After the Next Attack: Terrorism in the Trump Era

Saud Al-Zaid The concept behind this talk rests on two rather
foreseeable predictions. The first is that there will be a mass
casualty attack in the United States in the early days of the Trump
administration. Second, that the attack will be connected to
"Islamic Terrorism" even before all the facts have been
established. This talk builds on my previous talk at #33c3, where I
attempted to illustrate the larger evolution of the War on Terror
through the lense of video games (see below). In this talk I focus
on the discursive side of the conflict, starting from the chatrooms
of war games onto the twitter accounts of the most prominent
radical Imams on the internet.   Currently, rhetoric among
Islamic radicals towards the Trump presidency has been reserved but
combative. They often point to the fact that he is a Casino owner,
and they percieve him as utterly immoral in the Islamic sense.
Hoping Trump will provide the pretext to unify the Islamic world
against the United States, any Draconian measure against Muslims in
the United States will be seen as a rallying call.  The talk
will break down how the media reports on the attack, and how the
newly configured governmental systems react to publicly conveyed
information. Will Trump's promise of requiring registration of all
Muslims have a multiplier effect on recruitment to radical Islamic
organizations? Or will established systems put in place by previous
administrations mitigate Trump's ability to experiment in such a
manner? Larger historical trends in radical Islamic thought and
Western political systems will more clearly illustrate the
evolution of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" into what
I have redefined as the "Clash of Digitalizations" - where images,
symbols, and emotions are intertwined in a technological realm
reflecting the anxieties we have about the future.