How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat by Farah Pandith

Author:Farah Pandith [Pandith, Farah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Terrorism, World, Middle Eastern, Commentary & Opinion
ISBN: 9780062471192
Google: RkTKDQAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01NGZL02Z
Publisher: Custom House
Published: 2019-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

These projects were all very small and grassroots, but when you add them together, dozens of programs across the world moving in unison, they have the potential to have a significant impact on the global battle against extremist recruiting. As a participant in a 2015 training in Kenya said, “this is the generation that is unstoppable . . . a generation that can change the world.” Who knows how many more youth might have been recruited by extremists in local communities if these programs hadn’t existed?

It was not enough to build a platform that allowed youth to communicate with one another, share ideas, and facilitate change. I had stayed in close touch with the Berkman Center, and had been learning from former extremists, technology experts, and intelligence analysts about extremists’ increasing efforts to recruit youth using Google, Facebook, and Twitter (chapter 5). I wondered what more we could do to mobilize the young Muslims I had been meeting to create appealing counter-content online, and specifically to train them to use social media to counter specific extremist narratives. During my travels, many youth had told me that they yearned to craft their own, anti-extremist messaging online, but just weren’t sure how to go about doing so.

In researching the idea of an online skills training program, my team spoke with Muslims outside government to see if anything like this existed in the private sector. As far as we could tell, it didn’t. Having received encouraging feedback from other members of Secretary Clinton’s senior team, we began pondering the logistics of building such a program from scratch. At around this time, my friend Imam Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society asked to meet with me, introducing me to Humera Khan, an engineer and theologian unknown to the State Department. Humera and I shared a common vision, and after some due diligence, I suggested to Shahed that he might enlist her to help us build out this education program. The two wound up working closely together, alongside colleagues at State and the National Counterterrorism Center. We also reached out to members of Generation Change to help us craft and launch the program in ways that would gain maximum traction in their communities. Launched in 2011, Viral Peace, as the program was called, started in the Philippines and helped Muslim youth understand what extremists were doing online to target them, how to build strategies for transmitting CVE ideas to their peers online, and how to fashion greater resilience and leadership skills within their communities. By 2013, Viral Peace was conducting dozens of trainings across South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Africa. As of this writing, Humera is still conducting these trainings, and her hard work helping to develop curriculums and training modules has been recognized across the interagency.

In creating all these programs, my method merged ethnography with entrepreneurialism. I spent time on the ground speaking to thousands of youth as well as local leaders in Muslim communities, tracking not merely the

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