Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 5th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to start our second round, which will be for five minutes.

I'm going to start with Mr. Hawn, sir.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for joining us.

The testimony has been very interesting, if somewhat discouraging, Ms. Abdo's particularly. What concerns me, as you pointed out, is the impotence of the majority in the Muslim world to do anything about the violent minority. As we have said, we can't impose solutions on them; they have to come up with them themselves.

Part of this is understanding Islam and understanding governance, as you have said. In the Christian world, we have separated church and state, but it seems to me that in the Muslim world, the church is the state; Islam is governance. Everything they do is based on the Koran, is based on centuries of jurisprudence. How do we ever fight that?

A point I made on Tuesday to some folks we had here is that Christianity grew up over a period of time. To me, Islam needs to grow up. Are we ever going to see that? We can't wait 800 years for them to grow up as it took Christianity. How do we do that? How do we get into the schools where we're concerned about what's being taught, and in some mosques, and by some people in Canada, in the U.S., in Britain, wherever? How do we get into those places and work with these folks to give some power to the majority, to actually make the change, and to start separating church and state in the Muslim world? Is that ever going to happen?

Ms. Abdo.

[Geneive Abdo]

I'm sorry to be the messenger of bad news, but I think that maybe we need to be asking a slightly different question, which is not how can we force them to separate church from state.

Before I answer the question, I just want to note that, in a sense, with regard to a lot of what we're seeing, these kinds of extremist ideas, this isn't the first time in the Islamic tradition that some of these ideas have been advanced. There's a whole history of Islamic scholarship. There's a scholar by the name of Ibn Taymiyyah, and there's another ideologue by the name of Hassan al-Banna. There have always been these cycles of radical thought having some resonance in Islamic societies, of course not as violent as what we're seeing today, but perhaps that's just a result of the modern world. We have better technology now. We have better weaponry. The extremists now operate in a different way than they did in the 1990s. In the 1990s, in Egypt, they were attacking cabinet ministers with fairly primitive military operations. I think we have to separate what is technology and the instruments of the modern world from Islamic theology, or what is theological and has been part of the Islamic tradition.

I'll give you an example. The anti-Shia attitudes have existed for hundreds of years among the Sunni; it's just that now there's a different instrument for expressing that intolerance and that hatred: there's social media.

I think those are some of the challenges, but I believe the upside is that, as part of the modern history of these Islamic movements, at some point, public opinion does turn against them. The specific example that has been referred to since the unfortunate death of the Japanese journalist was in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, when the al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the most militant group that had existed in Egypt for a while, killed a lot of tourists and Muslims in the town of Luxor. That was virtually the end of the movement. I think the question now is, how many more of these really gruesome incidents can ISIS survive without public opinion turning against them in a way that matters?

I think what the west can do is try to help some of the religious leadership. I think there were 180 religious scholars who recently signed a petition against ISIS. How can the west help these people develop bigger platforms so that the extremists' voices aren't the only voices that people hear? As I mentioned earlier, I don't think that, either in the west or in the Arab world, religious scholars who are against ISIS, who are against this interpretation of Islam are effective in their own messaging. I think that is one way that the west can weigh in.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have, so we'll have to maybe pick it up later.

Madam Laverdière, I'm going to turn it over to you for five minutes.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for three very interesting presentations.

Of course, our aim is to look at the future for some recommendations, but maybe we need to look at the past a bit to better understand how we can do better in the future.

You mentioned a few failures of the past. One you mentioned, and maybe you didn't call it a failure, was the Arab Spring. In particular, you said that young people who are in ISIL had a different agenda a couple of years ago because they were involved in the Arab Spring.

What could we have done better, if anything, to sustain the Arab Spring, to help make it work and avoid those people who would rather turn to radicalization later on?

[Ellen Laipson]

Thank you very much. I should clarify it. I don't want to oversimplify or overgeneralize. There is some anecdotal evidence that young Tunisians are disproportionately represented in ISIL. It's startling for a country as small and as homogeneous as Tunisia that over 3,000 young Tunisians have made their way to ISIL. We have some anecdotal evidence that at least some of them were Nahdha supporters; they were supporters of Rashid al-Ghannushi, who is as close as you can come to a moderate reformist Islamist thinker, and they were disillusioned that there wasn't more immediate change in their feeling about their relationship to the state.

I think the west tried very hard to be helpful in the first year of the Arab Spring. There was a big infusion, the Deauville partnership, and all these ideas of what we could do. Reality is that the flow of aid, job creation, support for the private sector, etc., couldn't come fast enough or on a large enough scale. In the particular case of Tunisia, we're just about to release a report, like the ideas of the Marshall Plan, on what we could have done in the Arab Spring. The reality is that Tunisia is the closet to a success story and it's still on track, more than any other Arab country, but its own new parliamentarians didn't know how to change the legislative environment for economic action. They failed to open up the banking system, to create an enabling environment for new economic initiative, that a statist mindset was still in place.

I think there's still work to be done, but the sad truth is that, because of this media information age we live in, people very quickly decided that it wasn't working. That's what happened in Egypt. They didn't have the patience to let some of these transformative activities play out. I don't blame the west for failing. In addition, I would say the west was very clear that we wanted to respond to Arab requests. We didn't want to decide for them what their policy should be. In the case of Libya, we waited way too long because we were waiting for a Libyan government that wasn't competent to ask for help, but we said that we were not going to decide what they needed until they asked. They couldn't ask; they didn't know how to ask. There were some missteps there on both their part and our part early on.

We should not give up on the Arab Spring. I still think that the Arab Spring will, historically, be a turning point in the willingness of Arab societies to stand up and say that they want a greater voice. It doesn't mean we're on an easy path to democracy, but I do think state-society relations in the Arab world are changing. We're just at the beginning of that process.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

If you have time, perhaps you could expand a bit on the situation in Jordan. How do you see it? You've mentioned that it's starting to be touched by the events we've seen recently by ISIL and the population's reaction to the current events.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'd like a very quick response. The member is out of time.

[Ellen Laipson]

I was in Jordan in October and I thought Jordanians were very much in denial that ISIL was a domestic problem for them. I think, in the short run, the Jordanians are hugely galvanized in a unified spirit, but they want to fight now. The king wants to get behind the cockpit in a fighter plane. If I were his security detail, I would say, “You've got to be kidding.” What a tragedy it would be if the king were to be caught in a battle with ISIL. I think that Jordan has always been a vulnerable country, but Jordan is also a country that has such a close partnership with the west. It will mean that a security culture will dominate, so we will see a strengthening of a security environment in Jordan, but I do think they will survive.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you for that quick response.

We're going to move back over here to complete the second round. Mr. Goldring, you have five minutes, please.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

Thank you, witnesses, for your testimony today.

Ms. Abdo, it has been mentioned that Christianity has grown up, but I think we've seen over the last couple of years, even in Ireland where there was some terrorism, and we see even today on Ukraine's eastern border where Moscow itself has what it calls an Orthodox army, which in effect is persecuting other Orthodox Christians in Ukraine as we speak....

There is the Interparliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy, with parliamentarians from 25 different countries. It's not necessarily Orthodox countries per se, but Orthodox members of parliament.

Would you consider that would be helpful, maybe, or is there such an organization for Arab parliamentarians, not just from Arab countries but from the United States, Canada, and other countries to get together?

A lot of this seems to be the result of really serious misunderstandings. When we think of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and freedom of speech, it just seems to run counter to what other societies and cultures believe in themselves. I think a lot could be meted out by discussions in these forums, to perhaps take back to our own countries, to help improve our own Charter of Rights.

Could you comment on that, please?

[Geneive Abdo]

Thank you for your question.

Because, of course, we have to consider that post-Arab uprisings elected leaders in most countries—maybe Jordan and Tunisia now being the exceptions—who have less credibility than they had before, rather than parliamentarians, we're seeing the emergence of non-state actors. As I described, they're the ones who are in conflict. They're the ones who are making these kinds of calls.

What I think might be important if you take a country like Egypt, one thing that could be helpful, if you're talking about the idea of delegations, there is an institution called Al-Azhar, for example. The head of this institution is appointed by the Egyptian state, and that's always been true, but it's a religious institution. As I mentioned earlier, an institution like this—even though its legitimacy and how much respect it has in the Sunni world is debatable—as a state institution, is an institution that the west could maybe deal with in the kind of forum and format you're talking about. Their credibility has been hurt over time. There's a big debate in this institution among the religious scholars about the role of the state in religion, about Islamic interpretation. Perhaps it could be a player in the kind of thing you're talking about.

These institutions exist everywhere. They exist in Lebanon. There are Shia institutions, Sunni institutions. They've all weighed in on these issues, but there is no centralized way for them to exchange their ideas.

Now that these non-state actors are transnational, what happens in Lebanon doesn't stay in Lebanon. What happens in Syria doesn't stay in Syria. There's even more of a need for these kinds of, not parliamentary, but religious institutions to come together to try to sort out some of these issues.

I'll just give you a small example. Two weeks ago here in Washington a delegation of tribal leaders from Anbar province came to lobby the United States government to ask for more help in fighting ISIS. Some of these kinds of organizations are not part of the state necessarily, but they have a lot of power within Arab societies. I think that governments need to deal more with these kinds of nebulous organizations.

[Peter Goldring, Conservative, Edmonton East, AB]

You mentioned the issue in France. It was hotly debated here in Canada too. Our own CBC refused to carry the picture. It was criticized by some for not carrying it because it was not being open enough. Obviously it's an issue. We must explore how to be more culturally sensitive so we don't unnecessarily trigger backlashes in some of these other countries and cultures.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Goldring. That's all the time.

We're now going to start our third round. I'll have Mr. Anderson start, for five minutes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

I'd like to follow up with Ms. Laipson.

You made some comment earlier about education and scholarships. I think we're all supportive of these, but I have in mind the Jesuit statement that if you give me a child for seven years, I'll deliver you the man. I just wonder how we can be effective.

Islam is very cognizant of the idea that they need to educate their young people. How effective is it going to be for us to try to come to someone who is at the university level and say, “We'll give you a scholarship, and you can come over to North America”? To whom do those scholarships need to be geared in order to be effective? How do we deal with that issue? Are we going to change somebody's fundamental values when we bring them over here as a 20-year-old?

[Ellen Laipson]

I look at this issue with great humility. I'm sure there are people who can parse the issue much more carefully than I can.

I admit that in providing university-level scholarships, essentially what we're trying to do is perpetuate an elite, trying to ensure the sustainability of a western-oriented elite. We are not talking about transforming societies in which the demographic base everywhere—in Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, the population-dense countries—has a part of their demographic pyramid that is never going to be exposed to advanced education, or certainly to western-style education. In a country such as Pakistan, a few western scholarships are not going to replace the madrasa system.

I am not suggesting that this solution would be sufficient, but I think it's a useful input, because we want at least part of the elites of these countries to still retain some cosmopolitan values. I think there is a fair amount of evidence, looking over the decades, of how an intervention with an 18-year-old who comes to get an undergraduate degree or comes for graduate school sometimes is so inspiring that those people go on to become leaders in their own countries. I think we can be reasonably confident that they are contributors to a more positive relationship with the west.

It's not sufficient. I'm not suggesting that we could ever provide enough schooling or access to scholarships to transform these societies at the base. That has to be done at the primary education level within those countries themselves.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Good.

I'd like to follow up on one other comment that you made earlier. You said that this theology or ideology has not yet spread to Asia. But there are various Islamic insurgencies throughout Asia in various countries, in areas in which they're calling for sharia law to be implemented and are implementing it, separatist movements and those kinds of things.

Could you explain a little more what you meant by that? It seems that it is more international than that comment suggests, and it has an impact and an influence right around the world. I'm interested in whether you want to clarify that statement, or maybe you want to defend it; I'm not sure.

[Ellen Laipson]

For sure, some of these political Islam debates exist in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, countries in which there are Muslim minority populations or Muslim majority populations. We've been looking pretty carefully at whether the idea of the caliphate resonates in Pakistan, for example. We are really trying to watch for whether there is a contagion effect yet. It may happen, and I'm sure there are individual or pockets of ISIL sympathizers in Asian countries, but right now it seems to be more an Arab-world phenomenon than an entire Muslim-world phenomenon.

Again, I think it deserves to be monitored.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

The theory, then, is typically based around the caliphate, and the notion of establishing it is what you were talking about.

[Ellen Laipson]

Yes.

[David Anderson, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move over to Mr. Dewar for five minutes.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I have a question for Mr. Gartenstein-Ross. I found your comments around propaganda use and messaging to be very interesting. Actually, a couple of witnesses touched on this subject.

Based on your assessment, what is an effective way of disrupting this? Obviously, as a responsible actor, we have a responsibility to do what we can here under the United Nations Security Council resolution, but also in the region. Do you have ideas around that?

I was very interested in your assessment that while the public seems to think that Daesh or ISIL is gaining momentum and is on a roll, you're suggesting that they're very vulnerable. I appreciate your assessment, but what are some of the things we can do to effectively disrupt and hamper their actions, particularly in, as you quite rightly put it, their messaging, the way they use propaganda?

[Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

I'll start with the most immediate and least effective, which is obviously pulling Twitter feeds, pulling videos, things like that, including getting various services, like Twitter or Facebook, to do so can have a disruptive effect. But I think in terms of a messaging campaign, obviously we're looking for something much more sophisticated than that.

As I said, I don't think a messaging campaign can be driven by, say, a politician on the stump saying ISIS is actually weak. Instead, the U.S., Canada, other countries that are active in Iraq, have a lot of information related to ISIS. I think making sure that the information gets to the right people, that is credible news sources, both from the western world and from the Arab world, is extraordinarily important and can have a disruptive effect.

Number one would be showing their losses, and I think even putting together information packets for reporters that vividly document this group's losses. You have, for example, this new study that came out saying that ISIS has doubled its territory in Syria. It's not accurate. I've been following this in very granular detail. It has not doubled its territory in Syria. If you look at the most gains being made by jihadist groups...look, jihadist groups are gaining, but it's mainly the al-Nusra Front, which is ISIS' primary competitor, which has been on a rampage over the past few months. Likewise in Iraq, the fact they've lost Sinjar, the fact that their logistics are increasingly challenged, and the fact that Mosul is being increasingly encircled, these are the kinds of things that can vividly show the disruption of their momentum, and right now that's not getting out.

Another thing that could be shown is where they are exaggerating their reach. They've consistently exaggerated, and they've gotten it out into the media. I mentioned Derna before, where they were able to convince several western media outlets that they controlled Derna when they didn't. They have been in this campaign to make it seem as though various jihadist organizations have joined ISIS when they haven't. Ansar al-Sharia, in Tunisia, is an example. The Uqbah Ibn Nafi Brigade, also based in Tunisia, is another one where they got some of their supporters in Uqbah Ibn Nafi to release a statement favourable to them and for a while people thought that Uqbah bin Nafi had become part of ISIS. These are ways they're trying to generate false momentum.

Another great thing is that on November 10 they got a number of organizations at the same time to pledge their bay'ah to ISIS, with the exception of one, that being Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, in Egypt. All those organizations have not only pledged to ISIS before, but they have pledged multiple times. That's interesting, right? It's actually something that demonstrates their desperation. But we didn't have a messaging where we could get that out to reporters and say that there was this announcement and all these groups had pledged before. They're trying to blow it up into something bigger than it is.

The final thing is ISIS' atrocities. I interact a lot on Twitter with ISIS supporters, who are an annoying lot to interact with, but one interesting thing about them is a lot of them don't believe ISIS' atrocities even when ISIS itself claims those atrocities. What that shows me is that within ISIS' supporters in the west, and even some of those in the theatre, some of them just don't believe what ISIS is actually doing. As one of them said to me in a conversation, it's photos or it didn't happen.

I think it involves getting out what they're doing, and being able to more effectively show it. Look, in their own magazine, in Dabiq, they had an entire article dedicated to the reinstitution of sexual slavery. They are in fact doing that. They are enslaving women. It's a disgusting practice. You've had some stories come out about it, but the atrocities they're committing are important from both the perspective of their violating their own extremist interpretation of sharia law, but also they get to the fact that, regardless of whether someone can craft a sharia justification, a lot of their supporters are deeply uncomfortable with what they're doing and so they've created this kind of perspective where they're just not going to believe it. Part of that is our fault, in that we're not getting that information which we have out to publications, which can really vividly demonstrate what ISIS has been doing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Back over to Mr. Hawn, for five minutes.