February 10, 2016 MEMRI Daily Brief No.78
MEMRI VP Alberto M. Fernandez In Congressional Testimony Today: 'After San
Bernardino: The Future Of ISIS-Inspired Attacks'
By: Alberto M. Fernandez*
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9003.htm

On February 10, 2016, MEMRI VP Alberto M. Fernandez delivered the following
testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs/Sub-Committee on
Terrorism, Non-Proliferation and Trade:

Two weeks ago, a 15-year-old boy tried to stab to death a Jewish teacher in
Marseilles, France. When he was arraigned, he said that he was "ashamed"
that he had failed and when asked whether he represented ISIS – he had
claimed the attempted murder in the name of the Islamic State – he noted "I
don't represent them, they represent me."

The San Bernardino attack and the one thousand open investigations on
alleged ISIS members inside the United States are ample testimony to the
enduring appeal of the Islamic State.

A Successful Brand

Measured in comparison with most other terrorist groups and insurgent
movements, the ISIS brand is a huge success. The fact that it has mobilized
tens of thousands to flee their countries, thousands of those leaving very
comfortable circumstances in the West, is testimony to the power of its
message. It most certainly does represent, as one scholar noted recently,
very much a revolutionary, contemporary appeal. Many of the components of
this message are not new but the message is nothing if not contemporary.

This is a compelling package, which includes a strong Salafi Jihadist
ideological component, a political project which is portrayed incessantly as
seemingly successful and growing, and a 21st century appeal to substantive
and consequential participation aimed at youth searching for purpose and
identity in a apparently aimless, empty and hedonistic world; fame and
notoriety, vicarious violence, sex, and the end of the world.

It is actually remarkable that more people haven't joined and been mobilized
given the vast potential pool of recruits existing out there. But what the
Islamic State has succeeded in doing, at least for some, is creating a
post-modern Salafi Jihadist sub-culture: high tech, cool, ultra-traditional,
and non-compromising.

The brand is a "condensed symbol" which has multiple layers of meaning,
different things to different people and here I can refer you to the work of
many researchers and scholars such as Charlie Winter, Will McCants, J.M.
Berger, Peter Neumann, Lorenzo Vidino, Javier Lesaca and Aaron Zelin. One of
the few good things which have come out of the spectacular rise of ISIS is
some first rate research and insight.

The fully formed brand as we know it today is really new, about 18 months
old, dating from the double blow of June 2014: the fall of Mosul and the
declaration of the Caliphate. Despite being so new, its success is complete
in that it is now not a specific video or statement that mobilizes but
rather the concept or image of the organization that does so. Certainly
there was ISIS Spokesman Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani's September 2014 message
calling for attacks in the West, but aside from planned events like Paris,
we see a wider range of inspired individual actions like San Bernardino that
are evidently not centrally directed. We know the ideas of "leaderless
jihad" and Lone Wolves are not new and we usually shouldn't compare anything
to the Nazis, or compare ISIS to National Socialism, but when thinking of
the ISIS brand I can't help but think of Ian Kershaw's concept of "working
towards the Fuhrer" where individuals felt that they were in a way going
along the broad lines indicated by the general stance of the German dictator
and not necessarily following a specific order. It is the big idea that
mattered, the meaning embedded in the High Concept. One result, clearly, of
such attacks is to make the Islamic State look even more ubiquitous,
powerful and conquering than it actually is, something that we in the West –
including in government and the media – are sometimes unwitting accomplices
in helping to suggest.

Of course, much of the elements in this spanking new ISIS brand are much
older: Salafism is a couple of centuries old. The particular Salafi-Jihadist
template that we know is a few decades old. The conflict in Syria, which
served as a powerful mobilizing agent for so many young Muslims, is entering
its fifth year. And the organization itself, Zarqawi's creation, began in
the 1990s and was forged in the crucible of the confrontation with the
Americans in Iraq.

Zarqawi himself was something of a showman and a video pioneer, he certainly
talked about that end-times battle of Dabiq and marked a line independent of
Al-Qaeda from the beginning. It also must be said that one element that you
don't see in the ISIS brand is much that comes from the way the Iraqi Ba'ath
Party did media; some of the grotesque violence, perhaps, but it doesn't
look or sound like material put out by any Arab regime. The ISIS of today,
which has roots both in Zarqawi and in elements of the previous Iraqi
regime, has far superseded both of them.

If I was to try to be as precise and narrow in the words to describe the
ISIS brand, it would be "Khilafa Rebellion Now." These three words sum up
thousands of videos, tens of thousands of graphics and millions of tweets.
They encompass the mobilizing appeal to both Westerners and to people who
have never set foot in the West.

"Al-Khilafa" (the Caliphate) summarizes both the religious and
state-building efforts that are unique features of the Islamic State.
"Rebellion" captures the youth revolt, the "insurrectionist" nature of the
movement, this is a revolt against "the way things are now," the status quo,
the mundane both in bourgeois Western democracies and Arab dictatorships.
This also rebellion against "the Other," the Jews, the Shi'a, the Christians
and all those described in these words of power that ISIS uses: Kufar
(Infidels), Mushrikeen (Polytheists), Rafida Najas ("Dirty Shi'a"), Taghut
(Tyrant). And "Now" because the call is for action now, it includes a
palpable sense of urgency, not something to be done in some fuzzy future.

But "Khilafa Rebellion Now" is only part of the problem. Imagine it as the
core, the smallest in a series of Russian nesting dolls. The next size doll
is that old chestnut, the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), "Islam is
the Solution." Of course, the MB are bitter enemies of ISIS and vice versa.
But the ISIS message is one part of a much larger ongoing Islamist ferment,
a spectrum of great variety, ranging from contending political Islamist
movements to complex regimes to different and divergent Salafi Jihadist
insurgent factions. The ISIS message is one part of this larger construct,
it reacts to and draws strength from this milieu, from a wider range of
beliefs and attitudes within this Islamist spectrum.

So for example, when Saudis – who are both key targets of ISIS subversion
and also share some of those same Salafi views – promote the over the top
sectarianism of media outlets like "Wesal TV" as MEMRI pointed out recently
in an exhaustive study, they are in a way helping to propagate elements of
the ISIS message. Of course, many Islamists who are bitter foes of the
Islamic State share views quite similar to that of ISIS when it comes to the
Kufar, Mushrikeen, Rafida Najas, and Taghut.

The fact that "Islamism" is now, in a way "fashionable," even in the West is
also part of this political stew. And even though the very broad definitions
of Islamism and even Jihadism are not exactly the same thing as ISIS, there
is a focus and a forward motion on "things Islamist" (this includes people
saying bad things about it and obsessing about it) which is useful to ISIS
radicalization. "Islamism" and all sorts of (positive and negative)
reactions to it and about it are "trending" if you go by the amount of media
coverage the issue receives.

Just like an extremist political candidate who seems to be doing well, can
drag the discourse on certain issues in a certain direction, so does the
seeming success of ISIS drag others - rivals, critics and imitators - into a
sort of ideological and propaganda arms race. ISIS itself has succeeded in
resurrecting, of course, both the concept and reality of Khilafa and Jizya,
the historic, humiliating tax imposed on non-Muslims living under Islamic
rule.

This fierce competition is certainly very clear with the production and
actions of groups like Jabhat Al-Nusra in Syria and AQAP in Yemen. And this
deadly rivalry could bear fruit even beyond the possible defeat of the
Islamic State in its Syria/Iraq heartland given the shakiness of so many
regimes in the region. I know that when I was in government as recently as
2013, we hoped that the struggle between ISIS and Al-Qaeda would have them
fighting over the same finite pie, as a result discrediting both, but what
has happened is that their struggle continues within the context of a
growing pie.

If "Khilafa Rebellion Now" and "Islam is the Answer" are two of those
nesting dolls which have a very clear Islamic connection, the third one
which informs that brand, does not. It is something I wrote about recently
for MEMRI and someone similar to what anthropologist Scott Atran wrote about
in even greater length and that is that while ISIS is one high profile part
of a rising wave of "radical Arab Sunni revivalism," it can also be seen as
part of a larger trend of a deterioration of traditional culture and deep
crisis of authority and institutions occurring most drastically and
dangerously in the Middle East but also occurring – to a real if much less
extent – in the West. In this reading, a wide range of disparate, alienated
or angry elements that have nothing at all to do with the Islamic State–
Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, paramilitary groups, the Far Right, the
Far Left, anti-Capitalist extremists and anarchists, the "lostness" of so
many people in a changing and seemingly pitiless world – suggest some sort
of sense of rebellion and can provide an inkling into some of the pressures
and fissures many contemporary societies worldwide are experiencing. This is
a clash of civilizations but it is not Samuel Huffington, rather a clash
within civilizations happening both in the East and West.

If this internal civilizational shaking is even a little bit true, then the
disarray we see in the Middle East is not a blast from the past but one
possible vision of a future, even our future. I don't mean to suggest that
we will ever descend into the brutal depths we see in the region today, but
there is little doubt that the globalized, deracinated lumpen youth we see
today in many places is at risk to all sorts of very different social and
political pathologies. The Islamic State is only one of them, although
perhaps one of the most spectacular and strangest ones of all.

We see today an Arab Middle East unmoored as most of the pillars of power
and authority are shaken but you can read something like, for example,
George Mason University Professor's Tyler Cowen's recent utopian/dystopian
book "Average is Over" and see the dawning of a future which could
drastically change our own civilization if not unmoor it. This may seem a
bit something out of a "Mad Max" apocalyptic movie but I am not talking so
much about what actually will happen but about how some young people in the
West feel, and the ISIS image is, among other things, a lot about feelings
and young people.

Kinetic Propaganda Breaks The Brand

So what to do with this really successful Islamic State brand? It has some
real weaknesses despite the impressive success. It is, in a way, part
Ferrari and part donkey-cart – with this incredible powerful and shiny image
tethered to a less shiny, actually sordid reality on the ground. This ISIS
brand is a tremendous media success, the ISIS "state" is also an impressive
accomplishment but has demonstrated somewhat less sticking ability than the
virtual state online. I have frequently said that the best way to weaken the
ISIS propaganda appeal is on the battlefield and that is really true.

One thing I watched closely when the Coalition began bombing ISIS in August
2014 to this day was to see how much the ISIS discourse of victory and
indomitable progress would have to adapt to account for and explain away the
inevitable battlefield reverses. It would be logical to take such a step but
ISIS has done little to address this. There are calls, including most
recently by Baghdadi, to persevere and stand fast, there are a handful of
videos of civilian victims of Coalition bombing, playing the victim card,
but not much.

The ISIS victory narrative has been sustained by the use of two elements –
the actions and growth of the ISIS franchises and these continued attacks in
the West such as Paris, which mimic and in a way replace the image of
military victory on the ground. This still can be sustained for a while,
especially if the continued progress against ISIS on the ground in Iraq and
Syria remains slow and gradual. As long as the idea of the ISIS Khilafa, the
unsullied brand, remains plausible, it will continue to attract recruits and
copycats and spawn terrorist operations focusing on targets of opportunity
worldwide. You cannot "contain" the ISIS brand if the ISIS Caliphate is
merely contained.

Only a few days ago, we read the well-connected David Ignatius say that
victory against ISIS will take decades. Obviously this depends on how you
define "victory" but I do not think that is the case, as able as the
organization is and as much as the region is in disarray. Matthew Levitt and
my old boss Ambassador Jim Jeffrey at the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy have recently spelled out some commonsense political-military steps
on the ground which could accelerate the process of defeating ISIS in its
core-Caliphate area. I defer to military experts on what would be the most
realistic timetable for accelerating this campaign.

Certainly the shedding of the ISIS "proto-state facade" is something to be
achieved as soon as possible and will have important ramifications for their
power to mobilize. But unfortunately, the sheer number of ISIS supporters,
the volume of the organization and its adherents – as propagandists and as
fighters – means that the organization's decline back into mere
"Al-Qaedism" – a terrorist group targeting enemies in the region and
beyond – will take longer than it should. And as long as it has a critical
mass of numbers made of up of people of various nationalities, the group
will be able to a certain extent, "surge" into wherever in the region
governance may collapse or weaken. We see this, for example, in Libya and
Yemen.

While it is certainly possible that additional pressure in the Middle East
on the ISIS state will make it lash out and motivate its supporters in the
West to more action like San Bernardino, this pressure can tarnish not just
the ISIS brand but disrupt the actual propaganda cycle. This has actually
happened in the past such as in 2012 when Yemeni military action against
safe havens in South Yemen disrupted AQAP's production of material. You
certainly can't produce material about the great life in the Caliphate if
your propagandists and support structure are on the run.

In any case, there is a problem in that the actual reverses that the Islamic
State has suffered from Mosul Dam in September 2014 to Ramadi in January
2016 are rarely if ever personalized or presented in a way that would be
appealing or impactful to our target audience – that is to Sunni Arab
Muslims or Westernized Muslims living in the diaspora. We have actually
never extracted the full propaganda value from these victories in the way
that ISIS has actually done so with some lesser accomplishments. The Iraqi
military has made some small efforts in this direction in Arabic, some
material was produced after the fall of most of Ramadi recently, but it was
nothing like the volume, human dimension, immediacy, high quality and
multiple foreign languages that ISIS provides in its material. Look at an
ISIS battle video and look at anything produced by its adversaries and you
will see the contrast.

Lowering The Volume

In addition to this political-military dimension, another way to weaken the
ISIS brand is to interrupt its propaganda cycle. This may seem like bolting
the door after the horses have fled the barn but it still has value in
cutting up the ISIS online network and blowing up the image of constant
volume and production. It is the sheer scale of the ISIS network that gives
it some of its power. The distribution system now is well known and is
mostly involving a few high-profile platforms such as Twitter, Germany-based
Telegram, San Francisco-based Archive.org and Justpaste.it. That is just
four key platforms – Facebook and YouTube are somewhat less problematic now.

To give you a sense of the rapid rise of Telegram, especially in the past
six weeks, for most of 2015 MEMRI mined ISIS material principally from
Twitter, followed by Facebook and then YouTube. Since October of 2015, 35%
of our material comes from Telegram, 34% from Twitter. 10% from Internet
Archive, 7% from YouTube and 10% from Jihadi forums. Facebook as a source
declined from 25% to 2%.

Telegram today is probably the single most important online safe haven for
ISIS. In a recent discussion by ISIS supporters that we at MEMRI monitored,
one well-known figure described Telegram as his "hideout" and lamented that
he wasn't able to keep up with the many suspensions on Twitter. "Remember
Twitter back in 2014 when we hijacked hashtags and spread the news for the
entire world," he noted wistfully. It seems clear that Telegram's encrypted
chats were used as a platform to recruit people in Southeast Asia with
Malaysian police recently arresting several who has been recruited through
this particular messaging service.

Suspension of accounts and deleting material is not some sort of panacea in
the fight against the Islamic State, especially given the larger military
and ideological dimensions, but it does strike a blow. Cyberwarfare and
better policing of the terms of service of social media companies are not a
crutch we should rely on but they are a real tool, even if some ISIS fanboy
posts a picture of a cake celebrating the 100th time he was suspended on
Twitter.

A 2016 MEMRI special report described in detail the developments that have
been made over the past few months by the ISIS propaganda network to
maintain a high production tempo and respond to an increase in disruption
attempts by digital adversaries:

ISIS has slowly integrated the whole media apparatus into its own internal
structure, from production to distribution. ISIS operatives were always part
of the distribution process, passing on the media content and relying on
pro-ISIS supporter networks to distribute to a wide audience. However, with
disruption making the job harder by shutting down key accounts, ISIS media
now needs to rely on more systematic methods, such as robot accounts to
automatically distribute content through hundreds of accounts simultaneously
and thus reduce the overall effect of shutdowns.

High definition videos, as are daily published by ISIS, require broadband
connections and large remote storage space in order to be made available to
a large public. At this stage of the distribution process, the data flow is
concentrated between ISIS media production operatives who are locally
holding onto the data, and public hosting services on which they are
dependent on for wide distribution. This dependency on free public hosting
services is a double edged sword: on the one hand, it makes ISIS less
vulnerable to cyber-attacks and allows them to use privacy protecting laws
in their own favor; on the other hand, they are subject to censorship and
the content may be deleted fairly fast.

ISIS operatives need to find a hosting platform where this voluminous, large
size data will stay long enough for the entire distribution process to take
effect and thus generate dozens of copies of the new material. At that
moment, the data has lost its early vulnerability to disruption by
opponents. The well-documented use of "bots" - automatic distribution
accounts - enables ISIS media managers to rapidly get the links out to
primary distributors before any kind of censoring response has been made.

For those who seek to disrupt this cycle, the issue is the stemming of the
data flow prior to it getting out of potential control within the network.
There is a critical, vulnerable point in time when the data is shared but
not yet copied in enough different places.

The Ideological Fight And USG Efforts

The third element – after the political-military and the technical – is the
ideological. Here again, what needs to be done seems relatively
straightforward if difficult. The difficulty factor is increased, in my
view, by the suspicion and ambivalence which this administration's policies
have created among key partners, our Sunni Arab Muslim allies stretching
from Morocco to the Gulf. Given the current crisis of authority and its
profound political implications for these states, it will be difficult to
convince all of them to take on the public war of ideas to discredit the
very premises of Jihadist Salafism when some of these countries use these
same premises for their own ends.

On the surface, the rebranding of the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism
Communications (CSCC) into the Global Engagement Center seems to be nothing
but more than a public relations gambit. In the State Department press
release announcing it, not one of the responsibilities listed was new. All
of them had been within CSCC's mandate and were things CSCC had worked on,
with its limited funds, as far back as 2011. According to press accounts,
the new Center will no longer be in the direct messaging business, which
would mean – if the budget is not increased and remains at the old amount of
about $5.5 million – freeing up about $3.5 million a year for the creation
of proxies and indirect messaging platforms. Certainly a reasonable increase
earmarked for the Center's budget to fund overseas proxies is worth trying,
along with solid performance metrics and Congressional oversight.

The coordination of counter-terrorism communications efforts, often
highlighted as a key part of the old office, or the new office's work, is
important. But all too often in government, and including in this particular
effort, it becomes a way of prioritizing process over actual results and
activity over real forward mention. And coordinating a stagnant or shrinking
effort is of limited utility.

One way not to do it is – at least not yet – the single public signature
State Department effort launched this year. I am on delicate ground here
since I had a very small role to play in this process very early on in
mid-2014, and I believe that there is a grain of a potentially good nascent
effort here, and of course CSCC was intimately involved in this start-up
working closely with the Bureau of Near East Affairs (NEA) in the State
Department. Launched to great fanfare in July 2015, the Sawab Center in the
United Arab Emirates is a largely UAE-funded operation contracted out but
also including two American FSOs detailed to the operation. It is, six
months after its launch, a bit underwhelming with 2,624 tweets since it was
launched. This is like a smaller, more timid version of CSCC's digital
outreach team.

Although it should have greater freedom to do things that overt USG
communications lacked, Sawab so far is missing two things the ISIS brand has
in abundance: volume and passion. Reportedly, there were deep individual
tensions between NEA and CSCC at the launch of this initiative. One can hope
that this initiative will mature and others in the pipeline like it will
evolve into something more substantive and be replicated in ways that will
be more consequential.

I don't want to dwell on it too much because it may seem like Schadenfreude
but the USG basically wasted an entire year in the propaganda war in 2015.
When I left CSCC in early February 2015, I assumed that the powers that be
would go in a radically different direction from me but that whatever they
did it would be well funded, politically supported and focused. None of
those things seemed to have happened. The apparent micro-managing from the
NSC, the risk adverse mentality, and the obsession of form over substance
prevailed. One hopes something has been learned from this debacle and that
the new leadership will be empowered and given freedom to work, but it is
too early to tell.

I do want to recognize some of the valuable work CSCC seems to have done in
2015 in facilitating information on ISIS defectors and recanters. It is
still early days, but is certainly a very worthwhile effort that should be
supported and expanded. Governments receiving returnees from ISIS ranks
should find creative ways to incentivize counter-radicalization media
outreach as much as integration and law enforcement. And certainly, the
leadership disorder at the top does not detract from the dogged and valuable
work being done in this field by the dedicated civil servants, Foreign
Service Officers, and detailees from other government agencies involved in
this effort.

Given the importance of Iraq and, especially, Syria, in the ISIS discourse
and how it is sold to Western audiences and even non-Western populations
distant from the Front, there is real value in empowering Syrian and Iraqi
Sunni Muslim voices who can speak directly to wavering individuals outside
the Middle East and say to them directly: "I am one of those Muslims whom
ISIS claims to be defending and I am speaking from personal knowledge and
the image you are being presented of our reality is a false one."

Look at the faces of the people talking in ISIS videos, how so many of them
speak clearly and directly, stating with uncovered faces all sorts of (often
awful) things with tremendous conviction and clarity. This is the power of
personal testimony. I noticed a recent effort by the London Police to use
Syrian mothers speaking in Arabic in one video to reach out to U.K.
populations and that is a small step in the right direction. This is a
worthy experiment. The question is whether this can be deepened and
individualized to replicate the peer-to-peer radicalization process which is
so often a key factor in influencing the actions of new recruits. It should
be.

There should also be room for a well-funded regional media effort promoting
tolerant, liberal Arab Muslim values in contradistinction to the vision of
Salafi Jihadism. This is a longer term project that has value in promoting
the pluralism, tolerance and open discourse which is anathema to Takfiri
Salafi Jihadists like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Certainly there are enough eloquent
individuals – Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians and others, even in the Gulf and
Saudi Arabia – who believe in such a worldview but are rarely empowered by
us or by anyone else for that matter, certainly not on a consistent basis
and not like the support lavished on a range of Salafi – non-ISIS - media.

Again, this is not something the United States can do directly, but it can
certainly promote. But attempting such an initiative also underscores a
deficit in our counter-terrorism communications efforts. The default for our
government is all too often to work with either friendly governments or to
contract out our efforts to companies or organizations inside the Beltway.
Nothing wrong with that but more is needed. Government should also look to
empower and expand the scope of non-governmental messaging platforms and
organizations within the Middle East with a goal towards building
sustainable messaging efforts against Salafi Jihadists.

An ISIS Nineveh video a couple of days ago launched as part of a coordinated
campaign on North Africa spent almost as much time attacking Sufi Muslims
and liberals as it did in criticizing the political authorities. The Salafi
"sea" where ISIS rises from matters and it would seem to me to be good
policy to seek to push back on a political and societal discourse which sets
the stage for violence. This is not something the U.S. Government can do
directly but certainly something that needs to be prioritized. The Islamic
State is one prominent and extreme part of a larger trend that inimical to
our values and our foreign policy interests.

So this is the state of play in bringing down the ISIS brand. It isn't
rocket science nor particularly exciting. Despite my profound policy
differences with the administration I do see that some of the basic elements
needed in this fight are more or less in place, and slowly moving in the
right direction, albeit in a weak, confused or poorly directed form.
Certainly more tangible progress on the ground against ISIS is not
unachievable this year even if we will have to rely on very problematic
sectarian or ethnic local forces which do not contribute to solving some of
the basic problems of governance and extreme sectarianism and can make it
even worse.

Turning the ISIS Caliphate back into a terrorist/insurgent group running
around in the wilderness of Syria and Iraq and which tries to launch attacks
in the West, is not a definitive solution to the problem but it would
definitely lead to a qualitative change in its current unique appeal. It
removes some, but not all, of the motivation for individual San
Bernardino-type action. It particularly damages the concept of the Islamic
State as an ongoing concern with a bright future that a young person would
want to support.

Disrupting the delivery system and ramping up the quantity and quality of
the anti-ISIS material being generated on a daily basis are also important
steps to blunt the utility and freshness of ISIS propaganda.

This revolutionary ISIS brand rose and flourished not because it was so
startling effective – it very much is that, in relative terms – but because
of the political, military and propaganda vacuum which allowed it to
flourish and present a stance and an option – political and religious – that
was both extreme and plausible. Working on the former part - the extreme
message - is a longer term project, but working on the "plausible" part is
something we need to do now and we do have some tools to do so.


*Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice-President of MEMRI.


© 1998-2016, The Middle East Media Research Institute All Rights Reserved.
Materials may only be cited with proper attribution.