>>Jared Cohen: This is really extraordinary
to be here. It's my first time as a Google
employee at Zeitgeist.
The session that we're moderating today and
featuring today looks at radicalization, which
I believe is really one of the most important
unanswered challenges that we face in the
world.
It's a challenge that makes everything else
in the world that much more dangerous.
Now, yet too often we allow what we see on
the surface, what the media tells us, what
we read about online and in the newspaper,
to dictate how we think about and act on this
very important challenge.
52% of the world is under the age of 30. The
vast majority of those young people are at
risk, either socially, economically, or both.
Yet these young people think the best alternative
that they have in life -- there's this oversupply
of young people who feel that the best alternative
they have is to throw themselves at the feet
of whatever violent extremist is closest to
them, either in terms of proximity or identity.
Today, we're going to try to redefine this
and rethink this by looking across four contexts:
the gang context, the religious extremist
context, the nationalist context, and the
right-wing extremist context, to try to remove
those masks of extremism, ideology, religion,
identity, to really get to the bottom of what
draws a young person into an extremist group
and into a violent extremist group.
