Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank our witnesses for being here with us today.
In early December there was a meeting of the coalition partners in Brussels, from which they issued a joint statement laying out five lines of effort. These were as follows: supporting the military operations, capacity-building, and training; stopping the flow of foreign terrorist fighters; cutting off ISIL or Daesh's access to funding and financing; addressing associated humanitarian relief in crises; and exposing ISIL or Daesh's true nature in terms of their ideology.
Actually, I would like to work from the bottom up on that one.
Ambassador Bennett, in terms of the Office of Religious Freedom, what are you doing? We talked a little bit about this, but how are we approaching the issue of revealing the ideological extremism of these folks?
I guess we've all seen some recent polling that maybe concerns us because it shows that some of these ISIL-held beliefs seem to be held by a section of the general population. It seems that some of the justice penalties are applied by some of the local regimes as well.
I am just wondering. Are we dealing with this as a theological issue? Are we dealing with some higher calling such as the call to democracy and pluralism? What is our approach in dealing with this?