[Senate Hearing 114-566]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 114-566
INSIDE THE MIND OF ISIS:
UNDERSTANDING ITS GOALS AND IDEOLOGY TO BETTER PROTECT THE HOMELAND
=======================================================================
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED FOURTEENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
JANUARY 20, 2016
__________
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin Chairman
JOHN McCAIN, Arizona THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware
ROB PORTMAN, Ohio CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri
RAND PAUL, Kentucky JON TESTER, Montana
JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin
MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming HEIDI HEITKAMP, North Dakota
KELLY AYOTTE, New Hampshire CORY A. BOOKER, New Jersey
JONI ERNST, Iowa GARY C. PETERS, Michigan
BEN SASSE, Nebraska
Keith B. Ashdown, Staff Director
David S. Luckey, Director of Homeland Security
Elizabeth McWhorter, Professional Staff Member
Shad A. Thomas, U.S. Coast Guard Detailee
Gabrielle A. Batkin, Minority Staff Director
John P. Kilvington, Minority Deputy Staff Director
Harlan C. Geer, Minority Senior Professional Staff Member
Stephen R. Vina, Minority Chief Counsel for Homeland Security
Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
Benjamin C. Grazda, Hearing Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Johnson.............................................. 1
Senator Carper............................................... 2
Senator Peters............................................... 17
Senator Portman.............................................. 20
Senator Heitkamp............................................. 23
Senator Booker............................................... 25
Senator Ernst................................................ 27
Senator Ayotte............................................... 30
Prepared statements:
Senator Johnson.............................................. 41
Senator Carper............................................... 42
WITNESS
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Bernard Haykel, D. Phil., Director, The Institute of
Transregional Studies, and Professor of Near Eastern Studies,
Princeton University........................................... 4
Jessica Stern, Ph.D., Research Professor, Pardee School for
Global Studies, Boston University.............................. 6
Lorenzo Vidino, Ph.D., Director, Program on Extremism, Center for
Cyber and Homeland Security, George Washington University...... 7
Hedieh Mirahmadi, President, World Organization for Resource
Development and Education...................................... 9
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Haykel, Bernard D.Phil.:
Testimony.................................................... 4
Prepared statement........................................... 44
Mirahmadi, Hedieh:
Testimony.................................................... 9
Prepared statement........................................... 76
Stern, Jessica, Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 6
Prepared statement........................................... 50
Vidino, Lorenzo Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 7
Prepared statement........................................... 64
APPENDIX
Responses to post-hearing questions for the Record from:
Mr. Haykel................................................... 81
Ms. Stern.................................................... 83
Mr. Vidino................................................... 85
Ms. Mirahmadi................................................ 87
INSIDE THE MIND OF ISIS:
UNDERSTANDING ITS GOALS AND IDEOLOGY TO BETTER PROTECT THE HOMELAND
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WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2016
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:02 a.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Ron Johnson,
Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
Present: Senators Johnson, Portman, Lankford, Ayotte,
Ernst, Sasse, Carper, McCaskill, Tester, Heitkamp, Booker, and
Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN JOHNSON
Chairman Johnson. This hearing will come to order.
I want to welcome everybody and say good morning. I
certainly want to thank the witnesses for taking the time to
appear, for taking the time to really write, I think, some very
thoughtful and revealing testimony.
I would ask unanimous consent to enter my written opening
statement in the record,\1\ and Senator Carper is generally
pretty good about not objecting.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Senator Johnson appears in the
Appendix on page 41.
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Senator Carper. Oh, I will allow it.
Chairman Johnson. But, without objection, so ordered.
Let me just explain a little bit. Really, this hearing has
been in the works for quite some time, and it was really
spawned by somebody who could not be here because of scheduling
conflicts of the Committee as well as himself. But Graeme Wood
wrote, I thought, a very interesting article published in The
Atlantic a number of months ago, ``Inside the Mind of ISIS.''
And I would say that it certainly caught this Senator, and I
think an awful lot of people, policymakers in Washington, D.C.,
here, somewhat by surprise. It was pretty revealing. I have
talked to enough people that really did not understand the
importance of the territorial gains and holdings to create the
caliphate and the chain of events which that set up.
So, we started discussions, and although we do not have Mr.
Wood here today, we have, I think--he is a reporter. We have
the experts that I think he consulted with, in terms of writing
his thoughtful article, and so I am really looking forward to
the testimony here today.
I just want to throw out one little statistic, and this
comes from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism (START) from the State Department.
The START Report, which they initially published in 2012. The
progression and the growth of terrorism is stark, and did we
ever get to the bottom of the differences in the numbers from
2014? OK. Which should I use? OK, those are even worse.
So from 2012, the number of attacks reported by the State
Department in this report was 6,771. In 2014, the number of
attacks had grown to 16,800 worldwide. That is 2.5 times the
number of attacks just 2 years earlier.
In terms of deaths, in 2012 there were 11,000 individuals
killed in terrorist attacks. In 2014, there were 43,500. That
is almost a fourfold increase in terrorist attacks.
So the fact of the matter is, the risk, the threat of
Islamic terror, from my standpoint, it is real. It is growing,
and statistics prove it. And there is no way that we are going
to be able to adequately address this unless we fully
understand what motivates Islamic terrorists. This hearing is
specifically about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)--
but I think that we can talk about Islamic terrorists, in
general, and explore that--and what is their ultimate goal. And
I think that we will hear testimony that we have some
contradictory goals as well, which makes it even more confusing
in terms of how we deal with the issue.
But, again, I just want to thank my witnesses, and with
that I will turn it over to Senator Carper.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CARPER
Senator Carper. Thanks. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. It is great
to see all of you today. Thanks for your preparation, thanks
for joining us, and for your willingness to testify and to
respond to our questions. And I thank the Chairman for calling
the hearing.
One of the most important jobs of our government--in fact,
State and Federal and local as well--is to make sure that our
people are safe. That is what this Committee focuses on.
As the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks showed us,
ISIS and ISIS-inspired attacks remain a major threat in this
country. In fact, just last week, ISIS carried out attacks
against our allies in Turkey and I believe in Indonesia.
Today, we are going to look at ISIS's ideology and how it
hopes to achieve its goals. One of ISIS's key strengths is the
large number of recruits that they are able to pull in. And
despite the heavy losses inflicted on ISIS by coalition forces
in recent months, the number of ISIS fighters on the ground in
Iraq and Syria remains pretty much the same thanks to a stream
of new recruits flowing into the region on a regular basis.
ISIS also appears to have a significant online army that
grows daily, and these ``virtual'' soldiers may never set foot
in the territory that ISIS controls, but they are waging an
aggressive social media campaign that calls on people to do the
group's bidding from thousands of miles away. These battlefield
recruits and online supporters are attracted not only to ISIS's
ideology, but to its image as well.
And what is that image? Well, the image that ISIS would
like to project is that of a winner. And even as it suffers
serious defeats on the battlefield--I think the amount of land
they control in Syria and Iraq is down by about 30 percent in
recent months and continues to diminish. But even as they
suffer serious defeats on the battlefield and lose key leaders,
ISIS still attempts to project an image of indestructibility.
And they do this through fictitious claims and propaganda on
social media, and also by ignoring the truth about the progress
that coalition forces are making. This winner message appeals
to many young men who crave fame, fortune, love, and increased
social standing.
Just as troubling is the fact that ISIS has successfully
advanced a twisted narrative that the United States is at war
with Islam and that it is the duty of young Muslims to defend
their religion by attacking the United States and our allies.
Nothing could be further from the truth. That is not what
we are about. We know that, and it is important that we convey
that consistently throughout the world.
This battle is not against a religion. This battle is
against ISIS, plain and simple. ISIS is a cowardly group of
murderers who kill Muslims, kill Jews, and kill Christians
alike. They have no regard for human life. The estimated 30,000
ISIS fighters have nothing to do with the 1.5 billion Muslim
men and women who peacefully practice their religion around the
world and in our communities.
At the end of the day, this battle against ISIS is a war of
words and ideas as much as it is a war of military power and
action. That is why it is so important that we not only
continue to crush ISIS on the battlefield, but also counter
their hateful message.
To this end, last month I introduced legislation that would
create and authorize an office at the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) to counter the violent messages of ISIS and
other terror groups. I welcome all of my colleagues to join me
on this important piece of legislation. We will be talking
about it during the course of this hearing further.
This fight against ISIS, however, is not solely the
responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security or any
single Federal agency. All of us have a role to play, and we
have an obligation to say something if we see something
suspicious.
And we all, especially those of us in public office, have a
responsibility to be mindful of the words we use when we talk
about Islam and the 1.5 billion Muslims around the world who
practice their religion peacefully. They live in our States.
They live in our neighborhoods, and they believe as fervently
as we do in the Golden Rule: to treat other people the way that
we want to be treated. We need to work to ensure that the
rhetoric that we use does not play into the hands of ISIS to be
used against us as a weapon.
When we make careless comments about the nature of Islam or
the need to keep Muslims out of the United States for political
purposes, we feed ISIS's narrative that the United States is at
war with Muslims.
We have to be smarter than that. I think we are. Our
country is better than that. We do not need to engage in
demagoguery or run from our moral obligations in order to keep
Americans safe.
Let me close by just saying I look forward to learning more
today about ISIS's ideology and tactics as well as what more we
can do to address the root causes of this difficult challenge.
With that, welcome and thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper.
It is the tradition of this Committee to swear in
witnesses, so if you will all rise and raise your right hand.
Do you swear that the testimony you will give before this
Committee today will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth, so help you, God?
Mr. Haykel. I do.
Ms. Stern. I do.
Ms. Mirahmadi. I do.
Mr. Vidino. I do.
Chairman Johnson. Please be seated.
Our first witness is Dr. Bernard Haykel. Dr. Haykel is the
professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Director of the
Institute for Transregional Studies of the Contemporary Middle
East, North Africa, and Central Asia at Princeton University.
He is a historian of the Arabian Peninsula and a scholar of
Islamic law and Islamic political movements. His research is
concerned with political and social tensions that arise from
questions about religious identity and authority, and he has
been described as ``the foremost secular authority on the
Islamic State's ideology.'' Dr. Haykel.
TESTIMONY OF BERNARD HAYKEL, D.PHIL.,\1\ DIRECTOR, THE
INSTITUTE OF TRANSREGIONAL STUDIES, AND PROFESSOR OF NEAR
EASTERN STUDIES, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Haykel. Thank you very much. It is a privilege and an
honor to be here today. I have 5 minutes, so I will be quite
telegraphic, and I really have three or four points to make.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Haykel appears in the Appendix on
page 44.
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The first is that ISIS is a religious movement with set
political goals. The principal goal is the empowerment of Sunni
Muslims against a long list of enemies. The origins of ISIS lie
in a complex set of factors, a very complex context in the
Middle East. It involves a religious revival that started in
the 1970s. You have a situation where the governments of this
region are uniformly authoritarian, brutal, and have each
eviscerated the social fabric as well as the civic societies
that they dominate.
You have relative economic deprivation. You have a massive
youth bulge, with 60 percent of the population under the age of
25. You have bad governance, as I have already mentioned. And
you also have several wars.
The most proximate war for ISIS's development is the war in
Iraq and the U.S. invasion in 2003. And then some have even
attributed climate change as a cause for this kind of
radicalization.
Now, this movement is extremely adept, as you have noted,
at using social media to propagate its culture of victimization
as well as the sanctification of violence. And they argue that
violence is the only means to address the weaknesses of
Muslims. They target a long list of enemies, principally
Shiites, as well as other Sunnis who disagree with them,
secular people, anyone who believes in democracy, or any of the
modern ideologies of our age.
They also have developed a culture, which is a fantasy, of
what early Islam was like, which they are trying to reproduce.
This is a culture that is extremely rich and taps into a very
deep vein in the history of Islamic civilization and in the
text of Islamic civilization.
Now, I believe that there is no silver-bullet solution to
ISIS. It is a symptom of deep structural problems in the
region. Military defeat, while very welcome, would not address
the problem of ISIS. And, moreover, the United States does not
have the tools nor does the United States have the religious
standing to speak authoritatively on what is or is not Islamic.
I believe that ISIS today is, in fact, being defeated
militarily. As you noted, they have lost 30 to 40 percent of
their territory. But addressing the root causes that produce a
phenomenon like ISIS is what is necessary, and this will take a
generation to do. And most of the effort actually has to be
done by people in the region of the Middle East and by Muslims
throughout the world.
I expect that as ISIS loses more and more territory and is
defeated by groups like the Kurds or the Iraqi army, which is
principally a Shiite-ruled and Shiite-dominated army, ISIS will
become more desperate. And with desperation, we will see more
lone-wolf and ISIS-directed attacks in the West. It is very
important not to overreact to these attacks because it will
play into ISIS's narrative.
And I also think that lone-wolf attacks are extremely
difficult to stop. We must definitely mobilize our own Muslim
community against ISIS's ideology. They are the first and best
line of defense against this movement.
I also would like to underscore that ISIS should not be
seen as an existential threat. If we speak of it as an
existential threat, we also play into its narrative. So the
solution, I think, is one that would require patience, but also
hard-nosed realism and a strategy of not overreacting to its
attacks on us and on others.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Haykel.
Our next witness is Dr. Jessica Stern. Dr. Stern is a
research professor at Boston University's Pardee School of
Global Studies and an Advanced Academic Candidate at the
Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. She was a member of
Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law.
She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship
for her work on trauma and violence. And, finally, she is an
expert on terrorism and co-authored the book ``ISIS: The State
of Terror,'' and authored the book ``Terror in the Name of God:
Why Religious Militants Kill,'' among other works. Dr. Stern.
TESTIMONY OF JESSICA STERN, PH.D.,\1\ RESEARCH PROFESSOR,
PARDEE SCHOOL FOR GLOBAL STUDIES, BOSTON UNIVERSITY
Ms. Stern. Chairman Johnson, Ranking Member Carper, and
distinguished Members of the Committee, thank you so much for
inviting me here. It is an honor to be here to speak to you
about a topic I have been working on since the 1980s.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Stern appears in the Appendix on
page 50.
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My dissertation adviser was Ash Carter, and he thought back
then that it was weird that I was obsessed with terrorism,
Iraq, and chemical weapons. He has admitted in public that he
maybe was wrong at the time.
When we think about what ISIS wants, I think there are two
different aspects. One is: What does it want collectively? What
does the group want? And here we see two contradictory goals.
On the one hand, the group wants to run and spread its
caliphate, not just in Iraq and Syria but in its so-called wil
ayat, or provinces. One of the most important of these
provinces is in Libya.
At the same time, ISIS wants to polarize Muslim against
Muslim, Muslim against non-Muslim, and goad us into sending
ground forces to fight out a final battle in the town of Dabiq.
These are obviously contradictory goals. I believe ISIS
will continue to pursue both of those goals--trying to spread
the caliphate and also trying to goad us into sending in ground
forces to destroy the State.
The second part of the question is: What do individual
members think they will get from joining this terrible
organization? Well, in the region, as Professor Haykel has been
saying, they are looking for security. ISIS is capitalizing on
poor governance and the disenfranchisement of Sunnis.
Individuals are also seeking power, status, redemption, and the
lure of living in what they call the only Sharia-based state,
though we have to remember that many people living in ISIS-
controlled territory are trapped there. They are not remotely
interested in this ideology.
More importantly for us, in terms of our national security,
is why Westerners are joining. Here I think that there is a
desire to reinvent themselves, reinvent society, and to seek a
new and clear identity. Interestingly, the work of Lorenzo
Vidino has shown that 40 percent of those who have been
arrested are converts. ISIS is a new religion. Everyone who
joins it is a convert. But we are also seeing non-Muslims
attracted to this way of becoming a hero and having an
adventure.
Our military response addresses the problem over there, but
obviously it does not address the problem of homegrown
recruits. Here we have to think seriously about how to get
better at containing ISIS's ideology. I think everyone needs to
be involved in this--the private sector and schools, for
example. Ignorance about Islam is a vulnerability. Mothers are
a key factor in fighting this problem. They imagine their kids
are safe when they are inside on the Internet. We see this
especially in refugee communities, where moms think, ``Great,
my son is inside on the Internet. He is safe.'' We need to
teach those moms that this is not true.
It requires a global effort to find a new way for kids to
feel that they can find an identity with dignity and honor.
Finally, I want to say that there is a problem for scholars
who want to study the mind of the terrorist. Institutional
Review Boards (IRBs) make it very difficult for scholars to ask
such questions as: Were you recruited by ISIS? Why did you
think about joining? Why did you not join? I cannot ask those
questions. If somebody says, ``Yes,'' referring to recruitment
or joining, then I have to report them to the Department of
Homeland Security, and then I am in trouble with the
Institutional Review Board (IRB). This needs to be revised. At
this point, IRBs, as applied to national security affairs, are
a threat to national security.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Stern.
Our next witness is Dr. Lorenzo Vidino. Dr. Vidino is the
Director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington
University's Center for Cyber and Homeland Security. He
specializes in Islamism and political violence in Europe and
North America. The program he directs at George Washington
recently published a report called ``ISIS in America: A
Detailed Look at Legal Cases of Jihadism in the United
States.'' Dr. Vidino.
TESTIMONY OF LORENZO G. VIDINO, PH.D.,\1\ DIRECTOR, PROGRAM ON
EXTREMISM, CENTER FOR CYBER AND HOMELAND SECURITY, GEORGE
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY
Mr. Vidino. Thank you very much. Chairman Johnson, Ranking
Member Carper, and distinguished Members of the Committee, it
is a privilege to be speaking here in front of you today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Vidino appears in the Appendix on
page 64.
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While the vast majority of American Muslims clearly reject,
as we heard, the Islamic State's narrative and tactics, the
number of arrests and open investigations that we see
throughout the country tell us that the current mobilization of
Americans attracted to the Islamic State is unprecedented in
size. It is also astonishingly diverse. It includes men and
women, teenagers and men in their 40s, university students and
petty criminals, people born into Islam and converts, and
people born in America and recent immigrants. There is
absolutely no such thing as a typical Islamic State sympathizer
in America.
Individuals with such diverse backgrounds are unlikely to
be motivated by the same factors. Radicalization is a highly
complex and individualized process, often shaped by a poorly
understood mix of a variety of factors which are overlapping.
One of them, which is cynically exploited by the propaganda
of ISIS, is a deep sense of empathy for the suffering of the
Syrian people, and that was true particularly at the beginning
of the Syrian conflict. But by the time ISIS formally declared
its caliphate in June 2014, the motivations of recruits appear
to revolve more around fulfilling perceived religious
obligations. Unquestionably, the main motivation today is that
of living in a perfect Islamic society under the world's only
authentic Islamic government, as its supporters believe the
caliphate declared by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to be. Whether in
online conversations or in interrogations with authorities
following their arrest, the appeal of living in this utopian
Islamic society is cited by the vast majority of American ISIS
sympathizers.
Indeed, despite the attention that it has received in the
West, ISIS's main appeal is not so much in its sleek social
media campaign. It is, rather, its territoriality, as you
correctly said at the beginning. What matters is the message,
the substance, not so much how the message is spread. So I
think that there is a bit of a misguided focus on social media
where in reality the issue is the core of the message.
As is typical of an ideology that mixes politics and
religion, the obligation to join and defend the caliphate spans
both. Similarly, motivations professed by American jihadists
often frame what could appear to be religious factors in
political terms, and vice versa. Political grievances are seen
through religious lenses. Similarly, their political solutions
are framed as fulfillments of religious obligations.
The political grievances of American ISIS sympathizers run
the gamut. Some are of a global nature. But many American ISIS
sympathizers are equally, if not more, interested in domestic
events, such as the riots in Ferguson or the current debate
about Islam in America. These events all represent, in the
conspiratorial worldview they have adopted, proof of the evil
nature of America and every other entity or idea that ISIS
opposes.
Religious and political motivations are also impossible to
separate from personal ones, as Jessica was saying. A search
for belonging, meaning, and identity appear to be crucial
motivators for many Americans who embrace ISIS's ideology.
Some individuals are particularly vulnerable, suffering
from deep emotional issues or personality disorders. But in
many other cases, the individuals who embrace ISIS's message
are seemingly well adjusted. Rather, they are simply
individuals on a personal quest.
Moreover, most American ISIS sympathizers suffer from none
of the socioeconomic and integration issues that are often,
somewhat superficially, considered the main causes of
radicalization of European Muslims, for example, therefore
making the often adopted ``radicalization is caused by lack of
integration'' mantra highly debatable. When looking for
explanations of radicalization processes, I think it is
arguable that psychology provides more answers than sociology.
To conclude, ISIS is just the latest, and probably not the
last, in a series of groups who have adopted what we would call
``jihadist ideology.'' The defeat of ISIS, as despicable as
ISIS is, will not stop the violence. Only the defeat of
jihadist ideology will, so the problem is much larger than
ISIS.
Thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward
to your questions.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Vidino.
Our final witness is Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi. Dr. Mirahmadi is
the President of the World Organization for Resource
Development and Education (WORDE). This nonprofit educational
organization counters violent extremist ideologies by promoting
charitable, service-oriented alternatives. She developed ``A
Community-Based Approach to Countering Radicalization: A
Partnership for America,'' one of the first Muslim-led reports
to address grassroots strategies to counter violent extremism
and build resilient communities. She also has a degree in
Islamic doctrine and has contributed to books on related
topics. Dr. Mirahmadi.
TESTIMONY OF HEDIEH MIRAHMADI,\1\ PRESIDENT, WORLD ORGANIZATION
FOR RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION
Ms. Mirahmadi. Thank you so much, Chairman Johnson, Ranking
Member Carper, and distinguished Members of the Committee.
Thank you for the honor of testifying before you today.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Mirahmadi appears in the Appendix
on page 76.
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Although the U.S. Government and our allies have spent
millions of dollars in research to determine what is drawing
Westerners to groups like ISIS, unfortunately we still do not
have a terrorist profile. We actually cannot even prove one
single factor to predict who would become a terrorist.
But what we do know from the empirical research on
convicted terrorists are some of the indicators that exist in
many of those cases which may make an individual more
vulnerable. We heard about several of those from both Jessica
and Lorenzo. We also learned, as Lorenzo's report has told us,
that over 40 percent of those arrested for ISIS-related crimes
were Muslim converts, so that means that they grew up in a
house that did not practice Islam. This tells us that no family
is immune from the threat and that the solution will lie in a
holistic approach.
However, just because we cannot predict who will be a
terrorist, it does not mean that we cannot or should not do
anything or that what we do cannot be measured.
In fact, we can design programs and clearly articulate a
theory of change that connects the program activities with the
risk factors that we are trying to reduce. If we measure those
with traditional and innovative evaluation tools, we can show
whether they reduced the vulnerabilities of program
participants.
At my organization, WORDE, that is what we did to create
and adapt a community-led partnership with local government,
known as the Montgomery County Model. I am pleased to say that
after 2 years of rigorous scientific evaluation, funded by the
National Institute of Justice, it is now the only evidence-
based Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program in the
country.
It has a great potential to revolutionize community
policing, allowing the community to lead and building
relationships of trust and respect among diverse community
members, rather than separating them off into silos that
further feed distrust and isolation. This relationship among
community members is more critical now than ever. Domestic
terror attacks are creating fault lines in our society that
will only lead to more violence if not repaired. The separation
of Muslims from non-Muslims feeds into that bifurcated
worldview of the terrorists who are saying, ``It is us versus
them, the West against Islam.'' A comprehensive prevention
agenda must include programs that prevent that divide, so that
there is only an ``us'' against the terrorists.
In response to the need for specialized individual
interventions, we also provide counseling and direct services
for those who may be at risk of radicalization, before they
choose a path of violence. Ours is the first of its kind in the
United States.
Besides treating the psycho-social needs of clients, our
team can also tackle the ideological risk factors by referring
the individual to a mentor. It used to be that becoming a
violent jihadist took years of religious indoctrination. The
process was long because the Islam that they preached was so
foreign to mainstream interpretations of the faith that they
had to undo what Muslims have believed for centuries. And
besides, their calls to suicide and killing of innocent
civilians was, quite frankly, unappealing.
Unfortunately, civil war in Syria, continued persecution of
Sunnis in Iraq, and upheavals across the Middle East provided
the perfect opportunity for the jihadist recruiters to
reformulate the strategy. Constant depictions of torture and
bombing of families in the region, motivated young Muslims
across the world to go and join the ``humanitarian jihad'' and
save Muslims who were dying at the hands of brutal dictators.
Many of them were not even radicalized until they reached the
battlefield. Suddenly, as if almost overnight, the terrorists
had discovered the holy grail of recruitment: encourage people
to come and build, not to come and die. That message would
appeal to young and old alike, Muslim and non-Muslim. Anyone
who saw the global powers as corrupt and oppressive would be
welcome in this new utopia of misfits.
As a result, taking someone off of the path now requires
more than just a Muslim preacher. The process must include a
culturally proficient, trained professional that can resolve
the feelings of cultural homelessness and help the individual
find a sense of belonging and purpose in our society.
Since our program follows the protected health information
guidelines of professionals, our client information is kept
entirely outside the purview of law enforcement unless an
individual is an ``imminent threat'' or a ``threat to national
security.'' If we want to encourage more community groups to
get involved or to enter this space, there needs to be more
legal guidelines for practitioners, including how do we balance
the privacy rights of our clients with national security
interests.
The government has created numerous violence prevention
programs and alternatives to prison sentencing for all sorts of
crimes. There is no reason why we cannot establish guidelines
for extremist cases as well. Most importantly, communities need
resources to create the multidisciplinary community-based
prevention programs that can operate independently of law
enforcement, as well as diversion programs that can actually
treat radicalized individuals. It is impractical to think that
we are going to arrest our way out of this problem. With
thousands of individuals across the country that are vulnerable
to radicalization, it is irresponsible of us not to create
alternatives.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Dr. Mirahmadi.
I will start with the questioning. I really do want to
concentrate on trying to describe the full dimension of this
problem. Senator Carper talked about the number of Muslims in
the world. There are about 1.6 billion, according to Pew
Research. Dr. Haykel, do you have any sense in terms of what
percent of the Muslim population would identify with this
extreme version of radical Islam, Islamic terrorism? Because
one percent would be 16 million.
Mr. Haykel. Right. Senator, you put your finger on it,
which is that even a small percentage of people who identify
with this movement would still be a very large number.
I think, though, when it comes to identification, one has
to make certain distinctions. So, for example, in Saudi Arabia,
a country that I visit often, there are a number of people who
do not actually share the Islamic State's ideology or goals--
they would never want to be ruled by the Islamic State--but
nonetheless feel that they are the good guys out there fighting
the good fight because they are fighting against Shiites, they
are fighting against Americans, and so on.
There are people in the Middle East, for instance, who
would never want to be ruled by them and do not identify with
them, but still see them as heroes.
Chairman Johnson. And support them financially?
Mr. Haykel. Private individuals may support them
financially.
Chairman Johnson. So, again, is one percent wildly too
large? Again, I am just trying to get some sort of feel,
because often we say, well, this is just a very small
percentage, but a very small percentage could be a very large
problem.
Mr. Haykel. Right. So in terms of actual recruits, I think
the numbers and estimates that I have seen vary from about
30,000 to 100,000. A hundred thousand out of 1.5 billion is a
very small----
Chairman Johnson. But, again, that is recruits into ISIS,
into the caliphate.
Mr. Haykel. Yes, that is right, people who are fighting.
Chairman Johnson. There are news reports that show that
there are ISIS-affiliated branches in 30 different countries.
We are seeing ISIS move into Afghanistan to take over the poppy
fields.
You were talking about how we do not want to overreact.
Mr. Haykel. Right.
Chairman Johnson. And, by the way, I realize ISIS is not
going to come in and invade America and offer an existential
threat here. I do not want to be putting ideas into the minds
of terrorists. But, it does not take much of an imagination to
understand that a coordinated homegrown terrorist effort could
do unbelievable economic harm. Brussels did not have a
terrorist attack, and yet it shut down after the Paris attack.
So we have heard that we should adopt a strategy of strategic
patience. OK, we do not want to overreact, but as long as ISIS
maintains that territory, they are going to continue to inspire
what could be incredibly damaging events--maybe not
existential, but unbelievably damaging.
So how do we deal with it? I mean, do we recognize that
territory is the primary motivator? Come and build, as Dr.
Mirahmadi was talking about? Come and build, build that utopian
society. As long as that territory exists, we are going to be
under threat. And, again, we will continue to be--even if we
defeat ISIS, even if we deny them the territory, we have all
these affiliates, all these branches of this extreme ideology
around the world.
So what is the full extent of this threat? I do not think
strategic patience is working.
Mr. Haykel. Well, military victory is the most significant
contributor to recruitment. The fact that in 2014 they were
able to conquer so much territory----
Chairman Johnson. ISIS's military victory?
Mr. Haykel. Correct. It made it seem like the reality was
confirming that they were chosen by God to represent Muslims
and to win in the name of Islam. So making them lose militarily
is extremely important in drying up the fantasy that they are
projecting and the appeal that they have to recruits. So it is
very important to defeat them militarily.
Chairman Johnson. But, again, would you be describing that
as an overreaction? I want to go to Dr. Stern because you are
talking about the contradictory goals, which are: grow this
movement, grow the caliphate, and, at the same time, draw us in
to defeat them, so that they end up with the final battle of
Dabiq, or whatever. What is the name of that? Yes, Dabiq. Talk
about that. Talk about that contradiction.
Ms. Stern. Yes, there is a contradiction. I do not think
that our policy should be dictated just because they want us to
fight them in a final battle in Dabiq. I mean, I do think that
we need to fight them. I think anything we can do to not feed
into their fantasy that the West is at war with Islam is good.
Therefore, special forces are better than big armies. Sunni
Arab forces are much better than Western forces. But, I think
it is important to point out that, as you say, this
organization is now in many parts of the world. In Libya, it is
very important. Afghanistan--it is also there. It is an
ideology that is here as well.
I am not sure that the victory narrative that I know you
are quite interested in is so important. I think that, in a
sense--why victory? Victory is important because of this sense
of disenfranchisement, humiliation, and the sense that Islam
has fallen behind the West. It has. We need to find a way for
young Muslims and those who sympathize with them, including
converts, to find another way to be heroes.
Chairman Johnson. But rebuilding these societies that have
existed for quite some time, these governments that are
authoritarian and that offend our sensibility of freedom and
democracy, that is a long-term project. Can we sit back and be
strategically patient and allow this caliphate and the
territory to exist and have that threat continue to grow?
Because I think that it will continue to grow.
One way that we can counteract that goal is to not let the
final battle be in Dabiq. Let us take Dabiq first and let the
final battle be someplace else. I am not being flippant here.
We have to understand what they are trying to accomplish, but,
again, I just do not think that we can be strategically
patient. I think that we have to defeat them. I think that we
have to deny that territory as our first step in a very long
struggle. And let us face it, this struggle--let me be clear.
We are not declaring war on Islamic terrorists. They declared
war on us--I think, definitely starting in the early 1990s with
the bombing of the USS Cole, and the attack in Saudi Arabia,
and then the attempt to take down the Twin Towers initially in
New York. If you are going to end a war, there are two ways of
doing it: either both sides agree to end the war--and it is
obvious to me that Islamic terrorists are not agreeing to end
the war--or one side has to be defeated.
And so, trying to make this simple, I sit there and go,
well, this caliphate is something that is pretty attractive.
People want to go there. They want to either get there
physically or become adherents and, as they are being
encouraged to, kill where they are.
So, to me, that is the first step that we have to
undertake, and the sooner, the better. I just do not think that
we can be strategically patient.
I will go to you, Dr. Vidino.
Mr. Vidino. You are absolutely right. I think the reason
for ISIS's success is its success, the fact that it has
controlled territory. I think that if the Syrian conflict had
gone in a different way for a variety reasons, and Jhabat al-
Nusra had taken over territory and created this State-like
structure, Jhabat al-Nusra would be the big problem that we
would be facing. I think ISIS was just better militarily, but
there were a lot of circumstances there on the ground that led
ISIS to be the one controlling territory. But it is that
territoriality which is the main appeal for a lot of people,
whether it is in the Middle East or here, in the West.
I think that to some degree--I do not want to be overly
negative, but it is almost too late because the State has been
around for a year and a half now. So that idea, even if we were
tomorrow to completely destroy what is the Islamic State, the
idea or the fact that they created that society for a year and
a half will linger for a long time, and you will find plenty of
groups that will try to re-create that.
Obviously, there are also, from a secret military and
terrorism point of view, significant problems in keeping that
structure there. There is more pressure on them now, and it
makes it, to some degree, more difficult to expand their
territory. They are losing territory. There is some pressure
that does not allow them to plan attacks in the way that they
would probably have been able to a few months ago, but now they
are indeed planning them more. So, yes, they are being bombed.
They are running from place to place, to some degree. But part
of that strategy has been that they are also trying to carry
out attacks, and I think Paris was obviously probably the first
successful one, at least in the West, of an attack that was
planned with some strategy. It was not just left to some lone
individual to carry out. There was some strategy behind it,
some planning, centralized planning involved.
Clearly, I think that is one of the lessons from the 9/11
Commission. The more you allow an organization, a terrorist
organization--and ISIS is more than a terrorist organization,
but the more that you allow them to plan and have a sanctuary,
the more dangerous they are going to be.
Chairman Johnson. They have revenue streams. They control
research labs within universities. I will just quickly let Dr.
Mirahmadi comment, and then I will turn it over to Senator
Carper.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, I definitely agree with the comments
of my colleagues. I just want to add, though, that I think,
long term and generationally, we are not going to bomb our way
out of this problem. So even if we solve the military battles
and we win against ISIS in terms of its controlling territory,
ISIS is just a metastasized version of al-Qaeda and the groups
that came before it.
So I think that what we really need to bring to bear on
this struggle is our other resources, both domestically and
through foreign policy. For example, let us face it, our
Western governments have been complicit or tacitly allowed a
lot of the Gulf States to export this very virulent, intolerant
ideology across the Muslim world and throughout Western
countries. It has destroyed the cultural fabric of a lot of
these countries. I mean, thousands and thousands of Pakistanis,
Afghanis, Asians, and Africans have died trying to defeat it.
So I think that it is very important that we use our
diplomatic leverage with those countries to tell them to stop
exporting that stuff and try fixing all the damage that they
have caused so far.
In addition, we should also bolster the efforts of
countries like Egypt, who is now in a post-Islamist government
who wants to use its might and its religious infrastructure to
start exporting the opposite--start exporting a pluralistic
interpretation of Islam. And that, quite frankly, is the core,
it is the mainstream fundamental of Islam, so let us help them
and empower them to be able to do this in a way that is
authentic to the rest of the Muslim world.
So I think that from a foreign policy perspective, we still
have a lot of resources to bear on this problem that we need to
use long term. And then domestically, as I mentioned, we need
to be intervening and preventing the radicalization in the
first place.
Chairman Johnson. So, again, I understand that it is a
multifaceted, generational problem, but just a quick answer. We
have to deny them that territory, correct?
Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes, absolutely.
Chairman Johnson. The fact that the caliphate exists is a
real problem.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. But, we still have all these
other steps that we have to simultaneously----
Chairman Johnson. I know. It is a nasty, big problem. I got
it. OK, Senator Carper.
Senator Carper. Again, our thanks to each of you for
joining us today. Dr. Stern, thank you for writing a couple of
really good books, really informative books, in one of them,
``Terror in the Name of God,'' which I was struck by the way
you went into--literally across the world, right into the heart
of the centers of these violent folks, these violent groups,
and talked to them. Why did they let you in? And why did they
open up like that to you? It was amazing to me.
Ms. Stern. Terrorists, in my experience, young people,
really do want to talk, and that is one of the reasons that I
am frustrated that at a university it is impossible for me to
replicate that kind of work, even in prisons. It is very hard
for us to get into prisons because of the IRB rules at our
universities and also at the prisons. There is a wealth of
information that we could be collecting.
I also think that Saudi Arabia is actually, perhaps
ironically, at
the cutting edge in thinking about prevention and
counterradicalization. They have been spreading this Wahhabi
ideology everywhere where they think it might work.
I just came back from Bosnia a couple of days ago. They
have been very active in Bosnia. Bosnia is very vulnerable now.
Why can't we--and you know a lot about this, Dr. Haykel--try to
get them to help run a prevention and counterradicalization
campaign? They did not mean to be spreading ISIS ideology. They
meant to be spreading Wahhabi ideology.
What do you think of that, Dr. Haykel?
Senator Carper. Go ahead, Dr. Haykel. What do you think
about that?
Mr. Haykel. I think that the Saudis are extremely important
in this fight, and I am always in favor of getting others to do
the heavy lifting when we cannot do it or we should not be
doing it. So they are definitely partners.
As far as Wahhabism is concerned, this is just a very
literalist interpretation of the faith, and it does come with
money, but money is not enough to turn people to this version
of the faith. I mean, I think that people turn to it because it
responds to particular anxieties that modern people have--that
modern Muslims have.
So I think that just to blame Wahhabism for the rise of
ISIS is wrong. But the Saudis would definitely be helpful in
this regard.
Senator Carper. We spend a fair amount of time on this
Committee focusing on root causes, as opposed to symptoms of
problems. I will use an example. Our border with Mexico, we
spent about a quarter of a trillion dollars in the last 10
years to fortify the border--walls, dirigibles, blimps, drones,
and some 20,000 Border Patrol personnel. And that is all well
and good, but we spent about one percent of that--not even one
percent of that--addressing the root causes of emigration
factors in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador and the misery
that those people live in and how we have contributed to that
misery.
The Chairman and I have been down--and some others on the
Committee have been down--to actually visit those countries. I
was down and met with the Presidents, all three of them, just
last week and did see how they are doing. They swore in a new
President in Guatemala.
But we actually go to the source and say, ``What are you
willing to do to turn around your countries? And what do we
need to do?'' Because we are complicit in your misery, given
our addiction to the drugs that travel through their countries.
If we had the ability to ask--I believe in asking your
customer--our Chairman comes out of the business community. You
always want to ask your customer. In this case, if we are
asking those that are being drawn to ISIS--whether the folks
have actually gone to fight militarily or to set up these
satellite operations--to ask them as our customer, ``Why you
are doing this?'' and to better understand how to counter it,
what would they likely say? Hedieh, would you lead that off,
please? Ms. Mirahmadi, what would they say? Just very briefly.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, I mean, to tell you the truth, I have
tried to study this scientifically, so we tried to apply
evaluation tools to determine what those root causes are, and I
do not think that you can point to any one root cause. So I
think that people have claimed that it is poverty, but we have
debunked that theory because it cannot be just poverty because
a lot of poor people do not become terrorists.
People say that it is social alienation, or it is
disenfranchisement in Western countries, or it is ideology. I
think that we have come to the conclusion that it is a range of
risk factors that overlap and can cause a variety of responses.
There is no single factor that has been proven to cause
terrorism or proven as a root cause.
Senator Carper. OK.
Ms. Mirahmadi. So it is a lot of things, and it is
everything at once.
Senator Carper. OK. Thank you. Mr. Vidino.
Mr. Vidino. Unfortunately, I have to be as equally vague as
Hedieh because the reality is that it is such a diverse--if we
just look at the sample in the United States, the 80
individuals who have been arrested for ISIS-related activities,
the diversity is staggering, the profiles: 40 percent converts,
different levels of knowledge of Islam, for example. We have
people who convert literally on Google and overnight think they
know everything about Islam and they think that it is their
religious duty to go and join ISIS. But you also have people
who have grown up in the faith, actually they are Hafiz, who
have memorized the Koran, they are teachers themselves in
Islamic schools in the States, and then try to join ISIS. So
there is absolutely no one answer.
The psychological profile of a lot of them is that they
feel the need to help. It is obviously misguided, but there is,
I think, a lot of evidence that they are people with a high
sense of empathy, of compassion, and they feel that they are
doing something good or that they are helping.
Senator Carper. Thank you.
Dr. Stern, you ask this question of a lot of people. ``Why
do you do this?''
Ms. Stern. Yes, I agree with my colleagues that there
absolutely is no single root cause, no typical pathway. But we
do know that the lone wolves--I mean, this is one thing that
actually has come out of the literature. Lone wolves are much
more likely to have mental illness. This is the thing we are
most worried about now, lone wolves, here in the United States,
not what we are worried about over there.
We are finding in a study that I have been involved with at
Children's Hospital in Boston that a lot of time on the
Internet is a risk factor. But there are so many risk factors.
Obviously, I spend a lot of time on the Internet doing my
research, and it is not a risk factor for me to join ISIS.
I think that we are not going to get very far in
identifying exactly what the risk factors are, but that we can
use what we learn about each individual who is thinking about
it and who is sitting on the fence. How do we stop that person
from joining? We need to understand each individual. And I feel
very strongly about the efforts to talk to these kids one on
one online before they join, and also to deploy formers, people
who have actually joined and recognized that it is not a heroic
existence and that joining ISIS was nothing like what they had
imagined.
There are hundreds of clerics all over the world, learned
scholars, who have said, ``Well, this is not Islam''--that is
not quite true. It is based on Islam. But, ``This is not the
Islam that we believe in.'' They are boring. We need people who
can communicate with these kids who find the idea of ISIS
appealing.
So we need to understand, with each individual, why they
are drawn and to address that.
Senator Carper. Thank you. My time is up. Let me just close
with this thought. In an earlier existence, as a Governor, I
was a founding Vice Chairman of something called the ``American
Legacy Foundation,'' created out of the tobacco settlement, 50
States and the tobacco industry, a lot of money flowed out of
that to the States to offset the health care costs that States
were incurring because of tobacco. One of the things that came
out of it was $1 billion or more to set up a foundation called
the ``American Legacy Foundation.'' The responsibility of the
foundation was to create a truth campaign to convince young
people who were thinking of smoking not to and young people who
were already smoking to stop. And the message was developed not
by us, but actually by young people, sort of like you are
suggesting, and they worked with public relations folks who
were really good at messaging and did a multimedia campaign.
And if you think it might have worked, look at the rates of
teen smoking from about 2001 until the end of that decade.
Remarkable. But the key was, as you suggest, to go to other
young people and let them help develop the message--this is why
smoking is bad for you. This is why you do not want to do it--
and to be able to use that source of delivery to convey the
message. And maybe that is part of what we need to do here.
There is an entity within the Department of Homeland
Security--it is called the ``Office of Community
Partnerships''--which is designed, in part, to do that work,
and we are trying to help connect them with the people in the
American Legacy Foundation, who have done this truth campaign
successfully and see if maybe this is a way to do it to address
an even graver threat than tobacco.
Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Carper. Senator
Peters.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS
Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
our panelists for what I think is very interesting testimony,
and on something that is so important so that we get a better
understanding of what we are dealing with from an ideological
standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, and from the general
narrative that we are hearing from ISIS as they are recruiting
folks and moving forward with their terrorist activities.
I think that it is important to bring this hearing to what
is happening actually later today on the Senate floor. We are
going to be dealing with an issue related to refugees.
Certainly right now, we are dealing with a humanitarian crisis
that we have not seen since the Second World War. We have folks
who are fleeing ISIS. Dr. Haykel, I think that you mentioned
that folks would not want to live under ISIS rule. We have
people who have been persecuted, who live in fear, who live in
terror, and who are fleeing that part of the world as fast as
they can, both Syria and Iraq, looking for a safe haven.
The United States, in my view, should welcome folks as
refugees, those who are legitimate refugees, as part of our
commitment to the world community. Yet there are people who are
saying, ``No, we should shut down the refugee program, we
should not accept any refugees in this country.''
I would like to hear from each of the panelists. To what
extent does the fact that there are certain folks in the United
States who believe that we should shut down a refugee program
that accepts people who are fleeing the terror and fleeing
ISIS, play into ISIS's narrative? Or is that a good thing for
us to be doing? Let us start with Dr. Haykel.
Mr. Haykel. So the refugee crisis in the Middle East is
largely the result of the civil wars and the governments
themselves not keeping the State together. In the case of
Syria, for instance, the refugees are largely produced by the
Assad regime, a regime that is backed by both Russia and Iran.
ISIS does not actually allow the people it rules over to leave
the territory.
The way in which the refugee issue plays out--and the only
way that I have seen it was, most recently, in the way that Mr.
Trump mentioned that Muslims should not be allowed into this
country. That plays into the ISIS narrative because it
basically confirms that the United States is an enemy of Islam.
But more broadly, I do not think that ISIS is focused on the
debate over refugees, in general.
Senator Peters. Well, we heard from a previous panel, and
folks were saying that refugees are somewhat of an
embarrassment to ISIS because their narrative is that people
should welcome the caliphate and people should want to come. So
why does everyone want to leave the area and not come into
their protective sphere, I should say?
Mr. Haykel. Right, you are correct. ISIS calls for Muslims
to give their oath of allegiance to the caliphate and then to
come to the territory. Most of the people, though, who have
left that region have left actually--for instance, Christians
are a large percentage of the people who are leaving because
they are persecuted, both by ISIS and other Islamists there;
also moderates, liberals, all kinds of people who have left
actually are people who would not fit into an ISIS-like world
or a world in which Islamism dominates, whether it is ISIS or--
many of the other groups, for instance, in Syria are all
Islamists. Most of the opposition is Islamist and intolerant of
difference.
But you are right. I think that those who have left ISIS
territory and who describe what life is like under ISIS are
extremely important in the propaganda war against ISIS because
they come out and they describe it as a ``living hell.''
Senator Peters. Any other panelists?
Ms. Stern. I would say that I agree with you that we must
accept refugees. I think that we must thoroughly investigate
them. I think that we must recognize that ISIS will try to
insert operatives into that refugee flow. I think that those
are facts.
At the same time, if we do not accept the refugees, that
harms our position in the long run even more. It is not just
ISIS, as my colleagues keep saying. This is an ideology. We can
defeat ISIS. There will be another iteration of this jihadist
ideology.
Senator Peters. Dr. Vidino?
Mr. Vidino. I agree. If we look, for example, at the
numbers of individuals who were arrested in the U.S., only
really a handful have a refugee background. We basically had
two cases of people, very simply, one in Texas and one in
California, with a refugee background out of people arrested
for ISIS-related activities. There were a couple of other
individuals of Bosnian and Somali backgrounds who have a
refugee background, but their radicalization took place here in
the States well after receiving asylum.
I agree that it is, to some degree, an opportunity, but we
are missing--if we are welcoming people, we should be telling
these stories. They are an asset in undermining the ISIS
narrative. I am not seeing that kind of message being put out
in a good way, stories being told in the right way, being put
on social media, whether in Arabic, whether in English and
other languages, of people saying, ``I left ISIS because of
this and this and that, and I am now here, and I am being
treated humanely and everything.'' We are doing something nice.
We are not then using that opportunity.
Senator Peters. OK.
Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that there is a corollary issue
about the refugees as well, in that we have to make sure that
we are providing the requisite services for them to adapt to
life in the United States. We actually have a lot of clients
who are refugees, and a lot of them are having a real difficult
time adjusting to life in the United States because they do not
speak the language, and they have suffered from years of post
traumatic stress disorder from war and from losing family
members. And so it is really important that the refugee
resettlement services are doing their job and also referring
them for psychiatric services or other kinds of therapeutic
needs that they may have to make sure that when they do come
here, they are acclimating and integrating into society and not
leading to further problems down the road.
Senator Peters. So, if I could summarize, you believe that
the refugee program is an important aspect of U.S. policy, that
it speaks to our values as Americans, and that we do welcome
folks who are fleeing persecution and violence. Certainly, we
have to make sure that we are screening those refugees and that
we have a process to protect the homeland, which I believe very
strongly in, that we have a very vigorous screening process.
But, nevertheless, refugee program provides a very important
element in pushing back against this extremism, not just with
ISIS, but just generally. In fact, as all of you have said,
defeating ISIS by itself is important, but that is not the end.
There is still much more that we have to do, and having a
credible, workable, and secure refugee program in the United
States, and then using the stories that these refugees can tell
us about what they are fleeing and why American values are so
important, will be important to our effort. Is that accurate?
Does anybody disagree?
[No response.]
Let the record reflect that no one disagrees with that.
Thank you so much.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Peters.
Let me just quickly repeat what I have said, which is that
if we are going to accept, let us say, 10,000 refugees, which
is just a pittance in terms of the numbers of refugees, why do
we not establish criteria, allow women and children who have
been properly vetted and who are relatives of Syrian American
citizens who can financially support them? I mean, would that
not make sense? So, hopefully, the administration would take
that type of advice, and I do not think that we would have much
of an issue here. Senator Portman.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PORTMAN
Senator Portman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As tempting as it
is to get into the refugee issue, I am going to try to stay
away from it, except to say one thing. We have had testimony in
this very hearing room. Seated right where you are, Dr. Stern,
in fact, was the Director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FBI), who told us that there were gaps in
intelligence that did not allow them to properly vet these
refugees. And, of course, we should be helping the refugees,
and as the Chairman has said, bringing 10,000 in, out of the
roughly 4 million who have fled Syria, is a small drop in the
bucket. A much larger role that the United States plays is
supporting these refugees as they are trying to reestablish
their lives in these refugee camps, and we should and can play
a huge role there, and we do. American tax dollars are used.
But we do need to protect the homeland as well, and I guess
that is where my questioning would be.
I do not disagree with the comments about taking on ISIS in
the current caliphate that they are developing in Syria and
Iraq. I think that we need to be more aggressive militarily,
and I do think, to Professor Haykel's comments, that a military
victory is an important victory, outside of the military
aspect, because it shows that they are not invulnerable. It
shows that they, in fact, can be defeated.
I also believe that we have to protect the homeland in more
effective ways, including better screening, and not just for
refugees. That is, of course, a very small part of the people
who come here. The visa programs, obviously we had this issue
arise in San Bernardino, where a spousal visa was used to gain
entry for one of the terrorists, and we did not do the proper
vetting, including looking at her social media, which would
have been the obvious thing to do. And, of course, people
coming across our borders illegally, so protecting the homeland
is critical.
But to me, the most difficult part of this and the most
important part, which is why this hearing is so important--and
I thank the Chair and Ranking Member for holding it, and I
thank our
witnesses who have provided us with a lot of very valuable
information--is dealing with the core issue. Some call it the
``hearts and minds.'' I do not know if that is an appropriate
way to describe it, but, essentially, how to keep this
extremism from growing. And the jihadists who have converged in
Syria come from all over the world, and we know that.
We also know that attacks are occurring all over the world.
We have a New York Times story from December. Some of you know
this. I counted up the number of deaths from terrorism. This is
not from military actions by ISIS. This is really from
terrorism. It is over 1,500 people who have been killed in the
last year through terrorist attacks, including some we know a
lot about, like Paris and San Bernardino, and others we just do
not talk about much. So how do we get at changing the hearts
and minds?
Professor Haykel, you talked about our first and best line
of defense being the Muslim community. I could not agree with
you more, and I think we do not spend enough time and effort on
that. I was riding with police officers in Columbus, Ohio over
the weekend, in the communities in Columbus that are Muslim
communities, particularly the Somali community there. How do we
encourage better communication and cooperation to the point
that we heard earlier from Dr. Mirahmadi about separation
versus, I would say, inclusion or social alienation versus, I
would say, community involvement? How do you get that
interaction? I think that is incredibly important, and we are
not doing enough there, and it is about domestic terrorism and
the fact that we do have, even with success overseas, a problem
right here at home.
Dr. Vidino talked about this interest of living in a
utopian Islamic society. We need to have the counternarrative
to that, obviously, much more effectively online and elsewhere.
You talked about the core of the message being more important
than the medium. In other words, we can complain about the fact
that we do not do an effective job to counter it online, which
I believe we do not, but also we have to get at the core
message as well.
And then Dr. Stern had a number of interesting comments.
One that I thought was the most interesting was that we can
defeat ISIS, it will just crop up elsewhere, essentially that
was what you were saying. And it is almost like Whac-A-Mole. If
we are successful in Syria--I look at, again, this New York
Times story and the analysis that we have done. There are at
least ten other countries where ISIS now has a presence, a huge
one in Libya, for instance. And even beyond ISIS, of course,
other groups will emerge because of the core. And then we also
have the example from Dr. Mirahmadi, as an expert, saying we
are not going to bomb our way out of this problem and talking
about other ways to deal with it.
So that is what I want to get at, if I could just get more
ideas from you all. What should we be doing? You mentioned
Egypt. There are also other Sunni countries that should be
playing a more aggressive role in, as you say, exporting not
Salafi jihadi Islam, but traditional Islam. What more can be
done there? You mentioned, Dr. Stern, deploying former
jihadists, using clerics more, and the counter narrative that
we talked about. If each of you could give me a couple of
examples of what we should be doing to address this third, and
I think most difficult, problem that we face of how to get at
the core and how we change those hearts and minds. Let us start
with Dr. Mirahmadi and go to our right.
Ms. Mirahmadi. So in addition to the things that we could
do with Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia--when I talk about
helping them export, I meant materials, curriculum, books, and
Imam training programs. So basically what the Wahhabis--what
the Salafists did--was they exported such material, through
this mechanism of taking over small centers, creating new
centers of learning, starting at a very young age, and then
establishing an Imam in these centers that would then basically
change the ideology of the community around them. So we need to
do the reverse. We need these countries to train Imams, create
curriculums, and start creating that kind of groundswell around
traditional pluralistic concepts of Islam. And I am not talking
about making it up on the fly. This is part of 1,200 years of
Islamic history that they can use.
Senator Portman. We should use our leverage, the United
States' diplomatic leverage----
Ms. Mirahmadi. Diplomatic, exactly.
Senator Portman [continuing]. Economic leverage, whatever
leverage we have. That is an urgent need.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. And we are doing it. I know that
our cooperation with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), hosting
conferences, for example, Sheikh Bin Bayya is also doing a
number of events that are cosponsored by the United States. So
I know that we are doing it. For example, Al-Azhar University
and its network has 400,000 students at any one time--400,000
people. So that is a lot of people that could influence the way
the ideological religious dynamic plays out in the next 5 to 10
years.
Senator Portman. Dr. Vidino.
Mr. Vidino. Yes, generally speaking, I think that the
United States has been somewhat reluctant to get into the
religious debate, for obvious reasons: separation of church and
State, and because it is a religion that we are not very
familiar with. And I think that reluctance, to some degree, has
to go, although we do not have to do it directly, but I think
there needs to be more support for the right people--whether it
is governments or, even better, civil society organizations
abroad, and domestically, to work on the religious aspect of
it. It is not purely a religious problem, clearly, we all
agree, but there is a big religious component there.
I said that maybe we sometimes overestimate the online
aspect. Now I am going to reverse what I said. I think a lot of
the message is out there. You mentioned Morocco, Jordan, and
the UAE. A lot of these countries do put out a lot of very good
products, very good reinterpretations of Islamic texts that
undermine ISIS's interpretations. But they are not slick, they
are not cool--they need to be marketed in the right way. You go
to these conferences, and you have a lot of people with a lot
of gray hair. You do not get to the right people. And often you
reach those right people through social media. So it is a
matter of repackaging, and I think that is a goal, to have a
lot of--I do not know if there are a lot of debates, but
conversations between the White House and Google and Facebook
and so on. And I think that is one other aspect where we should
have that conversation, how to repackage----
Senator Portman. My time is expiring. I want to be
considerate of our other colleagues here, so I would like for
the record if you all, Dr. Haykel and Dr. Stern, would provide
me with specific examples, in addition to any more that Dr.
Vidino and Dr. Mirahmadi have.
But one final question. The Office of Community Partnership
has come before us from the Department of Homeland Security.
Are they doing what you just said? Yes or no. Not so much.
Mr. Vidino. Not so much.
Senator Portman. OK. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Portman. Senator
Heitkamp.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HEITKAMP
Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to get to
a story that was just released in the last probably 20 hours,
which is that ISIS is cutting the salaries of their fighters in
half. And I think that it was unclear how they were dealing
with food stipends. I think they thought that the food stipends
were fairly consistent, but not the stipends for children and
for wives. And that has to be an indicator of some of the
challenges that they are experiencing right now, and I want
your reaction to kind of the financial aspects of this, how we
can do a better job to cripple this organization from a
financial standpoint. I think $26 oil is having a pretty
dramatic effect. But beyond that, what does this reduction in
salaries and assets mean for this organization, for this
terrorist organization? And how can we further flame the
financial challenges of ISIS? I would like everyone's
reactions.
Mr. Haykel. So I am of the view that ISIS is actually
losing and has been actually for quite a few months now, not
only territory, but also financially.
One of the ways in which that can be furthered financially
is to have better control over private financial flows out of
the Persian Gulf, and here I am specifically talking about the
countries of Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.
Senator Heitkamp. And I just will interrupt and say that we
recently were on a trip to the Mideast, and this is exactly
supported by what we heard there.
Mr. Haykel. Yes, and they are definitely trying to do this.
The problem is that many of the payments take the form of cash
bags that are carried across the border. So getting the Turks
on board--because that is often where the cash is carried
through--is extremely important.
But I think that would be very important, and then the way
in which we are using special forces, in particular with the
Kurds, is, I think, a model that should be replicated with
other fighting groups on the ground. That is proving extremely
effective as well.
Senator Heitkamp. OK. Dr. Stern.
Ms. Stern. I guess one question I would want to ask is: Are
they cutting the salaries of propagandists? We know from a
really good story in the Washington Post, that the
propagandists are actually paid more than the fighters.
Senator Heitkamp. There is an indication that it is across
the board, that all salaries are being reduced, not just
fighters' salaries. But, again, this is based on intel that we
are receiving, that is being reported.
Ms. Stern. Yes. So this is a very good sign. Stopping the
sale of oil from ISIS to inside Syria, that is obviously pretty
hard to accomplish. Also, they make money from so many
different operations. They are selling amphetamines such as
Captagon. They are managing to get those antiquities out. So
this has to be a major effort to stop both the flow of foreign
fighters in and the flow of goods out. I mean, I do not know
what else to say. It is great. If this is happening, it is
great.
Mr. Vidino. I agree with everything that has been said, and
I think that the emphasis on Turkey is there. It is all really
about Turkey. Yes, the Gulf States in terms of private
donations are very difficult, but probably the crucial role
there is to be played by Turkey.
I think what concerns me also, to some degree, is how many
places ISIS has expanded to. Libya, it is probably also, from a
financial point of view, particularly concerning because ISIS
is starting to control parts of Libya, and this is also very
crucial from an oil point of view and from an immigration point
of view. It is sort of the end of a route that starts in Sub-
Saharan Africa, where all sorts of goods and refugees are
imported to Libya, and it is a gateway to Europe.
So there is a reason why ISIS is focusing on that part of
Libya specifically, and why it is even telling its fighters not
to go to Syria and Iraq any longer, but actually to shift to
Libya. It is obviously because there is a political vacuum
there. It is an opportunity. But it is a big financial
opportunity as well.
Senator Heitkamp. OK.
Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that for some of the cases that we
have seen here in the United States, financial incentives are
important. So them learning about a reduction in financial
incentives would hopefully reduce incentives to go. We had one
case in particular, Mona Abu Salah, who talked about how he had
food in his truck all of the time and that it was so great to
have these resources in the caliphate. So I think that it is a
very important issue.
And what tools we have mentioned already: the Department of
the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), all of
their financial control systems, designating more individuals
to stop the flow of money, and reducing the price of oil.
Anything we could do to cutoff their ability to provide
financial incentives is important.
Senator Heitkamp. I know that earlier we had this
conversation about what are, in fact, the root causes, and I
think that we could all argue that feeding someone's family and
providing a salary in a war-torn area may, in fact, be a great
incentive beyond the ideology and beyond the broader mission.
And one of the things that has arisen in this discussion is,
never mind the migration of refugees to this country, but once
they are here, the need to provide social services so that we
do not see radicalization. We could vet folks all we wanted,
but once they come here, if they are alienated, if they feel
isolated, and if they feel separated from the communities that
they are living in, then that is another risk factor.
And so I want you, I guess, Doctor, to expand. I thought it
was an important point that I want to reemphasize here because
I do not think that anyone here is talking about eliminating
refugees. What we are talking about is vetting them
appropriately on the front end, but you raise a very important
point, which is that there are risk factors if we do not manage
the refugee population, if we do not assist the refugee
population once they are here.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. I mean, Lorenzo mentioned the
fact that refugees were not radicalized before they came and
the small number of cases. I mean, a case in point is
Minnesota. So when you have a large resettlement effort----
Senator Heitkamp. You are talking about the Somalis.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes. The resettlement agencies tend to focus
on particular communities and continue to put refugees in a
single place, thinking that they are creating a circle of
resources. But the problem is it also can ghettoize communities
and not allow them to adjust and to integrate. So it is very
important that there are social services provided and that
there are also community service opportunities and other kinds
of community-based programs that will help them to integrate in
mainstream society, such as English language training and all
sorts of job, vocational training, to make sure that once we do
welcome refugees, which is a very important part of our
society, that they do become productive, healthy, and
integrated American citizens.
Senator Heitkamp. Yes. I just wanted to reemphasize that
point because I think that, as we are rightfully focused on
what is the appropriate vetting process, we still have these
challenges moving forward. And if we as a country do not have a
more unified message, we risk our national security in not
managing the refugee population that we have.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely.
Senator Heitkamp. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Heitkamp. Senator
Booker.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BOOKER
Senator Booker. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you, Ranking Member.
I just want to say at the outset how much I appreciate you
all being here, and your written testimony was really
important. I am grateful for your presence here.
I just want you to know that there are many tools to stop
ISIS. I think that one of the first things we need to be doing
as a country is to put forth an Authorization for Use of
Military Force (AUMF) for this engagement. I think that it is
actually an abdication of our authorities, as delineated by the
Constitution, that we are engaging in such an important war
without Congress at all doing its job and its constitutional
duties. There are a lot of other things we need to do, from
working with our allies, to making sure that we are
coordinating efforts to destabilize and destroy ISIS. We need
to craft a political solution, overall, to what is happen in
Syria.
I say all of this at the outset because I tend to be
focused a lot on the issue of counter-ISIS messaging, and I
want to say that that is just one tool in a toolbox. But it is
one that I really do not believe we are doing that well.
Ms. Stern, in your testimony you talked a lot, I think,
about important information about the alienation and
marginalization that can go on with young people--that they
have had humiliating encounters with the police and that
ignorance of Islam makes a youth more vulnerable to ISIS's
ideologies. All of these things create an atmosphere with which
people can be radicalized. And what I found interesting is an
important point that I think needs to be understood. When it
comes to those immediate threats in our Nation, you point
specifically to the fact that it is the Western recruits that
can so easily get back into this country, or never leave this
country in the first place, who offer the most immediate
threats to the safety and security of the United States of
America. And so that is really where I want to drill down,
because I am a little frustrated when it comes to our efforts
at countermessaging.
Now, you mentioned at the outset of your testimony, that
our counter-ISIS strategy is lacking in our investment in
counternarratives that appeal to specifically Millennial youth.
To that end, you will be offering a Peer-2-Peer (P2P) course in
your classroom next fall, which sounds like an interesting
course. Perhaps you should hold it here in Washington. My staff
has been involved in extensive conversations with Tony Sgro,
the founder of the P2P program. So we are very focused on this,
and I am working on legislation right now to give DHS the tools
to widely implement the Peer-2-Peer course.
So can you tell me, in your own words, what you believe are
the benefits of the P2P program and why it is so critically
needed?
Ms. Stern. I think that we really have not taken this
issue, as you say, seriously enough. If you think about what we
did during the Cold War, when we realized that we had to fight
the Soviet ideology, it involved the private sector and the
government working together with covert and overt programs. We
spent a lot of money. It led to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
(RFE/RL). It led to Voice of America. We are not taking this
nearly as seriously as we did----
Senator Booker. And, by the way, we still spend an
extraordinary amount of money on those programs of the Cold War
era.
Ms. Stern. Right, because they are effective.
Senator Booker. Well, I would question whether they were
effective--and thank you very much--and we are spending
hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money
on things like Voice of America and not on the programs that
you have such a specialty in.
Ms. Stern. Right. So Tony Sgro's course--it is amazing.
This is a guy who had found a way to help Honda design cars--
the car that a 19-year-old kid would want to buy, by having the
youth get involved in the design of the car. Why not get youth
involved in writing that counternarrative instead of a bunch of
middle-aged people in the State Department or----
Senator Booker. With no disrespect to middle-aged people.
[Laughter.]
Ms. Stern. Right. The program is now--it is in 30
countries. I have just spoken with a university in Bosnia where
it is very important because of the spread of ISIS there. The
kids get to develop their counternarrative. Hopefully they find
some hip-hop artist who had joined ISIS and quit. They know
what is attractive to young people. I think it is really
important that this be offered not just in universities, but
also in high schools. And as it happens, the Saudis are now
going to try to offer this program in high schools. I would
like to see that happen all over the world. I think it is so
inexpensive compared with the money we spend on the military
aspect of fighting ISIS. We can afford to experiment and see
what works. So I am a big proponent of EdVentures and Peer-2-
Peer----
Senator Booker. And I appreciate that, and just to
highlight the urgency here--and I really want to turn to
Professor Haykel, not only because I want to hear your
testimony, but because you are from New Jersey and I should
highlight you, sir. [Laughter.]
But, look, one of the factors in your explanation of the
multifaceted appeal of the Islamic State is the massive youth
bulge. We are talking about a boom of Millennials within this
region. Sixty percent of the population across the Arab world
is under the age of 30. Think about that. Seventy-five percent
of the population in Mali, for example--excuse me. The median
age is 15.9. In Tunisia, youth unemployment among graduates is
around thirty percent. So you have, in all of these countries,
massive youth populations, and youth are making up the majority
of the population in these countries where we are currently
facing ISIS or its affiliates. How should this demographic
reality, of these Millennials, as we were just talking about,
really affect the way that we think about Syria, Iraq, and even
Turkey and other countries in the region, to tune our strategy
in terms of countermessaging?
Mr. Haykel. Thank you. I have been involved in seeing how
ISIS recruits the Millennials. So, for instance, ISIS has
created its own version of Grand Theft Auto, the video game.
ISIS goes into where these young people are involved in
discussions online and then lures them with its own version of
these video games. So they are very sophisticated in basically
using our culture, things that we have produced, and then
distorting them for their purposes. So it is very important, I
think, to focus on this.
And the other point is that these Millennials that you are
talking about are actually, today, extremely connected through
the Internet to the world, largely because in many countries of
the Middle East, there is no other way to communicate and there
is no other way to have a discussion, an open discussion.
So I think that one has to think about these young people,
and especially the cultural products of the United States and
how they are being contorted and distorted to attract these
young people to extremism and radicalism.
Senator Booker. Thank you. So, in other words, we have a
region of the globe that is a Millennial region, and we need to
attune sort of the Baby Boomer and Gen X efforts to really
focus in on language that they understand and that they are
engaging in.
Mr. Haykel. That is absolutely correct.
Senator Booker. Thank you, sir.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
Just because you brought up AUMF--I am on the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee--let me give you my insight on
that. I would say that as soon as this administration were to
present and we were to have Democratic support for an
Authorization for Use of Military Force that shows the full
commitment of this Nation and this administration to accomplish
the goal of defeating ISIS--it does not limit this
administration, or the successor administration, in any way,
shape, or form. You have that authorization, but we have not
seen that yet. That is why we do not have one. Senator Ernst.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR ERNST
Senator Ernst. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to
our witnesses today. It is very good to have this discussion,
very relevant with everything that we have going on today.
Dr. Vidino, if I could start with you, please, in December
your organization published a report, which I think was very
well titled, ``ISIS in America: From Retweets to Raqqa.'' And
one of the report's conclusions suggests that intervention is
an effective alternative to arrest--and I would like to hear a
little bit more about that--to really help sway some of those
individuals from the path of radicalization. So you do note a
potential number of issues with this intervention, including
the lack of legal guidance and a set of best practices. So if
you could expound a little bit on that, please, I would love to
hear more about that.
Mr. Vidino. Of course. Thank you very much for your
question. What we advocate is a system--I think that we all
understand, as we said earlier on the panel, that we cannot
arrest our way out of this problem. And the FBI were the first
ones to say this, that the numbers are too big. And I think in
many cases, you have people who are minors or people anyways
who have not crossed a certain threshold. So I think there
should be at least the choice--the authorities should have the
ability to, in some cases, of course, monitor, investigate,
arrest, and go the hard traditional way, but there should be,
in certain cases, an ability to have a system in place where
some kind of mentoring, some kind of intervention is carried
out.
Of course, there are different ways of doing this. You have
a lot of European countries that have been experimenting with
this with mixed results, but I think that they have gotten much
better over the last 3 or 4 years in how to do that, whether it
is law enforcement directly that does it or, as I would
personally advocate, the lighter the footprint of government,
the better, so it is civil society that does that, of course,
with some kind of guidelines that come from the government,
some kind of clear legal guidelines aboout what can be done
when the intervention transcends into criminal investigation
and so on. But things need to be clarified from the beginning.
It also has to be very clear in the message that is sent to the
community, because there has been a lot of controversy and a
lot of pushback from some quarters in the Muslim community that
Common Vulnerabilities and Exporsures (CVE) interventions are
used as ways to spy on communities and so on. I think that it
should be done in a very clear way, explaining that these are
ways, not to criminalize people, but actually to help people
not criminalize themselves. This is a way out for people,
before they cross a certain line and do something that is
criminally relevant, and also something that damages their own
lives.
So finding the right people, finding the right partners,
whether it is an Imam, people from a religious background, or
in some cases they do not have to be, but people that can find
a way to gain the trust of these young people who are
radicalizing and sway them. And, of course, it is not easy. It
does not work all of the time. But the European experience
tells us that it works--for example, in the U.K., they talk
about a sixty to seventy percent success rate. That is huge.
That takes away a big, big chunk of work from what the FBI has
to do. Their resources are spread thin. If we eliminate sixty
to seventy percent of people who are potentially dangerous, but
just starting to flirt with the ideology, and we sway them, not
only are we doing something good for these individuals, first
of all, but we are also really helping law enforcement to
focus, to zero in on the really bad guys.
So it needs to be done in the right way, and I think there
should be some kind of legislative intervention there in
setting how the rules of the game should be. And, of course,
there should be participation with the law enforcement
community in that, and then getting communities involved.
Senator Ernst. Do you think that we would have good
participation from non-governmental agencies here in the United
States, organizations that would step forward and be able to
fill that role? And, Ms. Mirahmadi, I would love to hear your
take on that as well, please.
Mr. Vidino. Yes, I think, first of all, one should have
civil society involved in general, and I think Hedieh can give
a practical example of how that is done. But I think that the
local level is also crucial when it comes to government. I
think that it has to be done at the county level and at the
State level. These are the people who, more than the FBI,
really have the pulse of the community. And to some degree,
they are seen not as the bad guys, as the FBI would be.
Obviously, there is a role for the FBI for sure there, but I
think that it is local law enforcement, health departments, and
a variety of entities at the local level that are cricial in
getting the communities to be involved.
I think that we have seen a bit of pushback from
communities, but I think that it comes from some self-appointed
leaders of the community. So there are big parts of the
community that do want to help, do want to work with
government, because they understand that the problem is
targeting their own children. So one has to be really clear
about how diverse the community is and who they will find as
partners.
Senator Ernst. OK. Ms. Mirahmadi, if you would, please.
Ms. Mirahmadi. I absolutely agree with what Lorenzo
mentioned in terms of legal guidelines. So we do run one of the
first intervention/prevention programs on violent extremism in
the country, and it is difficult, risky, and complicated, but
that does not mean that we cannot navigate our way through it.
We are able to operate completely outside of the purview of law
enforcement until there is an imminent threat or some national
security risk. So there is a way to develop a program that
protects client health information, and then when it goes to a
case of radicalization, or when the FBI or the police
department would want to refer a case, you could follow the
rules of informed consent and balance those interests with our
national security concerns.
And I would just like to say that as long as the FBI
continues to have jurisdiction on those cases, as unpopular as
it may be to some people, they need to be part of that process,
because, at the end of the road, they will be involved if those
cases go south. So it is important to have a balance between
the community being able to stay within its purview and protect
the client information and then still have a relationship with
the Bureau when it is something beyond their control.
Senator Ernst. OK. Is this reflective of what the Europeans
have done? What are the greatest takeaways that we can learn
from what their governments have done?
Ms. Mirahmadi. As Lorenzo mentioned, there are many
different kinds of models. So in Europe, a lot of them are led
by government channels in the U.K. In my opinion, you should do
both. We can have community-led programs and rectify
inconsistencies in the process. In other words, if you do not
follow a systematic approach, some dangerous people may be
missed. For some, there is this hesitation to deal with law
enforcement too closely so that they can do only prevention
work.
So I think that you can set up diversion programs, like we
do in a lot of other violence prevention programs, that are in
partnership
with law enforcement. And then separately you could have
prevention/intervention programs that are largely community
run.
Senator Ernst. OK, great. Wonderful. Well, I thank you very
much for your input. It is something that we really do need to
tackle.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Ernst. Senator Ayotte.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR AYOTTE
Senator Ayotte. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I wanted to follow up on your report, Dr. Vidino, and ask
you about the aspect of it where you noted that there is a
largely untapped opportunity to leverage American ISIS recruits
that have become disillusioned with the cause, and that these
individuals have dropped out for a variety of reasons, whether
experiencing the brutality of life under ISIS firsthand or
finding a more positive outlet for the quest that led them to
ISIS in the first place. You noted that we would do well to
provide avenues for their stories to be amplified to help
dissuade would-be recruits.
Could you explain that to us and just let us know, first of
all, how many Americans do you think that would constitute? I
am just curious. And, what are the reasons they have become
disillusioned? And how could we use them to help us get at this
issue?
And then I am going to ask a dual question to all of you
after that. How do we get the message out as to what life is
like for women in ISIS? Because as I understand it, the way
that they are portraying the role of women in how they are
marketing it is quite different than the reality of being
engaged with ISIS or obviously traveling to Iraq and Syria and
joining up with the caliphate if you are a woman.
So, Dr. Vidino, I am going to have you address the American
issue, and then if people could jump in on women and how ISIS
treats women, I would appreciate it.
Mr. Vidino. OK. Thank you for your question, Senator. What
we advocate--and, again, this is an idea that has been floating
around in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and in other
quarters--is the idea that, as we said earlier, there is a very
powerful message that can be sent by people who are part of
ISIS or, in general, the jihadist movement. I think that you
are right that we are probably going to have some difficulties
in finding a lot of Americans who have left ISIS. It is not
really public information, but I would argue that there
probably are some very isolated cases that you would find. We
can definitely find more people who were al-Qaeda-linked, or
anyway, jihadists. We have a whole wave of people who are
coming out of prison now. These are the people who were sort of
arrested post-9/11, sort of the second-tier guys, the people
who did not go to fight, mostly the people who were convicted
for material support and got between 10 and 15 years, and who
are coming out of prison now.
There is really no de-radicalization program in the U.S.
prison system, but some of these people are coming out de-
radicalized on their own, reformed. That is a very powerful
message. We go back to--it is a message, but it is also the
messenger. The legitimacy that somebody that has maybe served
time in jail, maybe even went to Afghanistan or to Yemen, and
can come back and say, ``Listen, the stories that we were fed
are lies. The reality is completely different,'' that messenger
is so much more powerful than the countless books the four of
us can write here.
So we argue that in some cases, whether it is people coming
out of prison, whether it is people who, in one way or the
other, are living in the States, or, even better in my opinion,
if we have people coming back from ISIS--obviously if they have
committed crimes, nobody argues that participation should be a
way to get away with not being prosecuted and not being held
responsible for what they did. But since we know that there are
sort of borderline cases, with the proper considerations, I
think that there is such a powerful countermessaging tool there
that should be used. It is sort of a gutsy, alternative way of
dealing with the problem, but I think that we do need new
solutions and I think that this is an important one. Definitely
we have some of those that come from the ``old guard,'' let us
put it like that, the al-Qaeda people who were active 4 or 5
years ago, and I think that is very powerful.
Senator Ayotte. Who would like to go first in addressing
how they are recruiting women, the reality versus--how we get
that message out to women in particular?
Ms. Mirahmadi. I think that as Lorenzo and Dr. Stern have
both brought up, the issue of using formers could be a very
powerful tool. But I would also like to posit that oftentimes a
lot of
these--the would-be recruits are very skeptical of messages
that come from a former, because it is what they consider to be
propaganda against the caliphate. So it would also be valuable
to think of not only what we are against, but also what we
actually stand for. So not just telling girls why they should
not go, but also telling them why they should stay. And I think
that it requires--whether it is a Muslim mentor or some other
kind of social network that gives them a motivation for saying,
``I am Muslim, but I am also British or I am also American, and
this is my country. I feel part of it and I have a faith that
provides me with the spiritual and the intellectual needs that
I have.'' I think that is a much more complicated question, but
it is definitely something that we need to get to, because we
need a positive message not just a countermessage.
Senator Ayotte. Am I missing something? And maybe I am
wrong about this, but I thought that they were misrepresenting
to women what the reality was. And maybe I am wrong about that.
I just would like to understand----
Ms. Mirahmadi. No, what I mean is that they do not believe
it when we say women are mistreated.
Senator Ayotte. OK. I understand.
Ms. Mirahmadi. So when we say, ``They treat you terribly.
They make you wear a burqa. You do not ever get to go out. They
do not feed you.'' Their response is, ``You are lying. You are
making that up.''
Senator Ayotte. Oh, they think that we are misrepresenting
it.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes.
Senator Ayotte. Professor.
Ms. Stern. Here I think it is important to highlight the
work of a woman, Humera Khan, who is working one-on-one with
young people, and particularly young women, who believe this
narrative. I think that this kind of work really needs to be
supported. Of course they are lying. They are saying, ``You get
to be a jihadi wife.'' They do not say, ``You get to be a
jihadi wife one month with one guy and one month with the
next--or maybe one day.''
Yes, we need to get those stories out, but I think that the
one-on-one approach that Humera Khan is involved in is very
useful. That is what I will say.
Mr. Haykel. The recruitment to ISIS provides meaning and
structure to individuals. I do not think that it is gendered. I
think that women are as attracted as men to the meaning and
structure that ISIS provides when they are recruited. And ISIS,
itself, is extremely adept in its propaganda and using women in
its propaganda. So you see this in their online magazines, but
also, for instance, one of their principal ideologues today,
one of their principal thinkers who is writing poetry and
treatises on Islam, is a woman. Her name is Ahlam al-Nasr. And
they have a brigade of female morality police that roams the
streets.
So, the way that they present themselves to the outside
world and to potential recruits is that this is a terrific
place and women can lead meaningful lives and also produce the
next generation of fighters, which is a duty for Islam as a
religion, and for the caliphate itself.
Unfortunately, the testimony of former slaves--so I am here
thinking about someone called Nadia Murad, who is an amazing
woman, a Yazidi who was enslaved and testified at the United
Nations (U.N.) and also has given many interviews. If you
listen to her, I mean, tears well up in your eyes. But it has
had almost no effect, as far as I can tell, throughout the Arab
world, because she is ``othered.'' She is seen as something
outside of the community, and sometimes she is not even
believed. They think that this is disinformation against the
caliphate.
Senator Ayotte. Thank you.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Ayotte.
Let me quickly pick up on that point because it ties in--I
have three questions left. Dr. Mirahmadi, you talked about the
need for basically a reverse Wahhabism process or project. They
are not believing--I have met with young Yazidi women as well,
and you are right, the treatment of them is horrific. How far
along in that reverse process are we? I think I know, but I
want to hear it from you.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Not very far along.
Chairman Johnson. We are a long ways.
Ms. Mirahmadi. We are long ways, but I think that it is to
the point that Dr. Stern mentioned about not really believing
what our problem is. We are just kind of throwing a lot of
things at it and being, like, well, if we just do this, then it
will go away, if we just do that, then it will go away. I have
been doing this for 20 years. It is not going away.
Chairman Johnson. No. This is a long-term process.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. It is a tough, long slog.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Right, exactly. And, also, we have to get
over the issue of our trepidation in dealing with religion. So
once we can overcome these two aspects and really confront what
we are up against and then not be afraid of invoking religion
when it could be helpful to our mutual causes, Muslim and non-
Muslim, a whole lot of other tools will open up to us.
Chairman Johnson. Obviously, that was the purpose of this
hearing, to lay out a reality. Even if we do not like it, we do
not want to face it, it is the only way to solve a problem.
First, define it properly and then admit that you have one.
Dr. Haykel, can we just get back to some basics? Because I
really think that this is very confusing to most Americans. Why
do Sunnis want to kill Shia and vice versa? Can you just
describe the Sunni-Shia split within Islam?
Mr. Haykel. Well, it is a split that dates back 1,400 years
to the time when, after the death of the Prophet, there was a
difference of opinion over succession, over who was to succeed
the Prophet. And the majority went one way and the minority
went the other way. The majority are the Sunnis; the minority
are the Shiites.
Now, over time, this sectarian split--you can think of it
as Catholic versus Protestant. It was not actually mobilized
for military purposes or for sectarian wars. It is only evident
historically, and today, when States, when governments, choose
to use this form of identity, form of religious identity, for
very specific purposes, typically geostrategic purposes and to
achieve goals that States want to achieve. So you see the
Saudis----
Chairman Johnson. What was the first instance of States
using this split to go to war with each other?
Mr. Haykel. Well, the most prominent one in pre-modern
times was when the Ottomans fought the Safavids. The Ottomans
were based in Turkey, and the Safavids were based in Iran. And
they used this difference in religion to fight one another.
Today we see it in the fight between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
But I think one has to dig deeper than just the sectarian--
I mean, the sectarian language gives cover for what is
otherwise a battle over power.
Chairman Johnson. And then even within the Shia-Sunni,
there are factions within those groups as well, which is,
again, even more confusing. Sunni governments obviously want to
destroy ISIS because ISIS wants to destroy them. They are all
basically kind of Sunni-based, correct?
Mr. Haykel. That is correct. There are divisions within it,
and my advice to the U.S. Government is not to enter into the
fray of these sectarian wars, because we should not take sides,
for one, and, two, I do not think, again, that we have standing
to decide what is and what is not correct, Islamically. I think
that we should be very hard-nosed about what our interests are
and pursue those relentlessly.
Chairman Johnson. And what are those interests then? Again,
we want to defeat ISIS.
Mr. Haykel. Right.
Chairman Johnson. In order to do that, from my standpoint--
this is kind of my third question, too--we need to develop what
I have been calling a ``committed coalition of the willing.'' I
often use the model of the First Gulf War where literally our
coalition partners supplied 240,000 troops to that effort, paid
for about 85 percent of it. Now, that is a committed coalition
of the willing. But today we need a committed coalition of
Sunni Arab States, correct? Because of the history, because we
bugged out, and because we have had some problems. Can you just
describe the lack of confidence, from your perspective, of the
Sunni States right now in American leadership and why they
might be reluctant to join this coalition?
Mr. Haykel. The principal reason that Sunni States are not
fully joining this coalition is because they do not regard ISIS
as the principal enemy that they are facing. So the Saudis, for
instance, would think that Iran is much more dangerous. The
Turks think that the Kurds are much more dangerous. And,
frankly, Iran itself is playing a double game, in that it is
both convenient for ISIS to exist there because it keeps the
Sunni world in disarray, and it creates an enemy that is
convenient for the Iranians, and it brings the West on to their
side with Assad and to side with Iran.
So, this is a part of the world where, what is really
happening is not obvious, and one cannot have any illusions,
because all of these States use forces, these forces like ISIS,
for their own purposes.
Chairman Johnson. So I would like to give you the
opportunity to just go through that in a little greater detail,
I guess starting with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and just
really describing in detail what their aims are, who they are
concerned about, who their true enemy is, and who their
corollary enemy is because, again, it is incredibly complex.
Can you just step through that again in greater detail?
Mr. Haykel. Sure, and I will in a thumbnail----
Chairman Johnson. Again, kind of talking about their
strategic goals and aims.
Mr. Haykel. The Saudis basically want to reverse Iranian
influence throughout the Arab world. They consider Iran's
projection of power, especially through non-State actors like
Hezbollah and the militias of southern Iraq, to be
unacceptable, and they want to roll it back because they want
to dominate that region. They consider the region to be Arab,
and they consider themselves to be the dominant power in that--
--
Chairman Johnson. And what was their goal in terms of the
Wahhabism schools and setting all of that up?
Mr. Haykel. Actually, the Saudis were never involved in
setting up Wahhabism is either Iraq or Syria, because the
regimes in those two countries, authoritarian regimes, would
not permit the Saudis to do this. So the conversion of the
Sunnis of Syria and Iraq to Salafism is a very recent thing,
and it is--I think that there are reasons for why they are
doing this, why the Sunnis are becoming Salafists. I think that
it has to do with power again.
Chairman Johnson. So maybe not there, but they spread
Wahhabism----
Mr. Haykel. They spread Wahhabism throughout the world.
Chairman Johnson. And their aim in doing that was what?
Mr. Haykel. Well, actually, it was largely to fight against
Communism, Arab socialism, and Arab nationalism. They were
threatened by a form of politics that was deeply destabilizing
to monarchical rule, so they spread an Islamic solidarity,
Islamic identity movement and campaign, beginning in the early
1960s, largely and often in coordination with us, actually.
Chairman Johnson. So to really protect the House of Saud.
Mr. Haykel. Correct.
Chairman Johnson. OK. So there is encapsulated Saudi
Arabia.
Mr. Haykel. Yes.
Chairman Johnson. Move on to Iran, then.
Mr. Haykel. So Iran basically has yet to decide whether it
is a normal country or a revolution, and inasmuch as the hard-
liners in Iran still believe in the revolution, they want to
project the power of Iran, militarily, but also soft power,
revolutionary power, through proxies, from the Palestinian
territories all the way----
Chairman Johnson. So describe that in detail, because
everybody talks about how they are recognized as the largest
State sponsor of terror. Describe that. Describe the groups
that they are supporting and why they are doing it.
Mr. Haykel. Right. So they support certain factions amongst
the Palestinians. Hamas, for a while, was on their payroll, and
there is another faction in Gaza that is with--Islamic jihad
that is with Iran. In Lebanon, they have Hezbollah. They have a
number of militias in southern Iraq. They support the Assad
regime and also a number of militias that are fighting with the
Assad regime.
As far as the Middle East is concerned, by far, the most
destabilizing country has been Iran. The Assad regime, for
instance, which would not have survived without Iranian
backing, has killed close to 300,000 people and has made 11
million people displaced as refugees. So, ISIS actually pales
in comparison with Iran, in terms of instability in the region.
Chairman Johnson. What about Turkey?
Mr. Haykel. Turkey is an interesting country inasmuch as it
has been cut off from the Middle East for some 80 years, and it
has rediscovered the Middle East and thought that it, as a
successful country, could dominate it through soft power.
Turkey has quickly realized that the Middle East is much more
complicated, and they thought, I think, until recently, that
ISIS could be contained. And then ISIS started a suicide
bombing campaign against the Turks. So the pipeline of recruits
has shut down as a result of this. But Turkey still remains in
an old model of thinking about the world. For them, the Kurds
remain the most dangerous element because they represent 20
percent of the Turkish population and could potentially secede
from the country.
Chairman Johnson. Can you talk about the difference within
the Kurdish population between those in Turkey, the Kurdistan
Workers' Party (PKK), and the Iraqi Kurds?
Mr. Haykel. I mean, there are differences certainly between
them politically, but on the whole, I would think of the Kurds
as an American--as natural allies for us, especially those in
Syria and in Iraq. They are a long-suffering population. They
have really suffered and have never had their own country. And
you can think of them almost like Israel, as a group of people
that will always be a natural ally of the United States in the
region.
Chairman Johnson. OK. Does anybody else want to feed into
this line of questioning? Seeing Senator Booker has been
faithful in sticking around, I will let you have a couple of
extra questions as well. But does anybody else want to comment
on this?
[No response.]
Senator Booker.
Senator Booker. Thank you very much. I appreciate your
patience and the indulgence of the Chairman.
I just have really one last line of questioning, and it
really goes to this experience that I had 2 weeks ago when I
was in the Middle East--I was in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and
Turkey--and sat down with Saudi Arabian leaders, many of them
women and activists, and sat down with others in Turkey, from
Erawan to just individuals I met on my way there. And I was
sort of surprised at how much they were concerned that this
Nation, America, was turning anti-Islamist. Do we hate Muslims?
And I found myself having to explain that that was not our
stance and actually get very strong in reasserting or
reaffirming the pluralistic society in which we live, the
loving and tolerant society in which we live.
I guess my question for all of you is really, there seems
to be this counterbacklash, as I try to observe it, over this
alleged political correctness and how this country talks about
Islam, about how this country talks about the terrorism that we
are seeing. And I am wondering, basically, does language really
matter and how we frame this to the rest of the world. Some of
the comments that we have, some of the comments many people
believe is demagoguery, is that hurting our ability--because I
am about winning. Is it hurting our ability to deal with the
ISIS threat and how we are characterizing it or how some of the
characterizations have been out there. I think this is
important coming from specialists like you, for me at least, to
help understand American rhetoric and what we are seeing in the
media by political candidates, as well as elected Senators.
Anybody?
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely it does hurt. It does hurt our
ability to win. And I think it is because----
Senator Booker. So you are saying it hurts our ability to
win in the battle against ISIS.
Ms. Mirahmadi. Absolutely. Vilifying all of Islam and
Muslims of course will hurt us. So talking about not letting
Muslims into the country anymore or that Islam is the problem
will alienate 1.2 billion people for sure.
But that does not mean that we cannot have a rational and
intelligent conversation about what the threat is. So if you
had asked me 5 years ago, I would have told you that I
advocated calling it ``radical Islamism,'' and I used the word
``Islamism'' to make a distinction between that and mainstream
Islam. The problem is that it has metastasized so badly with
ISIS that there is only a sliver of theology left on top now,
and there are all these other countercultural, anti-social
components to what is radicalizing individuals.
But at the end of the day, there is this kind of long-term
problem with warped, deviant interpretations of Islam
constantly being used to galvanize violence. And I think that
there is something to be said for what are we going to do about
that element of the problem. And I think that the President's
call to the Muslim community, ``We ask you to stand up, we ask
you to talk to your Imams, and to take responsibility,'' was
very important, because there is a piece of this that belongs
to the Muslim community. I have a number of theories on why it
has taken so long to speak up against it, but the fact is that
there is a piece of this that belongs to the community, and I
think that we need to do that together. But that requires us
having a rational conversation about the subject.
Senator Booker. And so you said that you used to call it
``radical Islamism.''
Ms. Mirahmadi. Right.
Senator Booker. What do you call it now?
Ms. Mirahmadi. ``Violent extremism.''
Senator Booker. ``Violent extremism.''
Ms. Mirahmadi. I mean, for a number of reasons: one,
because it is so politically incorrect to call it anything
else, and----
Senator Booker. But I am not worried about political
correctness. I am worried about winning against ISIS. And so
you are saying that it is not politically correct, but you are
also saying that it is damaging, right?
Ms. Mirahmadi. It is damaging because people do not like
the association--Muslims do not like the association of Islam
with this problem.
Senator Booker. And so for that 27-year-old, it is
alienating, it is further isolating, and in many ways adds to
the climate in which people could be radicalized. Is that what
you are saying?
Ms. Mirahmadi. I do not know if that term does that to him.
Senator Booker. Right.
Ms. Mirahmadi. It is the feelings people have against Islam
and Muslims. So I do not know if it is the term that would do
it or just the way that our society is responding. So the
bullying in schools, for example, a number of our clients, the
young people who are the most vulnerable, are the ones that are
getting constantly harassed in school, called ``towel head,''
``terrorist,'' or ``Osama.'' They are just maladapting. And so
that is causing fissures in our communities across the country.
There needs to be work done at the grassroots level, at the
local level, to repair those fissures.
Senator Booker. So seemingly innocent semantics coming from
high-level leaders helps to drive intolerance? Is that----
Ms. Mirahmadi. Well, if you talk about banning all Muslims,
yes. There is a range, right? There is a difference between
addressing radical Islamism as a component of the problem and
banning all Muslims. There is a spectrum of terminology that
could be used, but, a large representation of the Muslim
community now do not like ``violent extremism'' either because
they think that it is code for ``Muslim.''
So I think that even though we try to avoid using certain
terminology, we are still in the same place that we were before
by fighting over terminology, rather than solving the problem.
Senator Booker. Would anybody else like to offer thoughts
on that?
Ms. Stern. I think that it is important to remember that
the primary victims of this ideology are Muslim, and I think
that some of the primary victims are the mothers of the kids
who are getting seduced, basically to commit suicide, in
somebody else's losing war in another country. I think that
hate speech right now is extremely dangerous, and I agree with
you that certain political leaders who are indulging themselves
in hate speech are really damaging our ability to fight this
threat.
Senator Booker. But do you think--you are not saying,
obviously, that a term like ``radical Islam'' is hate speech.
People using terminology like that, that is not problematic to
you, right?
Ms. Stern. Not for me. I mean, I think that the President's
discomfort with calling this ``violent Islamist terrorism''--I
understand why, but I do not agree. I mean, that is what it is.
And the vast majority of Muslims do not agree with that
ideology and are petrified--some parents are petrified that
their kids might, in this process of growing up and of
rebelling against their parents, be drawn to that ideology.
Senator Booker. And so political leaders who say ``violent
Islamic radicalism'' or ``violent Islamic extremism,'' that
does no damage, in your opinion?
Ms. Stern. That does not trouble me, but saying that we
cannot allow Muslims to come into this country, that troubles
me a lot.
Senator Booker. Yes.
Ms. Stern. Very dangerous.
Senator Booker. Mr. Vidino, you seemed like you wanted to
say something?
Mr. Vidino. Just very briefly. I think that there are two
levels of the conversation here. One is what public leaders
say. I understand, to some degree, the trepidation when a
President makes an address and the whole world is listening. I
understand that there is a level of defensiveness, in Muslim
communities and in allied countries, to any kind of statement
that can, to some degree, associate Islam with violence. So the
debate is much more open. When you go to Muslim majority
countries, they talk about political Islam very freely among
themselves.
Senator Booker. Right.
Mr. Vidino. But if somebody else that is non-Muslim, from
outside, calls it ``political Islam,'' immediately you get a
sense of defensiveness, which is completely understandable.
Senator Booker. As a black guy----
Mr. Vidino. What I am saying is that----
Senator Booker [continuing]. I would not understand what
you are talking about, words used by blacks that cannot be used
by---- [Laughter.]
Mr. Vidino. I guess to some degree. [Laughter.]
Senator Booker. I would not understand.
Mr. Vidino. What I am saying is also that there are two
levels. So I understand why, at a level of the President or,
anyways, elected leaders or political leaders in general, that
there should be--people should be very careful about the terms
that they use. Sometimes a little bit of carefulness is
metastasized into a paralysis internally, where we do not talk
about religion out of political correctness, and what could be,
for example, debates within the administration and finding
solutions, to some degree political correctness has blinded us,
and we look at all other aspects which are indeed important and
should be looked at, but we ignore the one that is religious.
Senator Booker. That is a very good point.
Mr. Vidino. Which is one of the components.
Senator Booker. That is a very good point.
Do you want to add anything to close it out at all? Being
from Jersey, I would like for you to have the last word.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Haykel. Thank you. I definitely think that there is an
Islamic genealogy to this group. The problem is that when you
enter into the specifics, it gets very complicated, and for
public discourse, it is better to be prudential and careful in
how you use the term ``Islam.'' So I understand where the
President is coming from. I do think, though, that an honest
discussion about this problem has to involve how this group is
using Islam for its purposes and where it is drawing its
inspiration from.
I would also like to end by saying that there are bound to
be more attacks in the United States like the ones that we have
seen already, unfortunately, and this is where we have to be
super vigilant in how we respond, because the temptation will
be to vilify the entire community of Muslims. And that is where
I think that we have to not play into the narrative of ISIS,
because that is exactly what they would want us to do.
Senator Booker. Thank you for those wise words.
Chairman Johnson. Thank you, Senator Booker.
I will tell you, as a Protestant Lutheran, if there is a
radical band of Lutherans committing terrorist attack after
terrorist attack, I would call them, ``Lutheran terrorists,''
and I would denounce them, and I would renounce them. I think
that is part of the problem. The truth is the truth, reality is
reality, and this strain, which we will all admit is a small
percentage, has to be defeated.
So, again, I just want to thank Senator Booker----
Senator Booker. Mr. Chairman, could we have a hearing on
Lutheran terrorists, please? [Laughter.]
Chairman Johnson. I am not aware that it is a problem.
Prove to me that it is a problem, and we will have a hearing.
Again, I just want to thank all of the witnesses and all of
the Senators who came here. We had great attendance and
excellent questions. I think that we did lay out some of the
reality here. I think that we helped to further define the
problem, and it is incredibly complex, and it is going to be a
long-term project trying to solve it.
With that, the hearing record will remain open for 15 days
until February 4th at 5 p.m. for the submission of statements
and questions for the record.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 12:03 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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