“The Arab world needs to take the lead on this,” added Muasher in a discussion with reporters ahead of the speech. “The Americans can lead on the military front, they cannot lead on the ideological front. They are not capable of doing so and the region does not want them to do so. The question is, is the region capable of taking the lead ideologically.”Yet Middle East experts in Washington are also wary of simply passing the buck. “I think there is a real danger of kicking the ideological war to the clerical authorities in the Arab world,” said Frederic Wehrey, a Carnegie researcher recently returned from Libya. “Because of the credibility gap, these authorities are tied to the regimes, they don’t have resonance among those who are at risk.”“This [Isis] ideology is going to stay with us for a while and is going to become even more violent and more barbaric than what you have seen,” added Muasher.The theme was echoed by US secretary of state John Kerry, who told the Washington summit that the struggle against violent extremism was the “defining challenge of our generation”Obama also acknowledged the high stakes. “As we speak, Isil is terrorising the people of Syria and Iraq and engaging in unspeakable cruelty, the wanton murder of children, the enslavement and rape of women, threatening religious minorities with genocide, beheading hostages,” he said. “Isil-linked terrorists murdered Egyptians in the Sinai Peninsula, and their slaughter of Egyptian Christians in Libya has shocked the world. Beyond the region, we’ve seen deadly attacks in Ottawa, Sidney, Paris and now Copenhagen.”
