 Good afternoon. Thanks everyone for coming. My name is Haroun Mogul. I'm a fellow in the National Security Studies Program here at New America. Today's panel is titled What Do We Make of Extremism After Wisconsin. I wanted to very briefly introduce the topic, and then I'll let the speakers go at it. They'll each have about 10 minutes of comments, and then I'll invite your participation for questions. Please feel free to ask any and all questions. We're trying to make this as interactive as possible. The idea for the event essentially comes after the August 5th attack on a Sikh Gurdwara, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on the day after an attack of a parent arson at a mosque in Missouri, Joplin, Missouri. These are part of a larger pattern of attacks against immigrants, minorities, Muslims, Sikhs, populations that are often sometimes confused, and an attempt to better understand what's going on in the 2012 election season, and the effect potentially of a bad economy and of some of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric that's out there. But I will let the panelists elaborate on that themselves. To my right, we have Spencer Ackerman, who's a senior reporter for Wired. Hopefully you've read his stuff. He's got some very interesting stuff out there coming out regularly. Here we have Amandeep Siddhu, who is from the co-founder of the Sikh Coalition. He's an attorney at McDermott and works with the Interfaith Alliance. We were going to have Valerie Cora come in to speak. Unfortunately, she is actually in Wisconsin. It was sort of a last-minute change of plans. But Amandeep has graciously taken some of his time to come here and talk to us. And then all the way at the end, we have Haris Thoreen, who's the director of the Washington D.C. Office of Impact, the Muslim Public Affairs Council. So I'll start with Spencer if that's okay, and then we'll move on this way. And then we'll have time for questions. Thanks very much. Thanks to Haroon for holding this. Thanks to New America for hosting this. Thanks to my fellow panelists for putting up with me on this. I wanted to make a couple quick points, kind of running down a bit of the landscape of domestic extremism. This is usually something that, as you all know, gets discussed in terms of a jihadist threat, a threat from al-Qaeda, a threat from homegrown Islamic extremism. What we've sort of built since 9-11 is an apparatus of surveillance and of detention under the rubric of terrorism that, in practice, is focused very heavily on Muslims. And where this is led has been a variety of different cases. It's hard to really quantify hard numbers. When you look at terrorism arrests related to Islamic extremism after 9-11, you do have a kind of gradation, you have gradations in the severity of the threats here. You have a large population arrested and convicted on things like financial support, usually for groups like Hamas, sometimes for Hezbollah, very, very few for al-Qaeda. And very rarely do you have circumstances, although this is ticked up in recent years, for homegrown Americans who either self-radicalize and join al-Qaeda or seek to sort of promote its agenda. It's out there, but it's statistically rather small. Inside the populace, the cohort that I've mentioned, you've got a significant but still small group of people who've been convicted of violent acts or of conspiracy to commit violent acts. And the point that I'm driving at here is that in this cohort, which is already very, very small compared to the broader population of American Muslims, an even still smaller cohort of people who've been convicted of violent activities. That's not to say they weren't plotting violent activities. It is to say that this is small, even within the small cohort of those who've been correctly surveilled, apprehended, arrested, and convicted. And yet, when you see the discourse in this country about terrorism, there's almost a presumption of guilt on the part of the entire Muslim population. And this is found away over the course of this, what you might call the 9-11 decade, of infecting, I would use that word, the institutions of national security that are supposed to safeguard the security as well as the rights and liberties of the American people. I did a series last year where I found what power points and presentations to the FBI Training Academy at Quantico delivered to second and third year experienced counterterrorism agents that found that they were being taught that all Muslims are violent, that mainstream Muslims are violent, that Al-Qaeda was a distraction from the actual threat of Islam itself. And it became sort of baffling at first to understand how it was that the nation's premier law enforcement agency, which is supposed to protect us from this very specific threat, had come to accept implicitly and host this overbroad conception of a threat that treated a significant population of American citizens, not as people who are entitled to rights under the Constitution that the government is supposed to safeguard for them, but threats to that very apparatus. And we see some of the wages of this. I'll take two examples really quick that were in the news fairly recently. It came out in testimony on Monday that the NYPD, which is built, I'm a New Yorker, I have both some experience with the NYPD as a recipient of its services and also sort of seeing the way it actually polices New York City. It built an elaborate system of surveillance that was not tethered to suspicion of and certainly commission of a crime. It was built around the idea that in order to get tips to understand what was actually happening in cohorts in New York City that they considered to be possible incubators of terrorism, which is to say American Muslim communities, one of which on Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush is right by where I grew up. They would go into mosques, they would find informers, they would track patterns of life of legitimate business people. And there was a great deal of concern when they started to get reported on, do some great reporting from the Associated Press, that you would see a lot of hand-rigging stories and editorials about this that perhaps this has, even among people who I would say do not have a particular animus against American Muslims, they would say, well, perhaps this is overbroad, but isn't there a legitimate threat that people have to look out for and doesn't that justify these perhaps extraordinary police powers? And what we found from open testimony on Monday is that not a single lead in the six years of this surveillance program has been generated from this enhanced surveillance, that six years have gone by not a single terrorism investigation has been launched because of it, let alone yielding a conviction. So if you've got to put together a kind of cost-benefit analysis of how something that has a very quantifiable, measurable, understandable, and intuitively kind of disturbing impact on American citizens and American nationals, that is to say they are surveilled by a law enforcement agency, versus the benefits to national security. If you were to take it purely on that cost-benefit calculus, it's hard to see how you could make a case for this going on. And yet this is six years that this program has existed. It had been at least one year that an individual responsible for this FBI training that I had found had been engaged in similar activity. Websites inside the FBI's intranet had been set up for disseminating rather curious, obscure, and somewhat misleading information about Islam within the FBI's own online system so that responsible agents, responsible counterterrorism agents who were seeking to get a little bit of background on the cases that they'd be seeking together, would find information about the perfidies of Islam itself. And the thing that this is kind of needing up to is a question for our society as a whole, which is at what point is this enough? At what point do we say that exceptional law enforcement surveillance and security powers given to the government to protect the citizens of the United States from an extreme circumstance that is the threat of al-Qaeda have become simply a regularized aspect of the American national security state? And is there a constituency for rolling it back? What we've now seen, and this will be the point I'd like to very much hear my colleagues on the panel discuss, we've now seen incidences of violence against the Sikh community. We've seen incidences of white supremacist violence that we ought to forthrightly call terrorism. It is the, I think it's fair to conclude, violence toward a political goal, and that is the pretty standard non-controversial, you know, non-religious specific definition of terrorism. I interviewed a Department of Homeland Security analyst who found himself in trouble in 2009 for writing a paper about the rise of right-wing extremism. He was denounced in the media, often by conservatives, for issuing this overbroad warning about right-wing violence. And conservatives were very worried that this meant that a new democratic administration would start taking the extraordinary powers of the American national security state and use it against people who had done nothing more than express their rights to be conservative, to espouse right-wing views in this country. And I interviewed this analyst, and he told me that one of the most immediate consequences was that his bureau, looking at neo-Nazis, at white supremacists, was gutted. And basically after, you know, a platoon of around 12 analysts during his time now been reduced to one, and he's not one of them. But I did have to say, and I pressed him in interviews and wrote this in a story I wrote about him, some of his critics had a real point. His warning about right-wing extremism went far beyond the threat of neo-Nazis, of white supremacists, and you could see how if you were someone of a conservative political affiliation, how you might be, rather worried that there would be this atmosphere of collective suspicion that someone who writes for a national review or posts to a conservative blog or maintains conservative viewpoints on Twitter or something like that might come under suspicion. And I think that that seems rather uncontroversially un-American, problematic, over-broad, and a reasonable concern about the civil liberties of people engaging nothing more than constitutionally protected speech. And I would close by saying, perhaps that same tenor of understanding that applied towards right-wingers, we ought to similarly exercise as we judge what this state is doing to American Muslims. Thank you very much, Amun. Thank you, Arun, and thank you to the New America Foundation for hosting this event. The perspective that I'm going to bring is going to be one, first and foremost, as a Sikh American, secondly, as an attorney in the Sikh American community that's worked on issues of discrimination and biased crimes over the last decade since 9-11, and to provide some context to what led to Oak Creek and what's being done after Oak Creek. As everyone in the room is well aware, the tragedy that occurred at the Sikh community in Gurdwara on October 5th took the lives of six individuals. It was a tragic attack on the Sikh community. Something that as shocked as we were, as a community, as shocked as we were as a nation, did not, unfortunately, come as a surprise, because it's something that the community had feared and anticipated not just since 9-11, but even before 9-11, an attack by an individual who had known ties to neo-Nazi groups and white supremacist beliefs. The fear that that type of attack could occur has existed in the Sikh American community and certainly in other minority communities for many years. After Oak Creek, we saw widespread media attention. CNN had a crew on the ground for the majority of that week, and an unprecedented amount of attention focused on a small religious minority in the United States of close to 700,000 individuals, and probably more attention and media coverage on the specific aspects of the Sikh faith that had occurred literally in the three decades before that. So you had a community that saw this horrible incident and immediately looked to how it could be shifted into a positive opportunity to draw attention to the Sikh American community, the unique circumstances of the articles of faith that Sikhs maintain, including the turban and uncut hair and beard. And so you immediately had the media attention. You had government responding in an unprecedented ways. Flags flown at half staff for the week. Attorney General Holder speaking at the memorial at the end of the week after the attacks. The First Lady is on the ground in Oak Creek today meeting with the victim's families there at the Sikh temple. So you saw resilience in the community. You saw this response which was not one of hunkering down a chilling effect on the practice of religion, which is really ultimately the goal of an attacker like the one in Oak Creek or similarly the attackers in recent events just in the last month on mosques throughout the United States. So we have a response of a community that is one of education outreach and really moving forward. But for all of the progress that occurred since 9-11, specifically in the Sikh American community, the proliferation of national organizations like the Sikh Coalition, which was literally created the day after 9-11 to track a crimes, provide legal resources and respond to the unprecedented backlash that the Sikh American community faced after 9-11. Despite all of that progress in the last decade, Oak Creek was a wake-up call that there was a tremendous amount of work that still needed to be done and there was a threat in the form of as has been correctly characterized as domestic terrorism and the threat of hate crimes that this incident led to the deaths of six individuals. But in the last decade has led to the deaths of hundreds and perhaps even thousands of six Muslim South Asians Arabs and those perceived to be members of those communities. So I think what's important to note is the context. We talk about Islamophobia, we talk about mistaken identity and the idea that this was an assumed attack on a Muslim community, but it happened to be six because we were turbines. To some extent perhaps that's true, but ultimately there is a context here and that is one that predates 9-11. It's an association between the turbine and extremism or terrorism as early as the 1980s in my lifetime growing up in Virginia born and raised there. I experienced hate crimes, I experienced bias crimes, I experienced bigotry. So this wasn't a phenomenon that was created on September 11th it's a phenomenon that far predated 9-11. In fact six have been in the United States for over a century. In 1906 there's an incident in Bellingham, Washington where a community of sick Americans living peacefully there were literally driven out of their town by an angry mob. So not an attack on an assumed Muslim community, an attack on a sick community, an attack on six because they were a turbine. We look different and an attack on otherness. So looking back on the pre 9-11 context we have to think about what that means when you have an attack like what happened in Oak Creek. So an attack on a minority community practicing their faith and ultimately we have a context today where that incident while it's been characterized as an act of domestic terrorism will not be noted in the FBI hate crimes tracking statistics as a hate crime against the sick American community. It will either be characterized as an attack against the Muslim community and put into that bucket. Or it would be put into the so-called other category which could account for any attack on any non-delineated member of a minority community that is tracked by the FBI. So after the attacks in Oak Creek there's been a tremendous effort. It actually preceded the attacks on Oak Creek but it's been stepped up since those attacks to push the FBI to actually include a component that tracks hate crimes against the sick American community. The purpose of these tracking mechanisms is to understand the problem, allocate resources, figure out solutions. So if there isn't a way to measure what's happening in a community like the sick American community there's no way to actually start to solve the problem. So part of it is an anti-Muslim sentiment and assumption that anyone associated with the Muslim community is associated with terrorism or extremism but part of it is understanding that it's an attack on Islamist in America, an attack on someone who looks different because they were a turban or they have a beard or they have brown skin. So looking at statistics we don't have them from the FBI but we have some context. We have the Southern Property Law Center telling us that there was a 60% increase in the proliferation of white neo-Nazi, white supremacists neo-Nazi hate groups in the state since 9-11. You have 2010 statistics showing that 20% of hate crimes that have occurred have been focused on the religious beliefs of the victims. FBI, over 6,600 hate crimes reported in 2010 broken down amongst the many communities but no specific breakdown in the sick American community. Post 9-11 the sick coalition began tracking incidents in the sick community. There were at least 300 incidents within the first 90 days after 9-11 those ranged from individuals being pushed of yelled at, screamed at, physically assaulted in the street to the murder of Bulbir Singh Sodhi a week after the 9-11 attacks. But part of the problem is the underreporting of incidents in the community. So you have similarly a study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2005 indicating that hate crimes are potentially underreported by a factor of 15. So if you take the 300 incidents that occurred in the sick community in those three months and multiply it by 15, you have some scope. If you take the 20% of 6,000 anti-religious hate crimes that occurred in 2010 and take that up by a factor of 15, you see the full scope of the problem. And underreporting is an issue that is ultimately caused by multiple factors. You have community, for example, the sick community where law enforcement in the predominant home country of India is not trusted. And so you have a lack of trust of law enforcement, a lack of understanding of fear of immigration enforcement. And so you have underreporting of incidents. You have incidents that go routine and things that people simply accept as the price of being a religious minority in America. On a personal note, the day of 9-11 driving home from my office, I worked in Alexandria. I was driving past the Pentagon. I was driven off the side of the road by an angry driver between his hands with profanities. Ultimately that was a hate incident. But could I report it? Did I get a license plate? No. But that's happening. And it happened after 9-11. It happens today. I just looked at my email before I came in here in an incident of a sick business owner in New Jersey asking his neighboring business to move his tow truck so it didn't block his driveway. And he was violently brutally beaten by that individual. And while the motivation could have simply been an anger towards that request, there's always the fear that there's some component of hate or bias associated with those types of attacks. So providing these statistics is really to give you some context to the fact that there are a lot of incidents happening. And no matter how many resources the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the South Asian community have within nonprofit organizations to do this great work, the onus is on the federal government to start tracking these incidents, to start providing resources to pay attention to organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have been tracking the Oak Creek attacker for over a decade. And say, we need to focus attention. We need to figure out why these incidents are occurring and where they're occurring and provide the appropriate resources to hopefully come together and figure out a solution. Specifically in the Sikh community, part of the solution is drawing attention, providing education. So in addition to the FBI tracking effort where we have 19 members of the Senate and over 90 members of the House have written a letter to the FBI indicating that this should be tracked. There's also been a call for Senate hearings on the issue of hate crimes and bias incidents in the United States in the wake of Oak Creek and the attacks on the mosques across the Southeast United States. 150 organizations are signed on. Many of those individuals representing their organizations are in the room today. There's no question that there's a call for something to be done. And moving forward, the Sikh American community, we see that being in places of employment breaking down barriers. Six in law enforcement, six in the US military. Having the visibility of a minority with a turban with a beard in the context of being the average American, there's nothing more American than serving your country in the armed forces. And so we're very proud to have obtained the accommodation of three Sikh Americans to serve in the US Army in the last two years. And that sends a strong message. But you can see with Oak Creek the challenge we're up against. We're never going to educate the attacker in Oak Creek about who the Sikh American community is, why we wear a turban, and why we are Americans. But we can do a better job as a country of tracking those incidents and providing resources to those communities to protect themselves. So I welcome everyone's questions after the panel. Thank you, Almond. Harris? Thank you. Thank you, Haroun, and to the New America Foundation for hosting this conversation. I don't think this conversation takes place enough. And I think, as Aman mentioned, there are folks who are doing this great work, tracking this great work, but not enough people are hearing about this conversation on extremism and violence. And I think what I want to focus on is looking at violence and its correlation to political extremism. I think we are going through a very specific period in our country where political extremism has been mainstream to a certain extent. And we see this in all issues. Not just on issues of religious or minorities or minorities in general, but we see this in the news, we see this in the media, and we see this in the halls of Congress, unfortunately. So what I want to focus on a little bit is the fact that the hate crimes that are taking place, the violence that's taking place, this is not occurring in a vacuum. There's been, over the past decade, since the 9-11, 9-11 decade that we're talking about, there has been very deliberate mechanisms and institutions and processes put in place by individuals, foundations and groups that have created this environment, this environment of fear, of hate, which then translates into violence. And not many people are willing to say that and are willing to go far enough, but that is when political extremism becomes mainstreamed, people then take it to the next level. And political rhetoric does not fall on deaf ears. That is something that we see that groups like the ACLU has seen, that groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center has seen. And I'll go into those numbers a little bit later. But just to kind of give everybody a little bit of a background in terms of when this political extremism became mainstreamed as it pertained to the American Muslim community. We saw in the midterm election of 2006 the first kind of proliferation of a national conversation about Muslims, and the marginalization and making the American Muslim community into a fifth column. And we saw local candidates at the very local level, not just at the federal level, seeing this as a potential election-winning strategy. So there corresponded bashing Muslims, anti-Muslim rhetoric to gaining votes and tying it to national security. So anti-Muslim rhetoric and national security became part of the same conversation. And you saw ads, TV commercials, you saw newspaper ads, you saw mailers that went out by various individuals at the local level basically saying that Muslims are coming to take this country over. They want to implement Sharia, and that's part of a larger grand strategy to somehow subvert the constitution and take America over. And so this idea of anti-Muslim rhetoric and national security were brought together and it was used as a political force at local elections and federal elections as well. Then we saw in 2008 the idea of the otherizations of Muslims at a very national level with folks calling Obama a Muslim for the conversation around Sharia starting at that point. And so the otherization became very intense. And those who really wanted to use a political agenda against Obama started to say that he was a Muslim and that he had Muslim tendencies or that he went to a madrasa. And so this conversation became very mainstream for a while until 18% of the Republican Party at one point during that election believed that he was a Muslim. Then we continue on after that in 2000, and you see this correlation with the national elections taking place 2006, 2008, and then 2010 again. We saw the Park 51 controversy, the Quran burning controversy that took place. Again, this otherization of the American Muslim community, the fact that they wanted to build a ground zero victory mosque, and that conversation becoming national to an extent where the president had to weigh in and then even retract to a certain extent. So that otherization continued, that politicization of the American Muslim community and basically using it as a political football continued. And then of course recently we've seen Michelle Bachman and this whole idea that somehow American Muslims at the highest levels of service, of public service are infiltrating the government to somehow subvert it from within. And this time it didn't stop at American Muslim institutions which has been quite accepted in Washington to a certain extent, and even the news media over the past 10 years. But it went to people at very high levels, people like Homa Abdeen, Congressman Keith Ellison, other folks who were accused of somehow infiltrating the government and wanting to subvert the government from within. And so these innuendos were thrown out there and it sticks. So what the strategy is, and part of this industry that has been created over the past 10 years, it's been an industry that I think many of you know about the fear Inc. report that came out of the Center for American Progress, which is a great report which tracks this industry that has been created. This very lucrative, financially lucrative industry that has been developed. And so this industry has basically, its strategy is as simple. You make as ridiculous as accusations as possible. And you throw it out and it will stick somewhere. Because the politics are really difficult right now. People don't want to take risk. And politicians don't have the political will and mandate to come out and address these issues at a very public level. This has been kind of the stage and the context of the political violence that we see over the past few weeks. And so I also wanted to address the issue of the American Muslim response. The American Muslim response to this craziness. And I'll get into some of the instances that have taken places two fold. You know, after the shooting at the Mara, we saw another 10 hate crimes and hate incidents that took place all over the country. So I mean the list is there from, you know, vandalization of mosques, of graveyards, to throwing of pig feet into mosques, to paintball attacks on mosques. You know, all of this took place over a two to three week period. And what was interesting in this correlation between political rhetoric and violence that we kind of hate crimes that we need to take into consideration is about two weeks ago, about three weeks ago now, Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois, he at a Tad Hall meeting made a statement that was quite interesting. He said, Muslims are out to kill Americans every single week. And right after this, within a two week period, you had three hate crimes that took place within his district or close to his district. That correlation between political rhetoric and hate crimes is very real. And the American Muslim community sees this. They've seen this over the past decade now. And I'll go into why it's important to counter this political rhetoric a little bit later at the public level, because if you don't, it allows for kind of fermenting of ideas and craziness to get to the mainstream. The American Muslim response has been two fold. The first, it's really been a generational divide to a certain extent. A lot of these attacks have taken place in very rural areas. Places where people are not familiar with Muslims. They don't have Muslim neighbors. They're not engaged with the American Muslim community. Yet, there is a presence of the American Muslim community in these areas. Places like Mobile, Alabama, in the Midwest, after Katrina when I was in Mobile, Alabama, I saw in this very small town 20 Pakistani American physicians who had stayed in one house and had not left when the hurricane hit, but stayed to take care of the people who had been affected and impacted by the hurricane. Now, these individuals, they were not known to be Muslim prior to 9-11. You know, they were folks who were, you know, immigrants who had come into the country, but their identity was not marked by the fact that they were Muslim. Now, in the past few years, their identity has been marked. These people are Muslim. So these individuals are, we're getting calls and we've gotten reports where these individuals now have been impacted. Their practices have been impacted. I mean, their medical practices have been impacted. Bullying in schools in these counties and these cities have increased, have been on the increase. You see these individuals who are now, never were asked, you know, what was your faith? What is your ethnicity? They are being asked by their patients, by professionals who work with them what their background is and what their faith is. So they're seeing this at a very real level, at the local level as well. And so they're frightened. There's a lot of apprehension. There are folks who are thinking about moving. You know, I just spoke to a physician who was, who had a practice in Indiana, in a small town in Indiana. He's moving to Los Angeles. He says, I can't stay in practice here. I've got two daughters. They're growing up and they're not able to go to school. So I'm going to have to move to Los Angeles. He's moving his practice now over to Los Angeles. So that's happening at the local level. But what's interesting is there's another generation, the second and third generation of American Muslim are saying the hell with the Bachmans, the hell with these crazies, the Gaffnes and the crazies out there, we're getting involved and engaged in the civic process. So in a place like Washington D.C., about six years ago you probably had only two civic and public policy leadership programs. Now you have at least ten of these programs that are focused on bringing young American Muslims and minorities to Washington to engage in the public policy discourse to find jobs, to find internships. And these young people don't want to stay back and stay home and see their identity be marked by this conversation. So you see this kind of dual approach response where you have the first generation of folks who are a bit worried, who are scared because they've built their lives in these very small communities and have been serving. But then you've got a second generation and third generation are saying we're not going to take this, we're going to actually engage in the conversation and make sure that we push back. So that's been a bit of the type of response that we've seen in the American Muslim community. But there's also been a sense of puzzlement from the American Muslim community in terms of political and religious leadership at the national level. They don't see the politicals, the politicians, the public figures coming out the way they need to come out to counter this political extremism that's taking place, that's being mainstreamed. I mean, Michelle Bachman, that story went on for about two months and didn't get picked up by the media really and didn't get picked up by the politicians until Keith Ellison had to make it an issue and move it to the front of the conversation and the media and get on to Anderson Cooper. When Anderson Cooper picked it up, that's when people like McCain came out, Boehner came out, Ed Rawlins came out. So you don't see this very real political will from public officials on this issue. And the problem with that is if you don't see this political will and public commentary against this type of rhetoric, as we said, it ferments. And then that turns into hate crimes, that turns into conversations that become ugly. What's interesting is that the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mark Potak, was telling me the other day that right after 9-11, there was a spike in hate crimes against those who were perceived to be American Muslims. And a lot of times, it's not even American Muslims, it's just those who were perceived to be American Muslims. And they saw a spike in hate crimes that took place, an act of violence that took place. But when President Bush came out, he went to a mosque. He actually, for a whole, maybe about half a year, about six months, he repeated this conversation that American Muslims are part of the democratic framework of this country, and they were Americans and just as American as any other group. That worked because what Mark told me was that there was a 1600 percent decrease the next year in hate crimes. That's a huge number. And they correlate that to the fact that a lot of folks were listening to President Bush and to senior level administration folks saying that this is not the fault of any specific community. And so it's extremely important when you have people like Colin Powell in 2008 when the conversation around Obama being a Muslim and a Muslim president took place, it was Colin Powell who came out who kind of calmed the situation down and said, so what? So what if we have a Muslim in the White House? So what if there's a Muslim kid who wants to be a president? When that conversation took place publicly, you saw a certain level, even in the media and in the public discourse, a calming of the Muslim scares or the Muslims are coming out to get us. So this type of political will and leadership is extremely important to ensure that this rhetoric does not take hold in the mainstream because that industry that has been created after 9-11, these guys and gals they've got influence. I mean, in 2008 about five or six of our neighbors came to my wife and I and asked those questions about this film called Obsession. And in 2008 there was a film called Obsession that was made basically looking at the radical threat of Islam on the west and in key swing states Ohio, Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, you had about 10 million copies of this DVD that was just mailed to people randomly. And they would get it in their mail, they would get it in their newspaper so I had about five neighbors approach and say, what is this? This is crazy. And we live in northern Virginia. But they had access to a Muslim that they could come to me and I knew the issue and I knew the film and we were working on it. But imagine all those folks in North Carolina in Ohio, in Virginia, in Pennsylvania who received these DVDs but were not able to talk to anyone. And so this industry has been working very hard on the ground with faith communities, with senior citizens, with Rotary clubs to ensure that their message of hate gets across. And when you don't get that political leadership and will at the national level this issue ferments and it creates this very real sense of hate that's created at the local level. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have time for questions. What I'll ask is, first of all, we follow the Jeopardy rule. Your question has to be in the form of a question. If you can't put a question mark at the end of it, it's not a question. And secondly, if you do have a question, just please let us know if it's addressed to someone specific on the panel or to the panel generally. And you can just raise your hands. I'll call on you. Yeah, right here. David Eisenberg, two questions. We have a mic, actually. Make it a little bit easier. David Eisenberg, two questions. Mr. Ackerman, since you mentioned the Department of Homeland Security report that came out a couple years ago, which was widely poo-pooed, to your knowledge, is anybody in government going to revisit the thesis of that report and say, well, yeah, maybe this is something we should actually look into. Will DHS or FBI or any other law enforcement intel community do that? Will Congressman King now hold a series of hearings on the subject? As I recall, he was previously asked to when he was holding his last series of hearing. He said, no, no, we don't need to. To the other panelists, I would ask, have you considered the possibility that, in part, what we're seeing here is simply the fear of a previously relatively secure elite top of society segment looking at America, seeing the future, seeing it's no longer going to be predominantly white and Christian, and saying that scares us, and we're going to lash out against those who are not like us. On the white supremacy neo-Nazi question, I would imagine you would see discrete studies inside agencies about this. Maybe some resources devoted to the subject, but nothing on the order of reorienting. The considerable surveillance resources of the United States government toward it. It's been hard enough just to get basic information about how the FBI breaks down its counter-terrorism budget to a lot funding and a lot manpower toward the threat of Islamic extremism versus in domestic terrorism in neo-Nazi white supremacist movements, so I wouldn't hold my breath on that. Just briefly on that, I won't even attempt to say that I understand the workings of that strategy at the upper levels of that conservative philosophy, but I think the sense, I think as Harris spoke to you very well, the rhetoric coming from high-level politicians is leading to responses at a very localized level because those actions at the local level are being validated. A politician attacks the Muslim community or claims that otherness is a threat to national security or to the fabric of America that gives the attacker in Oak Creek or the attacker of the mosques or anyone who's committed a hate crime justification for their acts. It doesn't just result in the mass killings or the incident that occurred in Oak Creek. It's at the level of kids being bullied in schools. A parent who holds a belief that doesn't correct their child and you have a sick child in New Jersey whose turban was set on fire by a classmate. You have a kid who was brutally beaten in the bathroom because he wears a turban because he's different told by his fellow student that he doesn't belong in this country even though he's born and raised in New Jersey. So whether there's a broad conspiracy on the fact that ultimately there is an increase in minority communities becoming the majority in the next 20 years and this is a response to that threat or if it is a legitimate belief that there is a threat against national security which is misguided in the context of saying the threat is the Muslim community or the threat is this otherness, I can't speak to that but certainly there is no question that there is a correlation between the rhetoric at the highest levels both in politics and in media and what's happening at the human level throughout America. I think there's no question that the demographic shift and the change that we're going through as a nation is part of the equation here and I think as President Bill Clinton says so eloquently as this country changes as the demographics change our biggest challenge as a country will be going through that shift and by 2050 when that change takes place we're going to definitely be tested as a nation but this is where political will and political leadership comes into play. As President Clinton says either you can have a political elite you can have a leadership that is willing to engage the conversation in a way that's constructive so of course there's demographic shifts there's age demographic shifts, there's ethnic shifts there's religious shifts but there's folks whether they're conservative or liberal who can take advantage of that and engage those communities engage those ethnic minorities or religious minorities and make sure that they become part of their platform as a party, as a constituency, as whatever it may be or you can use political rhetoric to try to rile people up and gain some maybe votes in the short term but lose communities in the long term and I think that's why political leadership is so important and we don't talk about that political leadership enough. If people fear that there will be a shift in the demographics and the way our society looks or acts even then we need to be able to have that conversation constructively but that needs to be led by our political leaders. Given your comments Harris I'd be interested in hearing what you think in particular about this question of political leaders speaking out so as you rightly pointed out after 9-11 President Bush took to the stage and made it very clear that American Muslims were part of the American family you had Colin Powell and Michael Chertoff at DHS and many other members of the Republican party you know obviously now many things have changed but to what extent do you think that Democratic leaders I mean if you're going to look at the Republicans versus the Democrats who do you think can not only be viable but also effective in carrying forth a similar kind of message. I know there's been some research done in terms of what audiences you target with more pro-Muslim, pro-Islam messages and so do you think in your view is it do you try to go after those members of the conservative sort of people with more conservative views who might be more amenable or more reachable with these views or would you focus more on sort of a liberal audience. I think we have to look at this it's easy and it's very tempting to look at this from a liberal or conservative prism and kind of then fall into that trap and reinforce our biases and I think a lot of people unfortunately do that. You have a certain political view and you look at every issue that comes into the public sphere through that lens. What I would say is that we need to go after everyone. We need validators and the research shows that we need validators we need national security validators so when Secretary Trotoff came out and said what he said about American Muslims he had a constituency that he was talking to. It was a national security constituency it was a very specific group of people and he was trying to bring them along. When Colin Powell came out he had a constituency he had people who listened to him and those people come out so we need everyone when John McCain came out against the accusations that Bachman made he had a specific constituency and that constituency will follow him. So that's why I think we have to go through we have to have a broad set of individuals party affiliations you know political leanings come out and engage the conversation in a way that's responsible if we just have the liberals come out it'll become a partisan issue and unfortunately if it becomes a partisan issue people will dig in and not say anything. So that's why it was encouraging when Speaker Trotoff came out against Bachman and said that what she you know the accusations she made were very dangerous when Ed Rollins her former chairman of her campaign a presidential run came out and said it was completely ridiculous and talked about where he sees the Republican Party going if this continues a party that's very for a very specific group of individuals and so our strategy has to be that we need to reach out to everyone from Democrats to Libertarians to whoever it may be and ensure they become part of the process because we don't want it to become a partisan issue at least that's how we view it. Yeah just very quickly I'll add to that I think that there's sort of this general assumption that minority rights religious rights is a Democratic you know Democratic Party issue and Republicans are against that and that's just that's not true but there's always with every legislative or advocacy effort a concerted effort to get as much bipartisan support as possible because ultimately the voice of a moderate or conservative Republican in support of an issue of importance to the sick community or to any of the minority communities at issue today is far more powerful. You obviously you know to beat a dead horse the comments of Colin Powell the comments of George W. Bush went far further than the comments of a liberal member of Congress would have had after 9-11 or in 2008 with President Obama so with every effort there is a direct level of outreach to all members of Congress and all parties to get that bipartisan support doesn't always happen but when it does it's far more effective I can tell you with the armed services work we've done on accommodation of sick Americans and there also have been Muslim Americans who've been accommodated with regard to facial hair. The support of Republican members of Congress has been instrumental in convincing DOD that this is not a liberal fringe issue this is an issue of it's an American issue. Minority rights, religious rights it's an American issue that should be considered respected and addressed by both parties. This is somewhat out of my lane but I just very quickly like to note that perhaps the most vocal element of American society particularly from respected leaders to have made statements praising Muslims and showing respect to Islam has been from the American military think about you know comments made by General Petraeus by General McChrystal General Allen and I don't have any data to back this up but my strong suspicion from covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from going there on several occasions is that were you to pull this country the most Islamophilic cohort would be combat veterans between the age of 25 and 35 all for the very good reason that most Americans tend not to travel abroad and spend a lot of time immersed in other cultures and have some of our presumptions about other cultures challenged by that front line experience and it's the military that's been called upon to do that and also because in order for the military to do its job in these countries they've had no choice but to partner with locals and get to know them and live by them and come to respect them. I think to this point I have an anecdote that's really interesting because this is a very important point that Spencer makes on a Sunday morning we were at home and I got a call from a woman in Virginia running for Congress and he's running against my member of Congress and so he's a Republican and he so he says you know his person who was calling on his behalf says we'd like your vote so I was thinking do I really want to get into this conversation on a Sunday morning with my family so I kind of look at my wife and say let me take this call so you know I engage this individual and I say well you know my parents were Republicans they probably voted for Bush and they loved Reagan I mean all I heard at home was how great Reagan was because my parents are Afghan Americans and what Reagan did in Afghanistan was just that's all praise of Bush and Reagan that's all I heard growing up and so he said what changed as he said why are you voting for or will you vote for this? I said I don't know I haven't made up my mind but this conversation around American Muslims minorities and this community it really I mean it disturbs me it's something that I find disturbing I've got children and I don't want my children to hear this conversation at the public level and I think some of that is coming from you know Republican members of Congress and so he tells me well this individual was a veteran he served in Iraq and he served in Afghanistan and he doesn't hold those views because he was able to engage Muslims in the front lines and so I ask you to reconsider your vote because this individual will be willing to engage you and so what he did was he took my number and had the candidate call me and say listen these are not my views you know I'd like you to please reconsider your vote and so I think that point is extremely important we need to be able to get individuals like that to have this conversation publicly. Hi Pam Constable from the Washington Post I wanted to play a little bit on devil's advocate Harris talking about the hate industry I think this rhetoric of hate it doesn't come from nowhere you know it's not being made up of old cloth this is a brief comment and then a question you know I've lived a lot in the Muslim world there is something going on I mean there is I don't know what you want to call it a sort of an Islamic revival sort of a you know not sort of a muscular Islamic revival going on across the Muslim world you also at the same time are seeing really scary things happening look at Mali for example look at Niger I mean look what's happening out there people see this people read about it people who already have a proclivity to fear and not understand what's going on they're scared to death so here's my question do you think that the Muslim American community is doing enough to counter this not unreasonable fear and it's not just representative king it's not just people trying to grandstand I think people are genuinely very worried about what's going on in the Muslim world and they see it as a very scary thing and obviously so do most Muslims so do 99% of the Muslims in the world so again my question is do you think that the American Muslim community is doing enough to make it clear that 99.9% of you do not believe in this stuff and I was thinking about that television show I never saw it I forgot the name of it it was trying to portray ordinary Muslim life in Dearborn or some ordinary Muslim place and there was some sponsor that cancelled because they said it they were making them look too normal I don't remember I wasn't here at the time but I thought what is this I mean I never saw it but it seemed to me that that was a good idea to portray a normal ordinary Muslim family in Dearborn having all its personal arguments and whatever about life and I thought there should be more of it again I never saw it but I wonder is more of that being done and what is being done that's my question. Good question on the first point I completely agree I think there is very genetic things going on in certain part of the world that needs to be addressed just this recent incident of this little Pakistani girl who was accused of burning the Quran and was arrested just today we released a statement our organization released a statement calling this absurd we asked American Muslims to call the Pakistani embassy to make sure that this was not something that was it's not humane and there are problems there is definitely extremism there's definitely radical people out there like in Mali like in Afghanistan I mean I come from my parents come from Afghanistan and we've seen this and we've seen the craziness that's out there and American Muslims are doing a lot to differentiate their understanding of their faith not just American Muslims Muslims in general their understanding of faith and the very minority that engages in this political craziness and really has a very political agenda but uses a religious garb to then hide their political agenda under so that's the key but here's the problem I think for the past ten years American Muslims have been shouting and screaming that this is not who we are this is not us this is not what we stand for and we've been doing this I don't know every single means that we've had press releases press conferences demonstrations everything that we've done as a community to really highlight this a lot of times unfortunately that doesn't get down to the local level to the local communities it's not sexy so it's not covered as much in the media when you're denouncing something it's not as sexy as somebody burning a copy of the Quran or actually desecrating a Buddha or a symbol in Mali that's part of the problem but here's the issue just as you mentioned I mean you brought up an excellent example of all American Muslim so what does you know all American Muslim basically portrayed American life not even Muslim life American life in Dearborn Michigan you had somebody who was looking to buy a disco club and trying to you know find open a hookah bar you had someone else who was just a cop trying to you know make a living yet for the Islamophobic industry that went too far in humanizing American Muslims that's the problem it's not that we shouldn't talk about extremism and we shouldn't talk about the crazies out there let's talk about the crazies out there let's differentiate who the crazies are and who the crazies are not and let's talk about people who want to implement a medieval version of Sharia law let's talk about that we have no issue in talking about that but let's not conflate American Muslims their beliefs their traditions with the craziness that's out there and you have this industry that is functioning based off of fear it's very lucrative it's over 50 million dollars and when they get lows to take their sponsorship off of a very benign and even probably horribly done you know a reality TV show that's where the conflation becomes a problem where average American Muslims are trying to live their lives but they're called extremists because they want to open a bar I'm an extremist somehow I'm subverting the American tradition of alcoholism that's where the craziness comes in and that's where we need to question so that's part of the conflation that this industry does and it's purposely done it's not just done out of ignorance it's purposely done so that the average American who doesn't have that engagement with Muslims then fears Sharia like I had a friend who was a pastor a progressive pastor in Wisconsin he said his congregation is going through bankruptcy so they've been trying to hold workshops on how to foreclosures and bankruptcies and get help with their homes and home loans and he said his congregation is coming to him and talking about the fear of Sharia law in Wisconsin and that's not what a pastor is trained to deal with but they're very specific they're very deliberate in getting to these communities that don't engage American Muslims Can I jump in on this real quick? Why should American Muslims have to answer for psychopaths in Mali? I'm Jewish and it occurs to me that a couple days ago a Jewish winch mob went through Jerusalem and brutalized Palestinian civilians their neighbors their you know people they probably saw every day and when I hear a question like that even with the gracious answer that we all just heard I have to really think how privileged I am that I live in a country that doesn't ask me to answer for the crimes of people who say that they're my co-religionists and I wish that we had more of that sense in our country. And I would just add to that that we you know it's probably restating the obvious to this audience but we don't ask that question of every white Christian American after Oak Creek or after Oklahoma City but we ask that question every time something happens in the Muslim community so that that's the problem. Homs, gentlemen right here in the front. Yeah, you have mentioned a few incidents the burning of mosque in Missouri just a day before the Oak Creek incident although thankfully there were no casualties there I suppose didn't receive that much of media attention and even the people in the administration here were not aware of the incident. So what do you think is the reason for that? Do the Muslim organizations don't reach out to the administration and the law enforcement or you think there is a kind of indifference when these incidents happen in mosques and are targeted towards Muslim communities. Are you addressing anyone specific on the panel? If anyone is willing to answer. I think there are multiple reasons I think there is a general sense of indifference. You know what really kind of a very personal level now. What impacted me after the shootings in Wisconsin was not only that you know I first had a conversation with my children I've got a 10 and a 12 year old about this right. So they talked about and they know the difference between Sikhs and Muslims and they've got friends who are of Sikh background in school and so one of them asked me why did they shoot someone who was Sikh. And my stomach just churned and I was like I think they mistook them for being Muslim that's the very raw conversation that people have been having with their children, with neighbors but part of what was difficult was that when people were having the conversation around the shooting it was not that the shooting was the problem itself. The shooting was the problem regardless of who was targeted or if there was a mistake in identity or whatever it was certain people started to say well they mistook them for Muslims he mistook that for a mosque and there is this insinuation that if it had happened maybe to a Muslim that it wouldn't have been as severe as an issue and I think there was a few articles written by Sikh Americans that kind of addressed that and said this is crazy that this insinuation has made but there is this indifference and I think because there's been the political rhetoric, the industry that has been built over the past 10 years, people see Muslims as a legitimate threat and so when something happens people are like well there must be a reason why people are acting out against American Muslims and so there is that level of indifference that takes place but at the same time there's been a level of support of neighbors, of communities I just had an evangelical friend who just emailed me yesterday the evangelical community, a group of evangelical leaders have bought a bunch of ad space in local communities saying I stand with my Muslim neighbor, I stand with my Sikh neighbor so there is also a show of support that's coming from various communities and I think that's the greatness of America, that's the greatness of our democracy, of our pluralism and that's what we need to kind of promote and that's what our leaders can promote if they had the political will and if leaders promote it, if leaders come out and say that this is not okay, that this is not something that's acceptable then people will generally tend to change their opinions Is there a question all the way in the back? Just to follow up on that I appreciate the fact that communities stand with one another a concern of course again is the violence overseas that happens between different Muslim groups but also to Christian groups and other religious minorities, I wonder if the American Muslim community could have a platform in general to stand up for the groups overseas that are minorities because they face the same experience in reverse and I think if the community could make that statement and continue to make that statement I think it's been made at times, I assume, it would really empower the community because it would make it into more of a universal issue Ambassador Ibrahim Rasool was here I believe in April or May at Georgetown and he made the same point and he said that not just standing up for rights of Muslims in America but American Muslims need to stand up for the rights of other minorities overseas and I think we would join with each other much stronger if we could do that I think American Muslim leaders and institutions have been doing this I just mentioned that with this case in Pakistan of this teenage or this little girl who is Christian I've heard from the whole spectrum of American Muslim leaders coming out condemning it and we were going to do a joint statement with our partners in the interfaith community so you see this taking place and there are American Muslim leaders who just went to Egypt to talk to the new president of Egypt about the rights of minorities and the rights of the adopted Christians and there was a letter that was sent by American Muslim leaders to him there was a letter that was sent to the leadership in Tunisia so it's becoming quite vibrant and I think this conversation can help in bringing communities together because when the folks who bought up all those ad spaces about standing with American Muslims and Sikh Americans, when that happened and then this incident in Pakistan we communicated and said we can issue a joint statement saying we stand for religious freedom wherever we are but my American side completely kind of sympathize with what Spencer mentioned, I don't need to stand up for people who are not part of what I stand for but at the same time unfortunately we shoulder that responsibility in the public and we've got to engage in that conversation and I think American Muslim institutions are doing that now. One of the challenges here is that American Muslims are Americans they just don't know what's going on if you do a lot of work with American Muslim communities across the country if you ask the average American Muslim even say he or she goes to their prayer space or mosque and they're engaged they have no idea what's going on in terms of sectarian conflicts, theology most American Muslims are you Sunni or you Shia they may be able to answer yes or no on that question and if you ask them a follow up they'll have no idea what's going on many of them will not know if you quote something from the Quran whether it's from the Quran or not these forms of religious literacy are actually pretty universal there was I think a poll done in Pakistan in the last 10 years that the majority of Pakistanis did not know that Muhammad was the last prophet and this is universally seen in Islam as elemental to Muslim identity because this is the son of God. I mean these are sort of realities so if you ask the average American Muslim what do you think of what's going on in Pakistan they don't know, they just don't know what's happening and so I think that needs to be taken into account because many times persons will go into these communities expecting some sort of opinion or denunciation and they'll get this kind of indifference or confusion which doesn't come from a bad place it just comes from the fact that it's outside of their everyday experience so we'll take two questions together I think Craig you had a question and right in front With all the discussion on this one of the things that I have not heard and might bring the communities together is the discussion of the roots of terrorists in America starting with the bombing of the Omaha building, the shootings in Virginia, in the University of Virginia the assassination of Amish school children and the assassination of the Sikhs and I've heard the word in this conversation of crazies, crazies, crazies but the crazies have to be addressed by the public health sector and how are you going to make a system where the public health sector is more made aware of patterns of conduct like buying a fertilizer or buying a large number of guns suddenly so that it pops up on the radar of the medical professionals that are going to treat these, that have treated these people in the past that's my question. Can we just take two more and we'll take the questions together and then answer them? There was one right here all the way in the front I think you had a question too. Yeah, Charter and Freedoms Correspondent, Beth Cesar Menden has the FBI or law enforcement group so far make a apology to the master community and their higher leader is the president of the United States have he done this and I would like to make a comment the master community in the United States is the American community and likewise the Jewish community here is the American community. The Indian community is the American community and the Chinese community is the American community this is only different this is a unique nature of the United States of America Thank you. I'm an independent writer I would just follow up on what Hearst is saying about putting this in the political arena and that the politician should actually address that but I also see technology as being a problem to that because most people don't really listen to their politicians as much as they will so on the internet you know some place like that and get information so how are we essentially going to address that? On the question about the roots of terrorism and public health since 9-11 we've had a pretty striking case in the discourse about this of saying one thing and meaning another we use the term terrorism the war on terrorism and onward to identify the thing that the United States is supposedly trying to stop but at the same time we've only meant a very specific sub-cohort of terrorism, terrorism by whether one would think that it would be more narrowly defined as the threat of al-Qaeda but it gets sort of broadly conflated to the threat of other groups like Hamas or Hezbollah or other Islamic extremist organizations and it's probably better to start insisting that people say specifically what they mean instead of retreating to these very loaded or confusing terms that would probably do a good job of helping define what specifically the threats are from what groups in the United States without relying on this blanket term as for the public health thing I think there's, I haven't honestly given much thought to the role of public health here I would think that if someone is stockpiling weapons or buying a lot of fertilizer that's a problem for law enforcement than it is for public health. For the apology question that I've not seen but the President of the United States, the national security staff and the senior leadership of the FBI to some degree after it became known that some of this inflammatory stuff, anti-Muslim stuff was being taught in the FBI and the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense initiated around the federal government's different national security agencies, departments and branches a very thorough going review of counter-terrorism training to get rid of that stuff so there is that I guess you might call silver lining. Just on the last question because I think the other ones have probably been addressed but the idea that knowledge is gained through the internet that the resources that are out there really where many folks, particularly young folks are learning things today I don't think that takes away from the onus and politicians to speak out and to set the tone and set the example because everything trickles down from that. One of the most interesting things that I find with every campaign or issue or case that I've been involved in in the last decade is when there is a media hit you go and read the comments and you have the trollers who are going to go and incite some sort of conflict on a blog anywhere but a good sense of what the perspective is of the audience you have individuals who are supportive of whatever the effort is and those that are critical and those that are frankly off the map left or right but that dialogue again it's a top down approach if the President of the United States is speaking out against an attack on the ethnic American community or attack on a Muslim mosque or post 9-11 attacks on these minority communities that's going to trickle its way down and some of the statistics that or spoke to I think are exactly on point that if there is an example being set that's going to set the tone it's not going to take away the fringe discussion it's not going to take away someone's resources that will say that Muslims are terrorists Muslims should be hated or anyone wearing a turban is associated with Al Qaeda but it at least sets the example that hopefully creates an environment of resources that are accurate. I think technology is difficult I mean it's difficult to deal with as you mentioned right after Bachman kind of the Bachman conference she came out and opened through her email fundraising campaign she raised and her it was mostly email and some mail-in campaign she raised over a million dollars in one week and using basically attacks that people had made against her so the internet and the proliferation of hate speech on the internet and the fact that the internet has allowed this to flow openly an anecdote of that is my godfather is a 90-year-old Jewish white man and you know I randomly get emails from him and usually the emails are very problematic 32.comic sands exactly and they're usually about how Muslims are out to get us sent to the Rotary clubs then sent to the book clubs that him and my godmother are part of this email and they're like well how do we respond to this and so they've got me as a resource to go to and it mostly comes through these mass-chained emails that everybody forwards so it's difficult to stay on top of that I can send them a response but that response is not going to gain the same type of momentum that the actual email gained and so it's maybe Mike German and some of these folks who follow this online can talk to us about how we can address this online because it is a big issue online I mean this stuff is proliferating at a fast pace online. Thank you very much for coming out really appreciate it and some great questions, great discussion I believe I know Spencer and Horace are on Twitter as well I don't know if you're not on Twitter so thank you very much have a great afternoon thank you thank you