Students Talk Back panelists take on ISIS

The Jesse M. Unruh Institute hosted its weekly Students Talk Back event yesterday afternoon in the Ronald Tutor Campus Center. The panel was titled, “A Global Threat: The Advancing Reach of ISIS and its Domestic Implications,” and discussed how the United States should respond to the terrorist organization both at home and overseas.

Three experts on the topic were invited to USC to make up the forum’s panel: Terry McCarthy, current president and CEO of Los Angeles World Affairs Council; Seema Mehta, political reporter at the Los Angeles Times; and Shikhar Gupta, vice president of USC College Democrats.

The event was co-moderated by Dan Schnur, executive director at the Unruh Institute and Emma Peplow, news editor at the Daily Trojan.

McCarthy opened up the discussion by differentiating ISIS with other known terrorist groups. He explained how ISIS is completely unwavering in terms of negotiation.

“Other groups use violence to achieve an endgame,” McCarthy said. “ISIS does not have that political ending in sight. Their tactic is to use violence to expand their territory. There is no negotiation with ISIS, you either get on their team or they will kill you,” he said.

McCarthy explained that once individuals begin to perceive ISIS as susceptible to outside forces, they will be easier to defeat.

“The way to counter that is to stop this expansion, and at the same time undermine their message because they need to keep recruiting people to help them,” he said. “Once ISIS is seen to be vulnerable and can no longer expand their caliphate, and once their acts are seen to be acts of criminals rather than of heroes, then I think they will be defeated fairly quickly.”

McCarthy went into an in-depth discussion regarding the ISIS message and explained that in order to counteract ISIS in the Middle East, their ideology must be opposed.

“ISIS is using quotes from the Quran to justify what they are doing,” McCarthy said. “The narrative has been using Islamic vocabulary to give hope to Muslims that feel as if they have nowhere else to go.”

McCarthy continued to describe the circumstances that allowed for this narrative’s credibility.

“The idea that young Muslims don’t have anywhere to go in the Middle East under their current parastructures is quite frankly quite valid,” McCarthy said. “There aren’t jobs, the education is not there, and if you’re a woman then God help you, because you won’t be allowed to go to college, let alone drive a car.”

He said that the governmental structure in the Arab world has proven to be extremely unfair and exclusionary and how this narrative must be challenged by the Arab world.

Mehta and Gupta emphasized the domestic implications of ISIS, switching the topic of conversation toward public opinion in the United States, the effects of social media and the language political figures use in addressing ISIS.

Gupta explained that public opinion toward U.S. involvement in Iraq has drastically changed within the past four years.

“Something interesting we see is that American support for airstrikes in Iraq has been very high over the past year of so,” Gupta said. “What we’ve seen recently is that American support for ground troops in Iraq is at 57 percent, which is interesting considering the past four years since we have withdrawn troops from Iraq. That is a very quick turnaround in public opinion.”

A student in the audience then directed a question towards Gupta about the impact the media may have had on the dramatic turn in pubic opinion.

“It may have to do with the novel nature of how ISIS operates in comparison to other conventional terrorist groups because they are making tremendous ground relatively fast,” Gupta said. “I think seeing the media cover this instills fear in the public, which in turn leads to more support for action.”

The three panelists agreed that the media heavily impacts the public by showing some of the more brutal acts by ISIS. However, they recognized that the language used by political figures in the U.S. counteract the media in order to avoid discrimination domestically.

By working as a journalist on multiple presidential campaigns, Mehta is is familiar with how politicians discussed ISIS, as well as other terrorist groups.

“The president has been very careful with the language that he has used,” Mehta said. “It seems like the goal of the administrations for the past decade has been to avoid using words that make it seem like all Muslims are responsible for the terrorist acts that we have seen.”

McCarthy responded to this with a warning about various forms of intolerant language.

“In the U.S., we need to be forward-thinking, trying to create a society that can tolerate difference and even embrace it,” he said.

He continued to address the language used in the political setting.

“The words that you choose to use feed into the story that you are trying to tell,” McCarthy said. “If you’re trying to tell a story of exclusionism and superiority of one ethnic religious nationalist group over another that is a route towards violence and confrontation; if you’re trying to tell a story of inclusion and tolerance that is a completely different route. It speaks to the art of messaging.”