Families trust and confidence. So now weve seen maybe not a change but certainly a significant orientation and how we are doing. This is all part of a change in policy over the last few years since 9 11. We had first and intensification of policy and the militarization to move to the acceptance of the complicated conflict. It had too much effect on the hostage policy accept the stuff i just talked about and thats been on a tactical level. However, many of the practitioners is taken on the transnational character as another talked about. Exacerbating the transnational Political Development in the insurgent activities with other types of transnational time for weapons of mass distraction and on and on. Criminal organizations as well as terrorist groups have gone global preventing a new challenge to government. Some of whom are overmatched and outgunned. The result is a global transnational exodus of political and criminal threats. The evolution of insurgency movements and terrorist tactics reflects what is happening to other organizations and is providing a situation with more or less solid nationstates now coming under attack by actors representing the self proclaimed entities as borders have become more open all of this legal trafficking activity is increasing exponentially. Its the system itself. In the terrorist and terrorist policy we have to focus on the strategic level in fact it is rapidly simple. Now we have a selfproclaimed hostage state. So we are returning to the older tradition in the Geneva Convention to become relevant again. In addition to the necessary National Response by governments it must be a coordinated response by the community of several levels government acting as group and in the international organization. Much easier said than done of course as the Current Situation demonstrates. The middle east is in political social collapse into anarchy. The major regional players that are standing on the scene with an ability to act in any degree took to saudi arabia and israel as the group and only one of them is arab. They all opposed the hostage taking and have a common enemy and isis but all engage in the crosscutting Competition Among each other. But in the end its all about politics. You can deplore the special operations teams from now until doomsday and you will not solve the problem. They are now dealing with hostage taking in the middle east particularly this is the challenges of dealing with the middle east for. How to sort out the enemies from our friends. [applause] [inaudible] it was designed to be the size. We have to continue by the way i think we have to discuss not only the Islamic State and others but also the lone wolf and particularly now that we are seeing the takeover in the people that came to watch a movie and all that, obviously we have to think about also the future in terms of the involvement of the socalled lone wolf now to weaponize and take over the entire communities let me move on to our friend and colleague as i mentioned with his experience for decades but also academically as a doctorate from nyu on iran to share with us the experiences in the middle east and elsewhere. Thank you professor. When i took the negotiations course in the fbi in the early 90s, it was focused basically on criminal hostages and when i asked the instructor what about the terrorist situations, he said he would handle it the same way. I am going to go through this and show how i believe it was incorrect at the time as it is now. They taught us that when you have a hostage negotiation or barricade situation where the crime has gone wrong and theyve taken hostages were there is a domestic dispute and theres a feeling of desperation by the people or somebody that wants to commit suicide by cop and theres hostages and hope they said that the first thing that people tend to want to do this work on problemsolving independent behavioral change. Hopefully the behavioral change our hands up and believe. But that rarely works if you proceed with three other things to do. The first is active listening. They basically mirror the hostage taker is saying and affect letting them tell their side of the story. Then you bring empathy into it and you want to determine how they feel and then you want to gain rapport and gain their trust. Once the process Gains Momentum you get into the influence part which is working on problemsolving with the hostage takers and bringing about the behavioral change. However this has little relation to the modernday hostagetaking when youre dealing with islamist extremist terrorism. Before i go into the ideology, in the 1980s president Ronald Reagan transferred arms for the hostages in lebanon and he finally enacted and admitted that both said that it wasnt to gain the hostage release, it was to foster better relations with iran. But in effect this became a revolving door. You pay for hostages and they release some and then they get more hostages and that is what was going on in lebanon at the time. In 2002, president bush had a policy that ran what could be paid if they could gain intelligence about the terrorist groups or the individual terrorists but not for the purpose of freeing american hostages because you dont want to encourage terrorism but this did allow for negotiations ended it all out for using the rationale hoping to gain intelligence about the terrorist groups. As the ambassador mentioned there is a statute about the detaining of u. S. Citizens outside of the United States and basically as he mentioned, the policy in some ways remains the same. You can negotiate with no concessions, no ran some kind of change in the u. S. Policy to the hostage takers. However as you mentioned, the one change is we can buy we urge the citizens ought to pay ransom if they want to do it anyway, we provide basic Logistical Support and help with those governments. It should be noted that the department has never prosecuted anyone for paying ransom. Now recently, president obama swapped kelly and commanders. The rationale that he used us for our own soldiers we do not leave anyone behind once the conflict is over. However in my opinion, the sergeant lost this when he collaborated with the enemy. In that case i think that he lost the right to have the United States release the top taliban commanders. In 2002, the National Criminal justice Reference Service pointed out the civilians for the release of the prisoners. My colleague will go into this in further detail that it should be noted that the policy was no concessions and they rely on hostage rescue operations. However, due to the public pressure its a small country and people tend to know each other and as a result, israel began releasing prisoners and some, there was criticism from releasing those in return for releasing hostages. Getting into the hostage initiations for the islamist extremists i must note they are not concerned about the public opinion. They are not concerned. Their audience is and what the public says. Their audience validation comes from god. As a result theres no need to minimize casualties. In fact its fine for them to maximize. Its fine for them to do barbaric things like beheadings, drownings, crucifixions. The leadership believes to know what god wants of them. The religious scholars rule on behalf of the returns are they are tied in so once the citizens of a country and power the clergy to speak they are forever precluded from criticizing the clergy it would be like criticizing god himself. As a so tourism becomes an act of religious expression. One time, people at the book which would be like jews and christians were a protected status while they were persecuted and while they had to pay exorbitant tax rates at least they were protected from being killed. However islamist extremists get around this, to back. Instead of people of the book they refer to jews, christians were fellow muslims who dont agree with them which is pagan. So by changing the label from people in the buck, anyone can become a terror target. Christians, jews, muslims. Now they were once islamic and they are part of the islamic entity until the end of time. So its not negotiable. For example, it was under the islamic rule so they are precluded from dissociating or giving up any part of that and its an obligation on them so that people are either willing to be ruled under islam or they become muslim. Whats my solution . We cant win a war if we worry about political correctness. Its true that we have to identify the enemy, and islamist extremist. And while it is important to try our best to limit civilian casualties we cannot become paralyzed to take action for the worry that there will be some Collateral Damage. If we were paralyzed in this way and world war ii we would have lost the war. We must identify the enemy and allow the military to succeed in its mission. In world war ii if we worry about the Collateral Damage we wouldnt have been bombing japan and we wouldnt have obtained the unconditional surrender. So basically what im saying i am saying is that they end very badly. We must fight to win and obtained the unconditional surrender. If we go back to the position of military and economic strength we can deter the war with weakness or as an affordable in a inevitable. [applause] thank you very much. We will come back to some of the issues that you raised. The next speaker was a minister and counselor as i mentioned before in the middle east and counterterrorism and is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and the school of law so in cairo in the embassy several times and she will deal with the israeli response to the hostage taking to address a couple of days they declared that they do have some parts of the soldiers that are killed during the year ago with a lot of questions. We have to say from the start will offer more dilemmas than answers and i simply dont have we dont have good answers for what is the toughest most difficult situation for the decisionmakers anywhere. Another opening remark is i want to be discussing the situation of the border with al qaeda but we still have bigger breasts and bigger problems that we face from those organizations that have been targeting for decades now mostly the organizations. This is an ongoing challenge, an ongoing experience and one that has gone through different phases and i think its fair to say that they are we are still in the midst of the learning curve and while we have reached several conclusions this is probably not the end of the process unfortunately. But i would like to begin with first of all the understanding that while we face the unique aspect of the ransom which is to say we are mostly faced by the ransom which is to release prisoners into terrorists and this is not for the ransom that is paying money so the people that are kidnapped are not faced with this the mama and both were speakers spoke about whether to pay out of pocket or to get the money in another way so this is an issue to the states. Israel this is the responsibility of the state to deal with this issue and that families can do a lot in terms of Public Relations in terms of making this issue remain very much in the news but its not the capability to do what is needed to release their loved ones. So this is an important remark which is unique to our situation. But i would like to give a background in saying that the whole issue for ransom is actually a very old one in the tradition or at least the tradition of the jewish people they pretend the bible and this is one of the most important commandment that you have in the jewish religion and it was extensively debated in the literature because not only does it refer to a very tough phenomena that was going on the jewish communities facing the situation where people were put in jail by hostile authorities in order to pressure the communities to pay ransom. There was such a commandment that was considered much more important that adult with helping the poor in helping the weak. So we have discussions that they are going back almost 2,000 years ago. [inaudible] but the most important rabbis from both years and the questions are mostly how do you weigh the life of a person and individual and the benefit of the whole community and how do you put value on human life . Could even be possible . Wouldnt that be counterproductive because it would just bring about the next incident where a person from the community with the object of and get back into salon. The answers have been given by the way. There was even an attempt to actually say you can pay ten times the fair value of the hostage and who is to tell what is the fair value of a human being and how can you even presume that apparently people found ways to do that but i have to say even those who were not exactly maintained there were exceptions for example in the case of husband and wife and they have the duty to pay everything they have to release his wife at least for the first time. There are no limits to what you pay because the peoples value to the community is much higher and so on and so forth. There is some kind of logic for the community to operate according to the reality always stronger than those attempts in the rules. If i go now to our time, the modern state of israel, again the nature have changed and it is mostly the release of prisoners and the babies of terrorists. That is another set of competitions and dilemmas of course decisionmakers because mostly it is a question of motivation and a if you do paid this price what happens next and what about just encourage the next hostage taking and we have to take into consideration. Those themselves have the potential. The decisionmaker is facing again how do you weigh the lives against life if you know there is a citizen or a soldier that has been kidnapped they have a face and a name and parents and family and friends. Theres a small country and Everybody Knows everybody. But at the same time, you are asked to release the funds released will probably go back to terrorism and then they might kill an independent number of people that you still dont know their identities and their families. So it is a result of the terrorist activities that some of the people who were released during the last have been a bold and different levels. This raises a huge dilemma for the society and for the government. So, beats are questions that are very, very difficult to answer and there are no good answers. This is the ongoing effort. [inaudible] there been changes in the way that the organization conducted the kidnapping activities as a result of the way that the government of israel chose to react to them. So there is a significant difference between those kidnapping and the ones that we experience since the 80s to this day. The main difference is if you had this incident where there would be a takeover by the terrorists in and the facility it could have been school, bus house and they were would take hostages and then they would start making their demands and bargaining yes or no would start. That allowed for a situation where instead of actually starting the negotiation to release the hostages, the government of israel chose when it was possible to try a military option, a military takeover taking down the characters in releasing the hostages without paying the ransom. So, not yielding to terrorism. And that in fact was the policy that has put forward in the 70s by the late then print mr. Whenever there is a possibility to try to take down the terrorists and release the hostages, you do not negotiate. You do not start the negotiation. However, the second part of it was when this possibility does not exist, you in fact do start negotiations and you start to see which of those demands you can answer and the reason you cannot leave people in the situation and just abandon them completely. So we never really had a policy of no negotiation because that would have been i think for the Israeli Society almost unbearable. Because we have a general and poison girls when they turn 18 go to the army especially from the Jewish Population both boys and girls. They go to the army and a list. The country sends them to defend itself and when they are taken hostage were kidnapped in this context, a country has an additional duty to get them back. This is part of what was mentioned here with respect to the u. S. He dont leave a wounded soldier behind. You dont leave soldiers behind and it is i think a very strong notion in israel somewhat argue its more than a that the state of israel has with its soldiers then israel has for the parents of the soldiers. The former generation because its the mother and father in the state of israel expects to send kids at the age of 18 and they expect to do his best to make sure that there is a possibility for them to come back home this is what the state should do. So what has happened in the 80s was that since the different terrorist organizations saw that the government preferred to do everything forcibly and ordered not to conduct negotiations but is actively trying to by the way with a terrible price. We have cases of both hostages and soldiers that participated in the release of hostages. Im sure we are where of the case where we had airplanes that were affected to uganda and the israelis held hostages at the airport there and there was a very heroic release of them. Actually most of the hostages got back safe and sound. There was a lady who was hospitalized and she died but actually we took losses and the famous one was a Prime Minister. So in the 80s they saw a change in the strategy and tactics of the terrorist organization. They understood that as long as they operate in a known place there would be some attempt to release the hostages so what they tried to do from then onwards was actually kidnap an israeli citizen be it a soldier or a citizen and take him somewhere unknown preferably outside the state of missouri where would be difficult for the security organizations to find him. And there actually you leave the state noted a chance but to start a negotiation. If indeed there is a moral religious what have you commitment to bring our citizens and our soldiers back home. There started were a lot of people to see nowadays as the slippery slope for you had some very famous deals and you could see a trajectory where the prize just goes higher and higher. The ratio between the numbers of the hostages or the kidnapped people that were released in the number of prisoners that were released by israel to security became bigger and bigger and in fact in the last 30 years or so we release more than 7000 people and god 16 p