Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 5th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Good morning.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) our study of Canada's response to the violence, religious persecution, and dislocation caused by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant will continue.

I want to welcome all our witnesses and guests from Washington today. Thank you for taking the time to present to us.

I want to introduce to you Ellen Laipson, who is the president and chief executive officer of the Stimson Center. With her is Geneive Abdo, who is a fellow with the Stimson Center as well.

We have Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Welcome to all.

We'll start with Ms. Laipson. We'll work our way around the room for our opening statements. Once we've had your opening statements, we'll go back and forth around our room to ask you questions over the next hour and a half or so.

Ms. Laipson, I'm going to turn it over to you for your opening statement.

[Ellen Laipson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Stimson Center, As an Individual]

Thank you so much.

We are very honoured to join you.

even over this long distance to discuss what is clearly a very compelling and anguishing issue.

The events of the last 24 hours only stand to strengthen our concern about the rise of ISIL and the shocking and abhorrent violence that we're seeing in at least pockets of the Arab world.

I very much appreciate Canada's concerns about this. I think those concerns are very much shared by the U.S. and other western governments. It's a dramatic moment at which to be thinking about these issues and about whether the west can do anything, or what it can do to diminish the threat not only directly to ourselves but also to good citizens in the Muslim world.

I do hope we can all keep the human dimension in mind, that not all Arabs are falling to the siren's call of ISIL. They are struggling very much to keep some normal conventions of social and political behaviour in check even while this radical and extremist threat increases.

We used to think this was a problem just for Syria and Iraq, and now clearly we understand that Jordan is threatened. It could spread to Saudi Arabia. It has certainly already affected Lebanon, and there are other countries as well that will be struggling with this for some time.

In terms of the western response, I was in government for 25 years working on the Middle East. At this particular juncture, I think we all have to be somewhat humble about, first of all, whether it is a problem that we can solve, and we have to accept the limits and the challenges of the role of outsiders. We have to consider whether some of our responses to deal with the horrific violence and the threat to journalists and more generally to innocent citizens actually end up compounding the problem. I just want us to be attentive to that, because I do think there are policy responses that feel right in the short run, but that in the long run actually compound the problem.

I think it would be most useful to try to give a little bit of historical and political context. How did this happen? My colleague Geneive will look much more deeply at how these extremists talk to each other and what they talk about, and a little bit at how we understand what motivates them.

There are a number of different historical reference points that I think are all relevant when we are trying to put in context the rise of ISIL: the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, which demonstrated that what were then considered peaceful Islamists, under the guise of the Muslim Brothers, were being challenged and superseded by a much more violent and extremist form of political Islam in Egypt, which was, after all, the heartland of Arab and Islamic thought.

For those of us of a certain age, these events are all from our fairly recent memory, but more cumulatively, there has been a failure of the west to transfer its model to the Arab world. From the end of the colonial era through the end of the 20th century, there has been a realization that the western project for the Arab world wasn't really working. Certainly the American intervention in Iraq in 2003, with all the good intentions and all the efforts to try to work with like-minded Iraqis to build modern institutions, fell short because there were some other countervailing forces in Iraq and in the region.

So it is both the failure of the western project to build an Arab world that had western-style institutions and a failure of the Arab world to develop an ideology that was modernist and positive and constructive for their own citizens.

We think of the sequence of Arab ideologies that have tried and failed, from pan-Arab nationalism to nationalism within individual Arab countries to various kinds of political Islam.

When the Arab Spring began in late 2010 and 2011, there was a flurry of hope and belief that at least some in the Arab world were now ready to try again to modernize and liberalize and open up Arab politics.

What is striking to me from recent travels in the region is how quickly the disappointment has set in. Even for people who supported the change in Tunisia, for example, with a moderate Islamist party coming to power for a brief time, or the one-year reign of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the disappointment in that experiment has led to very quick radicalization by some young Arabs. The notion that people who are being recruited successfully into ISIL had a very different political agenda only a few years ago is a very disturbing thought. We really will have a very difficult time understanding who are the vulnerable populations that can be recruited by this radical movement.

My next large point is that really we have to see this as a struggle both within Sunni Islam and between Sunni and Shia Islam. I hope Geneive will explain this in much greater depth. What we are seeing in ISIL now is a willingness to kill other Muslims. This is not Islam versus the west in the first order; in the first order, it is a struggle within the world of Islam, of Sunni Muslims profoundly disagreeing about what kind of governance they want. I still believe that ISIL represents a very small minority of Arab populations, but because of their aggressiveness, they are able to coerce much larger segments of Sunni communities. They are using intimidation, and obviously, extreme violence to keep people in fear of them.

But between the world of Sunni and Shia Islam, that's another cross-cutting theme that has started to replace identity that earlier might have been focused more on “in which Arab country do I live?” Now, the source of identity may be more determined by that sectarian affiliation.

The last point I want to make when I know that all of you are thinking about possible policy responses is that I think we in multicultural societies have to stick with the core themes that we value, which are religious tolerance and commitment to a modern education, so that people have greater understanding of other communities and not just the community in which they themselves live. I would like us to think about the policy responses as having a very wide spectrum of activities, not defaulting only to a military or a counterterrorism response. It is my view, and it is one of the things that I think we have learned of the political dynamics within Iraq after 2003, that if we come on too strong, we are actually contributing to the radicalization problem. There's no way around it.

Then we can motivate people who might not otherwise have turned to a more radical course. I would argue for a very careful integration of different tools of policy response, with the understanding that we are not likely to be the primary agent of change, that these are long struggles within societies and communities, and that outside actors can play—I hope on the margins—a helpful role to somewhat reduce the violence and to give people who are more moderate in their world view some solace.

But I don't think that we alone will be able to turn the tide in what could be a generational struggle within the world of Arab Islam. This is not yet infecting Islam in Asia, but that should be something that we have on our screens as well.

Thank you very much for your attention.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We're going to move to you, Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.

[Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, As an Individual]

Thank you. It's an honour to be here.

What I want to talk about is what ISIL's strengths are and what their weaknesses are. Right now, we as western polities and those involved in counterterrorism efforts combatting militancy are very much focused on ISIL, as we should be. It's unprecedented in terms of its brutality, unprecedented in terms of the amount of contiguous territory that it holds. At the same time, it's also incredibly vulnerable, much more so than public discourse tends to suggest. I think that the vulnerabilities of ISIL need to be understood. Let me caption this within the statement that right now jihadism is in a period of growth and I think that it's going to be, as Ms. Laipson said, a generational challenge to address. That being said, ISIL in particular has some very clear weaknesses that it has been able to disguise, but which at some point are going to come to the forefront.

Let's start with what they're good at. I'd say that, in addition to their obvious military successes, ISIL is extraordinarily good at messaging in a way that is unprecedented. If you look at their videos, the production quality is extraordinary. They have something close to professional quality editing for their videos. They really understand the social media game. They're able to game Twitter and they're able to connect with young people in a way that al Qaeda was never really able to do. They take full advantage of the range of social media and this is an extraordinary advantage. You can see that just in the lone wolf terrorist attacks that occurred last year. Obviously, Canada, quite sadly, was victimized twice on consecutive days. But in general, over the course of the past decade, across 15 western states you had an average of 7.3 lone wolf terrorist attacks per year for all kinds of terrorism, not just jihadist terrorism, but far right, far left, eco-terrorism, and the like.

In contrast, for lone wolf terrorism, that is, one individual acting alone, you had more than that last year in western states that were inspired by ISIL. I think the reason why is it deals with social media. Terrorism tends to be a group phenomenon and the reason is that in general, to get someone to undertake an extreme act, like an act of terrorism that will ruin their lives, it takes someone reinforcing their proclivities towards extremism. In the case of social media, social media is increasingly serving as the stand-in for what in the past was a group activity. In other words, social media can be the terrorist group. It's changing radicalization patterns; it's speeding them up. People are radicalized, I would say, (a) more quickly and (b) there are more of them doing so. I would say, however, in ISIL's case, this is unlikely to be sustainable.

I want to look at the flip side of their messaging. One thing, obviously, that Canada is concerned about now, which is reflected in Bill C-51, is trying to figure out a way to disrupt ISIL's messaging. I think that this is an area where western states have an enormous opportunity to disrupt ISIL and it's one that is not being taken advantage of. In particular, ISIL is dependent upon momentum. This is something that was clearly articulated in their magazine Dabiq. They have this propagandist who has been basically conscripted, John Cantlie, who is, quite gruesomely, a journalist who was kidnapped and now is being forced to go through a series of propaganda pieces for ISIL. In one of these propaganda pieces, one that bears his byline in Dabiq, he talks about momentum, which is a key concept for ISIL. He says that other people will glom on to their successes and basically it will keep on building and building and building. That's how ISIL sees themselves and they're desperately trying to show that they have momentum. In fact, in many cases, we have allowed them to make themselves seem far, far bigger than they are, and I'll get to that in one second.

The fact is that ISIL has lost momentum. They have gained no new major territory since October, and in particular, they're in trouble because of the aerial campaign. It has really degraded their heavy weaponry, which they don't have an industrial base to replenish, so they're forced to undertake raids against air bases and the like to capture the tanks, the Humvees, and other equipment that they have come to rely upon in their warfare against the coalition, against Assad's forces, and against Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

As a result of not experiencing battlefield successes, and in fact having some significant battlefield losses, they had to pull out of Sinjar. And Kobani, which just four months ago was a symbol of an unstoppable ISIL, has become instead a fierce symbol of Kurdish resistance and ISIL's inability to capture even a small town in northern Syria.

They've lost momentum within the region. As a result, they've tried to show that they have momentum in other areas. This is an area where I think we need a more effective counter-messaging campaign. There are a number of examples of where they've blown themselves up to be bigger players than they in fact are.

I think the best example of this is in northern Libya, where ISIL was able to convince the western media that they had captured the city of Derna. This was reported even by the BBC. In fact you have a political article that came out just a few days ago that talks about how ISIL has captured Derna. It's not true. It's definitively untrue because when Derna put together a mujahedeen shura council, the person who was in charge of it was a member of the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade, which is the group that ISIL has been fighting against in Derna. Quite obviously, if they controlled the whole city, their enemy would not be in charge of the overall shura council, one that ISIL was locally part of and subordinate to.

We need to show their losses much better. It's not something that would be done by politicians getting up there on the stump and talking about how ISIL's weaker than people think. Instead, there's a credible media out there, one that is both credible and also sometimes credulous. Giving them accurate information about ISIL's losses can disrupt ISIL's momentum.

Another thing I'll say just briefly as I don't want to cut into Ms. Abdo's time is that it's also a group that has committed severe transgressions of Islamic law even by a Salafi jihadist perspective. I think it's important to understand the perspective they're coming from. Taking a moderate perspective and saying that they transgress this is not particularly helpful, but there are areas where they're extraordinarily weak to a messaging campaign, and in at least two different ways.

First, when they declared the caliphate, they made their own legitimacy hinge on the caliphate's continued viability. Al Qaeda controlled territory in the past. They never declared a caliphate. Part of the reason was that they understood that it would be fleeting thing. They would be seen as being overeager to declare it. Particularly as ISIL faces the loss of Mosul, most likely before the end of 2015, being able to publicize how they do not actually fulfill the requirements of a caliphate is important.

Another way they're extraordinarily vulnerable, which I will mention briefly, is that one of the requirements of a legitimate caliphate is having a caliph who fulfills the relevant Islamic requirements. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not. I don't want to get into detail here, but liaising with your U.S. intelligence counterparts will make it very clear that there are serious problems with Baghdadi from a sharia perspective.

The second thing is the atrocities they've committed. In their indiscriminate killing of Muslim civilians, in cancelling the jizya in Mosul, and in killing civilians who were protected by Islamic treaty, people such as Alan Henning or Abdul-Rahman Kassig, they have violated the Salafi jihadi interpretation of Islamic law such that even al Qaeda scholars are criticizing them. This is another weakness. The U.S., Canada, and other western countries don't have real credibility weighing in on how Islamic law should be interpreted, but getting this information to relevant people who can publicize their transgressions can help to disrupt their messaging campaign. Because messaging is what they're so good at, they're particularly vulnerable to disruption in this regard. Quite fortunately, they are also an opponent who've made themselves far more vulnerable than they realize.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to welcome you, Ms. Abdo. I will now turn the floor over to you for your opening remarks.

[Geneive Abdo, Fellow, Stimson Center, As an Individual]

Thank you very much.

Good morning to everyone. It's an honour to speak before you this morning.

I'm going to focus on the role of religion in ISIS activities. The reason I think this is so important is that there is some reluctance, particularly among western governments, academics, and the media, to take religion seriously as being part of ISIS's appeal, part of its recruitment strategies. I think that's a mistake.

There's also, I think, a tendency among Muslim leaders in the Middle East to say that this isn't about Islam, that this isn't the real Islam. Unfortunately, here we are, 30 years after we saw the emergence of key Islamic groups, namely al Qaeda, which actually began in Egypt, and we have to tell ourselves that it is about Islam, because this is what they believe. It does have something to do with Islam.

I think the more relevant question is, what is this something in Islam that is so powerful that we are seeing people from 80 countries joining ISIS? One answer that demonstrates the great role of religion in ISIS' power and its appeal is that the speeches of al-Baghdadi and some of the other ISIS leaders are filled with references to the Koran. This is how they condone their military actions. This is how they condone most of what they do. This is how they seek legitimacy for their interpretations. They refer to the Koran in almost all of their speeches.

They have also recruited clerics from Saudi Arabia, from Morocco, from Yemen to endorse their ideas to give them more legitimacy. On this particular point, we have seen a lot of discussion since the killing of the Japanese journalist just 48 hours ago, or at least with the publication of the video—we assume he was killed in early January—about the competition between al Qaeda and ISIS. This competition isn't just about power, as was alluded to earlier. It's also about Islamic interpretation. For example, al Qaeda doesn't really condone killing other Muslims. When al-Baghdadi founded ISIS there was a huge quarrel between the leadership of ISIS and the leadership of al Qaeda, because there are profound differences. But the fight is not just about territory. It's not just about how many people they are able to recruit. It's about Islamic interpretation.

I think another great difference is how it reflects on the ground in how religious minorities are treated. I know that the committee is particularly concerned with religious persecution, and I'll get to that a bit later. ISIS' position obviously is not only that their campaign is directed against Christians, who have left in great numbers from many Arab countries, but it's also, as Ms. Laipson pointed out, an internal Muslim debate, because people in ISIS don't even believe that Shias are real Muslims. So it's a debate about Islamic interpretation, and it's a way to marginalize other Muslims who are not with ISIS, not only to marginalize them, but to kill them.

To give you a brief background of where ISIS has developed some of its ideas, there was a book written by al Qaeda leadership in Iraq called The Management Of Savagery. ISIS has taken some of the ideals and principles in this book to a greater level. One of the principles in the book is that as states wither away, this gives jihadists more opportunities. It's a great time for jihadism. Of course, we've seen this. I think this is one of the reasons that ISIS took this opportunity. We are seeing failed states in Iraq and Syria. We are seeing failed states all over the Arab world. They consider this an opportunity.

They also consider this an opportunity because not only has the nation-state collapsed, but there is no longer any sense of citizenship among the majority of people in some Arab countries. In the case of Iraq, it's very apparent. We all understand that the Sunnis were marginalized by now two successive Shia governments, and that has been a great source of popularity for ISIS. ISIS has capitalized on this.

It's also, as was alluded to earlier, that there's a sense in the Arab world and in Arab societies that they are no longer Iraqis or Egyptians or Lebanese, but they are Shia or Sunni Muslims. Another appeal of ISIS, even though many Muslims might not necessarily agree with this idea, is the establishment of the caliphate. This is something that has evolved and it has been debated in Arab societies for a long time. There's a sense of defeat, of loss, because many Muslims compare their standing in the world to what it was centuries ago and they feel that they have been defeated, not by the west but by their own leaders. I think that's a very important part of the establishment of the caliphate and of why ISIS has been able to bring people and to lure people into this Islamic state.

As part of this, I think that as westerners we have to stop ourselves from believing that the majority of Muslims can actually challenge ISIS. We had this discussion after 9/11. Even in this country, in the Muslim community now many years later, the leadership has not really been able to effectively articulate why extremism exists. Again, as I said in the beginning, the most cliché expression is that this isn't about Islam. If you look, for example, at what happened in France, I think it's a very good example of how western governments and western societies need to come to grips with the fact that there are certain principles in Islam that are different. Freedom of expression is one of them. This again is part of the appeal of ISIS, that they are taking some Islamic principles and interpreting them in a sense that is not only anti-western but that is agreeable to a lot of Muslims.

I'll share a very brief story with you. When I was a correspondent in Iran for the Guardian many years ago, it was the 10th anniversary of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. I went and interviewed many clerics in the city of Qom, where they have their seminaries, and I asked them if they thought this fatwa should still be in effect today. They all said yes, even the moderate ones, because, as they explained, they don't consider the principle of freedom of expression the same way the west does. They don't interpret it in the Islamic tradition in the same way. They believe there need to be limits on freedom of expression.

I offer you this anecdote to show that I think we have to resist our tendency to believe that somehow we can convince Islamic societies to think as we do and to appreciate our principles and morals and moral values.

What is the appeal of ISIS? It is interpretations of the Koran that are agreed upon by at least some Muslims. It is also not just the messaging but the fact that a lot of Muslims really don't understand their own religion. They have this powerful movement that is talking about how Islam was interpreted hundreds of years ago, and in this internal Muslim debate, that's again what distinguishes ISIS from a lot of groups. They believe that the real Islamic practice should stem from the time of the prophet. Other Islamic scholars say, “No, we need to take the traditions of the prophet, but we need to apply them to the modern world.”

I was reading an interview in Vice News with a Canadian citizen by the name of Abu Usamah. He's also known as Farah Mohamed. He said no one recruited him and actually no one spoke a single word to him. All he did was open the newspaper and read that ISIS was following the Koran, so he went and read the Koran and decided that they were right, and that's why he joined ISIS.

I'll just make a few other brief points.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Be very quick so we can get to questions.

[Geneive Abdo]

The last point I'd like to make is really about dislocation, which is one of the topics I know you're interested in. I'm just going to throw out a few figures for you. In Iraq the pre-2003 Christian population was as high as 1.5 million or 5% of the Iraqi population, and now it's fallen to 400,000 Christians. Of course this is due not only to ISIS but also to everything that's happened in Iraq since the invasion. But ISIS definitely and the Shia-Sunni conflict definitely do target Christians, and this is one of the many reasons that there is now persecution against Christians in the Arab world.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you to all three of you for the excellent testimony.

We're going to start the first round with seven minutes for questions and answers.

I'm going to start on my left with Mr. Dewar. The floor is yours, sir.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you to our witnesses for their superb overviews. Each of you kind of complemented one another, as if you had coordinated this. The component parts that you are each looking at, be it understanding the history, understanding what the appeal is, and understanding what the messaging is and how ISIL or Daesh has manipulated all of that, is incredibly important to the work we're doing. Just to let you know, as a committee we're looking at making recommendations to government to better understand what we can best offer to the coalition of around 60 countries dealing with this.

I want to thank particularly the Stimson Center for the work you have been doing. I was involved tangentially with the work you did in 2009, when you had identified the issues that we're all waking up to now. As we heard from our last witness, the emptying out of minority groups has been ongoing and continues.

I want to start with either of our guests from the Stimson Center.

Just around policy options, I really appreciate and we've heard from other witnesses that we can't impose a solution, be it in northern Iraq or Iraq, but we obviously need to do what we can to help. We've had a lot of experiences as a country on governance issues; the whole framework and flexibility frankly of federalism is something that's interesting for me, at least to see how that can be an offer or something we can help with.

Also, I think the point made on education is extremely important. As we've heard, when you get a siloed view of the world through education it really foments and allows for the kinds of recruitment that we've seen.

I'd just like to hear from our friends at the Stimson Center, what are some of the policy prescriptions you can see coming from a Canadian perspective that you think would be important, both in the short and medium terms and in the long term, in dealing with that ongoing issue in Iraq? To focus on Iraq, when it comes to governance, we've seen the new government in, and hopefully this will hold the revenue-sharing agreement in Kirkuk on oil with the Kurds and Baghdad that was announced recently.

What are some of the things you think we can concretely help with and support? That would be most helpful for us.

[Ellen Laipson]

Thank you so much.

I'm so delighted to see you. I recall with great pleasure that you hosted us. The Stimson Center and CIGI, the Canadian think tank, organized meetings with Iraqis in Ottawa. We used the conference rooms of your Parliament to talk in some detail about federalism.

Let me just say a few words about what may evolve when cooler heads can prevail in the Arab world, about whether several of these artificially constructed countries will need to devolve power to regions—those regions may be somewhat more ethnically homogeneous—and whether we are looking at a gradual evolution to some decentralization of power and authority if, in the end, a country called Syria and a country called Iraq still exist. I presume, odds are that they will still exist 50 years from now, but maybe they will be governed quite differently. I do think the Canadian model of federalism is sometimes a way of managing, and I know that Canada has offered this advice to other multicultural countries.

The Iraq story is a very complicated mix of success and failure. The autonomy of the Kurdish region in a way is still a positive story, on balance, both for Iraq and for the Kurds. They have managed to demonstrate that they're self-governing and yet they are still part of an Iraqi state where there is an exchange of revenue.

Certainly, the Kurds behaved very honourably in trying to push back ISIL and were successful. They did need help. They needed help from.... Well, as they would say, apparently there's a story out that Barzani said, “I called the Americans; they couldn't get there fast enough. I called the Turks; they said no. I called the Iranians and they were there in eight hours.” So there is still some question about who is their best partner.

I still think the United States plays a special role in the relationship with the KRG, but I cite this as an example that we have a slightly simplistic view that the government in Baghdad today is almost as bad as it was under Maliki. I would argue that it's a bit better than being under Maliki and that there is at least some recognition of needing to take a more inclusive approach. Nonetheless, whether we need Baghdad, for the future stability of Iraq, some decentralization of power and some recognition that perhaps federalism is part of the solution....

Just on education, again, it's not up to us to tell them how to run their ministry of education. What I think Canada, the United States, the Brits, and others can do is offer scholarships and at least save a few promising young people. Let them come out to be educated and exposed to more tolerant multicultural societies. Even though the numbers in scholarship programs are usually so small that you might ask how this can possibly affect the whole country because the numbers are too small, the impact on individual lives is sometimes huge in regard to what happens when those people go home and learn to be better citizens than they would be had they been educated at home.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you. That's my time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Yes. Thank you.

We're going to move over to you, Mr. Anderson, for seven minutes.

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

I want to thank our witnesses for being with us this morning. I think it's been very helpful for us.

I'd like to address a couple of things. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time on each of these rounds.

All of you have...and we heard from other witnesses earlier who basically have said that this is a problem which as outsiders we can't solve. We heard that this morning, that we're not likely to be the primary agents of change. We had witnesses here the other day who said that, really, we shouldn't be expecting that democracy can work in the Arab world as it stands today.

I wonder if we can get a response to that statement. Is it possible to have democratic structures functioning well in the Arab world in the times we live in?

I think Ms. Abdo talked about how there are some principles that are very different from what we have in North America. I'm interested in how you see those coming into play in terms of governance structures.

[Geneive Abdo]

Thank you for your question. It's a very important one.

If you look at polling data, I think the most reliable polling that's done in the United States is being conducted by the Pew Forum. They've done very interesting polling data on how Muslims in the Arab world feel about apostasy, for example, or how they feel about cutting hands, or about some of these kinds of punishments and penalties that we consider barbaric. What's very interesting to me is the large percentage of people who were surveyed, the respondents, who favour these policies.

To answer your question, I don't know what the solution is and how we get there but I think that we have to understand, as you point out, that we need to help Arab societies develop a different form of governance that is somewhere between Islamic extremism and dictatorship, because these are the two sort of polar opposites that have been competing for power for 30 years now. As we've seen, during different times one form of these governances triumphs over the other.

In Egypt now, there's a very repressive government that is far more repressive than anything that happened under the Muslim Brotherhood or even former President Mubarak. Conversely we have a situation in both Syria and Iraq where you have extremist Islamic groups at least governing some parts of these countries.

I think that one way the west can be instructive is to try to help—and I hate to use this word—moderate Muslim leaders, people, and civil society think about other forms of governance that would work in those societies. It's not democracy as we know it and it's not the caliphate for most people. Part of that is education.

I want to briefly comment about education in answer to the previous question. It's just a thought. There's been a big movement in Europe now to educate religious scholars who are born in Britain or France. There has been a very effective program here in the United States which started 10 years ago that is now affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, where there's a seminary now to train religious scholars who are Americans. I think this is very important when we get to the issue of foreign fighters, because it's important—

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

I would just like to comment on that point.

[Geneive Abdo]

—for Muslims living in the west to be educated—if we're going to talk about education—by scholars who are Canadians or Americans, not people who come from Pakistan, Iraq, or Syria.

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

I think I'm running out of time here, but I would like to follow up on the domestic side of that.

Maybe Mr. Gartenstein-Ross can answer this.

Why has there been such silence, in our perspective, from the Muslim community? They seem to have an inability to articulate their larger response to these issues in North American society. Is it that they are unwilling to, they're afraid to, or is it that these principles actually are different even in the Muslim community in North America and they're unsure about what that response should look like even in our society? Could you give us some perspective on that?

We've talked about trying to deal with the ideology. How do we deal with that here? I'm interested in your perspective on this.

[Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

I think that's an excellent question.

Ms. Abdo, in her opening statement, talked about how the American Muslim community hasn't been able to articulate that stake-in-the-heart view, that stake-in-the-heart response to extremism. I thought Ms. Abdo's presentation was excellent, and her argument to take religion seriously is, I think, very important.

We largely live in a post-Christian west in that Christianity was at one point front and centre to the way we thought about governance. It no longer is. We have this way of thinking about religion that is very different from how anyone would have thought about religions at the time of their founding. There's a very good book by Scott Appleby called The Ambivalence of the Sacred. In it he argues that we have basically two views of religion among political scientists, one of which is that everything that religion brings is bad; the other one is that everything religion brings is good. I'd say that the latter one is more the way we think about it in the west. We tend to think that of course jihadists are wrong, because what they stand for is bad. But that's not necessarily true.

That's why in my presentation I emphasized that there are mistakes ISIL is making, clear digressions they're making, even from the Salifi jihadist perspective. You're not going to have a moderate scholar who will necessarily be able to just defend the extremist argument, because this is essentially an originalist argument, an originalist interpretation of religion arguing that you should discard the centuries of jurisprudence and the kind of scholarship that has changed Islam and made it more consonant with modern society. That's what jurisprudence has done. The Salifi argument is that all of that is a deviation from the religion; all of that is bidah, or innovation, and they need to go back to how it was originally practised. There's a powerful argument there.

I think one of our frustrations is that we see religion through that very narrow lens, a very western lens, which just isn't at all consonant with the way it's viewed in the Muslim world, or even by many Muslims in the west. As a result there's this frustration. We think that religion should turn out and be good. It should be consonant with democratic principles. But religion is a much more complex thing. Within the history of Christianity, obviously, you have much more complexity as well than in how it's understood today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Mr. Anderson.

To round out the first round, we're going to have Mr. Garneau, for seven minutes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you all for being with us.

My first question is for Mr. Gartenstein-Ross.

I agree with you that ISIS is exceptionally good at social media and putting out that kind of messaging and propaganda. It sets up a paradox in my head when I see them put out a 20-minute video on a Jordanian pilot being burned alive. Part of me reacts by saying that I'm sure this is going to make everybody in the world really want to destroy this group. At the same time, they obviously have a different notion of the result they're going to get from showing this video.

Please explain to me what, in your view, they are aiming for when they put out these horrific videos.

[Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

They're aiming for a few things. They're taking people who once were in some position of power, whether they're journalists, whether they're fighter pilots, and their subjecting them to maximum humiliation and defeat, and ultimately some of the most disgusting deaths possible.

In particular, the case of Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh, the Jordanian fighter pilot, he represented....They're basically taking out their frustrations with the air campaign, which has been quite effective against ISIS. Not only was he burned to death, but before that he was castrated. He was raped. The way he was treated was extraordinarily brutal, even for ISIL.

Now to get to the broader question, I think they're making a mistake. I mentioned that at the outset. They're making a mistake in several ways and this is why ISIL is actually much more vulnerable than al Qaeda, in the longer term.

This kind of debate happened before, and Ms. Abdo referred to it, a debate between al Qaeda and al Qaeda in Iraq, under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It was a debate, and in part she alluded to religion, but it was also a debate about strategy. What al Qaeda saw was that this extraordinarily brutal approach under Zarqawi ended up producing localized resistance in the from of the sahwa, or the awakening movements, which ended up pushing back against al Qaeda and really destroying them. There is a combination of factors.

The fact is that their extraordinarily brutal approach caused people not only to chafe at their rule but also to extract revenge that was every bit as grisly as what al Qaeda did. It's not very well publicized but there were a lot of revenge killings and a lot of humiliation has been put to the al Qaeda guys after the '07 to '08 period, and their defeat.

ISIL is very dependent upon social media and the youth demographic. But one thing we understand is that what's popular today won't be popular in two years. That's why your fellow Canadian, Justin Bieber, is not necessarily going to continue gaining popularity. Most people feel that he has a ceiling and that at some point he'll be considered uncool. We may have already reached that point.

That's kind of a humourous example, but the point is that the extreme brutality is at some point going to be diffused. I mentioned some ways that this could be done. But let me tell you something that I guarantee will happen at some point because I have watched the cycles of revenge in Iraq during the last period.

At some point, you will have a video released by somebody, maybe it will be rogue peshmerga forces; they probably won't reveal their identities, but they'll take an ISIL guy, and rather than his being strong and beheading people, he's going to be crying and humiliated, and he'll be subjected to a death every bit as brutal.

Something like that will have an enormous effect. I'm not condoning it. I don't condone brutal killings in general, but at some point that will happen. You'll get the tools that they have used, used against them. At some point, there will be a kind of reckoning where the al Qaeda strategy will eclipse the ISIL strategy, because ISIL has overplayed its hands.

You're not supposed to fight a two front war. They're fighting a war on about six different fronts right now, with lots and lots of people who want to kill them and kill them in the most disgusting ways possible. In a matter of military strategy, that's not the place they want to be.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

We tend to focus on the military defeat of ISIL. You've pointed out that one of the things we should be able to do better is to try to exploit their loss of momentum and to more effectively show how they're being stopped and in some cases reversed.

This question is for all three of you, whoever wants to weigh in.

ISIL needs not only this momentum that you speak of, but it also needs money. It needs recruits. It needs weapons. Quite apart from the challenges of governance that come after all of this is hopefully concluded, how effectively is the west or the coalition dealing with trying to strangle them from the funding, from the recruiting, and from the weapons point of view? It's a very broad question.

[Ellen Laipson]

I don't have any confidence that we would know all the details of what's being monitored by intelligence services, but my sense is that we should not be confident that we can block them through banking sanctions, for example. They have been able to rob banks, literally, and they've been able to collect sufficient funding in very small ways through coercion and intimidation.

Some people have interpreted their demand for $200 million for the Japanese hostages as a sign that they had at least temporarily run out of money. They have big swings in whether they're feeling financially secure or not. But I think they're operating in an environment in which they are more mobile than we can stop them from accessing whatever resources are available locally. Unlike Iranian sanctions or Russian sanctions, our capacity to intervene from afar and stop the flow of finances is not likely to be completely successful.

[Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross]

On the weapons front, I think they have a clear vulnerability in that they're fighting like a conventional military. They're not fighting like an insurgent force. They're using tanks; they're using Humvees; they're using heavy armour, and they don't have an industrial base to replenish that. That's one reason that air strikes have been fairly effective.

I'd say that one thing that can be done to further speed up their decline in that regard is to change the targeting of air strikes. Right now, air strikes are focused one, on senior leadership, and two, on kinetic operations by ISIL. If we were to target tactical leadership as well, that would help to accelerate their decline in that regard.