Islamophobia and Natural Language Processing update (August 28, 2022)

This update includes reflections on a documentary about a traumatic assassination that has inspired remarkably little curiosity, and on two podcasts that both focus on high profile hoaxes. What connects the three is confirmation bias, that is the idea that we are often ready to accept incomplete or flawed information if it happens to correspond to our pre-existing beliefs. We might think of this as mapping an event to a pre-written script we happen to have already in our mind.

In all three cases Muslim identity is at the core. There are many tropes and pre-written scripts about Muslims that portray them as inherently violent, disloyal, or scheming, and these play out in this post as we discuss the assassination of Malcolm X, the Trojan Horse Letter, and the Caliphate podcast.

There is relatively little here that pertains directly to Natural Language Processing. However I am poking at the problem of identifying fake news or disinformation, and perhaps implying that simply detecting such content has little practical impact if it happens to correspond to what an audience already wants to believe.

Who Killed Malcolm X, a documentary by Abdur Rahman Muhammad, 2019–2020

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10948316/

The 1960s in the USA were marked by multiple high profile assassinations. Many of us know the pairings of victim and assassin names : John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King Jr. and James Earl Raye, Robert F. Kennedy and Sirhan Sirhan, Malcolm X and … who? That’s where we tend to stumble. Who killed Malcolm X?

We might know that Malcolm was shot by multiple gunmen at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21, 1965 … maybe we remember that scene from the Spike Lee movie? … But who actually did the shooting?

I doubt that many can name the three men arrested and convicted of this crime: Mujahid Abdul Halim (aka Talmadge Hayer or Thomas Hagan), Muhammad A. Aziz (aka Norman 3x Butler) and Khalil Islam (aka Thomas 15X Johnson). Halim was shot and arrested at the scene and found to be in possession of a gun used in the shooting. Aziz and Islam were arrested after the fact away from the scene without having a clear connection to the crime, and in fact had alibis that placed them elsewhere during the shooting. But, despite these different circumstances all three men were convicted. Not coincidentally, all three men were Black and members of the Nation of Islam.

Both Aziz and Islam served 20 years in prison and were paroled in the 1980s. Halim was eventually paroled in 2010 and long maintained that Aziz and Islam were not involved. Finally, in November 2021, in large part due to questions raised by this documentary, Aziz and Islam were exonerated. Aziz was by that time 83 years old, and Islam had died in 2009. No other arrests have ever been made in the case despite obvious questions about the reliability of the original arrests and convictions. There was also never any investigation into the overall organization of this plot, and questions such as who may have given the order for the killing have never been seriously addressed. The conventional wisdom seems to have been that this was a dispute among Black Muslims and the Nation of Islam, and so let’s leave well enough alone.

This documentary starts with a profile of Malcolm X, and then goes into his relationship with the Nation of Islam and its leader Elijah Mohammad. It is a classic rise and fall story, where Malcolm the pupil rises up to become a peer of Elijah the master, they become rivals, and then finally part company as enemies. By the time of his assassination, Malcolm was seen as a traitor to the Nation of Islam — this view held that Elijah Mohammad had lifted Malcolm up out of crime, prison, and obscurity to make him into a national figure, and then this is repaid by Malcolm renouncing Elijah and leaving the Nation. After the assassination Elijah Mohammad implied that Malcolm had brought this end onto himself and had become a victim of his own preaching — he had simply reaped what he had sown.

The documentary points out numerous extraordinary aspects of this story. First, the investigation into the shooting was lackadaisical at best. Malcolm was shot at 3:15 pm before an audience of 400. A dance scheduled at the ballroom for 7:00 pm that same evening went on as planned. Second, the lectern into which many bullets were fired during the assassination was never put into evidence, instead it was moved to the basement of the ballroom where it stayed for years. Third, in 1977 Talmadge Hayer named four accomplices in the shooting in an affidavit taken by his attorney William Kunstler. Like Hayer (now Halim) these men were members of Newark Mosque #25 and included Benjamin Thomas, Leon Davis, William X. Bradley, and Wilbur McKinnley. This affidavit was ignored. There was from the start seemingly little interest in the case, and that remained true for many years.

The documentary shifts to focus on William X. Bradley, now known as Mustafa al Shabaz. He was named in Halim’s 1977 affidavit as one of the shooters, and had a reputation for violence as a young man. However, in more recent years Bradley had become well known in the Newark community as a mentor to young people, to the point of being included in a re-election ad for US Senator Cory Booker. By the time of the making of this documentary he was the only one of the co-conspirators implicated by Halim who was still alive.

However, Bradley died before he could be interviewed for the documentary (on October 24, 2018). He was given a hero’s funeral that was attended by hundreds including the Lieutenant Governor of New Jersey. Despite all the obvious indicators that Bradley should at least have been considered a suspect, there never seems to have been any particular official interest in investigating his role in the killing of Malcolm X. The documentary reasonably asks the question “why not?”

One theory advanced is that at the time of the shooting the FBI had infiltrated the Nation of Islam to a high degree. There were as many as nine FBI informants in the Audubon Ballroom at the time of the assassination. Perhaps William X. Bradley was never investigated to protect his status as an FBI informer? If an FBI informer was found to be one of the killers, this could easily lead to the FBI being implicated in the crime, or even being held to be the organizer and mastermind.

There remains the still unanswered question of the role of the Nation of Islam in the killing. Halim and all the co-conspirators he named came from Newark New Jersey Mosque #25, which was led by James Shabazz who was particularly critical of Malcolm X. Did Elijah Mohammad or some other highly placed leader give the order, or perhaps simply wonder aloud “who will rid me of this troublesome priest?” This is widely speculated, but is not known.

There was perhaps little incentive to investigate this crime. Three Black men were arrested, they were members of the Nation of Islam, and it fit the overall police narrative that this was an internal fight in the Nation. For its part, the NOI may have been content to not have the killers revealed since it might have made it more clear how and if NOI was involved. And of course the killers who were never arrested had a great deal of incentive not to talk about the crime. A very neat solution, except for the two wrongly incarcerated men.

What is the pre-written story here, and how does it connect to our overall theme of Islamophobia? I would argue that Malcolm X was widely viewed as a Black Muslim who was therefore inherently violent, and who was killed by other violent Black Muslim men. This is the pre-written story, and if in the end one prominent Black Muslim is dead and three others are in prison, what need is there to dig any further?

This is a genuinely complex crime involving multiple gunmen (unlike the lone gumen in the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK). But, compare the very uncurious reaction of the police, the courts, and society to these other assassinations. How many books, documentaries and movies have been made theorizing on the assassination of JFK? Why such a difference? I think it may be that there is no convenient pre-written story to explain why JFK was killed, and who would want him dead. There are various such theories floating around, where no single story captures the collective imagination. However, in the case of Malcolm X you have a violent Black Muslim dying at the hands of other violent Black Muslims. This pre-written story corresponds to widely held tropes and so is accepted relatively quickly.

The Trojan Horse Affair, 8 episode podcast, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/podcasts/trojan-horse-affair.html presented by Brian Reed and Hamza Syed

This is such a strange story.

At the core is a letter, the so called “Trojan Horse Letter”, which was alleged to be correspondence between Muslim plotters planning to infiltrate and “Islamize” schools in Birmingham, UK. The letter was nearly immediately understood to be a hoax that contains obvious disinformation intended to mislead, and yet it went on to have a profound influence on UK school policy and public opinion. How does this happen?

This podcast shows why disinformation and fake news are such powerful forces. It turns out that if obviously fake content corresponds with a widely held pre-written story about the world, it will be taken as factual evidence. This is textbook confirmation bias. The thinking is that even if this particular case isn’t true, it is taken as evidence that there are similar cases out there waiting to be discovered. Therefore the appropriate authorities need to take action, before it is too late!

This letter played upon the fears of many non-Muslims in the UK that Muslims have a hidden agenda to take over society and make it Islamic. This is yet another instance of the Great Replacement Theory, which has existed in various forms for generations. The events in this podcast played out in 2013–2015, which corresponds to the time when ISIS was “on the march” in Syria and Iraq, and when many Muslims were assumed to be secretly supporting ISIS and hoping for a restoration of the Caliphate, the imposition of Sharia Law — all the usual tropes about secret agendas and disloyalty.

The Trojan Horse Letter came to light in late 2013 after it was sent anonymously to Sir Albert Bore, Chief of the Birmington City Council, on November 27, 2013. The podcast starts by asking “who wrote the letter?” noting that previous investigations had left this seemingly important question unanswered.

For listeners from the USA (like me) some of the terminology associated with British schools is new. A governor is an elected volunteer who helps schools with its planning and strategy but not day to day operations, somewhat like elected school board members in the USA. A head teacher is like the principal in a school in the USA. It is also very important to understand that there is not a strong separation of church and state in UK schools, in fact schools are expected to offer some kind of daily religious observance or act of faith, which can be tailored to the students at a particular school. While this is often Christian in nature, it is possible to request permission to include other faiths, which is what the Birmingham schools did. There were then calls to prayer and Muslim prayers in school, but all done in a way consistent with UK school policy.

There are two people mentioned by name in the letter, Tahir Alam and a Sally Turner, later determined to be Sally Taylor of the Birmingham City Council. The podcast investigation starts with Alam, a governor of several schools in Birmingham. He is interviewed at length and talks about his efforts to make the Muslim majority schools in Birmingham both higher performing and more welcoming and inclusive for Muslim students. While the letter alleged that he was the mastermind of a plot to Islamize schools in a seemingly sinister fashion, he denied this and said that his efforts were in fact in line with requests from higher officials in the schools. Alam also made the intriguing suggestion that if you want to find out who wrote the letter, find out who the letter is most strongly defending.

The letter included a five point strategy to take over a school which included identifying underperforming Muslim majority schools and identifying “Salafi” parents sympathetic to more extremist views who could then slowly infiltrate the school’s governance and staff. Ultimately the goal should be to have a head teacher removed due to staff grievances that would hopefully trigger an “external council” investigation. In particular it was suggested that staff engage in an anonymous letter writing campaign to implicate the head, and then the end result could be a head teacher more sympathetic to the plotters end.

The letter also made allegations about several schools, and paid an unusual amount of attention to a specific situation at Adderley School which included information that was not public. This suggested that the letter writer had some inside knowledge and perhaps a connection to the school. What was happening at Adderley?

Mrs. Rizvana Darr was the Head Teacher, and she had run into problems with four Teaching Assistants (TAs). Three of the TAs were Muslim, and the other was an “English” woman (presumably meaning white). These TAs filed grievances against Mrs. Darr in late 2012 that were on the verge of being investigated when suddenly Mrs. Darr received letters of resignation from all four TAs. However, they denied writing these letters and said they were the victims of fraud. Despite this Mrs. Darr accepted their resignations and they lost their jobs. The TAs protested and the Birmingham City Council carried out an audit that led to a report that was issued in October 2013, prior to the receipt of the Trojan Horse Letter. The audit concluded that the resignation letters had been faked, and that it was reasonable to imagine that the forger was Mrs. Darr. Then, at the end of November, the Trojan Horse Letter surfaces.

The letter talks at length about this resignation controversy, and alleges that the TAs wrote the letters in a way to make them appear to be forgeries, so that the Head Teacher would get fired (sacked) for accepting their resignations. The letter also alleges that the Head was not a good Muslim and that parents shouted abuse at her for being too Western and not a proper Muslim. The letter says that these are good examples of the kind of disruption this plot could cause, and clearly paints the TAs as guilty while the Head is an innocent victim. Thus, in answer to the question “who does the Trojan Horse Letter defend?’’ The answer is clearly Mrs. Rizvana Darr.

However, at some point after The Trojan Horse Letter becomes public, the City Council retracts the audit report and issues an abject apology to Mrs. Darr. Why did this happen? The original audit report triggered a police investigation, and in March 2014 the police went to Adderley School looking for evidence that Mrs. Darr had written the letter, but left the school convinced that she had not.

This about face was motivated by the existence of CCTV footage that showed the letters of resignation being delivered by the sister of one of the TAs, and the previously unknown testimony that two Deputy Heads, Mark Walters and Anilla Ashraf, had witnessed the opening of the letters. This then suddenly authenticated both the resignation letters and the Trojan Horse Letters in the eyes of the police. Neither Ashraf nor Walters ever commented on this evidence publicly, and Walters left Adderley School and moved to Australia sometime in the Spring of 2015.

Beyond the question of who wrote the Trojan Horse Letter, which the podcast circles around throughout, it also asks the question why didn’t anyone else seem to care about the answer to this question? My own impression is that while it was perfectly legal for Muslim majority schools to accommodate Muslim students’ cultural and religious needs, somehow this did not sit well with city leaders and was perhaps seen as the start of a journey down a slippery slope. Thus, the letter confirmed the fears that this was just going too far.

Chief of City Council Sir Albert Bore, for example, mentioned the Muslim ethos to have separate PE classes for men and women. However, this was pretty typical and consistent of how PE classes are often conducted in the UK. There was perhaps a general sense that the Muslims must be up to something, we just don’t know what.

Michael Gove, UK Education Secretary at the time and until recently a member of Boris Johnson’s cabinet, has well known positions on the connection between Islam and terrorism. He wrote a book entitled Celsius 7/7 which was published in 2006 and explored the roots of Islamic terrorism. While making a distinction between the traditional faith of Islam and a more modern extreme intolerant variant he refers to Islamism, the book paints with a broad brush and leads to the impression that Islam has lost its way as a religion, and that Muslims are all complicit in allowing the more extreme views to take hold.

It also seems significant that Celsius 7/7 starts with the story of Mohammad Saddique Khan. He was a Muslim man who was born in Leeds, educated in UK schools and university, and was working as a teaching mentor in a UK school while at the same time being an Islamist plotter who would lead the London bombings of July 7, 2005. Gove’s book argues in general that the Islamist threat is being underestimated, and so we can easily imagine the contents of the Trojan Horse Letter would confirm these kinds of underlying beliefs.

Gove met with Sir Albert Bore on February 12, 2014, although initially nobody could remember who attended and what was said. However, eventually Sir Albert shared his notes from the meeting, which makes it clear that Gove and Bore both knew that the Trojan Horse Letter was a hoax. The only other person at the meeting was Sally Taylor, who was mentioned in the Trojan Horse Letter (as Sally Turner) as a co-conspirator, and yet nobody mentioned she was there. But she took the notes at this meeting and prepared the briefing for Michael Gove. Everyone knew it was a fake letter, and yet, nobody was willing to say it was. Why not?

Despite knowing the Trojan Horse Letter was very likely a fake, Gove proceeded as if it was genuine. This is because he had recently received another letter, this one not anonymous, alleging a kind of Islamization at the Park View School in Birmingham. This letter came from the British Humanist Society, who were acting on behalf of Steve and Sue Packer who had both worked at Park View School.

They knew Tahir Alam and agreed with his vision of making the school more welcoming for Muslim students (who were the vast majority). However, the Packers alleged that students reported that they were being taught that women could not say “no” to their husband’s sexual advances, and other reports of women being regarded as inferior an subservient to men. They decided to approach the British Humanist Association to advance their concerns. They felt that rather that celebrating Muslim identity the school was promoting a certain kind of conservative Islam that was particularly dismissive of women. Sue sent an email to the Humanist after the Trojan Horse Letter was sent but before it was public. The Humanist forwarded these concerns on to Gove’s Education Department.

It is quite a coincidence that two letters which center Tahir Alam in a plot to Islamize Birmingham Schools were sent in late 2013, one to Birmingham City Council and the other to the Education Department. Could they have been written by the same person, or coordinated in some way? However, it really does appear to simply be a coincidence. Sue Packer admits to being the author of the letter to the Education Department, which did not even mention Atterley School. Sue had no connection to Atterley, and would not have been aware of the resignation dispute that figured so prominently in the Trojan Horse Letter. And so clearly the letters must have two different authors.

It also seems fair to ask why Sue Packer was speaking up on behalf of Muslim women. She felt they were conditioned not to advocate for themselves by the Muslim community, appealing to the usual trope of submissive Muslim women being victims of misogynistic Muslim men. However, when interviewed the Muslim women allegedly impacted said they did not see these as particularly serious situations. Sue Packer resigned from Park View School due to an incident that happened to her Muslim friend Amina on a bus, where a male teacher was alleged to have told her that she didn’t belong there. While Sue resigned over this, Amina was not particularly troubled by it. In general you begin to see the Packers repeating Islamophobic tropes without having evidence of such things occurring.

Thus, the February 12, 2014 meeting focused on these two letters, which became fused together. The result of this meeting was far reaching. Michael Gove appointed Peter Clarke, a former counter terrorism official, to investigate the Trojan Horse Letter. He concluded there was an effort to instill an extreme form of Islam in the Birmingham schools. This was not, however, backed by specific evidence. For example, he claimed that Park View School was recording terrorist videos which were in fact a BBC documentary. There was also no evidence presented from students. The report also said there was too much Islamic influence, and that the Birmingham schools had become faith schools. But it’s not clear how you decide that, and the report did not reference UK standards which allow a focus on faith in schools.

The Clarke report was issued in July 2014. It does not actually say there is a plot, rather there were some events that happened in the schools at the same time with common aims. This seemed to point to the work of Tahir Alam, which was in fact being encouraged by the government. However, the podcast points out that when you take a CV (Alam’s) and lay it out in the form of a spider diagram, it all starts to look a bit nefarious.

The conclusion of the Clarke report was that to prevent extremism, you must tackle it before it is violent, and this depends on recognizing when Muslims are moving from Islam into Islamism. The early signs of Islamism and extremism that were pointed to can simply be elements of daily life, for example choosing to grow a beard or going to the mosque more frequently. But in this environment a person who is sincere in their desire to become more faithful may well be profiled as an extremist. This led to a government program called PREVENT which encouraged people to inform on their fellow citizens based on their perception of whether they are an extremist. Ultimately though the Clarke Report was not substantiated, and the inquiry ended without a clear resolution.

The podcast concludes with an ultimately unsuccessful trip to Australia in search of Mark Walters, hoping to reach some kind of conclusion regarding the authorship of the Trojan Horse Letter. They wanted to ask if he saw Mrs. Darr open the resignation letters, I think in the end hoping to show that Rizvana Darr was in fact the author of the Trojan Horse Letter. But, their journey was fruitless. Walters would not speak to them.

In the end we leave the podcast not knowing who wrote the Trojan Horse Letter, despite strong suspicions. Does it matter? It is a fascinating example of where known disinformation is legitimated by existing biases, and that two dubious letters end up reinforcing each other and appearing more legitimate as a result. One letter was written by Sue Packer, and it seems like the other might have been written by Rizvana Darr, but when taken in combination they take on the force of truth because they correspond with a widespread belief that Muslims are in the end seeking to replace and push out the white English. There is of course no evidence of this, but that doesn’t really matter. Confirmation bias.

There are other such hoaxes out there, where plots among the members of a group are manufactured and supported with fabricated evidence in the hopes of inspiring distrust or hate towards them. Perhaps the most far reaching example has been The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published anonymously in 1903. Understood to be a fake, these purport to be the records of secret meetings outlining a Jewish plot to take over the world. There is also the Great Replacement Theory, known by various names, which alleges a variety of plots by immigrants and refugees to take over countries and replace (usually white) majority rule with their own. Finally, the novel the Turner Diaries is understood to be fiction, yet has taken on a kind of greater truth among White Supremacists (particularly in the USA) who often treat it as a plan of action for overthrowing the government and starting a race war.

And so for the project of NLP, where does this leave us? The Trojan Horse Letter was I think understood to be a fake, to be disinformation. There is no need to detect this, because it was already known. Despite this, it was accepted and acted upon. This shows I think that the problem of dealing with misinformation and disinformation goes well beyond simply identifying it, and seems potentially to be beyond the reach of NLP, at least as we are currently applying it.

Caliphate, 10 episode podcast, 2018, Rukmini Callimachi

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/podcasts/caliphate-isis-rukmini-callimachi.html

This is another strange story.

Caliphate was a high profile and very successful podcast that was released in April and May of 2018. It won awards and was widely praised. By December 2020 it had been retracted. What in the world happened?

The podcast featured a young Canadian man of Pakistani origin referred to as Abu Huzayfah, later identified as Sheroze Chaudry. He claimed to have been a member of ISIS and said he had carried out punishments and executions in Syria in 2014 as a member of the ISIS police (Hespa). His story made up the majority of the podcast. It turned out that he invented it all and that it was unlikely he was ever in Syria at all. The New York Times retracted this podcast only after Chaudry was arrested by Canadian authorities in September 2020 for carrying out a terrorism hoax.

The problems with the podcast are well documented, and this NPR story provides a good summary of the shortcomings. The New York Times also published this analysis, and added a 30 minute epilogue to the podcast which discussed its failings with then Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

The reporter and main personality on the podcast was Rukmini Callimachi. She had reported on ISIS for a number of years previously, and first learned of Abu Huzayfah from Anat Agrom, a researcher at MEMRI. Agrom had found posts by Huzayfah on Instagram where he claimed to be a member of ISIS and posted some photos from Syria which he claimed documented his presence there but which were later shown to have been copied from social media. Agrom also located his LinkedIn profile, which is how Callimachi was able to make contact. Huzayfah agreed to talk. Just like that.

The idea that an Instagram profile and LinkedIn account get you access to a New York Times reporter is … something.

Huzayfah claimed that he had been in Syria with ISIS starting in February 2014. He said he had traveled from Canada to Pakistan to Istanbul and then went overland and crossed into Syria surreptitiously.

By June of 2014 ISIS was on the move in Iraq, and on July 4 Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared the Caliphate or Islamic state had been established in Mosul. Huzayfah claimed he was there and witnessed candy being handed out. Then on August 19 James Foley was beheaded by ISIS on video, after being held in captivity since 2012. Anyone who had missed the news about ISIS surely knew now.

Huzayfah claimed to be in Syria during this whole time. The first five episodes of the podcast go into his background and experiences, and Callimachi repeatedly says on air that his story is consistent with things she knows. But presumably she has reported on much that she knows, and so perhaps Huzayfah was simply an attentive consumer of the news?

He told a familiar story. He was an immigrant kid living in Toronto (Burlington) who was born in Pakistan in 1994/1995, and so he grew up with the escalating War on Terror and the Internet. He expressed curiosity about the Taliban, Al Qaeda and wondered if they were Muslims…as he investigated these questions he claimed to be radicalized both by the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and chat room recruiters.

Choudry is clearly familiar with the usual radicalization sources on the Internet. He spoke at length about Anwar al-Awlaki, a youtube Imam who was born in 1971 in New Mexico, held dual US / Yemini citizenship, studied at Colorado State, supported Bush before 9/11, and then went to Yemen in the early 2000s. In September 2011 he was deliberately targeted and killed by a US drone strike, after which he became an icon for ISIS recruitment of English speakers. Chaudry also mentioned Sayyid Qutb, an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who was the mentor of the founder of the group that went on to become ISIS.

Huzayfah says he began to study Islam in high school, and claimed that the Syrian Civil War inspired him to go to Syria to join ISIS. He refers to a common jihadist recruiting pitch — If one part of the body feels pain, all parts of the body feels that pain. By this reasoning then persecution of any Muslim is something all Muslims should feel, and therefor all Muslims have a duty to fight to remove whatever that source of pain may be.

Huzayfah claims to have arrived in Istanbul Turkey February 2014 and then traveled to the border of Syria. In what would become a familiar dynamic on the podcast, both Callimachi and producer Andy Mills seem to prompt Huzayfah … “is your heart pounding?” … “Did you see the ISIS flag?” And so after the flag question he responds “That was the first thing I saw, it looked glorious…I can live under the banner.” But would he have even mentioned the flag on his own? Callimachi then explains … “to you this is the promised land” and then she goes on to define what a Caliphate is, as her source Huzayfah listens attentively.

She seems to push the idea that establishing the Caliphate is his motivation for joining ISIS rather than Al Qaeda … and you can almost hear him nodding along. And then when talking about the Caliphate, Callimachi helpfully explains “This dream of the Islamic homeland is responsible for bringing people in” and then asks, “who are these guys … fighters?” to which he simply responds yeah…

Huzayfah described ISIS as if he was getting a job at some typical corporation … you’d fill out a form and they’d do background checks to which Callimachi adds “I’ve seen these forms” …. there is an application process to “determine where you would best fit”. Huzayfah says he applied to be a police officer, to which Mills remarks “but I thought you went there to be a fighter, did something happen, are you in too deep?” Huzayfah goes on to explain “… I couldn’t kill someone right away. A position with the police was the next lower position to fighter,” so Huzayfah joined Hespa and had a 2 week training period with weapons. Callimachi is talking a lot, “I’ve seen this before” … “I’ve heard of this place”

When he describes torture Callimachi is again prompting “Does he kneel in front of you, is he naked” … “does he scream?” … “had you seen real blood before, in person?” and then concludes “this very much gibes with the other accounts I have heard, down to the technical details” … “what is unique here is you are hearing from someone who inflicted the pain, there has never been someone like this to come forward.” There is a kind of self breathless self-congratulatory tone to it all.

Huzayfah claims to have carried out his first execution in June 2014, when ISIS is on the verge of declaring the Caliphate. Callimachi helpfully provides analysis of his comments : He uses the language of us versus them, and correctly identifies a local tribe Abu Nimr that stood against ISIS and were executed because of it. “This suggests insider knowledge,” insists Callimachi. She goes on to say he properly identified the crime of this group and used the correct theological term murtadeen. But simple Google searches show that the events at Abu Nimr were well covered at the time they occurred, up to and including the use of this specialized terminology. And so again, was Huzayfah simply an avid consumer of the news from Syria and Iraq?

After Huzayfah tells this part of this story, Callimachi asks, “Then at some point you decide to quit. Why?” Huzayfah explains, “It was the second time I killed someone. It was a drug dealer, I had to stab him in the heart because that was the punishment. I was due to go into that training a couple of weeks from that time, including my superiors …”

Then, perhaps curiously, Mills interviews Callimachi about Huzayfah’s motivations and asks, “can you explain what happened to him?” She explains in a familiar vein, “I’ve seen this time and time and again. It is the hypocrisy that brings them out.” So he went back to Turkey, flew back to Pakistan, and then back to Canada.

They also asked about turning himself in, to which Huzayfah said well, no, this isn’t their business (of the Canadian authorities). What happens in ISIS stays in ISIS. At this point we reach the end of episode 5.

In episode 6 we get to the doubts. Huzayfah says on the phone “I’m done, the CSIS just came to interview me.” CSIS is the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. This was apparently the day after his most recent interview with the podcast. How did CSIS come the next day? Callimachi wonders if her phones were tapped, or if she was followed? Normally she would need to re-engage with a source in this kind of trouble, but Iraqi troops are taking back territory and would shortly retake Mosul. Then there was a series of attacks, November 29, 2016 in Berlin, London Bridge on June 3, 2017, … so the story is dropped. But when they finally return to it they begin to have a sinking feeling that something was off with Huzayfah’s passport.

There is an entry stamp of September 17, 2014 from Karachi, which is supposedly when he was in Iraq. They try to corroborate his story, there is no stamp into Syria of course, but also no entry stamps for Turkey. And then an exit stamp of July 1, 2014 from Lahore, Pakistan. Since February 2014 he seems to have been traveling back and forth between Lahore and Canada, for example on February 28, 2014 going from Canada to Lahore, all times when he was supposed to be in Syria.

There is also a video he claims is him shooting a Glock into the Euphrates River. But, where is it really? An analyst brought in by the podcast studies the video and says that it is the Euphrates, but must have been taken after November 2014 since there is an island visible that would have been underwater earlier. So again, there is no evidence supporting his story. Mills asks “What if this turns out to be the weirdest case of catfishing?” Callimachi does not know the term catfishing. Mills explains, “What if this is just an invented persona?” And yet despite having this question raised, somehow, we continue.

They conclude that he appears to have been in Pakistan from September 2014 until April 2015. He could have been at the Euphrates any time from November 2014 until February 2016 based on the temporary island seen in the video. They contact Huzayfah’s father who said he was a curious kid who spent a lot of time online. He was never involved in any militant activity, he was very earnest, and mostly spent time at the university when he was with his grandparents.

HIS STORY DOESN’T REALLY ADD UP. And yet, the podcast works hard to justify his omissions and inconsistencies.

They find that university sources said he didn’t attend often, and his transcripts show that he missed a semester. Ah ha! Where was he? In Syria? He is also found to be on the USA no fly list for unspecified reasons relating to terrorism, and he is under investigation by the Canadian government for something … and so therefore they must think he is a terrorist! And there is a timeline that could have had him in Syria consistent with all the evidence, it’s just not the time line he provided. But, if Canada suspects him of being a terrorist and he’s in Canada, why hasn’t he been arrested? And so … it is kind of painful to listen to how hard Callimachi works to fix his story for him. She clearly wants to believe him. Confirmation bias.

She introduces Huzayfah to a former ISIS member who works on deradicalizing ISIS members, and had heard from this person that he had confessed. She goes on to say his exaggerations make sense, everyone wants to put themselves at the center of great events. And she kept insisting that he was providing details that nobody knows and yet correspond to what she knows to be true. She even at one point says “he knows as much as I do,” which is somehow taken to support him being a terrorist rather than an avid consumer of the news.

When finally confronted with all of this contradictory information about his timeline, Huzayfah admits he entered Syria after September 2014. Why then the earlier timeline? He said he wanted to be there pre-Caliphate because it seems more innocent, and that he can claim humanitarian motives since the true nature of ISIS was not clearly understood. After July 2014 you would be entering in service of the Caliphate. Callimachi helpfully explains, “He told us different timelines because he didn’t want to be associated with the worst elements.”

After episode 6 we don’t hear from Huzayfah for a few episodes.

Episode 7 focused on the recapture of Mosul by Iraqi forces on July 8 2017. This features Hawk, Callimachi’s translator, fixer and friend, who is also a fan of George Micheal and Metallica. There is a review of the history to date, the USA invades Iraq in 2003, which is when ISIS is started by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The USA pulls out in 2011, hands over Mosul to the Iraqis, and it falls to ISIS by June 2014. On July 4, 2014 the Caliphate is declared.

Then, ISIS begins to govern and makes some improvements compared to the Iraqi government — streets are cleaner, sater. But then come all manner of brutal executions, pushing homosexuals off buildings, stoning adulters, crushing a captured soldier with a tank, lowering a cage full of people belonging to a particular tribe into water and filming their downing, or hanging people in a slaughterhouse and bleeding them out. Somehow ISIS wants to assert that they are doing God’s work, and that these punishments are consistent with his will.

Episode 8 includes a newsgathering technique Callimachi is known for, which some describe as theft. After Mosul is retaken she goes into a former ISIS building looking for documents. She finds a briefcase, and believes that that the content fleshes out and supports her previous reporting. These documents show, and she has already shown elsewhere, that ISIS is a self-sustaining organizati

on that makes money from a variety of sources, particularly taxes, fees, and the selling of flour. And this makes it harder to starve ISIS for cash, since they have their own sources of income. She also finds that ISIS uses the existing bureaucracy to continue the operations of government, it leaves people in their jobs and allows them to continue their work on behalf of ISIS now.

The briefcase appears to have belonged to a finance person named Abu Jarrah, and she is able to track down his family, which is wealthy. They appear to want to deny he worked for ISIS, or that he was driven to it by false accusations made against his father by the Iraqi government for planting a land mine. His mother worried about who he was hanging around with, and that he took the humiliation of his father the worst of all. Callimachi was never able to locate Abu Jarrah.

Episode 9 features a visit to an Iraqi jail, where ISIS prisoners are being held. Why would a prisoner talk to Callimachi? She isn’t sure, but wants to hear what they have to say. If they are found to be confirmed members of ISIS then they face life in prison or execution, and the trials that are held are very fast. There is a prisoner from western Mosul who agrees to speak. His name is Bashar, and he claims that he pledged allegiance to ISIS to get paid for his job. However, Callimachi finds that the amount he was paid was improbable, and the fact that he said he quit ISIS was not believable.

Given the large amounts of money he was talking about receiving, Callimachi wonders if he had a Sabiya, that’s a female sex slave, that he bought and sold. ISIS attacked Mount Sinjar in the north in August 2014, which is where the Yazdi people live. They are not Muslims, and so according to ISIS it is permissible to hold them as slaves if they are taken in battle. Callimachi explains that it is important important to remember that ISIS wants to restore Islam to the 7th century, when slavery was still somewhat accepted. Bashar claimed that he had bought her to give her freedom, which Callimachi did not find believable (rightfully so). However, her high level of distrust and skepticism of Bashar is in stark contrast to her acceptance and wanting very badly to believe Huzayfah.

Bashar challenged Callimachi to find the family of the girl to verify his story, and so she did. And the girl said she was bought, that he was the third owner, and that he held her for five months and raped her daily and was very cruel to her and he beat her, and even asked her father for ransom. Bashar continues to deny this story and so Callimachi simply leaves, clearly not believing him.

Episode 10 concludes the podcast. Huzayfah reappears, one year later. This marks the seventh episode in which he plays a significant role. He said he noticed that he was being followed after their interview. When asked about his interviews with CSIS he said he admitted to being in ISIS and in Syria but not to enforcing violence. He says he didn’t admit to that because it wasn’t really their business, since these things didn’t happen in Canada. Huzayfah also claimed that ISIS is reacting to unfair treatment and fighting back. He says that not all jihadi groups are right, but there is an ideology that you should follow.

In discussing his case Callimachi and Mills remain puzzled as to why he hasn’t been arrested. Again, they seem to simply assume his story was true. Callimachi points out that many people are coming back from ISIS and it is hard to prove specific acts in Syria or Iran. They speculate that he will be put under a Peace Bond, which is an order of protection that indicates the Canadian government thinks someone is likely to commit a crime, but hasn’t done so yet. Callimachi concludes by saying we have historically underestimated groups like ISIS and perhaps by implication people like Huzayfah, maybe trying to suggest he is really a threat that should be taken more seriously.

And then the podcast is released starting in April through June 2018. It is widely acclaimed, although not universally. And during that time Canadian authorities continue to talk to Huzayfah, which in the end results in his arrest in September 2020 for perpetrating a terrorism hoax. By December 2020 the New York Times was retracting this podcast.

There is a follow up episode discussing what went wrong with this podcast. It features New York Times Executive Editor at the time Dean Baquet, who starts the episode by summarizing the podcast and then stating “We got this story wrong.” “There was no independent evidence to confirm he was an ISIS executioner.” “We were taken in by a con artist who made up most of what he told us.” “The evidence looked compelling, but there was other evidence that raised questions about his story.” “We didn’t present the story with enough focus on evidence that might have raised doubts.”

When Caliphate was published Canadian authorities were already investigating him as a hoaxer. They started by investigating him as a terrorist, and then a hoaxer. He didn’t go to Syria at all. He was on the US no fly list due to the Canadian investigation. He did not fool Canadian authorities for very long. He was a fan of ISIS, but never a member. His posts on social media drew initial attention — Chaudry took photos from other sources to create his own persona, something that is not unusual in social media.

When asked “How did this happen?” Baquet calls it confirmation bias. “You get a good story, you need to look at evidence that supports and refutes, and we didn’t listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged this story. Two US government officials confirmed in 2018 that he was in ISIS. We did not pay close enough attention to refuting evidence. His whole account was based on being in Syria, but the documentation and timeline just didn’t support that. There was a lack of high level oversight, they just did not pay enough attention.”

I listened to the podcast knowing that it had been retracted, so perhaps this is unfair, but there was often a feeling that Callimachi was prompting her source to tell a particular story, one that may have already been written in her head and just needed someone else to tell it to make it journalistically acceptable.

History

2019 updates:

• July (project kickoff)
• August (background reading, Ilhan Omar, Minnesota)
• December (background reading, Genocide)

2020 Updates

• May (annotation scheme)
• August (data statement)
• November (invited talk at UMass-Lowell)
• December (invited talk at Muslims in ML/NeurlPS)

2022 Updates

• March (questions on the utility of annotation, other directions)

Please stay in touch!

• Email : tpederse@d.umn.edu
• Twitter : @SeeTedTalk