 I'm very happy to have Arun Kandani come and speak about his new book, great title, The Muslims Are Coming, Exclamation Mark, subtitle Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic Warrant Terror. Arun holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University, teaches at NYU. He's written another previous book which was selected as New Statesman Book of the Year in 2007, The End of Tolerance Racism in 21st Century Britain. He grew up in London and he arrived in New York in 2010 on a fellowship with the Open Society Foundation and he now lives in Harlem and he's going to talk about the big themes and stories in his book and then we'll open up to Q&A. Arun. Thank you. Arun. Okay, thank you all for coming along and thanks to New America Foundation for hosting me. So as Peter said, I'm going to begin by kind of sharing some of the stories in the book, some of the personal kind of stories and then get into some thinking about some of the policy issues that emerge from those. The motivation for writing the book when I began this project around about 2010 was the sense that looking at the transition from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, it seemed to me we were moving from a situation where, whereas under Bush you'd had this kind of high profile intense heated debate about what the war on terror meant and how it would be fought. So you had these kind of big debates about, for example, whether the US should go to war in Iraq, for example, the legitimacy of using torture, kind of for me disturbing that those are things that we were debating but nevertheless there was a high profile debate. What happens with Obama is we kind of go to a period of calm and silence on national security policy around these particular issues. So I wanted to kind of understand what was going on there, understand the way in which neo-conservatives, if you like, had invented the war on terror, but then Obama liberals had kind of normalized it and thereafter it had become something that wasn't really discussed anymore, at least in the first of Obama's two times in office. So coming into the issue, so word about the background to the book, the actual research I did first of all, right? So in 2010 I spent a year travelling around the United States, I spent some time in New York, in Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Virginia and here in D.C., doing interviews with FBI agents working on counterterrorism, people in local police departments doing counterterrorism, people working on national security in various agencies here in D.C., community activists working on these issues, and I interviewed a number of people who in various ways have been labelled as Islamic extremists here in the U.S., and so the book comes out of that research. So as I say, I'm going to begin by kind of going into two or three personal stories that I described in the book and then we'll get into some of the thoughts on the policy here. So the story I want to begin with is of someone called Jesse Curtis Morton, who I interviewed in early 2011 shortly before he was arrested. So Jesse Curtis Morton talks about when he was growing up in the 1980s not having cable television. When I was a child the new wave was MTV and I didn't have access to it, he told me. And I think it's a major reason why I had some level of human consciousness as I grew up, and I could see through the lies and the hypocrisy of my own society from the beginning. So he's someone who hates the consumerism that he thought had brainwashed his fellow students at his working class high school. They watch their favourite TV show and they eat their favourite cereal and they buy their favourite shoes and that's what life's about. I think they're sick, I was never part of it. So Jesse leaves home at an early age to escape his abusive family. For a while he travels with the band The Grateful Dead. He's attracted to their kind of rejection of materialist values. By 2002 he's struggling with drug addiction, he's in Virginia and he's charged with petty larceny and possession of crack cocaine. Within a few years he's converted to Islam, graduated from college and earned a master's degree from Columbia University. He described his first reading of the Quran as an overwhelming epiphany and his subsequent conversion seemed to have given him a sense of focus and discipline. He changed his name to Yunus Abdullah Muhammad and found work as a substance abuse counselor in New York City. He also spent some time in Saudi Arabia. To his dismay he encounters there the same materialism that had alienated him from US society and so he comes to believe that the commercialism that he sees as rampant in America is being imposed around the world. But he also starts to think that Islam, the religion that he thinks has saved him from drug addiction, would, if properly followed, save the world also from Western capitalism. So he has this very offbeat interpretation of Islam that he's following fusing a kind of revolutionary anti-globalist politics with religious conservatism. So very different from almost every other American Muslim. To take his ideas forward he helps create an organization called Revolution Muslim, which is launched in December 2007, functions mainly through its website. It puts up videos which celebrate the 9-11 attacks alongside discussions of the kinds of social and economic policies that he thinks ought to be implemented. He attempts to preach his message on the sidewalk outside the Islamic Cultural Center on New York's Upper East Side but most of the congregants leaving the mosque after their prayers basically just ignore him. In April 2010, one of the bloggers on the site hears about a forthcoming episode of a television series South Park in which the Prophet Muhammad is to be depicted wearing a bare suit. A graphic picture of the murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh is posted on the site accompanied by a prediction that the program's writers would probably suffer a similar fate. Details of the neighborhood where the South Park writers live in Colorado are added with the suggestion that readers pay a visit. The posting soon picked up by the mainstream news media and Revolution Muslim, the name of this site, enters Google's list of the 100 most searched for phrases. So now Abdullah Muhammad is inundated with calls from journalists and he decides to issue what he calls a clarification statement. But it hardly clarifies. It claims we are not trying to directly incite violence but then it quotes Osama bin Laden saying, if there is no check in the freedom of your words then let your heart be open to the freedom of our actions. Three months later, Abdullah Muhammad quits his job and leaves the United States for Morocco where he's later arrested, then extradited back to the US and charged with conspiracy to solicit the murder of his fellow citizens. He's held in solitary confinement for several months until he agrees to take a plea rather than risk a trial. He's sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison. So in a society that usually tolerates threats made online unless they directly lead to acts of violence, it's a strikingly lengthy sentence. But Abdullah Muhammad embodies the threat that many in the US national security apparatus most fear. An American who rejects a society in which he's raised and becomes an admirer of its most feared enemy Osama bin Laden. It's easy to devise psychological theories to explain his journey to radicalism. Could his abusive upbringing have produced a rage that was then projected onto American society as a whole? Was his only way of escaping drug addiction to structure his life according to absolute moral precepts, a maniche and mindset vulnerable to a fanatical belief in violent struggle between forces of good and evil? Did his childhood experiences give rise to a failure to adjust to reality, a relentless longing for a utopia where his life struggles could be redeemed? Maybe those were parts of the explanation. But the bigger question is why his ideological journey took the particular form that it did. The answer which I offer in the book is that his beliefs actually mirrored the war on terror's own clash of civilizations precepts. So Abdullah Muhammad accepted at face value the official narrative that radical Islam was an existential threat to an American society that he had come to despise. And he acted on that basis. He merely wrenched the labels of good and evil from the official war on terror discourse and inverted their positions. So the second kind of personal story that I want to share with you involves an African-American Muslim from Detroit called Abdullah Lukman. So he was the Imam of a mosque on Detroit's impoverished west side. Every Sunday, he and his followers ran a soup kitchen seeking to provide for the basic needs of a local community. And this is a neighborhood where the majority of people either unemployed or in very low paying jobs and they kind of depend on these kinds of initiatives for their survival. Imam Lukman's a familiar face in this neighborhood. His son Omar Regan told me his favorite word was grassroots. That's how my dad would talk. He's from back in the 60s, he said. So Lukman Abdullah converted to Islam in the early 1980s after serving in the military and then falling into depression. He's a follower of someone called Jamil Al-Amin, who's someone who was a Black Revolution in the 1960s, known as H. Rap Brown, one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 60s. So soon after 9-11, the FBI begins to categorize Imam Lukman as, quote, a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African Americans who call on their followers to an offensive jihad rather than a defensive jihad in order to establish a separate sovereign Islamic state within the borders of the United States governed by Sharia law, end quote. So the implication here from the FBI is that he shares an ideology with al-Qaeda. There's little doubt that Imam Lukman viewed the U.S. government as an oppressor and called on his followers to organize against it. Like the Black Panther Party, which is part of a tradition he comes out of, members of this mosque also carried guns. But there was no evidence of any plot to carry out a terrorist attack, just small-time hustlers in an impoverished neighborhood struggling to pay the bills while denouncing America. In 2007, the FBI began a sting operation targeting Imam Lukman's mosque. I won't go into the details of the operation. That's in the book. But essentially, the FBI paid very large sums of money to lure those around the Imam into helping fence stolen goods so that eventually the Imam can be placed at warehouse in Dearborn when the time comes to carry out a raid. In fact, exactly five years ago today, on October 28th, 2009, the Imam's in this warehouse, which is surrounded by 60 law enforcement officers, including a special operations team that the FBI has flown in from Quantico, Virginia, a SWAT team from the local field office, officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I'm not sure what they're doing there. And then at a prearranged time, the free informants exit the warehouse, explosives are let off inside as a distraction. A dozen federal agents approach the Imam and his colleagues and command them to get down and show their hands. Accounts of what happened next differ, but most likely the FBI agents suspect that the Imam is holding a gun to his chest and they release a dog that's been trained to grab at his arm. The dog bites at his face. The Imam fires at the dog, prompting return of fire from four of the agents who were positioned nearby. He's killed instantly by semi-automatic rifles from a few feet away. As the Imam's body's lying dead on the warehouse floor, it's handcuffed while the police dog is evacuated by a helicopter to a hospital for possible life-saving treatment. So the Department of Justice exonerate the FBI's handling of the arrest and declare the killing lawful, but there's little doubt that had the government chosen not to infiltrate his mosque and entrap him in a criminal conspiracy of its own invention, he'd still be alive. So the killing of Imam Lokman barely registered in the news media. From one point of view, the manner of his death was hardly different from the dozens of other killings of African-Americans each year at the hands of militarized law enforcement agencies. From another perspective, he resembled the thousands of unnamed so-called militants killed by drones in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Whether as a so-called Islamic extremist or as an African-American, his death was a perfectly normal occurrence. The criminalization of Imam Lokman is in fact a textbook case of the kinds of current tactics used by the FBI in the domestic war on terror. Over the last decade, a substantial number of the federal terrorist prosecutions that we've seen have involved the targeting of people for their ideology, and then the use of informants and undercover agents acting as, often as agent provocateurs, to create a criminal case. In all these cases, someone working for the FBI provides not only the plan, but also the means and opportunity for whatever crimes take place. So without the FBI's help in supplying money, weapons, and often a specific plan of attack, the accused would not have had the capability to carry out any plot. And the thinking behind this is the notion of radicalization, right? It's the idea that there's some notion of ideology that's leading people to become terrorists. And so there's a notion of early intervention into that process through things like sting operations and the use of agent provocateurs. So one of the kind of main things that I do in the book is try and unravel this concept of radicalization, which underpins so much of how we do counterterrorism policymaking, especially domestically. And it's actually, I think, become the chief lens through which Western societies now view Muslim populations, right? So on both sides of the Atlantic, we've seen terrorism experts advance theories of radicalization that claim to be able to identify individuals who are not terrorists now, but might be at some later date, right? So how do you identify tomorrow's terrorists today is kind of the key question here. And so I think here it's worth thinking about Steven Spielberg's 2002 film Minority Report in which you have a specialist pre-crime unit which is imagined as having these three psychics called pre-cogs, who can predict who will be the murderers in the future, right? And then the unit is able to arrest so-called pre-criminals before they've committed the crimes for which they're convicted. And this is a good allegory for the kind of preventative approach to counterterrorism that we've adopted. In place of an actual pre-cogs unit with psychics, which we haven't yet discovered how to do, security officials have academic models that claim scientific knowledge of a process by which ordinary Muslims become terrorists. And these models claim that there are certain behavioral, cultural, and ideological signals that can reveal who's at risk of turning into a terrorist at some point in the future. So in the FBI's radicalization model, for example, there are four stages that someone goes through on their way to becoming a terrorist. In the second stage, such things as growing a beard, starting to wear what's called traditional Islamic clothing and becoming alienated from one's former life are all listed as indicators. In the third stage, which is one level away from becoming an active terrorist, you have increased activity in a pro-Muslim social group or political cause. So the underlying kind of argument behind these models is that the root cause of terrorism lies in some kind of radical religious ideology so that you can read someone's radicalization through these ideological signals that are manifested in their dress and in their kind of ideological activities. And we've spent millions of dollars trying to prove that some version of Islamic belief leads to terrorism, right? So I call this argument the myth of radicalization, the idea that some version of Islamic belief leads to terrorism. In fact, the evidence to support that simply doesn't stand up. So in my book I look at who, for me, to the most sophisticated scholars working on this question of radicalization, which is Mark Sageman and Quinton Victorovich. But even in their work, which I respect, there's a kind of fundamental flaw in how they go about interpreting their data, where it's almost taken as an unquestioned assumption that it's religious ideology of some kind that is underpinning the turn to violence. So my argument is that having a belief in extremist Islam, however you wanna define that, does not, in fact, correlate with involvement in terrorism. So there's many good reasons, maybe, for objecting to reactionary interpretations of religion, but the idea that religious ideology mechanically causes terrorism is not one of them. Religion might provide the semantic register, the language, the vocabulary within which some terrorists articulate their propaganda, but we've failed, I think, in thinking about these questions to focus enough on the underlying political causes. It's more convenient for us to talk about religious ideology than foreign policy is essentially the point. So I mean, a good way of thinking about this is to think about Hamas. Hamas uses religious ideology to legitimize its violence. It also uses religious ideology to legitimize its ceasefires, right? So it's not the religious ideology that's determining whether it chooses to engage in violence at one time or another. It's its assessment of the political situation, the context of the occupation by Israel and so forth. Similarly, if you look at the data that we have on terrorism-related crimes in Britain over the last decade or so, you see between 2003, when Britain joins the Iraq War, and 2006, the number of terrorist convictions more than doubles before halving again by 2009. So we get this sudden upsurge from 2003 to 2006. If we think about what's caused that, well, it's not that the perpetrators have changed their interpretation of religion during this time. It's not that the religious ideology has suddenly kicked in and made them into terrorists. What's changed is their exposure to news of what's happening in Iraq, right? It's the political situation. It's the images of torture. It's the images of hundreds of thousands of people being killed there. But we've kind of been sold this story by most terrorism experts that there is some relationship between Islamic belief and violence, okay? Which obviously creates an atmosphere of Islamophobia in society as well. So you might have seen, there's been circulating a lot on the internet recently this episode of Bill Maher's show on HBO where he gets into an argument with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, the famous kind of atheist writers on there as well. And so what we've seen over the last, well, at least a decade, is a kind of ongoing so-called debate where you have someone like Bill Maher or there's any number of other people who kind of make this argument that Islam is a violent religion. And then someone replies that no, actually, Islam is a religion of peace. It's not a inherent violent, but a minority misinterpreted in an extremist fashion. So this isn't the standard liberal response. So then each side trades quotations from the Quran and from the classical Islamic sources, which of course means, taking those quotes out of context and doesn't really settle things because each side seems to have some plausible quotes to make their case. And this goes on and on and on, right? And the point for me is that both sides in this debate are assuming that if only we have an accurate knowledge of the nature of Islamic theology and ideology, we'll be able to explain where terrorism comes from, right? So Islamic ideology on either side of this debate becomes the key to understanding why terrorism happens or maybe why it doesn't happen, right? My argument is that Islamic theology is largely irrelevant in trying to understand the causes of terrorism. And that seems like almost a perverse thing to say because it's become common sense to think otherwise. But as the Italian political thinker, Antonio Gramsci tells us, common sense is always what the result of previous rounds of ideological work that's been done to make us think that something is just an unquestionable assumption. And of course, if you believe these radicalization models, then preventing terrorism means that you're gonna want to build up detailed information on the religious opinions of Muslims, on their ideological activities, their ideological expressions, in order to detect these warning signs that you believe tell you that someone is radicalizing. And that's exactly what we've seen happen. So with our $40 billion annual intelligence budget, we are now amassing vast quantities of information on the private lives of Muslims in the United States, largely without any connection to reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. The FBI has 10,000 intelligence analysts working on counter-terrorism and 15,000 paid informants, right? I had a piece in The Nation magazine last week that talks about the case of an African-American Muslim in Springfield, Massachusetts who was under pressure to work as an informant for the FBI and spy on fellow Muslims in his community, refused, and then was convicted on gun charges that he alleges was planted. And then he finds out that his wife has actually been working as a paid informant for the FBI since before they met. So it's, you know, the kinds of level of, the kind of level of, kind of aggressive recruitment of informants that we're seeing is kind of unprecedented, but also reminiscent of things like Cointel Pro that we know about from the 1960s that the FBI was up to then. And then when it comes to looking at the actual system of prosecutions of people who've been caught up in this system, in other words, federal terrorism-related prosecutions, so the first thing to say about that is, once you've been indicted on terrorism-related charges within the United States, it's almost impossible to be acquitted, right? I've been unable to find a single case of someone who's been charged and acquitted. People, I think three-quarters of those cases go to plea, a quarter go to trial, and all of them, as far as I can tell, have resolved in conviction. So we have a 100% conviction rate. If we saw that statistic in a State Department report about another country, we'd say this is evidence of a flawed criminal justice system. The reason that we have that very stark statistic of near 100% is because of the way in which we have legislation, like, for example, the material support statute, material support for terrorism, which is defined so broadly that all kinds of activities that are actually about ideological expression can be very easily criminalized. So prosecutors call it the black box of counterterrorism. And of course, the rationale links back to these radicalization theories. If you think that your ideological activity is a precursor to violence, then you want to intervene earlier and try and criminalize that ideological activity. Add to that the fact that when we arrest someone on terrorism charges, we put them in solitary confinement, pretrial, not post trial, pretrial. All the medical evidence in this area tells us that after 60 days in solitary confinement, it's starting to have serious mental health consequences for you. And so we're undermining the possibility of defendants to have a chance of a fair trial because we're simply driving them insane in the way that we imprison them pretrial. We've had a kind of situation where a lot of people who are sincerely concerned about things like Guantanamo are making the argument that Guantanamo is kind of exceptional space and we want to get back to the federal system of prosecution and incarceration which is seen as the kind of liberal alternative to Guantanamo. Actually, it's not an alternative, it's a continuum between the practices that happen in Guantanamo and the practices that happen in our federal prisons. Guantanamo is modeled on the supermax prisons that we have in the federal system. So then the other liberal kind of argument that I think is increasingly made nowadays which I want to just kind of finish by examining is the argument about a counter-violent extremism style of policy, right? Which has been something that's been rolling out from the Department of Justice in the last couple of months in a number of sites around the United States. So the counter-violent extremism approach says instead of trying to criminalize people in the early stages of this radicalization, let's find alternatives to intervene and prevent that radicalization from progressing. And its value is a recognition that security is best established through relationships of trust and inclusion within the community. But then we run into some problems when we look at how these kinds of policies are actually implemented. One of the things I do in the book is I spent some time in Houston, Texas, examining how they're kind of, the FBI are doing community outreach with the Muslim community in Houston, which has adopted this kind of counter-violent extremism model for a few years. And also I did a similar investigation of community outreach being done by the St. Paul Police Department in Minnesota with the local Somali community where there's a program called AIMCOP is one of these kind of horrible acronyms that stands for African Immigrant Muslim Community Oriented Policing or something like that. In the Minnesota case, what becomes very apparent is that this program that's presented as a community outreach program in the conventional sense to build relationships between young Somali Americans and the police department with a view to preventing radicalization is has intelligence gathering embedded in it, right? And so one of the things that happens is that the police officers who are doing this work are collecting information about the young people they engage with about their political opinions, about their religious opinions, about their ideology, and then in weekly meetings sharing that information with the FBI in a way that the young people involved are not aware of. The young people think that they're involved in some sort of scheme that's about mentoring and homework clubs and so forth, right? So I think there's issues there about if we create a situation in which the kind of conversations that people are having at community level just become data for a national security potential investigation, and then it ends up being counterproductive. And similarly, in Houston, you know, when I interviewed the FBI agents who are doing that community engagement down there and their community partners, it became very clear that the idea here was that we want, the FBI is basically saying to these community leaders, we want you to send out a message to the community, and that message is in America, the way to be American is not to talk about Iraq and not to talk about Afghanistan and not to talk about Palestine, right? And to kind of keep your head down and don't think about politics, especially foreign policy, right? Which is not my notion of what it means to be American, but there's a way in which there again, the assumption is that the best way to prevent radicalization is to prevent certain conversations from taking place, certain ideologies from circulating, okay, which is counterproductive. If you think about the Boston Marathon bombing, you know, we had a sort of discussion after that about what were the missed opportunities. And for me, the real missed opportunity to intervene was not some missing piece of surveillance that we didn't discover. It was the moment three months before when Tamaland Tseneyev stands up in a Friday prayer service at his mosque and he's angry about the Imam's sermon, which is celebrating the life of Martin Luther King, which Tamaland thinks is selling out. So he's kicked out of the prayer service, right, at that point. Since 9-11, mosque leaders have been under pressure to eject anyone expressing radical views, right? Rather than engaging with them and seeking to challenge their ideas, address their frustrations, or meet their emotional needs. So the policy that's been forced on mosques by this kind of wider climate of excessive surveillance means that mosques are wary of even having conversations with those perceived to be radicals for fear of attracting official attention. You know, we don't know what might have made a difference here, we're kind of speculating, but given that one of the motives for the bombing seems to be to do with foreign policy, given what one of the brothers wrote when he was trying to escape from the police, it seems like we lost the chance to create an opportunity for some kind of engagement, some kind of way in which he could be challenged or channeled into nonviolent political activism. Our flawed models of radicalization have assumed that the best way to stop terrorist violence is to prevent radical ideas from circulating. The history of terrorism suggests the opposite is true, right? The timing, again, support for terrorism appears to increase when legitimate political activism is suppressed. You think about the French anarchists in the 19th century began bombing campaigns and assassinations after the defeat of the Paris Commune, you think about the Algerian National Liberation Front in the context of French colonialism, you think about the weather underground's declaration of war in the early 70s after the repression of the student campaigns against the Vietnam War. Pathological outcomes are more likely when the space for the free exchange of feelings and opinions is squeezed. And all of our policies at the moment seem to rest on this kind of fundamental assumption that our aim should be to suppress radical ideology as a proxy for counter-terrorism. Thank you and I look forward to your comments and questions. Thank you very much. Well, you know, there was lots of chew on there. You know, Tamalain Saanay, if you mentioned that he was, there was some intervention by the Mosque elders when he objected to the pre-show sort of supporting Martin Luther King. And it's kind of an interesting example of because there actually were two interventions by the Mosque with Tamalain. First of all, he objected to some any Muslim celebrating Thanksgiving was the first thing he kind of had an outburst about that. And then he had another outburst about the preacher kind of comparing the Prophet Muhammad in some way to Martin Luther King. Or basically, Martin Luther King was a heroic figure. And the Mosque elders talked to him and they they told him, you've got to stop these outbursts. You've got to stop. And in a sense, they did everything. I mean, it was the perfect intervention, but it didn't work. And so I guess what I'm what I'm getting at is for some people, I don't think there is an intervention. I think that in Tamalain's case and in the case of Jahar, his younger brother, I mean, Tamalain and his family were having and this has got nothing to do with anything to do with religious ideology. The family were having huge problems in the United States. You know, they came as refugees from sort of from Dagestan and their father, basically, his business collapsed. Their parents, their parents' marriage collapsed. They ran out of their own welfare. They ran out of welfare benefits. Tamalain's dream to become a boxer failed because he couldn't compete as a non-American, which is all by way of saying is like sometimes people come along. There's nothing really, you know, the FBI looked at this guy and there was nothing there. The Muslim community tried to intervene with him and succeeded, by the way, in getting him to stop sort of interrupting Moscow. This is but he went off and did his own thing, which was, of course, to do this attack. So I guess it's sort of an interesting case study of what sort of basically agreeing with many of the points you've made, which is I don't think Tamalain and Jahar's attack on the Boston Marathon really had much to do with American foreign policy or Islam. It was more about their way of sort of, you know, they were going to amount, nothing was going right in their life. And, you know, maybe 70, maybe in the 70s, they would have become weather underman or black panthers or maybe they would have some other kind of anti-government, anti-American kind of ideology that they would have grabbed themselves to. So just wondering what you... You know, I think it does have to do with foreign policy. I mean, the reporting that has been done on, you know, there's been Janet Riemann's piece in The Rolling Stone, which I think is the best piece that goes into a lot of detail on the kind of biographical background of the two brothers. You know, I think she kind of downplays the politics and focuses very much on psychology in a way that I don't find compelling. You do it and on? But I don't find compelling. I mean, obviously, you know, when we think about... I think the point about the mosque intervention, right, is what I think what we should be aiming for is a situation where people who look at the world and feel that there are huge injustices taking place, which clearly these two brothers did and clearly people like Jesse Curtis-Morton did, that there is a culture in the community where those views can be expressed and engaged, right? And we certainly do not have that today in the United States as far as young Muslims are concerned. We, you know, when I was travelling around the US and doing the research for the book time and time again, when I did a number of focus groups of young people, did dozens of interviews across the country and time and time again, you get exactly the same message, we do not feel that we can openly talk about Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, the general picture of US foreign policy. We do not feel we can express that. And so we're growing up in a society where we constantly are told that America is a society that celebrates free speech, but we feel that we cannot take advantage of those rights because we will come to the attention of some sort of national security agency. And so we go quiet, right? And that is the worst possible climate for creating a peaceful society. And, you know, so, and, you know, we can go into different interpretations of the Tzanaev brothers, but I think the broader picture is certainly one in which there is a culture of self-censorship that has been fostered by by flawed government policies here. Okay, but I think I guess I have two questions. One is, you know, it seems to me that every anybody who bombs an abortion clinic in this country is a Christian fundamentalist, but very few Christian fundamentalists are abortion clinic bombers. And the sort of similar point could be made about everybody involved in some kind of active terrorism, Islamist terrorism, for one of a better phrase, is invariably has a sort of Sunni Wahhabi militant, but very few Sunni Wahhabi militants become jihadi terrorists. I mean, does religious ideology does seem to play a role here? I mean, you can't, it would be like trying to explain the Crusades without Christianity. I mean, Islam is somehow involved in this, whether, and that's not a criticism of the religion, but it's clearly, and then I guess if you're trying to draw sharp distinction between religious ideology and, you know, critiques of American foreign policy, you know, beginning with Osama bin Laden, in a way, they're inseparable, right? Because his objection to American foreign policy was a religious objection to the seemingly prominent presence of American foreign soldiers on Saudi soil. So I mean, the two things are very related, right? The religious ideology and objection of American foreign policy kind of spring from the same place. You know, I think, when we think about the role of religion here, what I think we tend to do, which is, which I think is at the heart of the problem here is we tend to take this idea of religion as if it's some fixed set of beliefs that kind of exist somewhere in the abstract, whether we mean, you know, Islam itself or we use these words like Wahhabism or extremism or Islamism, some other fixed set of beliefs that kind of sit somewhere up in the ether that kind of people either adopt or don't adopt. I mean, what religion means is to do with how it is used and applied in people's actual lives, right? So of course, you know, one of the things that's happened in the 20th century is that in context of colonialism and post-colonialism, people have tried to find what material they can from the Islamic tradition to create a political analysis and a political program to deal with the political context within which they exist, right? Bin Laden is one version of that, Saeed Goddab is another version of that. So we can't understand that process unless we understand that it comes out of those political contexts. And so, you know, I think that's the way into understanding the kind of role of religion here. And I think, you know, if we say Islam must have something to do with it, I think that, you know, that takes Islam to be this kind of unchanging kind of thing, which it isn't really, right? Islam is always about, it always has a different, you know, Wittgenstein's right, meaning is used, right? The meaning of Islam is how it's used in particular context here, right? And I think if we look at it that way, we get a much more, I mean, that way leads to us understanding the politics of a situation much more. And religion then provides a kind of lens, a kind of vocabulary rather than being this thing that can actually capture people's minds and turn them into kind of violent fanatics, which is the way it's normally seen. Of course, I'm not sure I entirely agree with you that every jihadist terrorist or have we wanna define it is a Wahhabist or a Salafi or an Islamist. As a general. You know, one of the things that's very striking is if you look at the young people right now who are traveling from Europe to Syria and Iraq, they're not necessarily people who have any kind of religious ideology at all. The two greatest films on terrorism, for me, are Battle of Algiers and Four Lines. Four Lines depicts this very well. You're dealing with people who are very unsophisticated in their kind of ideological bearings. And so I think what, you know, the story here is not so much about some kind of ideological process that is a kind of fully formed ideology that kind of brainwashes people. It's more to do with, you know, certainly at the moment, there's this element of it, which is to do with adventure and glamour of going to a war zone, but also anger and feeling the sense that what the Assad regime has done in Syria, that the huge numbers of civilians that have been killed there, those images are circulating and there's a sense of something must be done. No one else is gonna do anything. It's up to us to do something ourselves, right? So that's a political story. Yeah, no, I think that's all fair enough. I mean, if we kind of look into, let's say, Medjana, Dalhussan, I mean, it's a fairly classic example of somebody who's adopted pretty militant Sunni beliefs and objects to American foreign policy and conducts an act of terrorism, but he's very careful to do it in what he regards as an Islamically okay context, which is only to kill soldiers. I mean, he seeks advice about this issue from Al-Aqqa, basically is it okay to kill soldiers and he doesn't receive much of an answer, but the way that he is framing it is we're entirely Islamically. Now, and I agree, there's some people that were just, they're not very sophisticated, they're basically idiots, who maybe get caught up in this. But at the end of the day, if you were trying to find an explanation for this, you'd have to locate it with something to do with Islam. Otherwise, oh, it doesn't, are you trying to make the case that no Islamic terrorist is not influenced by Islam? No, so if you take me into a high-sounding case, as I'm saying, he's using religion as a kind of framework, kind of lens with which to... Isn't that sort of tortological? I mean, we all use frameworks. I mean, they're real to us, right? I mean, rather than for him, I mean, he was a very devout, he was giving away practically all his salary to Islamic charities. He was a regular mosque-goer, seeking advice from Islamic figures. Islam is gonna provide a kind of broad moral framework, right? But when you get down to the specifics of, is it legitimate for me to carry out this attack on military personnel in Texas, you're gonna get, different people are gonna give you very different answers to that, right? He's chosen to go to Anwar Al-Arki because he's already in a place where he's, the choice of who to go to for advice is what's significant there, not that he's using Islam to make sense of it, right? Within Islam, there's gonna be as many different answers to that question. Sure, but he's not going to a Marxist professor. I mean, he's going to an Islamic cleric. But that doesn't, I mean, the fact that he's going to an Islamic cleric is, it doesn't really narrow it down the range of possible answers to that question any more than, Sure, sure. I mean, the Marxist professors are gonna, Marxist professors are gonna give us varied range of answers. But the claim isn't that Islam is, no one disagrees with the idea that it's a big tent, but I mean, are you trying to make the claim that? I'm saying that the question is, what's driving this, right? Not like once you're in a position of going down a path of advocacy, of indicating violence or engaging in violence. Not like, what is the language that you're gonna use to think about targeting? What is the kind of language that you're gonna use to think about how you legitimize what you're doing? Yes, of course, he's using an Islamic language to do all that. But that doesn't really get you to, what is underlying this? Where does this violence come from? Well, what is the answer with Nezha Nader-Hussam? So the answer with him is, in my opinion, he's someone who's working as a psychiatrist with veterans of the Iraq War, and every day he's hearing stories of what he considers to be war crimes being reported by the people that he's treating. He goes to a senior officer saying, I feel I need to report these war crimes to senior officers that they can be investigated. And that's turned down. He's getting all kinds of, he's a victim of an Islamophobic abuse case when he's in Texas. There's all kinds of political stories there that for me are a significant part of a story that we constantly downplay. We constantly think that the explanation for what he's done is that he's kind of been brainwashed into fanaticism by some kind of religious ideology. We ignore the political side of it. Obviously, one way into this is to go back to... Can I suggest another one? Yeah, please do. Yeah, which is a psychological explanation which you don't seem to like. No, no, my argument is this. Obviously, when you think about, if you think about the question of what causes terrorism, which if you look at the scholarship on this before 9-11, when I think we were more clear-headed about this, the best kind of scholarship that you'd see is people like Martha Crenshaw who talk about, if you want to understand terrorism, you need to understand it on three different levels and think about how those three different levels interact. There's an individual level, a psychological level, which is precisely your question from earlier of, well, lots of people are angry about foreign policy, but how come it's just some that choose to act on it in violent ways? Then there's the question of the kind of group dynamics, whether that's the terrorist organization or the social networks that Mark Sageman has kind of emphasized, and then there's the wider political context that is there as well. What we've done since 9-11 is condense our explanatory model down to just the individual ideology, usually understood in a religious way, and occasionally think about the group dynamics, and we've excluded politics. I'd like us to go back to a kind of rich and more elaborate analysis in which we have all those three levels, and we don't ignore solutions and counter-terrorism policies that take into account the political drivers of this. So what would that look like? So, you know, so then I think the starting point would be to think about foreign policy very differently so that we do a lot better job of not creating a political context in which terrorism becomes more likely. You know, the fact that we have once again made this assumption in recent months that we will bomb them over there so they don't bomb us over here, right? We're back to bombing Iraq, and all of these assumptions only make sense because of these flawed models that we have, right? That ignore how foreign policy has been counterproduced. Isn't that somewhat complicated, but I mean we're not, I mean we're doing that at the request of the Iraqi government, they were begging us to do this. I mean it's- So well, that doesn't mean we have to do it. No, but I'm just- We put that government in power, so that's kind of circular. Well, I mean, I think that there is quite a healthy understanding in Iraq that ISIS is a potentially substantial threat to them. I mean, we're doing that at their request. I mean, we did it actually very reluctantly. Sure, but you know, I think, the problem that we have here is that we're constantly in this cycle of violence, right? Where we try and fix whatever the current perceived threat to the United States is by going and inflicting mass violence and then that generates a whole load of new threats and then we go and fix those and this is an endless cycle that we're in, right? And so, you know, I think we can be a lot more, we can be a lot smarter about thinking about how we break out of that cycle. And the key to breaking out of that cycle is to understand that we are ourselves radicalized, right? We have been much more willing to use violence in much more places since 9-11, you know, which is what radicalization is supposed to mean. So understanding our own implication, our own complicity in violence, I think is important to do that and that's an inconvenient and uncomfortable conversation to have, but I think we really need to have that conversation in the US. You know, the only way we can condemn the terrorism that groups like ISIS are involved in without hypocrisy is if we also have a moral condemnation and critique of when we kill civilians, right? And do that in equal measure. That's how we become a credible force for peace in the world and how we start to create situations in the Middle East where we might have some friendly governments out there, but we're considered to be a force for violence by ordinary people. And part of this as well is about our alliances with regimes like the Saudi regime, the Jordanian regime, the Egyptian regime, where this is obviously a long history of supporting authoritarian regimes under some notion of stability and then something like Egypt 2011 happens and we certainly aren't sure whose side we're on. We seem to be as much interested in siding with the military, with their long history of torture and so forth in Egypt as we are with a popular revolution. So these are the kinds of areas where I think we can really rethink our policies and think about envisioning a situation in which we become a force for peace and democracy in a way which we're a million miles away from being right now in the Middle East. Great, well let's throw it open to questions. If you have a question, I'll raise your hand and wait for the mic. Courtney, we'll start with this lady here. Good afternoon, my name's Mahir. I blog as PETA Policy. I was just wondering, in your interviews with law enforcement and FBI, I was wondering if you were able to ask for statistics or figures on how much personal gun sales have gone up and the use of these weapons by groups like the KKK or affiliates like that in the US in response to this concern of counterterrorism. In response to the fear of terrorism. The fear that's gone up is there been a parallel world going on that we don't hear about the gun use and the consumption of that. I mean, I didn't ask that exact question, but one of the things that, I think one of the things that's significant here is that we've kind of let the question of far-right violence fall by the wayside, which I know is something New America's been also arguing. There was, soon after Obama came to office, Department of Homeland Security did a study of far-right violence by one of the unit in there, and once it became public that that research was being done, there was a big uproar and the unit was shut down. So part of the problem here is that the kind of narratives, the climate, that the assumptions that we have about what terrorism is have led to resources being thrown in one direction and we have blind spots on the far-right. So I think that's a valid point. I don't know if there's any data that anyone's done around that particular question of gun sales. Certainly there was reports of increasing gun sales after Obama came into office, but that's more about the issue of someone having a black president, right? So you're here. Thank you very much. I'm going to take it to the discussion of foreign policy that I think you were actually trying to have. So in the blurb describing this event, there was a mention of Edward Snowden's disclosures, and I work with a whistleblowing organization here in D.C., and I've been researching some of this and some of the facts that I've come across in this research. First of all, one of the things that Snowden disclosed was that the NSA was giving raw email and phone communications to the Israeli military intelligence service. That's communications of all U.S. citizens that the NSA intercepted without redacting names. So that's one fact. We also have Israeli security forces training thousands of U.S. police forces across the United States for several years. So your story about the Imam, although I realize that was an FBI operation, comes to mind. And then we have recently the same intelligence unit that was receiving the raw data of U.S. citizens phone calls and emails. Recently 43 Israeli whistleblowers came forth from that intelligence unit saying the information that they were using or gathering on Palestinians was being used to basically entrap innocent Palestinians and essentially to recruit them to become collaborators. So we have a long history of U.S. and Israeli intelligence, law enforcement, military police, enforcement agencies collaborating to gather the U.S. and Israel. And your research on the situation of Muslims in the United States, have you come across evidence where our cooperation with Israel has somehow impacted U.S. citizens? And if not, do you know of others who are researching that? You know, I think people like Max Blumenthal have done work on that, which kind of tells a story about the way in which, as you were saying, police departments here take kind of models from Israel. New York Police Department ran a surveillance program until recently collecting information about sending informants into masks and having undercover agents go to restaurants and community centers and so forth to gather information about people's expressive activity, what would normally be thought of as First Amendment protected. And that was reported to be modeled on the Israeli strategies in the West Bank. In fact, we had a situation where the New York Police Department was effectively subsidizing the Arab and South Asian restaurant sector in New York because they were sending so many undercover agents into restaurants to kind of gather notes on conversations that people were having. And by the way, none of that surveillance led to any criminal leads between 2006 and 2012. So those examples exist. I think there's a kind of, in a way, a longer historical point to be made here, which is a lot of the way we think about terrorism comes out of initiatives in the late 70s, early 1980s by kind of pro-Israel lobby groups that wanted to create a certain narrative of terrorism that said there's some kind of association between terrorism and Islam. So when you think about what's happening in Palestine, don't think about this as a human rights issue or as a military occupation issue, but think about this as a religious extremism issue. There was a kind of a concerted effort to do that. And so when you get Reagan's war on terror in the 80s, which we kind of forget about now, we had a war on terror in the 80s when there actually was no terrorism within the United States of any significance, but we had a war on terror nevertheless. And that was framed around, that was the beginning of kind of embedding this notion of this association between Islam and terrorism, which then all kinds of terrorism experts and so forth have kind of turned into our common sense assumption since then. So I think that's significant because that's hugely damaging. And that fosters Islamophobia within the United States. And so I think that's another level on which to think about your question. Shall I go over here? Oh, there's a glasses here. No, thank you very much. I'm just wondering, just connecting to your first point about the transition from the President Bush war on terror to the normalization of that concept and the President Obama. I just think that what could be a gap in a lot of the discussion could be the fact that, are we not dealing with competing extremisms as a informing paradigm? Because what you have is the extremism of the neocons embedded then within a state structure and getting all its wherewithal and its legitimacy from the fact that it is the state and that it becomes a surveillance state. And it becomes a state that understands its exceptionalism to mean that you can torture outside your borders, that you can redact outside your borders, that you can kill outside your borders without accountability. And that becomes a mainstreamed extremism still doing violence, still being able to do the kind of things within that it deploys in another ideology in the name of fighting that ideology. And so I think that should we not invert the discussion to reflect that we are probably dealing with mirror images in the way in which it goes. I think in much the same way, the kind of destruction wrought at the hands of guns probably outweigh what destruction is wrought at the hands of terror within the borders of the USA. And yet a body fomenting the right to shoot and the right to bear arms, the NRA is so germane and mainstreamed to the political system. I just think that there's a, the other side of the mirror may be absent from the little that I've glanced through your book because if we see that mirror, we can begin to detect the strains of extremism that crosses ideology and that it's a pathology. I think that we're dealing with rather than an ideology and that it's available across ideologies, in fact. You know, I think you're right to kind of think about violence more generally in US society. So we have something like 15,000 murders a year in the US, right? And so most of those gun related, right? So if we had a pot of $100 billion that we wanted to say how are we gonna use that money to make it less likely that Americans are deliberately killed? You know, we'd start, I think, with trying to think about gun crime and terrorism would be probably quite low down the list if we were just going on kind of numbers of people who are dying. And I broadly, I wouldn't, I don't think I put it quite the same way as you have in my book, but I broadly agree with you that a lot of what's going on here is this kind of mirroring or this kind of circular relationship, right? Where we have state violence producing non-state violence, producing state violence, producing non-state violence in a circle, right? And so understanding that we are part of that circle, right? Our government is part of that circle. It's not just somehow, you know, we tend to do this. One of the things that, I used this phrase earlier that, you know, we have to understand that our government also radicalized, right? Was willing to use violence in more places. One of the things the word terrorism does is it basically arbitrarily separates out some violence and says that violence is fanatical and crazy and to be morally condemned, but other kinds of violence by implication are normal, necessary, rational, right? It's always got that kind of feel to it. And so, you know, one of the requirements that I think we have, if we want to actually be morally consistent in thinking about these questions, is to say, well, if we're killing civilians as well, then what is, you know, we need to account for that and acknowledge our complicity in that as well, right? And the processes that lead to that, right? The enabling environment for that, which is some of the things that you're talking about. John, I'm here to stir it up. You mentioned earlier about the four step process that the FBI have identified. As the person's becoming more radicalized and to become a terrorist, what is the reaction of his friends, colleagues and other people in the Muslim community as they're observing this increased radicalization? And is there anything that indicates as he's going through these four steps that all of a sudden he goes to step three and then he gets back to step two? Right, well, you know, in the literature, those are some of the questions that people talk about as significant possible interventions, right? Because obviously if you can create a situation in which friends and other people around pass on information about someone being in stage three, that's useful from an investigative point of view. And obviously if you can find out what would take someone back from stage three to stage two and to stage one, then that would also be incredibly helpful. The problem is that I think these models are flawed as an account of how someone becomes a terrorist. And so I don't think that they provide a good kind of way into these questions. But of course there is a question of, you know, there are all kinds of examples of cases where people argue that they've been able to intervene, right? Sort of community activists, for example, have argued that they've been able to intervene where they think that someone might be about to get involved in some kind of plot and basically pull them back this way, right? And there's a literature about people's ideas on how you might go about that, which I think is incredibly valuable and important. And obviously, you know, going back to the conversation earlier about Tamal and Saneev, and if we had a model of what that intervention would look like, that would be something that you'd want that mosque to be doing at that point when he's seeming to be angry about the Imam Sermon and so forth, right? After the 7-7 bombings in London, you know, there was a kind of network of community activists in the Muslim communities in England who, you know, who kind of developed a practice of interventions, right? Which I think still remains an interesting model where you have youth workers or activists or mentors who reach out to people who seem to be angry about injustices taking place in the war on terror and so forth, and you develop various ways in which you engage them. Often, in some cases, it's about an emotional problem. In some cases, it's about a political kind of anger that you then wanna channel into some kind of nonviolent political activism. In some cases, it might be that you wanna kind of have a more religious ideological conversation. This was the various ways in which these community activists were thinking. So there are definitely models out there that I think we could do a lot more to explore. The key point there is in implementing these kinds of ideas, you know, you don't want to turn this kind of activism into another channel of intelligence gathering because then you're just gonna end up in a situation where it becomes counterproductive and no one wanna engage. Certainly, you know, these kinds of things are really important right now with question of what happens to people who come back from Syria and Iraq, right? Or someone who decides they wanna come back. We have a load of people in Turkey right now who've left ISIS, decide they wanna come back to Europe, they're scared to do so because they don't wanna go to prison. You know, a sensible approach would actually be to enable them to come back and then engage with them in these kinds of programs, giving them some kind of support, some kind of counseling and then actually holding them up and saying, you know, these are some people who can tell you what it's really like if you join ISIS and that's gonna be a very credible way of discouraging other people from going, right? We don't wanna do that because we have this whole language of extremism and radicalization. We think that they're inherently fanatical because they've been brainwashed into some religion, right? But, I mean, there's other ways of telling these stories that kind of open up a lot more interesting policy opportunities. This gentleman here. Your assertion is that Islam is not fixed. Perhaps that is true on the global level. But let's just go onto the micro level. For example, in Madrasa, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan region, depending upon the source of the funding of that Madrasa, the teaching of Islam, for example, if it's from Salafi sources or Wahhabi sources, they're very fixed. There are a thousand and thousands and thousands of students who go there and who internalize the internal logic of that discourse. And that way of Islam, that is equally true and that is from a general perspective very, very violent and it may not be a proxy. For example, the students growing up in that kind of environment, it may not be a proxy for semantics or linguistic or something like a political struggle. It may actually be life or the truth of life. They're deriving it from that source of Islam that has been taught to them. Don't you think that is fixed? Okay, so I think the key question here is, I agree broadly what you're saying, but the key point in this issue is, when you said Wahhabism is a very violent, generally a violent belief or something like that, right? And I mean, I think that doesn't really work as an explanation here. My research has been predominantly on US-based and UK-based Muslims, right? And I've spent a lot of time doing work around the kind of Salafi networks in both those countries, right? I mean, just the data just doesn't stand up to the idea that if you're a Salafi, you're more likely in any significant way to become a terrorist. It just doesn't, so, you know, and if we start getting into that, then we lose opportunities for, you know, we lose opportunities for building partnerships that are actually more productive in policy terms, right? I think that's, you know, because there's as many Salafi activists in London, for example, who are doing this work that I was just talking about, of engaging with young people with a nonviolent argument, right? So we lose the opportunities to mobilize that. And I want to kind of downplay the complexity here and the kind of, you know, the sheer difficulty of making sense of these issues and working out what policies might work. Counterterrorism policy by its very nature is incredibly difficult to kind of get any kind of data on, any kind of predictive power on, right? My, you know, my key point here is just that I think we are doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring all kinds of strands to this that we don't want to face up to because they're inconvenient to us, right? But yeah, I would say that I think it's not, it's too mechanical to say, you know, being a Salafi or being a Wahhabi is this kind of stepping stone onto terrorism, right? I mean, that's too mechanical. So over here. Would it not be a little more productive, and maybe you have already, I haven't read your book, to look at the way our culture and our government reacts when some young male Protestant goes in and shoots up a school and some young male Muslim talks about terrorism? I mean, our entire reaction to these two and the causal, one is totally psychological and the other is religious political. But are there really any different? That's my question. I mean, I think that's, you know, I think one thing we can do is look at, I mean, the differences in our reactions to those are illustrative, right? Sorry? And the government, sure, sure. But I'm not sure, you know, I think in some of these cases it may well be that the best way to interpret what's happened is, you know, on the kind of Columbine model, right? Where we think of this as someone who's kind of flipped some kind of psychological story and they want to inflict violence and the kind of ideological vocabulary that seems to be a part of how they interpret what they're doing is kind of secondary, right? But actually, I think that may work in one or two cases, but I think by and large, we have to tell the political story as well as the psychological story, right? If we're going to understand this. And so in that case, I think the kind of analogs and not so much, you know, the kind of Columbine-style cases, but, you know, the longer history of political violence, right? You know, things like the anarchist bombers and from the 19th century and the various terrorist campaigns in the 20th century, right? It seems to me that's where we can find analogs. The differences then also need to be highlighted, right? So, you know, we're dealing with a situation where it's not like the IRA or the FLN or any of these kind of, you know, mid to late 20th century terrorist organizations because there isn't an organizational structure in the same way, right? So then there's important differences there. But in other ways, I think the analogs, I think this is part of this longer history of political violence, not a history of kind of pathological violence. Okay, this gentleman here in the green shirt. So your basic argument is that we should shift our understanding of these as religious radicalization to political radicalization. My question is, how do we do that in a society where we have elected officials who say that American Muslims are a cancer upon our society and that they represent a threat and that we shouldn't trust them? I mean, in my home state of Oklahoma, we have elected officials who've gone on the record and said this and then when Care has asked for an apology, he says that they're being political bullies and they're going after his First Amendment rights because they're afraid that the truth about American Muslims will be exposed. Right, I mean, I think it's, I'm not saying this is an easy argument to make in the US today, right? Obviously that is a difficult argument to make. And we have not just a kind of whole set of assumptions that have kind of just been embedded in our discussions on these issues over more than a decade, but we also have reasonably well-funded campaign groups that are constantly trying to reproduce and maintain those assumptions, right? So, I guess I'd be more optimistic than your question implies about the ability for us as a society to do better on this, right? And to start having this conversation in a smarter way. I think that public opinion on this area is much more dynamic than it might at first seem, I think, actually. I think that, you know, one of the interesting things that we saw last year was that pretty much for the first time, opinion polls were saying that Americans do not want to trade to the liberties for national security, right? Which is striking. Yeah, I think there was, there's been a lot of beneath, just beneath the surface in America. I think there's a lot of frustration and kind of confusion about the war on terror, about national security, which is kind of what got Obama elected as well, right? And even though he then didn't use that kind of energy to actually bring about any substantial changes in national security policy, but there was a certain body of public opinion there that drove him into office. And I think it's still there. And I think, you know, we can do more to mobilize around these kind of civil rights issues about freedom of expression, Islamophobia, and the kind of costs of the war on terror. So I'd be a bit more optimistic. Great, well, thank you very much, Arun, for a very brilliant presentation. And I'm sure you're willing to sign books, which are next door. Sure, thank you. Thank you.