Jesse Morton and Mitchell Silber for New America: From December 2007 through May 2011, Revolution Muslim, a radical Salafi-jihadist organization based primarily in New York City, brought al Qaeda’s ideology to the United States. At its inception, many dismissed Revolution Muslim as amateurish. Yet the group developed an effective and deadly methodology for promoting “open-source jihad” via radicalization, recruitment, online propaganda, social media and covert communications.
The organization was linked to many of the most serious terrorism investigations opened by the New York Police Department at the time and had international links with cases touching four continents. In 2012, federal prosecutor Gordon Kromberg, who prosecuted the cases of Yousef Khattab, Jesse Morton and Zachary Chesser, all figures at the core of Revolution Muslim, said: “It is amazing from the perspective of time to look back at Revolution Muslim. In our pleading we listed … 15 different defendants … who engage[d] in terrorism or attempted to engage in terrorism [and] all were connected to Revolution Muslim.” Though the group disbanded in May 2011, it laid the foundation for jihadist organizing in the United States that the Islamic State would later copy and take advantage of.
Revolution Muslim was a virtual terrorist group, before the term “virtual caliphate” became the en vogue way to conceptualize the future trajectory of ISIS following its loss of territory in Iraq and Syria. As a result, analyzing the history, operations and the means of thwarting Revolution Muslim is essential to understanding the challenge of ISIS’s “virtual caliphate.” …
Today, ISIS is in retreat. The military campaign against the self-declared Islamic State has all but ended its control of territory. Yet the history of Revolution Muslim warns against optimism regarding the threat from ISIS. Revolution Muslim itself emerged out of a splintered and diverse tradition of Islamist organizing, illustrating the limitations of focusing on a specific group’s fortunes rather than broader shifts in the jihadist ecosystem.
As ISIS loses control of its terrain in Syria and Iraq, it is likely to evolve into more of a transnational “virtual caliphate,” which is what one set of researchers has defined as “a radicalized community online — that empowers the global Salafi-jihadi movement.” In doing so, it would revert to a small group of violent activists who seek to mobilize adherents through the multifaceted use of online media. In short, it would resemble Revolution Muslim.
School attendance a basic building block
Lauren Bauer for the Brookings Institution: Although most schools have daily attendance rates of well over 90 percent, according to the newly released U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection, about 8 million students in the U.S. missed more than three weeks of school during the 2015–16 school year. That represents an increase over the 6.8 million students who missed more than three weeks of school during the 2013–14 school year.
Attendance is the building block that must be in place to meet student achievement and high school graduation goals. Physically being present in school is one of the most basic conditions for a student’s success — if students are not in school, they are not learning what is being taught and could be falling behind in earning the course credits needed to graduate.
Do it for the money, not the perks
Tim Rice for E21: It is no surprise that the Class of 2018 is clamoring for nontraditional perks. Faced with a generation that wants to work for “the next Google,” employers are delivering perks that range from the clever (nap pods at the Casper Mattress headquarters) to the creative (“music jam” spaces at Credit Karma) to the truly extravagant (Boxed, the online warehouse company, will pay up to $20,000 for an employee’s wedding).
But if they’re smart, members of the Class of 2018 will resist and reverse this trend while they can. Keeping the kitchen stocked with craft beer and organic granola is not just your employer’s way of improving the office culture — it is your company’s way of paying you less.
Since World War II, employers have tempted workers into accepting lower salaries in exchange for perks. Today, small start-ups are relatively open about using perks to make up for what they cannot offer in direct compensation. …
Consider pet insurance, a preferred perk among millennials. Such insurance is offered by about 5,000 companies, including Microsoft and Xerox. In 2017, fewer than 2 percent of the nation’s pet cats and dogs were insured. As millennials continue to choose pets over children, it’s not unreasonable to assume that an increasing number of employers will offer pet insurance and we will once again find ourselves heading down the path to lower wages.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages and salaries comprise 68 percent of total compensation today, down from about 73 percent in 2000. A recent report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution shows that “while benefits have made up an increasingly large share of compensation, wage growth has lagged.” If the Class of 2018 wants more benefits, it should not complain about lower wage growth.
• Compiled by Joseph Lawler from research compiled by the various think tanks.
