighting oppression and hate, or Aya the Swordsmaster. This should give me more time, by the way. And these images also, of course, they show women fighters. Other images show them in a BMW. And all this reinforces their feeling of sisterhood, adventure, freedom, and sense of empowerment. This is, for example, one of the tweets that was released. So I was seen as a woman in the kitchen clearly disempowered, then moving to a sister, so which gives them a sense of equality. And these are real, obviously. Oh, yes, they're tweets. And these are the kind of some propaganda images, so obvious. This is about the state releasing their first ID with a chip, or discarding leaders of Soda that are expired and how the state is actually taking care of its population. In the West, women project a romanticized image of ISIS, balancing tradition and modernity. They claim the Mujahidat follow the steps of the wives and daughters of the Prophet to appeal to young crowds. They also personalized Japanese anime as we saw. And then the third point is that their purpose is really to marry a Jihadist or a fighter, raise future fighters, and look forward to becoming a widow because their husband would obviously become a martyr, which raises their social status within ISIS. This is one of many Twitter accounts related to arranging marriages. This is obviously one of the propaganda messages. And the other tweet is about a woman congratulating the other of the martyrdom of her husband. And Jannah is paradise. Jannah is paradise, yeah. And this is the promotion of violence. So they were talking about the Texas attacks. And in the second image, you have a kick correspondence in which at the very end you have, we have 71 trained soldiers in 15 different states. So they're talking about future attacks in the U.S. My fourth point is that the women seem to be more in charge of the online battle than their male counterparts. So we saw that they promote violence. Now they encourage videos and they spread messages about fighters. They also released in Arabic a hashtag about giving online tactics and how should women do during wartime. And this is the message itself. So women should get ready for combat. Useful tips and recommendations from Omar Abdallah Jezrawiya, who is a Saudi woman. Women relay messages from men in the battlefields and ask the Twitter community to stop posting about some specific combat zones. They also would either issue shout outs in support of fellow members coming back from suspension or call to block certain accounts believed to be spies, as shown here. This is one of the online Jihad tactics. I can go, delve further later. This is how they support future convert to Islam or those who think of joining ISIS. This is the shout outs. We know, many people are very Twitter savvy here in this room. So, we'll see. Yeah, I would just like to conclude by emphasizing that these women have a strong sense of moral superiority, which makes them immune to contradictory discourse, even a religious one. The reading of their communications and blog posts shows how these women maintain their convictions by repeating how the West is corrupt and that they hold the truth and practice a pure Islam. This perspective gives strong moral justification to performing what they call Hijrah, which is the religious immigration, and gives them a sense of self, entitlement that is characteristic of every illegitimate self-annoyment. They call Muslims living in the West coconut Muslims, and when religiously illegitimate critiques come out of US Islamic scholars, their response is political. They show images of the mentioned scholar with Bush, for example, and this image is enough to delegitimize anything he could say. In the broader spectrum, the issue of Western Muslims joining or supporting ISIS raises two major questions. One about the place of religion in the public sphere in secular countries, and for Muslim communities, the opportunity to emphasize and perhaps better transmit existing counter-narratives away from the Salafi-Takfiri ideologies. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Soleimah. Susan? Yeah, hi everybody, and it's great to have you here at the US Institute of Peace. As John said, I'm the Director of the Religion and Peace Building Program here, and I wanna start by telling you about a symposium that we held last September in partnership with the Network of Religious and Traditional Peacemakers, of which Muhammad El Sinusi is the DC representative. I'm glad to have you here, Muhammad. We brought, for this symposium, we brought together religious actors from around the world from many different contexts that are experiencing violent extremism that's couched in religious terms, and this included a representative from the Sultan of Sokoto in Nigeria. It included a woman from Pakistan who works with mothers who, to help them identify radicalization among youth, this included a Buddhist monk from Myanmar and a Buddhist layperson from Sri Lanka who are watching the rise of nationalist Buddhist movements there that have been fueling and justifying violence or oppression against Muslim minority groups. This included a woman from Libya who has been following the role of various religious actors and institutions and responding to the rise of violent extremist groups operating in Libya. It included a vast array of people from different traditions, people from very different contexts, and male and female religious actors in order to come together and to try to understand what are the drivers of some of these violent extremist movements and what can religious actors do to address them. And we did an exercise at the beginning of our day together where Georgia Holmer, who is the coordinator of the CVE work at USIP, handed out a bunch of post-it notes to everybody of all different colors. And she said, I want you to just start writing down one per post-it note, one of the push or the pull factors that leads people to join violent extremist movements. Don't think about it too much, just start writing them down. We gave people about 10 minutes and they started going post-it note after post-it note after post-it note and we collected all of them. And after about 15 minutes of this, we had an entire wall that was covered in different colored post-it notes that included everything from poverty or economic inequality to religious ideology or false understandings of religion to trauma and hopelessness, to lack of livelihood, to many, many different factors, those political, those issues of governance, those that were issues of economy and of livelihood and jobs, those that were issues of ideologies and religious interpretations or social segregation of different religious communities, those that were psychological issues of experiences of living in insecure environments and experiencing ongoing episodes of violence. It was many, many different things were identified and we tried as best as we could to try to categorize them and map them out. But one of the things we acknowledged after having done this exercise is that there's no one driver of violent extremism, just like there's no one driver of violent conflict that we can point to. There's many people who are poor and who might practice forms of conservative, even what we might call extremist religion, who don't necessarily join violent movements. And that what it seems to be more is something of a tipping point where these many different factors come together and create vulnerabilities of individuals or societies to join these movements. And that when we seek to understand violent extremism generally, but more especially the ways in which to counter it or address it, we have to take into account this really complex web of factors that if you'll forgive me using some Buddhist terms, there's this mutual arising of all of these different causal factors that lead to this situation of violence. And we have to take that into account in order to understand how to create sustainable and strategic solutions to them. After we created this huge cacophony of colors of post-it notes on the wall, we then asked those who are with us to identify which drivers, in particular religious leaders are already addressing or are well positioned to address in their communities. And a couple of things came out of this portion of the exercise. One was that counter narratives are obviously something that religious leaders are well positioned to address when violent extremism is being couched in religious terms. And they see themselves as being crucial to playing those roles as legitimate authorities within their religious traditions to be able to challenge some of the religious interpretations that fuel prejudice or that fuel violence. But they also, and I should say as well that this is both male and female religious leaders and this was again religious leaders across different traditions, especially recognizing that religious extremism in one community can fuel it in another community as well, like what we're seeing in Asia. But they also recognize that counter narratives is not the end of what religious leaders can do to address violent extremism. That they're also well placed and are already addressing some of these underlying drivers. So one thing that they recognized in particular were the psychological aspects. That they can and do play roles in addressing some of these elements of hopelessness or these elements of belonging or these elements of inclusion that again are not the only sole driver of people going into movements but are playing a role in what leads some people to join some of these movements. They also recognized themselves as playing a role in some of the issues of economic issues and some of the political issues and being able to help with jobs training for youth and with livelihood support in mobilizing communities to address issues of governance and corruption. The next day, this group met with leaders from the US government in order to relay some of their, at this point, a little bit more focused recommendations about how to best support religious actors who are trying to address some of these drivers. And they raised the issues like that military solutions alone are short term and are actually fueling some of the grievances of communities who are already living in very insecure situations. And when there's military incursions to try to address some of these, it fuels some of that sense of insecurity and some of that trauma and so on. And that ultimately military solutions are not going to address some of the underlying drivers. And as they were making these recommendations and talking about what they were doing and what they could do more with greater support to address the multiple factors, it really struck me that a lot of what they were saying and recommending were things that we've heard for a long time and we've heard before within the peace building community because while this is a pivotal moment right now in the world and while the actions and the visibility of groups like the Islamic State and so on are modern and that they're using technology and they're using social media and they're using all of these new tools to fuel recruitment, to get visibility, to promote their cause. The underlying drivers that are leading people into these violent movements are very similar to what have led people to join the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka that led people to join the IRA in Northern Ireland that have led people to join violent movements throughout history. And so I think we need to also bear that in mind as we think about how to address these pivotal issues now and the different multiple factors and the different tools that they're using that we can similarly use in our attempts to address it but to recognize that at root are some of these same issues that have existed for millennia that lead people to violence as a way to address their grievances. Thank you, Susan. Yes, David. Thank you, John. Thank you to the Alliance for Peace Building and to USIP for inviting me to speak on this panel. I do have to start out by saying that I'm here and my capacity as a subject matter expert providing an operational level perspective, not a policy one. So the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the USAID, the US government, the National Endowment for Democracy who's up next to my name but who I have no affiliation with. But rather these views are my own and based on my experiences inside and outside government. So I think similar to what was said by the previous speakers, our first step when dealing with violent extremism and radicalization is to begin by demystifying it. When we look at violent extremism and from where we sit, it seems that the provocative and brutal actions of the extremists evoke shock and fear. It seems completely outside the bounds of rationality but that's exactly the response that they intend to provoke. They use mind-boggling savagery to spur fear and to cloak themselves in an aura of mystery. That fact, the fact that contemporary extremists portray themselves as religious and couch the recruitment and appeals to religion further adds to this sense of mystery among more secularly oriented observers. It's also used to appeal to potential recruits. There's the novelty of, well, this isn't my grandma's religion. It has edge and because they're so adept at manipulating religious motifs, we often fall into the trap of falling for the rhetoric but the rhetoric has more to do with theater than it does with theology. So as Sulayma said, when religious arguments are made against them, they come back with other arguments that are political, et cetera. And it's a shame that Imam Jihari couldn't be here to speak to some of these issues but actually the religious arguments are the easy ones to make. It's the easy win that we have but there's so much more at play so we have to pull back the curtain and expose the real face of these groups and look closely at how they prey on individual's feelings of shame, desire for redemption, their isolation, their frailties, their insecurities, their aspirations and their vulnerabilities. And by doing this, we can begin to dismantle their ability to recruit and manipulate but it requires a multi-layered and nuanced approach. At USAID as a development agency, many of our tools are ideally suited to deal with the push factors. Those conditions that are the underlying vulnerabilities that make communities vulnerable to be mobilized by malign actors including violent extremism. These underlying conditions favor the spread and the appeal of violent extremists. As Susan mentioned, social marginalization, systematic human rights abuses, frustrated expectations, relative deprivation within their societies. But what the research consistently shows is that it's the pull factors that are in fact the most vital when looking at who joins a violent extremist organization or not. So what are the pull factors and how do they operate? Well, they're the factors that make joining a violent extremist group attractive to an individual. They're the personal connections, it's family, it's friends, it's networks, those who you know, who you trust and who may be involved in some of these things. Or they promise fulfillment and reward whether it's in this world or in the next. It provides an outlet for those who are seeking adventure instead of being trapped perhaps in a go nowhere job or without a job in a village somewhere around the world. Terror groups employ predatory tactics not dissimilar to child molesters, particularly on the internet. These tactics exploit identity seekers desire to focus on monolithic identity narratives, feelings of guilt and social isolation. They focus on secrecy and driving a wedge between their victims, their families and their peers. A lot of work has been done and more has been done. I mean, Mia Bloom in her book, Bombshell, described a lot of the ways in which al-Qaeda in Iraq, for example, was using female operatives to actually arrange for women to be raped and then they were persuaded based on their sense of guilt to undertake suicide missions in order to redeem themselves. I mean, these people are at the core criminals. And we see other recent examples. I don't know if any of you were watching PBS NewsHour just the other night, but there was the story of young Lucas Dahm, a Danish young man who had ADHD had a history of identity seeking, trying to find his place in society and a history of criminality. And it was those things that ISIL preyed upon in order to entice him to go to Syria. And we see this issue of a criminal past and a violent past coming up pretty repeatedly in recruits to these organizations, particularly the foreign fighters. But we also have to make a differentiation between the homegrown or the territorialized groups and how they manipulate real grievances that are existing in society and how they're able to build upon those in the more transnational groups that deal more in larger perceptions of the war on Islam or other kind of macro-political issues. Territorialized groups like ISIL, Hamas, Hezbollah, Shabaab in Somalia, they have a nationalist dimension. They're well embedded in society and violence is often a means to an end. But at the same time, we have to look closely at some of the mechanisms they use. I mean, if we look at ISIL as an example, in many ways it resembles the Republic of Fear that was described by Khanan Makia in 1989 and is booked by the same name. And those similarities are for a good reason because the methods employed and those employing them are holdovers from the Bathis regime in Iraq who have commandeered the local Al-Qaeda affiliate for their own purposes, overshadowing even the parent organization. Coercion, not religious legitimacy, is the cornerstone of their movement while also capitalizing on real grievances around marginalization of the Sunni population in Iraq. So, as I said, the more transnational groups do focus more on kind of the looser and more vague and unrealistic aims and we can talk a little bit more about that and that's where we see the foreign fighters. But it's important for what as peace builders can we do? Well, we have to look at both the tactical and the operational level. At the tactical level, we need to look more closely at the pull factors, those networks, the individual motivations, et cetera. But we have to also acknowledge that there's a narrower space for development and peace building actors around pull factors but we definitely have a role in bolstering and sometimes helping to build positive social networks. At the operational level, what we can do is address the push factors in general and targeted ways. Decrease the vulnerabilities, increase the gap between communities or at-risk groups and those criminal elements that would prey upon them. Strengthen the communities, existing mechanisms to be able to resist those pressures. So we should consider taking a systems approach to help us understand how interventions impact different factors that drive radicalization and how those efforts are complementing activities in other spheres. Most fundamentally, we need to understand that these are not in fact other worldly phenomenon or issues that defy rational analysis. Peace building activities regularly seek to provide opportunity where it had previously existed, provide voice to those who have been silenced and provide healing to those whose minds and bodies have been damaged. Our approaches to violent extremism don't differ in fundamental ways from what we are already doing but we have to take the time to analyze and assess the specifics and focus our efforts where we can best impact the system in which recruitment and mobilization takes place. Thank you. Thank you, David. And finally, Michael. Yeah, thanks John and thanks for AFB and the OSIP for inviting me to speak today. Well, I come from Egypt. I was raised by a Christian family in Egypt, my family. And so because of that, I was all my life subject or a target of Islamic tourists. Then later when I grew up, I chose to became an atheist and to advocate for peace between Egypt and Israel and that made me more of a target to terrorist groups in several occasions in my life. I needed security to protect my life and in several occasions of my life. I received the threats from people who call themselves Democrats, summarize activists as like as terrorist groups. Later I've been living in Germany and Europe and I could see some of the social reasons why it, which contributed to some people leaving Europe and United States and going to join some terrorist groups. So I'm trying to speak through my personal experience here. First I want to emphasize on what Sara said that there is no simple answer, there is no one reason. We are dealing tourism or extremism as a complex phenomena and for any complex phenomena, there is a complex answer. I have been in several arguments which people argue is it religion or is it politics or is it poverty? It's very simplistic to assume that there's one reason for tourism or extremism. As if it is to be very simplistic to say that there's one motive for murder or rape or any other crime. I think to properly understand extremism we somehow need to understand how a terrorist think or how an extremist think. It is if you wanna protect yourself from theft you need to somehow understand how a thief think. If you want to protect yourself from hackers you need somehow to understand how a hacker would think. As the same thing was radical or extremist or terrorist you need somehow to understand how what motivates people to become radical or extremist or violent. I think, so Leymann spoke about this issue how they propose, how some groups propose what they do or their choices as a seek of freedom, as a seek of strength, power. I think there are more to contribute in the subject. So as an example, ISIL and Sinai in Egypt in their promotional videos they picture themselves as protectors of civilians against the crimes committed against civilians by the Egyptian army. So there's a situation in Sinai in Egypt the Egyptian army use massive use of force against civilians. Many civilians are being harmed systemically by the Egyptian military and then these groups present themselves to the public we are protecting civilians from the abuses of the dictatorship. So for them, I'm not saying that's how it is but for them they feel that they are fighting for justice they are fighting against injustice. And there are many cases of extremism, mentorism and radicalism in history which can be compared to this. As an example, when there was some terrorist groups from Ireland making attacks they were not, they didn't concern themselves as terrorists they concern themselves people who are fighting for independence. The same case can be said about several conflict situations in the world. Conflict terrorists, communist terrorists were motivated by what they saw to be social justice or economic justice. So they, there is a need to more understand what motivates people to be extremists or terrorists because most of our many cases it happens under good motives or good intentions even if they end up doing the wrong thing but that's not how they think it is. There's one, yeah, another personal experience to contribute about that. When I persuaded in the Egyptian uprising in 2011 the Egyptian police forces started shooting us with tear gases. And after the gas like that used away in the air people were like holding the tear gas cannons and the redonet made in the United States. And for many people that was the first United States made product they hold in their life. And for many people have never seen United States that's their picture of United States or the West in general. So there's a need to understand that what people in other countries see about our countries or our societies is different than how it is really is. We have to understand that there are maybe thousands of millions of people who their only idea about United States is the drones hitting places in their countries or arms exported to their dictators. Just to make the comparison obvious other people in other countries they will see volunteers coming from United States to help their local communities people who volunteer through the Peace Corps and some groups who go and dedicate part of their lives to help people in other societies. So in some societies people see the good sign good part of our culture, our societies people are trying to help and sacrificing part of their lives to help. But people in other countries see only the drones and tear gas cannons and the weapons and the F-16s and similar stuff. So there's a need before we ask question why these people hate us. There is a need to understand the context how these people develop their picture about United States about democracy about many other things. There is also the just to contribute to what can be other possible reasons. There is, I believe there's a correlation between how United States react to a specific government or authority and how people in this country see the United States and the West and democracy in general. Natan Sharanski in his book The Case for Democracy explains this phenomenon and use the example of Saudi Arabia and Iran and why there are many young people in Iran has favorable opinion about United States in opposite many young people in Saudi Arabia have negative opinion about United States and he expressed that this is because the United States has been friendly to the Saudi government and somehow don't have a problem with how the Saudi government systemically oppresses its own citizens and that wasn't the case with Iran. The problem is that many of the US allies are dictators and responsible for horrible things and by the US government or the European Union or any other country by supporting this dictatorship it became part of the problem. It's not a, it's political dispute and when you take a side you become systemically or eventually an enemy to the other side. And I mean, I think this need to be a discussion about this thing is it's really our problem to take a side in a society and bring or give people more motive to hate us and that lead me to the last point who can be a partner for fight on extremism or fight on terrorism because yeah there is a coalition now made to fight ISIS or to contribute to fighting radicalism in several countries and many of the countries joined this coalition are not that much different than ISIS in their policy or in their religious detroying. So as an example I grew up in Egypt and in Egypt there is a famous Sunni institute or other and most of the religious teaching of others is not that far different than ISIL as an example. So having the wrong allies and the wrong partners in the fight against terrorism it will lead to two negative points. First point is that it will make it look it's okay to make these things as long as you are doing it on our side. So there is a message broadcasted to millions or maybe billions of people out there telling them it's okay to torture people as long as you are our ally. It's okay to occupy territory of another country as long as you are our ally. It's okay to assassinate people, to kill people. It's okay to public hanging. So because like if United States government is okay with its allies doing the same things including Saudi Arabia and others then why strong allies do the same? So the message being broadcasted generally to too many audience around the world that it's okay to do these things as long as you are our ally. As a peace activist in Egypt I had to deal with the Egyptian occupation of Halaib which is the Sudanese territory and the subject was completely undermined because Egypt is an ally to United States. One personal experience to contribute in this matter I was tortured by the Egyptian military in Egypt in 2011 and later I had to speak, I got the opportunity to speak to a formal military intelligence and I discussed the case with him. And his reaction was like, yeah I'm sorry it happened to you but that's how we do our job. Do you think other secret services don't do that? Don't you think United States doesn't torture people? The argument which was made that it's okay that's how we do our jobs, that's how we do the job done. And by United States doing these actions itself or having allies who do these actions and United States not objecting to them it sent a message to these people who are potentially recruited or jihadists that it's okay, everyone does it, United States does it, everyone does it. So it's okay if we did it and the problem with it is not that it's immoral, it's not that it's unjustified, it's not that it's a crime. The problem, actual problem with the world is that we are doing it while we are not on their side. And that's a message and the ideology being put casted on a gross level and that need to be addressed. And yeah, I think that's fine, thank you. Thank you Michael, yes. Thank you, those are all very powerful comments. Whether it's sophistication of recruiting, the fact that there's no single factor or are the pull factors stronger than the push and certainly our need to understand the larger context of drivers that really frame this situation. You know, Michael, to your point, so what we'd like to do is open a conversation with you all. And I would like to, before we take some questions and comments, I would just like to frame the conversation by saying, Michael, your point about the military officer in the secret police, he says, you know, this is how we do our job. This is symbolic of what we're seeing in the world, this cyclical and interdependent relationship between extreme beliefs and actions and the traditional state-based tools that we have available to us to provide a sense of safety. And I think that's an important issue. Just to mention, you know, the context of, you know, in Washington, the Obama Administration CVE initiative has a nine-point action plan of ways that they're gonna turn the concept of countering violent extremism into effective work, how they're gonna operationalize it, in other words. And you can find this information online, but I'll tell you what's not in those nine action points. One is genuine dialogue between the us and the them. The people that we are seeking to prevent from becoming recruits, the communities that they come from, the larger cultures and cultural narratives that in which they live, there isn't a suggestion that we ourselves need to be in dialogue across cultural barriers or religious faith barriers to be able to communicate. And obviously, extremism is not an issue about Muslims or Islam only, extremism is in all of us. It's a human thing. But that's something that's glaringly absent. The other thing is global factors. So support for repressive regimes or trade in military equipment and or in legal frameworks that really squeeze the democratic space in other countries. And finally, there wouldn't be any suggestion that we should take a look at ourselves and what we think about other people and what we tell, the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are in the world. Something as simple as, well, if we hammer them enough, eventually they'll get the message. What President Lindborg said this morning, if you were talking to a room full of kindergartners, the first thing she said, use your words. It's eventually we will discover through experience that you can't hammer people and get them to do what you want. You actually need to talk to people and show respect in many different ways. And so my fear is that this initiative is going to seek to program a solution. Let's take the best practices. Let's take what works and what doesn't. Let's look at push factors, pull factors. Let's set up new funding streams and grant cycles and we'll get all of the large operational NGOs to frame their proposals in terms of CVE rather than development or then conflict resolution or then governance. Because that's what we see is needed in the world but it doesn't take account of all of these factors. So that's enough for me. It's overstepping my bounds as a moderator. I'm sorry about that. You can see a little bit of passion here when we're talking about some of these issues. I would like to open it up to you and also pose a question to you in the audience that we would love to hear from you. What's missing in this debate? What perspective would be outrageous to say right now in a comment or a question? Simply because culturally our social cues are such that we wouldn't talk about this right now because we're wearing suits and we're in nice building and that's not how you do it. But what is missing that we collectively are critically overlooking as the whole world, our government and other governments, try to figure out how to respond to the status of human relations that we find ourselves in today. What's missing? So I'll just leave that to you to answer or not. But let's take a couple rounds of questions or comments. We'll take three to time. We have about 17 minutes. So that's gonna go by very quickly. So I'm gonna ask you to be very brief, much briefer than me. Again, a hypocrisy acknowledged. So I saw David's hand and then I wanna try one back here and over here and then we'll get to another. Go ahead, David, and please introduce yourself. David Steele, Brandeis University and independent consultant in Religion and Conflict for over 20 years. I would tend to answer your basic question by saying there serious look at religion has been missing in many cases as a very contributing factor. And I was actually very happy to hear the last comments in regard to that. I don't disagree with a lot else. Martialization, fear, in terms of tactical approaches. My concern, I guess, is about the stereotyping of who these people are in terms of criminalization, for example. There are studies that are very different than the ones David that you mentioned. By Jessica Stern, for example, at Harvard, who talks about interviewing people where she didn't think she would find that religion was a basic factor in it and found that it has been, as she interviews them, who changes their mind. So my question to you is, how much do we then want so much to identify this in ways that we understand already and know how to respond to already and don't take into consideration the factors that are new and different and we don't understand. Thank you, here on the side. Hello, my name is Julianne Post. I'm a program facilitator for ICERM, the International Center for Ethnoreligious Mediation in New York. And it got touched on, but I just want to bring up the fact that the title doesn't really include the radicalization of Islam. So where in the conversation do characters like David Koresh and Timothy McVeigh and Ruby Ridge and things like that, where does that belong? Because that, for me, is the glaring missing point. I don't like to point outward until we look inward. And these are older examples, but it goes on and on and on. So that's just a really pertinent point that I wanted to make. Thanks. Thank you very much. And finally, up here. My name's Heather Coltman. I'm the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters of Florida Atlantic University, where we're launching a new peace justice and human rights initiative. My question to my answer to who's missing or what's missing is, are we talking to the 15, 16, 17, 18 year olds here in this country? Are we talking to kids involved in model UN programs or other related programs who would already identify an interest and some knowledge of this kind of topic. Let's get the teenagers' perspectives not only from this country, but perhaps in other countries. And maybe that's happening? I don't know. I'm just, I would be interested because all of us are older. Our brains have been formed. What about the kids whose brains haven't been formed yet? Thank you very much. I wanna give our speakers any chance to comment or react at all, or we can take another round of comments. Have questions about stereotyping, missing elements of extremism, non-Islamic extremism that are abundant and young people, the role of young people. Where are they? Well, I mean, both are the first two questions. I mean, I was trying to get to exactly that point or those points, perhaps a little ineliquently in that absolutely religion is a factor among many, but it is not the only factor. And unfortunately, in this oversimplification that happens in the 24-hour news streams, religion tends to pop out as the unifying factor for ISIL and several other organizations that are in the news. I mean, statistically, here in the United States, there are many more acts of terrorism committed on an annual basis by right-wing groups here in the US than by international Islamistic extremists. So, I mean, yes, we focus on certain things and what I was advocating for is that we look at what the phenomenon is, where it is, and start to deconstruct it so that we can deal with those issues as they present themselves. And if there's a religious element to it, absolutely. We need to have the religious voices at the table dealing with that. If there are real grievances that need to be addressed, whether they be human rights issues, governance issues, what have you, those need to be addressed. And let's face it, part of the reason why Islamist terrorism is in the news these days is because it's a legitimizing philosophy. Marxism has largely fell to the wayside. Nationalism, while it still unifies, many does not have the cache it once did for many people in a globalized world. So, Islamist rhetoric, Islamist extremist rhetoric does have a certain legitimacy that appeals in a globalized world. So there are reasons for this, but absolutely I don't wanna stereotype there's no one pathway to radicalization. There's no one common element. But if we look at each instance of individual or communal radicalization, there are things that we can begin to understand and that begins by doing the analysis and demystifying the problem. I'll say a couple things. One, agree, religion is part of the soup, the cocktail that leads to violent extremism. One thing that I get concerned about is that when we focus on the religious solutions, again, we jump to that counter-narratives that if we can just come up with the right religious messaging, then that will pull the rug out from under. But we know that it's not just about the ideas and it's not just about the theological propositions that there's other elements that we might ascribe to spiritual faith these issues of hope and belonging and what do we do in the face of injustice and as violence is a violence of legitimate response and all of these things that are also playing into that quote unquote religious umbrella and we need to take into account of those more nebulous or complex or complicated factors in addition to some of the other institutional issues. One thing, you know, I said that I was very careful in my presentation to say that it's not just a Muslim problem, it's not just Islam. And I work in Sri Lanka and Myanmar and other places and in Nigeria where you see forms of Buddhist, what we might call extremism or Christian extremism and then of course here in the US, we see forms of it as well. And I think we need to be careful to continue to recognize the different forms in which extremism arises, including those from different religious traditions as well as those from different secular ideologies. But I think we also at the same time need to recognize that elements of the Muslim world in particular are struggling with this right now in a very acute way that I think other religious traditions have in the past too. And so how can we, the pressing question for us in the US is how do we respond to that in a way that doesn't fuel this narrative of the war on Islam as well? And I think that's something that a lot of policymakers here are struggling with. So the final thing on youth, I would just say that in my experience and a lot of these zones of conflict in which I work, the youth are actually at the front lines and they're doing a much better job than us oldies. Although I say that also acknowledging that at the beginning when the question was asked, if who here are parents, none of the people at the front of the room raised their hands. You are? Oh, sorry, David has kids. I just didn't raise my hand. Okay. He doesn't like to acknowledge it, but he has kids. But the youth have really been some of the most courageous and some of the most frontline responders. In Myanmar, for example, it was the youth groups in particular who came forward to do some of the interfaith work and to challenge some of the rising Buddhist nationalist rhetoric that was seeming to fuel some of the violence that was taking place there. And I've seen that in other places too. And there's a number of programs like Generation Change, a number, especially some of these technological savvy social media campaigns that have really been youth driven and youth led and that old fogies have a lot to learn from. Thank you, Susan. So why don't we take another round and maybe give Michael and Selima a chance to address those ones so we can hear from them as well. Yes, Olivia, and then, and one here. Go ahead. So I wanted to just give a little bit deeper in the poll factors with ISIL in particular. I was really struck by Sunday Times article, magazine article a couple of weeks ago about the British fighters and how I forget the statistics, but the majority were college educated, middle class families were so programmed as peace builders to think of things in reaction to grievances, but it really didn't feel like it was coming out of grievance. It was more, I was reminded of the generation that went to fight the Spanish Civil War, that there was this tremendous sort of romanticization. And I think, Selima, that really came through in the Twitter pieces that you were showing Facebook with the women. And I was then thinking about the thing we just heard about neuroscience and how what we think will be effective counter narratives often backfire. You'd spoke, David, about this not being your grandmother's religion, that there's this sort of excitement and edge to it. And I wonder if we're creative enough in thinking about how to address that aspect of it. You spoke about its legitimacy. So I just feel like there's more to understand there and really curious to your responses. Jane? Thank you for some wonderful presentations. My name is Judy Barcelot. I think the CVE conversation often focuses on the trees rather than the forest. And what I mean by that in this case is brilliantly alluded to by Michael and followed up by John. But what we fail to do is engage in what can only be a radical critique of a situation where we basically went into a war in Iraq which created the circumstances in which the rise of ISIL became possible in combination with decades of failed policy in the Middle East supporting dictators and the rise of the Arab Spring in protest and the disintegration of the social order and the political order that has ensued which creates the vacuum. I think having actually worked at USIP from 2007 to 2007 during the Iraq war, what strikes me most is how we in this peace building community are often expected to come up with a sort of bucket brigade, to come up and clean up the mess after it's been created. And I think a challenge is to figure out how we can remind people that it's not just a matter of coming up with the specific techniques to work with the damaged individuals who've resulted from these political circumstances but to remember to position front and center the failed policies that led us to this situation in the first place and to prevent continuation of those policies. Thank you, Judy. And finally. Thank you. My name's Melinda Holmes. I work with the Carter Center's Human Rights Program. I think that probably most of us agree that religion is an important component to this specific conversation but I wanted to push a little and ask what should we be doing when it comes to thinking about the role of religion more broadly? And I wanna ask that because just as it doesn't work very well to only talk to Muslims when there's violence occurring or when there's violent extremism or worried about terrorism, I don't think it works very well to only think about religion when it comes to the role of religion and violence. And so I wanted to ask much as we may not see where the youth are because we may not understand their ways of acting, their ways of mobilizing. Maybe we aren't really understanding religion and its role very well because we're not where religion is with the youth, with sort of the masses. And so I was wondering if you could comment on how we can advocate for a more effective and broad look at the role of religion in public policy and society at large. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, Salema or Michael, I don't know if you have any initial reactions. Otherwise, anyone on the, anyone else? Go ahead, Michael. Two comments. First, I agree with the statement came from the back about that we shouldn't make a stereotype that terrorism is somehow correlated to Islam. Terrorism happened from different groups and actually making this correlation in public makes it look like that terrorism is also wrong when it happens from a Muslim, but when it happens from someone else, it's okay. Lots of violent groups use examples from Mandela, not from Mandela, that in many eyes he was counted as a terrorist until he reconciled with the regime at the time and then he is not a terrorist anymore. So it seemed that the act of terrorism is considered a political decision or a political side. If you are on my side, then you are not a terrorist, then you are a freedom fighter, but if you are on the other side, then you are a terrorist. And I think that's why the neutrality needed in this aspect. Referring to other things about, I think the second point, extremism for me is a symptom to a real problem. There is a real problem, could it be poverty, could it be foreign intervention, could it be dictatorship, could it be whatever it is? So there is a problem, extremism is just a way to express the problem. People are angry and they carry guns, they kill people, they do crazy things, but why is there anger, that is a serious problem. I think we need to address the real problem, not the symptom. We need to fight the disease, not the symptom of disease. I think religion contributes to this process as just finding and executes to do it. So as an example, in my country, lots of people like criminal groups, they rob people and to justify socially, they would say, okay, I rob only from, I steal money from rich people. And by making class differentiation, they make their crime to seem justifiable. I'm stealing from the rich people, or stealing from other people. Or I'm stealing only from Christians because God allowed us to take Christians money or properties of Christians. So I think religion contributes to this process as just by providing a way of justification or saying it's okay. But it's not the real problems. The real problems that people have the motive to do these actions, and they have the intention to do it, and religions then come and justify it. Some religious interpretations justify it, but it's not the real problem. I understand that by offering justification to crimes, it's a problem in itself, but it is not what motivates people, according to my experience, it's not what motivates people to do these actions. People have the intentions to do it, and then they try to look for ideological or religious justification for these actions. So Leva? There's a quick comment, because first of all, what happened in Iraq is really sectarianism. And as was said earlier, ISIS uses the ideology of Baptist movement with Islamic references. And I keep hearing religion as if Islam contained in itself a problem when it doesn't. It's really an ideology coated with Islamic references that they use out of context, historically completely wrong, and they use to attract people, because when they come across naive, young girls or boys and they say, well, it's your religious duty to come and join us and fight for us, et cetera, that's how they gain force. So I think we should really be careful in using words just like religion or Islam. It's not religion or Islam, it's Muslims, certain Muslims who create a problem. Thank you. Please join me in thanking our panelists for all their comments today, and for your comments as well, and your thoughtful remarks on this topic. And from a peace building perspective, we know this isn't new per se, but rather gets to a lot of the heart of the issues that we've worked on for a long time. And I, for one, refuse to believe that narrative and identity is impossible to change. And so we can only work in the micro factors in programming or in the microcosm. I believe large change in the way we think, the way we think about ourselves, the way we think about others is possible, and that needs to be front and center in our strategies for this moving forward.