رحمة الرحيم الحمد لله والصلاة والسلاة أشرف الأنبياء والمرسلين أب القاسم المصطفات صلى الله صلى الله عليك واتك المظلون صلى الله عليك يا رحمة الله أمة مؤمن ومؤمن إيتنا كنا فنفوز فوزا عظيم الله تعالى في كتابه الكريم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم فسادوا في البر والبحر بما كسبت ومدوال محمد النظر صلاوات for the love of the Ahl al Bayt عليهم السلام الله صلى الله عليك وثلاثة صلاوات for the love of أبا عبد الله والسلام الله نحن في عام رليجيس وفollowing رليجيس ليس نور يعني أنه إذا كنت تعتقد أنك رليجيس ورعا أنك تريد رليجيس ستجدك من المنور إذا كنت رليجيس كنت مجرد رليجيس وحوالي عن رليجيس الإسلام وحوالي عن كل رليجيس اليوم رليجيس صلى الله عليه وسلم بشراء لديهم مرحبا تجمع رليجيس رليجيس ورعا رليجيس ورعا أنك تريد رليجيس يكون رريجيس رليجيس لزأ إذا أنك تريد أن تحدي برات رليجيس تردج من المنور بشراء إذا أن يوجد أولا أقل من يقولون أنهم لا يريدون أن يكون لديهم أي شيء مع أي رلجن و أي رلجيس و هذه البلداء الآثيين أو الذين يعتقدون themselves أنهم لا يفعلون بأي رلجن إنها مجموعة مجموعة و مجموعة في السبب 7 سنوات فقط في السبب 7 سنوات البلداء الآثيين أو الذين يعتقدون themselves لا يفعلون بأي رلجيس لديهم مجموعة من 16% إلى 23% في السبب الأمريكية هذه البلداء لديهم مجموعة و نرى أن أي شخص يعتقدون themselves رلجيس أو wants to be a part of a religion يجب أن يجد مجموعة و مجموعة رلجيس مجموعة رلجيس يجب أن يتنسون بأي رلجيس فقط في السبب 8 سنوات البلداء الآثيين و يجب أن يجب أن يجعل so many concessions يجب أن يجب أن يجد a system so that people remain catholic so that people stay worshiping according to the Catholic establishment أخرين أمريكيين are also losing in numbers and participants و نرى أن تظهر that the religion of Islam although the number is growing day after day and year after year in population but we see that the ones who are actually religious Muslims they are decreasing Islam is growing by number Islam is growing by quantity but it's not growing by quality and we see that people are leaving religions for two main reasons the first reason is that they say we have seen so many bad things from people that claim to be religious I see this person, he did this this Catholic priest he did this he was abusing the children so I'm not going to join the Catholic church this one this cheikh here he said this to me the other day and I'm not going to become a Muslim anymore and people bring excuses because of actions of individuals and this is although it sounds funny but this is very common you ask people why don't you go to the church why don't you go to the masjid why aren't you a part of a religion yes because this and this they point out stories of individuals now this doesn't make sense let me say I don't believe in the government because one or two of the politicians they're corrupt so therefore I don't believe in the whole system of the government this doesn't make sense but we see that people continue to do this and also some people blame they say look at religious you see people who claim to be religious look at the fighting the wars the bloodshed and insha'Allah in the upcoming nights I'm going to be talking about shari'Allah and religious extremism and we will speak about this issue but many people they point out to this issue they say religious people look at them all they're doing is fighting I don't want to be a part of this religious system as if it's only the religious people that are fighting it's as if no one else is fighting with one another it's only the ones who claim to be religious and then on the other hand you find the media the environment the public atmosphere the universities they are preaching against any established religion not only Islam anyone who considers themselves religious they will find difficulties and challenges attending the university here in the united states and in the west I've heard from people and I've seen this I've heard from a friend he was telling me that he was in a class as soon as he went in the class the professor he told the first day of the class the professor he asked the students who of you believes in God so the ones that believed in God they raised their hands and he told them why do you believe in God and he began to refute their arguments one after the other this is the first day of class starting off the class by teaching people to turn against God and turn against any religious establishment and the problem is that this is the first this is the first argument the first argument people say I don't want religion and the second they say that you see the problems that religion is causing and then they come and they say religion is irrelevant religion today we don't need to have religion we live in a time where religion is not necessary anymore people used to believe people used to pray at a time where they wanted their crops to grow and they saw someone who was sick they don't know what kind of a disease this person has this person is just dying day after another they don't know what's wrong with this person so they pray now we have technology we have medicine we have sent people to space we have all of this advancement in technology and in science and in medicine there's no need for God there's no need for religion now how do we answer this my dear brothers and sisters the religion of Islam is a very logical religion and everything has to make sense in the religion of Islam if you hear someone sitting on the member and saying something that does not make sense go and question that person go and tell that person bring me the proof this is the beauty of the religion of Islam and specifically the شيع صول of thought نحن أبناء الدليل we are following the proof we follow the حجة if someone does not convince you does not bring you حجة then you have to go and ask for a حجة because on the day of judgment الله سبحانه وتعالى is going to tell you why did you take that path I need to answer why for example why am I following I need to know I need to know the proof of the Imamah so that I can answer so we have to bring an answer a logical answer because this religion is a very logical religion and when someone comes and brings an argument against your religion against your foundations against your belief system you have to be able to answer how many of us are remain quiet how many of us are not able to answer when someone comes and questions my faith and criticizes my belief system the problem is not with my belief system the problem is with me when I'm not able to answer because the prophet he came and he justified the Qur'an justified we have the حجة we have the proof so this is the first argument some people they say we don't see that religion is relevant religion is not necessary we don't need religion right now I have money if anything happens to me I go to the doctor the doctor is able to cure me we have advanced in science and in technology and here this is where you see the human being how arrogant this human being can become this human being who is hurt very easily one bacteria one bacteria could kill a person one small bacteria that you can't even see but then you see this same human being as soon as he has a few dollars in his bank account he's driving a nice car this person becomes so arrogant that he becomes arrogant even with his own creator even with Allah سبحانه وتعالى الذي جمع مالا وعددة يحسب أن ماله أخلده he thinks that his wealth is going to make him live for eternity he thinks everyone else will die but he will not die this is the human being there's a hadith it says that why are you so arrogant oh human your start was from a clot of semen and your end is going to be a jifa you're going to be you're going to rot and in between you're carrying the jasat with you you're carrying filth with you and then you come and you consider yourself so arrogant you consider yourself so powerful first of all the knowledge the science the knowledge that we have is that enough to prove that we don't need God anymore first of all you ask any scholar to ask any scientist because the religion of Islam doesn't have a problem with science like you see other religions there's no contradiction between education and science and the religion of Islam there should be no contradiction because Allah is the creator and he created that system that the scientists are using so there is no problem you find in other religions they have grudges and they have a problem with science the religion of Islam doesn't but today you go and you ask any scholar any scientist they'll tell you that what we do not know is much more than what we do know and this is a proven fact there's more that we do not know in this life than what we do know so is this enough proof to come and say I don't worship God anymore because I have a little portion of knowledge in my head is that enough and second the ones who say religion is not relevant anymore has the technology that we have built the medicine that we have reached has it stopped people from dying has the technology helped people or have we seen that it is causing more bloodshed because before people used to fight it used to be a fight with swords one person kills another person now one person he's sitting in Minnesota or in one country he's flying a drone that is bombing people in Yemen and Arab and Syria and Afghanistan it kills hundreds of people this technology it's a good thing but when it's used in a bad way that means there's a problem that means we still need someone to show us the way and then being religious for the ones who say it's not relevant go and look at the studies go and look at the institutions that are not there are secular institutions they have done studies that show that following a religious system following a religious belief system is much better for your life than not following a religious system and this is a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology this is the study of epidemics study of when an epidemic kills people they've or people fall sick they've done the study and they say that joining a religious group does more to someone's sustained happiness this person ultimately they will be happier sustained happiness than other forms of social participation so you join a religious group or you go and join a yoga class which one will help you more to feel more happy it is the religious group and second the study found religion led to the greatest mental benefits and it also lessened depression depression how many people suffer from depression in the society the solution is religion the solution is following a system now someone might say how it's not something very difficult to comprehend because Allah سبحانه وتعالى created us in this way Allah سبحانه وتعالى created us so that we worship so that we follow that system Allah says in the Quran the body of the human and the spirit of the human it's created so that it worships Allah سبحانه وتعالى this is how we are programmed this is why you see that when you are praying you will feel satisfied when you are worshiping when you are reading whenajad you will feel at peace and that peace nothing else will bring it other than that reconnection with Allah سبحانه وتعالى no money, no wealth no fast car no lifestyle other than being religious because Allah says بذكر الله إنه القلوب it is only through the remembrance of Allah only through a connection with Allah that the hearts will find peace and furthermore for the ones that say religion is not relevant you see that if you make a mathematical calculation if you use logic you will see that religion is better off than not having religion this is letting alone that religious people are happier, they don't go through depression and all these other things that studies show having the religion increases the chances of success and this has an argument that philosophers use and this argument was used by Imam Sada with one of the one of the atheist of his time this man came to the Imam and he was arguing he was an atheist he was arguing the existence of Allah سبحانه وتعالى with the Imam after arguing for hours and hours the Imam told him okay let's say you win let's say there is no God I go I worship it's not going to harm me I'm going to live a religious lifestyle and of course when I follow the obligations that Allah has sent for me this is something for me to live this is a way for me to live a happier lifestyle for example Allah says do not cheat, do not steal, do not abuse do not backbite is there something wrong with that living with that lifestyle do not kill this is the system that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has given me I'm going to live that style and you're going to live your lifestyle of not worshiping and you're going to do whatever you want there's no moral system for you you could do whatever you want this is let's say if you were right now let's say I was right you know you're not 100% sure that there's no God there is a chance that there is a God but then I will have eternal paradise an eternal bliss while you will have eternal suffering and if you compare this life with the eternal afterlife which one is greater so if there is no God you will only have this life but if there is a God I will have this life and I will have the afterlife and this today philosophers they call this Pascal's wager of course this argument was used by Imam Sadab over a thousand years ago so this is the first the first reply to the first argument that religion is not relevant anymore the second argument that is used by many atheists is that look at all the suffering that you see in the world today all that suffering all that bloodshed all this evil in the world how can you say there is a merciful Lord when there is so much suffering when there is so much crime when so many people are unhappy how can you even say that there is a Lord when there is so much evil in the world and we see that this is a legitimate argument and we see that sometimes even some Muslims even some believers for example someone a lady her son was killed her son had a disease and died or something happened you see some religious people some believers they start questioning and they start saying why does this have to happen to me I pray I worship I go to Hajj why is this happening to me and no one else we see that even sometimes some religious people ask this in order to to comprehend this we have to look at a few steps and a few answers first Allah سبحانه وتعالى we have to comprehend the mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى ورحمة وسعة كل شيء الله سبحانه وتعالى says my mercy has encompassed everything and Allah سبحانه وتعالى does no evil to anyone and Allah سبحانه وتعالى he is the source of mercy in our life and he is the merciful and the hadith says that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has rahma there is 99% of his rahma Allah سبحانه وتعالى has saved it to be used on the day of judgment and 1% of that rahma Allah has allowed it to take place on earth and that 1% you see the mother showing mercy towards her child you see the mercy between one another the love and the compassion and the humanity within people who placed that within them who programmed us to all view that oppression is wrong if we were all created by chance how do I know and a million other people and 6 billion other people we all agree that oppression is wrong we all agree that cheating and abusing people is something immoral and wrong how do we all know that we know that because this is how Allah programmed us this is how Allah built us this is how Allah created us so Allah سبحانه وتعالى created us all and he gave us that fitrah that innate disposition we all are created with that fitrah to know this is right this is wrong to know that good doing good acts of charity is something good every human being will tell you this and even the ones who do not they know that what they are doing is wrong but they try to justify it in one way or another the problem it's not with Allah the problem is when someone does not use that mercy that Allah equipped him with the problem is when that mercy is taken out of someone's heart so evil it's not a creation evil is the absence of good Allah سبحانه وتعالى created mercy and good but when someone does not use that good when someone does not apply that mercy then they will be doing evil so Allah سبحانه وتعالى did not create evil evil is the absence of good and Allah سبحانه وتعالى programmed us all to have that good and we see that Allah سبحانه وتعالى he is compassionate even with the ones who do not even believe in him even with the ones who do not even believe in him there's a story a hadith about the life of Prophet Ibrahim Prophet Ibrahim he was a he was a believer in God and one of the acts that he was doing to get closer to Allah سبحانه وتعالى was that every day before he eats he would go and stand outside his house and he would invite people to come and eat with him he would invite people to come and eat with him and the hadith says that this is one of the ways that Ibrahim became خليل الله the friend of Allah it's by feeding other people Allah loves to see someone feed do good show rahman show mercy to other people so Ibrahim everyday he used to feed people one day a man came and sometimes Ibrahim because he was living in a time that sometimes he goes and stands on the road and no one comes so he has to wait until someone passes by one day a man came Ibrahim found him and took him by his hand and he came to his house he had the food ready in front of him Ibrahim said بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم that man he did not say anything so Ibrahim told him you're not going to say بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم you're not going to acknowledge God the man said I don't believe in God Ibrahim told him how do you not believe in God and he kept trying to prove to him the man said no I don't want to believe in God Ibrahim at that moment he told him that you're not going to eat with me you're not going to eat with me the man said you invited me to eat with you and now you're telling me not to eat and he left after the man left Ibrahim came down and he tells him Ibrahim Allah says I have been feeding this man his whole life and he does not acknowledge me now one time you had the chance to feed this person and you refuse to feed this person I have been feeding him his whole life every breath everything that he has is from Allah and you refuse to feed him once this is the mercy of Allah so Allah does not want injustice and oppression to anyone to anyone who asks to anyone who asks to anyone who does not know Allah is the one who gives the ones who do not ask him and the ones who do not know him this is Allah in another story another hadith Prophet Noah Prophet Noah he lived with his people for 950 years Allah says in the Quran he lived with his people for 950 years he would call upon people to believe in Allah سبحانه وتعالى they would close their ears and they would cover their eyes so that they do not see Prophet Noah inviting them toward Allah the hadith says that after 300 years after the first 300 years Prophet Noah he raised his hand he said oh Allah bring your punishment upon these people now imagine he was patient for 300 years and then he does a dua Allah tells him and this is a reminder for us because sometimes we are not patient for 3 minutes Prophet Noah was patient for 300 years Allah tells him oh Noah be patient be patient there is a chance maybe we will still guide these people the second time he asked was another 300 years so now he is with his people for 600 years he has been telling them believe in Allah leave these idols worship Allah this is a better lifestyle for you he is telling you Allah is going to give you paradise he is going to give you a blessing of a rain that will grow your crops they continued to close their ears and ignore him so now 600 years he has been calling them finally Prophet Noah he raises his hand and he says oh Allah bring I have been calling them for 600 years here the hadith says here Allah told Prophet Noah oh Noah I want you to go and create and make clay pots go and make pots out of clay so Prophet Noah without questioning why this is the order of Allah he goes and he takes some mud and he makes and then he has to wait for them to dry of course they didn't have the technology that they have right now it's a hard process he sits he waits for them to dry and then he tells Allah oh Allah I'm finished after a few days or a few weeks Allah سبحانه وتعالى tells him oh Noah go and destroy them Noah tells him oh Allah you told me to make these pots now you're telling me to destroy them here Allah told him oh Noah you want me to punish these people I made them I created them I created them you want me to just punish them because you're not happy with them and then he waited another 300 years then after 900 years of being with his people he did a dua Allah accepted his dua and then it took him 50 years 950 years he was with his people this is the mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى so Allah doesn't punish people just very quickly Allah doesn't punish people just because they're not believing in him because you see many people do not believe in God and they're very well they're very healthy there's nothing wrong with them when does Allah punish when does the adab come from the eyes of Allah there are some things that are more severe than other things one of the things that is severe is when you oppress another group of people Allah says in the Quran اهلكناها لما ظلموا these villages. الله speaks about the people of Prophet Luwab قوم عاد قوم ثمود. الله says these villages we brought down the wrath of Allah upon them لما ظلموا once they became oppressors. once it led to oppression و الله سبحانه وتعالى will not allow oppression to go without justice الله سبحانه وتعالى sometimes you see he waits the hadith says Allah waits but he does not let go and he does not forget so punishment sometimes comes upon a group of people عداد comes upon a group of people but it's because they have oppressed themselves it's once they have abused themselves ظهر الفساد في البر والبع بما كسبت ايد الناس فساد the problems and the evil emerged on earth بما كسبت ايد الناس it's what people have done to themselves and this is the human nature today why is there poverty didn't Allah allow food to grow for everyone why is there shortage of water didn't Allah bring water for everyone why are there people being killed didn't Allah give everyone life didn't Allah give everyone the breath didn't Allah give us and show us mercy at a time where no one was there for us there was a time that no one knew about me when I was in the womb of my mother who was sending that nourishment to me who was providing for me at that time wasn't it Allah سبحانه وتعالى Allah gives but you see the human being it's so arrogant it's such a criminal that with one push of a button they will exterminate thousands of people Allah سبحانه وتعالى created this human to live وَلَقَدْ كَرْوَنَّا بَنِيْعَدَمْ but it's the actions of people that bring death and that bring crime and that bring oppression to other people but of course we the humans we only want to take credit and then if something bad happens right away Allah did this it's not us we just know how to blame other people but we only want to take credit when something good happens Allah سبحانه وتعالى punishes a group of people when they have allowed oppression within their selves and within their society now someone might come and say where's the mercy of Allah why does Allah allow oppression to take place why does Allah allow a volume to oppress other people here Allah سبحانه وتعالى has a system Allah has a system and he created us with that system first of all Allah gave us all the intellect Allah gave us the ability to choose in life إما شاكرا وإما كفورا and then if Allah is going to intervene every time there's oppression then how is he going to be able to distinguish from the good and the bad how is he going to reward someone if Allah didn't allow for example someone to oppress another people قابل to oppress Habil how are we going to know how is Allah going to distinguish and judge between the people Allah سبحانه وتعالى sent prophets He sent messengers He gave us the logic and the fitrah He programmed within us for us to know what's wrong and what's right but then Allah is not going to come and interfere every time there's oppression because otherwise then Allah will be forcing us we will be robots do this, do that where's the test where's the karma of the human being one of the ways that Allah سبحانه وتعالى has honored us is by giving us the ability to choose and make decisions in life another another reason why there is suffering sometimes is because Allah سبحانه وتعالى is testing us sometimes Allah is not bringing down the عذاب upon a group of people but he is only testing that group of people and Allah mentions in numerous verses in the Qur'an احسب الناس اي يتركوا اي يقولوا امنا وهم لا يفتنون do people think that they will be left alone they just say I believe in Allah and they will not be tested the day of Ashura we are gathered to remember Imam Hussein the day of Ashura there were two prayers there was one prayer in the camp of Imam Hussein and there was another prayer in the other camp anyone can say I believe anyone can say I'm believing in Allah سبحانه وتعالى but sometimes you have to make decisions in life sometimes we have to make difficult decisions in life and this is the fitnah this is the test that Allah سبحانه وتعالى test us with in another verse Allah says if Allah doesn't test us how are we going to know who is the good person who is a role model who is not a role model everyone will be the same what's the point Allah سبحانه وتعالى he is the gafoor he is the ra'im but Allah is also the adin Allah is also just and this is something that we have to believe in there's a justice system and Allah is the judge and third sometimes I may look at something as suffering but in fact it's not suffering I may look at something Allah is testing me this is a form of suffering for me but in reality in the eyes of Allah this is not suffering in the eyes of Allah Allah سبحانه وتعالى wants to raise you Allah wants you to be at a higher level when you are taking your tests in your university or in your school do you consider that suffering no this is an opportunity for you to grow this is an opportunity for you to get a higher degree and become a better person some people they sign up for a test and they are happy when they are allowed to take the test same with Allah سبحانه وتعالى sometimes when Allah tests us this is a sign that Allah loves us this means that Allah wants us to grow Allah wants me to become a better person Allah does not want to just reward me the simple reward Allah wants me to be to have a higher level in paradise and this is why we see that the NBA the prophets of Allah they were the ones that were tested the most difficult tests don't look at the lives of the prophets Allah mentions them in the Quran Prophet Yusuf he was tested he was separated from his father he was tested Prophet Yaqum Prophet Zakaria he was cut up by the by the saw by his people بني إصرائيل they cut him up Prophet Yahya was beheaded Prophet Musa was tested رسول الله صلى الله عليه و عليه says ما أوذي النبي مثل ما أوذي no prophet has been harassed and abused the way that I have been abused so sometimes الله سبحانه و تعالى test us and that test it's not a form of suffering but it's a form where Allah سبحانه و تعالى wants me to have a higher level in paradise Imam Ali عليه السلام he says in a hadith إن البلا للظالم أدب the bala the suffering for the oppressor it's a form of discipline and then he says و للمؤمن امتحان but for the believer it's a test و للأنبياء درجة and for the prophet it's so Allah elevates them and raises them و للأولياء كرامة and for the أولياء the believers and the مؤمنين it's a form of blessing الله سبحانه و تعالى it's blessing them this is why when we go and we look at the أهل البيت عليهم السلام when we look at the إمامs we see that every time the test was getting more difficult and more difficult they were feeling more spirituality they were getting closer to الله سبحانه و تعالى إمام الحسين on the day of أشورة he was feeling that he had an opportunity to get closer to Allah سبحانه و تعالى as the suffering became more severe he was glowing and he was feeling that he is reaching الله and being able to offer something to Allah that no one else can offer every time one of his children one of his companions would be killed إمام الحسين عليه السلام he would say هوا نما نزل بي أنه بعين الله what has made this مصيبة what has made this suffering easy for me is that الله is the judge الله is watching and when الله is watching الله will reward you so do not give up hope do not give up hope in the mercy of Allah سبحانه و تعالى or in the justice of Allah سبحانه و تعالى ultimately justice will prevail as long as you believe in Allah سبحانه و تعالى and when we look at the adabate when we even look at the children of imam الحسين you don't need to go and look at the adults look at the five year old daughter of imam الحسين look at the young children of imam الحسين go and read the narrations of the maghaten go and read the events that took place on karbala not one time will you see one child of imam الحسين say why is this happening to us why does this happen to us and not anyone else these little children this is the family of رسول الله that Allah سبحانه و تعالى wants to raise them so he test them so he brings them closer to him through the testing say the زيناب عليها السلام عندي ديف عشورات she goes to the body of imam الحسين عليها السلام that body that it was so disfigured that even سكينة the daughter of imam الحسين she could not tell who زيناب was speaking to she couldn't tell there's no head there's no clothes it's filled with wounds say the زيناب عليها السلام she goes to the body and she says one word that remains throughout time and it never dies throughout time she goes she places her hands under the body of أبا عبدالله and she raises that body and she says الله هم تقبل مننا عالي محمد oh Allah except from us the sacrifice of عالم محمد this is the patients this is the أهل البيت عليهم السلام they take say زيناب and the women and the children to the palace of أبا عبدالله زياد over there he has the head of imam الحسين in front of him and he is hitting the head of imam الحسين he tells her كيف رأيتي صنع الله بأخيكي وأهل البيتكي كيف رأيك ما الله has done to your brother الله did this to your brother he tells زيناب الله did this to your brother what does زيناب answer at that time where they are all the men in the family have been killed there is no one with them other than زينا العابدين what does زيناب answer she says ما رأيت إلا جميلة all I saw was beauty ما رأيت إلا جميلة هؤلاء قوم كتب الله عليهم القدن فبرزوا إلى مضاجعهم وسيجمع الله بينك وبينهم فتحاج وتخاصم فانظر لمن الفلج يوم إذن ثكلتك اللهم صل والله حكود وصل مام الحسين علاهاسلام殿 لام الحسين they were tested in the most difficult test Does this mean that الله سبحانه وتعالى was angry with them Does this mean that الله wants to oppress them No الله سبحانه وتعالى wanted to raise them and because of their actions on that day because they passed that test you know you know الله سبحانه وتعالى يجعل إبراهيم المقامل الإمامة ويجعل إبراهيم المقامل إبراهيم المقامل الإمامة now you go and you look at the Bala of إمامة الحسين who actually sacrificed his sons one after the other isn't this بلا أعظم isn't this sacrifice much more difficult than that of إبراهيم عليه السلام now imagine the position that إمامة الحسين has my dear brothers and sisters my time is almost up and on a night like this we remember أم والبنين that wife of أمير المؤمنين after the martyrdom of فادمة الزغراء عليه السلام أمير المؤمنين he married أم والبنين and there's a story we will mention that on the day we remember أب الفضل العباس however that lady the honorable lady أم والبنين she raised she took on the responsibility of raising the children of أم والبنين and she raised them not as step children but she raised them as the imams she raised them showing them love Allah سبحانه وتعالى he gave her also four children he gave her four children but she would always favor the children of فادمة over her own children because these children حسن and حسين زيناد and they are connected to رسول الله صلى الله عليه و آله so أم والبنين would favor them but you know that lady أم والبنين on one day she lost her own children and the one who she saw greater than her own children إمام الحسين عليه السلام when the caravan أفبني هاشم came back to مدينة they came back without the man without إمام الحسين without أب الفضل العباس إمام زين العبدين عليه السلام he asked بشربني حدلم to enter مدينة and more نبع عبد الله بشربني حدلم he entered مدينة and he began to cry يا أهل يثرب لا مقام لكم بها oh people of مدينة مدينة is not a city to live in anymore they told him ما الخبر و what has happened he tells them ما الخبر عند قبر رسول الله I will give you the news next to the grave of رسول الله they go over there and he tells them what has happened then he says I saw a tall lady she came she was carrying a child she came she seemed to be confused she says او ناعي او من who is crying and mourning tell me what has happened حسين he says I asked who is this lady they told me this is أم والبنين the mother of عباس and their brothers of عباس so he said I told her for the loss of your son جعفر she says do not tell me about جعفر tell me about my son حسين he tells her أم والبنين she went to give her condolences to sayyada zaynab عليها السلام she asked to go and see zaynab zaynab was like her daughter she goes she knocks on the door they say أم والبنين is in the door sayyada zaynab she goes and she welcomes her sayyada zaynab she looks at zaynab she says is that you zaynab zaynab was unrecognizable after only 4 months a few months of traveling because of what has happened to them she tells her انتي زيناب اسلام الله أم والبنين عليها السلام she would go to the بقيع and she would stand and she says اسألوك الله ام وندعوك باسمك العظيم الاعظم الاعجر الاجل الاكرب يا الله قلب القلوب ثبت قلوب اللهم اخفر للمؤمنين والمؤمن لاحياء منهم والأموات تابع اللهم بيننا وبينهم بالخيرات انك مجيب الدعوى الخضيئات انك ماح السيئات انك على كل شيء فدير وصلى الله على محمد وان محمد


... in the back, was the little assistant that he was happy with. Furlong's cross, in the six-shot box, Smith in there again, and then a shot from Marnus! ... attacking sense, yeah. That was a good ball across to their post. So, thank you, you've got to touch on it. He made a full buck, so he put Kristi in. He'll be extending their lead. A good opportunity here for Dom Slanky. Great ball from Lerma. You know that he was fouled as he went to take the shot, or he's taken a deflection. Lovely link up. Smith in the shooting position. Down into a deep garner, but released it in time. Now, Billing, down this near side. It should come over to the right-hand side a little bit more. Whips a ball in, and John Zamora snuck in blindsided the defender completely. And for the left edge of the six-shot box, was it even closer to the finish?  The perfect pass. He lands it. I just think it's skidded off the surface rather quick.


Can I now welcome Daphne to talk to us about another no doubt emotive topic, sexual violence in conflict affected and post conflict context. Daphne comes from the Brussels office of MSF and we look forward to your presentation. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you as well for the opportunity to talk here again on this topic.  Standardised or context specific. Let me start with giving you a very brief snapshot on the background.  In particularly in the eastern DRC being a zone of active conflict rape is used as a weapon of war. At the same time in other regions of the country with labelled as being post conflict still high rates of sexual violence have been reported. And this is equally so for Liberia where during 14 years of active conflict unprecedented high levels of sexual violence have been reported.  So in response to this MSF wanted to implement different programs to take care of survivors of sexual violence. One was a vertical program in Liberia supporting three sexual violence clinics. Then in two projects in DRC the same package of care was offered or was integrated at hospital level and decentralised at different health centre levels. So with this offer of the same package of care we questioned ourselves is this adapted to this different contextual settings. So for this we wanted to describe and to document on the characteristics of sexual violence survivors, the patterns of sexual violence and what are the medical consequences and its clinical management. So this study is a retrospective analysis of standardised, of standardly collected data. In Liberia data was collected over a period of two years including 1500 individuals. In DRC data was collected over a period of one year including 671 individuals. Ethics approval was obtained. For all survivors coming to the clinics that standard package of care was offered by specifically trained staff to provide sexual violence care. And this package includes psychological support, medical history taking and examination, wound care, post exposure prophylaxis for HIV when a survivor was presenting within the time frame of 72 hours, STI prophylaxis or treatment, emergency contraceptives, termination of pregnancy, hepatitis B and tetanus vaccination and there was a provision of a medical legal certificate. Next to this MSF invested this as well in extensive awareness and health promotion activities. The main message being if you have been raped come for treatment as soon as possible. It is free of charge. So these awareness activities could take on many different forms from leaflets or billboards, talks and community meetings. And here I want to highlight a different strategy which was implemented in DRC in the MSF. Y maen nhw'n consulau o'r ddechrau. These are women living in the community and they were charged with the task to deliver messages on water sexual violence and the importance of going and look for care and treatment. There were trusted persons within the community so they could not take a role of counselling the women of also taking care within the good time. The limitation of this strategy is the number of people it can reach. So looking into some of the results we can see that over the three programs the majority of survivors seeking care were female. Only one in two percent were male survivors. When looking into the distribution of age I'd like to highlight here in red bars in the Masisi program, the conflict setting that most of them were seen were adult women. While looking into Menrovia and Niangara, the blue and green bars we see that the majority were children and adolescents. The type of sexual violence which was most reported was rape. In Masisi here the bar in the middle and I want to highlight the green and red part is that the number of aggressors was higher in that context. And this was also associated of having more brutal forms of assault in Masisi. There was more association with use of weapons and other associated violence. What we know on the side of the perpetrators is that the most common perpetrator in the post conflict zones were known civilians. While in the conflict zone of Masisi the military was the most important aggressor. We also know that amongst children up to 12 years 17% of them reported that the aggressor was a minor. The blue part in the bars at the left graph show here the proportion of survivors presenting within that critical time frame of 72 hours when prophylactic treatment can still be initiated or is most effective. We see that in Masisi 60% of survivors came to our service within that time frame. For both Menrovia and Niangara this was lower. In relation to referral source I want to highlight here that the community talks in Masisi including the system of the moment we are here managed to link 20% of survivors to into care. The drama the other approach that was used in Niangara helped to link 17% of victims into care. Although the package of care was the same the uptake was sometimes different. So this graph represents the coverage of the initiation of treatments. The blue and red bar here shows the initiation of PEP and the STI prophylaxis which had a good coverage with even close to 100% in both DRC programs. At the same time we see that the uptake or the provision of emergency contraceptives in Menrovia the green bar at the left was very low. Not half of the patients being eligible didn't receive the emergency contraceptives. From the survivors who reported of becoming pregnant as a result of the rape more than half of them requested a termination of their pregnancy. In three out of four of these requests the abortion was performed. However in Masisi we see a very different trend where there is a much lower request for the termination of the pregnancy and no abortions were performed in the study period. This is surely a problem within DRC because all voluntary abortions are criminalized by law also on the grounds of rape. So returning to the initial question we could see that there were some important differences in patient characteristics and in patterns of violence. This makes that we need to be able to adapt our services to what we can expect. So should awareness activities be tailored to reach those we expect to see but also to those that we don't see yet in our programs. We need to focus more on collaboration with partners to refer to. For instance in post conflict settings where we can expect more child survivors we need to be able to refer them to child protection services. Also training of staff can include modules to focus more on the victims we see. For instance counselling of children or examination of children is very different from adults. Then adaptation of the package of care needs to be tailored as well to adolescents needs. As we learned here from the experience in Monrovia an important proportion of adolescents reported that they had consensual sex with someone of their own age. The package of care and the counselling they need is different. At the same time we saw some similarities between the different settings. So there was a low proportion of survivors presenting within the 72 hours. We saw only very few male victims although we know that there are more and there's a low number of follow up visits in general. Limitations of the study is that we don't have specific data on the perpetrator's age. Now we do not know why some of the survivors did not receive the treatment they were eligible for such as the emergency contraceptives in Monrovia. And then there was the component of the psychological support but the database was different and we were not able to cross link this data. This is a facility based study and from an operational perspective we can say that both studies in Monrovia and Iangara were rather than late. They were done towards the end of the program. So in conclusion we can say that this kind of analysis can contribute to that we can see that standardized provision of care that it will leave gaps. But at the same time it also contributes to identify where are the areas that we need to reinforce or that we need to tailor our services differently. From there we also like to recommend that an early and tariff analysis of program data should be done quite early on. After six, nine months or perhaps one year of program it's good to go into that analysis so that it can be tailored according to the context. I'd like to thank first of all the patients, the ministries of health involved, the whole team of investigators of the different studies and for your kind attention. Thank you. Thank you very much. There is time for a few questions before we start the panel. There's a gentleman with a blue top in the middle here and someone at the very back will be next. Thanks. Please remember to say where you are from and your name please. Florian, working for MSF in Brussels. Did you look at whether or not the perpetrator was a stranger or known to the victim before the incident or coming from the family even and was it different between the sites? Thanks. Okay. There are more breakdowns. I couldn't present the whole ad, all of the results we have, the different settings we know if there were known, if there were civilians and then if there were known civilians or unknown civilians. And so this we know for the places that mostly in the post conflict settings that a lot of them were civilians but also an important part were known civilians to the victim, which was different from our CC in the conflict setting. The gentleman at the back please. Hi, Petryam from MSF Sweden. I was wondering, you mentioned that MSF provides a legal medical certificate. Is some form of legal assistance also included in the package of care? As for example in Kibera where MSF actively assists the survivors of rape for pressing charge. Okay. Thank you for that question. Because it's one question a lot like should we even provide the certificates because what is done further. It depends a bit on the setting where we are if we can give more support for pressing charges or legal support. What we found out as well is that it's important to link up with services who can do that as we are quite limited in MSF. However it depends on where we are and for instance from here we learned that in the newest setting we have now in Zimbabwe in the clinic there in Harare that we put more efforts as well to support victims who want to press charge that they have to support their need also at that legal site. Hi, my name is Tuan. I volunteer with MSF OCG and the International Office. Thank you for your presentation. What are your thoughts regarding strategies to really get the treatment, the life-saving treatment, emergency contraception perhaps in time for the survivors? Are community-based approaches such as getting a package of drugs in the community maybe with Maman conseiller so that survivors could access them before they could be linked to our services? Would that be considered? And then what are your thoughts about targeting also perpetrators in terms of treatment from a public health point of view? So if you go into the papers there are some more results that we have there and for instance what we did at MSCC was mapping from where were the decentralised health centres and then to see from where did the survivors come from. And then we saw that it was very important to have the decentralised approach as well where at least a minimum package which is like the PEP initiation and emergency contraceptives can be given and perhaps for psychological support there can still be a referral at hospital level. That this contributes to having a better rate of having this treatment provided within the 72 hours. I don't think that we went as far as discussing on the Maman conseiller if they could for instance initiate this kind but definitely decentralisation has shown that it works, that it really increases that. What we know as well from MSCC is that still the reason why survivors came late is that they didn't know about the availability of treatment or the existence of the different treatments. And from Niangara we know that one of the main reasons was given that fear and fear for stigmatisation as well to come to the services. So we know really some points to work on further what we can do and a lot is to make it to make our services known and accessible and acceptable for the survivors. It's definitely a working point. It's as important as being able to provide the medical treatment but to make it accessible. OK Daphne, and would you care to answer the second more controversial and difficult question I think whether you feel that there should be a service for the people who caused the rape or the violence, other types of violence from the point of view as a public health measure? I don't think I can really give something into that but perhaps it could be an interesting one for later on in the panel discussion. I would be very interested to have more an idea of what the origins would think of that. To be honest I'm not very sure if I can give a reasonable answer to that one. That's probably a good point on which to thank you again for your presentation and invite the panelists to come.


Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE. We are here with Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO, Chief Technology Officer and Head of AI for 5.9. Jonathan, great to see you. Thanks for coming in. Thanks, my pleasure to be here. So you've had a stellar career, certainly technical career going way back, the loose in technologies now here at 5.9, Cisco along the way. You've been a real technical guru. You've seen the movie before. This is happening, every wave of innovation, multiple waves you've been on. Now you're on the next wave, which is cloud AI as CTO 5.9, rapidly growing company. Yes, it is. What attracted you to 5.9? Great question. There's actually a lot of things that brought me to 5.9. I think probably the most important thing is that I've got this belief and I'm very motivated for myself at least to do technology and innovate and create new things and this belief that we're on the cusp of the next generation of technology in the collaboration industry and that next generation is going to be powered by artificial intelligence. And one of the ways I sort of talk about this is that if you look at the entire history of collaboration up till now, meetings, telephony, messaging, it was figuring out a way to get the bits of data from one person to another person fast enough to have a conversation. That's it.  And we didn't actually analyze any of that because we couldn't. We didn't have the technology to do that. But now, with the arrival of artificial intelligence and particular speech recognition and natural language processing, we can apply those technologies to that content and take all this dark data that's been basically thrown away the instant it was received and get to process it and do things. And that is going to completely transform every field of collaboration from meetings to messaging to telephony. And I believe that so strongly that I said, great, that's going to be my next job. I want to work on that and it's going to start in the contact center because the contact center is the ideal place to do that. It's the tip of the spear for AI in collaboration. And it's a real great area to disrupt and create innovation opportunities. So take us through the impact because one of the things I've observed in this industry is you have, you know, I don't want to say mainframe client server to go back to date myself, but there was that wave of client server computing. And mainframe is cool again. We just call it cloud now. Exactly. So you have these structural industry waves. Take us through the waves of how we got here and what's different now and why can't the old guard or the older incumbents survive?  So what do these waves mean? Why is this important? What has to change to be successful in any way? So there's been this whole, like you said, these waves. So the first wave of telecommunications was like hardware, circuit switching, big iron switches sitting in telco data centers, you know? And then that era of transition to software. And that was with the arrival of voice over IP and technologies like SIP. And that made it more less expensive and anyone could do it and it transformed the industry. The next wave, the third wave, we're still like halfway through and in some areas actually just beginning context centers early here, the third wave is cloud, right? Is now we're moving that software to a totally new delivery vehicle that allows us to deliver innovation and speed. And that wave has now enabled us to start the next wave, which is only in its infancy, which is AI, right? And the application of machine learning techniques to automate all kinds of aspects of how people communicate and collaborate. I think cloud is a great example. We've seen AI, which has been a concept around when I was in computer science back in the 80s. There was AI theory and the science of it is not so much change, but computing is available. The data to be analyzed for the first time is available. You mentioned analyzing the bits is now a key part. What does it actually mean to someone who either has a contact center or has a large enterprise says, you know what? I got to modernize. How does AI fit them? What is actually going on? Right, great question. So AI actually can solve lots of different problems. At the end of the day, again, AI is like, it's the biggest buzzword, right? It's in my title, so like I'm a little guilty, right? Definitely got to pay raise for it. But what it comes down to is really this core idea of machine learning, which is really like a fancy new algorithmic technique for taking a bunch of data and sort of making a decision based on it. So, and it turns out as we've learned, if you have enough data and you can have enough computing and we optimize the algorithms, you can do some amazing things, right? And it's been applied to areas like speech recognition and image recognition and all these kind of things, self-driving cars that are all about decision processes. Do I go left? Do I go right? Is this Bob? Is this Alice? Did the user say and or did they say or, right? Those are all decision processes that these tools can automate. What does it mean in the context center? It means everything in the context center. If you look at the context center, it's all about decision processes.  What's the right agent to handle the call right now? When the agent gets the call, what kind of thing should they be saying? What do I do with the call after the call is done? How should the agent use their time? All those things are decision processes and they're key to the context center. So AI and ML are going to transform every aspect of it and most importantly, analyzing what the person is saying, connecting with the customer and allowing the agent to be more fair.  But as machine learning continues to get at sea legs, you're seeing kind of two schools of thought. I call it the Berkeley school, hardcore mathematics, throw math at it and then you've got this other side of machine learning, which is much more learning, you know, it's less math, more about adaptive and self-learning. One's deterministic, one's non-deterministic. You're starting to see these use cases where, yeah, there's a deterministic outcome. Right. Okay, throw machine learning at it. Great, exactly. Boom, help humans can curate, create knowledge, create value. Then you've got a new emerging use case of non-deterministic like machine learning environments where I can be driving my Tesla down the road or my company's running the contact center. I got to understand what's going to happen before it happens. Talk about this. What's your thoughts on this? This is in a really new pioneering area. What's your view on this? Yeah, so I think it actually illustrates sort of a key point. I want to narrow it up from what you said, which is that a lot of these problems still, it's about the combination of man and machine, right? It's that there's things that, you know, are going to be hard for the machine to predict. So the human in their usage of the product teaches the machine and the machine, as it observes, helps the human achieve mastery. And that human part, by the way, is even more important in the contact center than anywhere else.  You're reaching for a human connection. You're calling this, you want to talk. You've got a problem. You need someone to not just give you the answers, but to empathize with you, to understand you, right? And if you go back, John, you think about the best experience you've ever had when you called up for support or got a question answered. It was like, it was someone who understood you, who was friendly, polite, empathetic, funny, and they knew exactly what they were doing, right? And they sold it for you. So the way I think about that is that actually the future of the contact center is a combination of human and machine. And the human delivers the heart and the machine delivers the mastery. Yeah, and I just noticed you're, I'm looking at Twitter right now. You just tweeted this 14 minutes ago, the future of the contact center. That's nice. Combination of human and machine. That's accurate. The human delivers heart and the machine delivers mastery. I think this is so important because unpacking that, words like trust come out. Yes. Truth. Exactly. So you may ask about my experiences. It's when I've gotten what I needed. Knowledge or the outcome I wanted. Plus I felt good about it. I trusted it. I trusted the truth. And you're seeing that in media today, with fake news, you're seeing it with digital has kind of almost created this anonymous, non-trustworthy, it's data. There's been no real human packaging. So I think you're, I'm hearing you, you're on the side of humans and machines. It's not just machines being the silver bullet. Absolutely, absolutely. And again, it goes back to sort of the history of the contact centers. There's been this desire to like just make it cheaper, right? But as the world is changing and as customer experience is more important than ever before. And as now technology is enabling us to allow agents and human beings to be more effective through this symbiotic relationship that we're going to form with each other. Like we can actually deliver amazing customer experiences and that's what really matters. And that idea of trust, I want to come back to that word. That's like super central to this entire thing. You know, you have to, as a user you have to trust the brand. You have to trust the information you're getting from the agent. You have to trust the product that you're calling them and talking about. And that's central to everything that we need to do. In fact, it's a fundamental aspect of our entire business. In fact, if you, again, think about it for a moment here. We're going to customers who are looking to buy a contact center and we're saying trust us. We're going to put it in the cloud. We're going to run it. We're going to operate it for you. And we're going to deliver a great, highly reliable experience. That takes trust too. So one of the things that, back to your early, early question, why did it come to 5.9? One of the things it has done is build this amazing trust with its customers. It's huge, amazing reliability, uptime, a great human process of how we go and work with our customers. It's about building trust at every single level. So I want to put you in the spot here because I know you've seen many ways of innovation. You've seen a lot of different times, but now it's more accelerated. You got cloud computing, you got AI. Much more accelerated innovation cycle. So as users expect to interact with a certain kind of environment, Rowan talked about this in his interview, the CEO, Rowan Troll. So users want to be served on the channels that they want to be served in. So having a system that they have to go to to get support, they want it where they are. So how does the future of the customer interaction, whether it's support or engagement is going to take place in context to non-linear discovery progression? Meaning, are they going to service themselves in the organic digital space? I honestly want to go to a site per se. How do you see the future evolving around this notion of organic discovery, talking to their friends, finding things out? Does that impact how 5.9 sees the future? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it gets back to sort of an old idea of Omni-Channel. I mean, this is something that the contact center people have been talking about for like, forever, like the last 10 years, right? And its original meeting was just this idea of, oh, you know, you can talk to us via chat or you can send us an email or you can send us a text or you could call us, right? And we'll work with you on any of those. But like you said, actually what's more interesting is as customers and users move between those things and it actually switches from reactive to proactive, right? Where we actually treat those channels as well, depending on what the situation is, we're going to gather information from all these different data sources and then we're going to find the right way to reach out to you and allow you to reach out to us in the most efficient way possible. So you see a real change in user expectation experience with real contact. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the one thing that technology has delivered is a change in user expectations on how things work. And if you look at the way we as human beings communicate with each other, it's dramatically different today than it was really just a few years ago, right? So John, let's look under the hood now in terms of the customer environment because certainly I've seen legacy after legacy systems being deployed, it's almost like cybersecurity kind of matches the same kind of trend that in your world which is throw money at something and then build it out. So there's a lot of sprawl of solutions out there trying to solve these problems. How does the customer deal with that? And they're going forward, they're on this new wave, they want to be modernized, but they've got legacy, they've got legacy process, legacy culture. What's the key technical architecture? How do you see them deploying this? What's the steps that they should take in your opinion? It will surprise you not one drop when I say it's go to the cloud, right? And there are real reasons for it. And by the way, this is going to be, I'm going to be talking about this at Enterprise Connect. So tune in Enterprise Connect, I'm going to be talking about this. There's a ton of reasons, five huge ones actually, about why people need to get to the cloud. And one of them is actually one of the ones we've been talking about here, which is a lot of this modernization is rooted in artificial intelligence. And it turns out you just cannot do artificial intelligence on premise, you cannot. So the traditional gear, which used to be installed and operated by legacy vendors like Avaya, they go in and Genesis, they go in, they install a thing and it works just for one customer at a time. The only way artificial intelligence works is when it gathers data across multiple customers. So multi-tenancy and artificial intelligence go hand in hand. And so if you want to take any benefit from the stuff that we've been talking about in this conversation, the first step is you've got to take your context under the cloud just to begin building and adding your data to the set and then leverage the AI technologies as they come out. So data is the central equation in all this because good data feeds good machine learning, good machine learning feeds great AI. So data is the heart of this. So data making data in the cloud addressable seems to be a key thought. Your reaction and what are you guys doing with respect to that? Absolutely, absolutely. And this is by the way another reason why I joined 5.9 that I've been speculating in here. I said, all right, if AI, if the future is about AI, as I said that's what I want to do in collaboration, you need data to do that. You actually have to work for a company that has a lot of data. So market leadership matters. And if you go look at the contact center and you go look at all the industry and analysts reports, it made it pretty obvious like who to go to. There was like the leader in cloud contact center with tons of agents and tons of data is 5.9. And so that's why I'm here. So building the data, aggregating data, that's one of the first things I'm working on here is how do we increase and utilize the data that we've been gathering for years. And we've had this conversation with many customers before about silos. Silo's kill innovation when it comes to data, addressability, your thoughts on that and what customers can do to start thinking about breaking down those silos. Yeah, exactly. So in fact, silos have been a big part of the history of like especially on premise systems. Yeah, in fact, often you had one silo for inbound contact center, a different one for outbound. Different departments, by the way, also had their own different contact centers. And then you had other tools that have other data. You'd have like a separate tool over there for CRM and a different tool over there for WFO and WFM and something else for QM. And all these things were like barely integrated together. In the cloud, that becomes much more natural to bring these technologies together and the data can begin to flow from these systems in and out of each other. And that means that we have a much greater access to data and correlated data across these different things that allows us to automate all over the place. So it's this positive reinforcement cycle that you only get when you've gone to the cloud. So the question I want to ask you is more customer. So I'm pretending I'm a customer for a second. I want to ask you, Jonathan, what's the core innovation for me to think about and bring to my organization if I want to go down the modernization? How do you answer that question? What is the core innovation strategy that I should have? Obviously moving to the cloud is one. But beyond that, is it just cloud then, what else? What do I need to be preaching internally and organizing my culture around? Yeah, great question. So I mean, I think the cloud is sort of the enabler of many of these different pieces of innovation, right? So velocity and speed is one of them. Again, setting up and adjusting these things used to be super, super hard. You wanted to add agent seats. Oh my gosh, you don't have to go buy new hardware and rack and stack boxes and whatever. So even simple things like reactiveness, right? That's something that's important to talk about is that many of our customers in our businesses are highly seasonal, right? We've seen like someone showed me a graph. This was like, oh my gosh. Like it was a company that was doing a telethon. And they said, here's how many agents they have over this year. It was like two agents.  Like two days, exactly, it dropped back down. And I'm like, if you think about a business like that, you could never even do that. So cloud is nice, but the way you talk about it, and as an IT buyer of these technologies, you talk to your business owners about reactiveness, speed, velocity, right? That's what matters to a business. And then customer experience. You know, one of the things, just to kind of end the segment, I want to get your thoughts on, I'm going to bring kind of an industry trend that's I think might be a way to kind of talk about some of these core problems on data. Most mainstream people look at Facebook and saying, wow, what a debacle. They use my data, they're using it against me. I'm not in control of my data. You're seeing that weaponization, people are saying Alexis were rigged. So weaponizing data for bad means there's content and there's context and infrastructure cloud. But there's also the other side, which is you actually make it for good. So you start in thinking about this, people starting to realize, wow, I should be thinking about my data and the infrastructure that I have. It's create a better outcome. That's right. Your thoughts on that as people start to think about AI in terms of the business context. How do they get to that moment where they can say, I don't want anyone weaponizing data against me. I want to use it for good. How do they actually think about it? It comes back to trust, by the way, right? Is that, you know, and to some degree that's an uphill battle due to some of these debacles that you just talked about. But contact center is a different beast of the whole thing. And interestingly, it's an area where there's already been an assumption by users that when they interact with the contact center, that data is sort of used to improve the experience. I mean, every contact center, first thing you say, by the way, this call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes. They opt in. Right, it's already opt in. There's an assumption that that's exactly how that is being used. So it's, and this is another reason, by the way, what's a contact center? Is it was this tip of the spear because it was a place where there was already permission, where the data is exactly the kind of stuff that had already been subject to analysis and a customer expectation that that's actually what was happening. The expectation was there. The ability to action that data, what was missing? So now we're filling in the ability to action on all that data with artificial intelligence. And final question, what's your vision going forward? A CTO and AI, what's the vision of 5.9? What do you see the 20 mile stare for 5.9 within context of the industry we just talked about? Yeah, yeah. So it's about revolution, I'll be honest, right? And I tell people like, I'm not like an incremental steady Eddie CTO. Like I do things because I want to make big changes. And I believe that the contact center is on the cusp of a massive change. And my boss Rowan said this, and this has been actually central to how I'm thinking about this. The contact center in the next five years will be totally different than the 25 years before that. As a technologist, I say, wow, five years. Like that's not very long in terms of software development. That tells me we're going to pretty much rewrite our entire stack over the next five years and show what should that start to look like? So for me, it's about how do we completely reimagine every single aspect of the contact center to revolutionize the experience by merging together human and machine and totally new ones. And the innovation strategy is cloud and AI. Cloud and AI. And data, great. Jonathan, great to have you on. My pleasure. Great conversation, quick plug for you guys. You're going to be at Enterprise Connect, theCUBE will be there covering the event as well. What are you going to talk about there? What are some of the interactions? What will be the hallway conversations? What's your objective? What's your focus there? Exactly, so I'm going to be having my own session where I'm going to be talking about the five reasons that you may not think about to go to a contact center in the cloud. I've hinted already at just one of them. Well, that's how you count it. AI is clearly central. And I'm going to sort of talk about the other four. Great, great conversation. Lot of change, massive change happening. Great innovation strategy. Great mission here at 5.9. Great mission around changing and reimagining more changes in the next five years in the past 25 years. Again, cloud computing and AI is doing it. There'll be winners, there'll be losers. We'll be following it here on theCUBE. Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO and head of AI at 5.9. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


Just waiting till everybody has found a seat. Very good. Welcome, everybody. Welcome here in the room and on the live stream. Welcome to this press conference at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum 2016 here in Davos. We're particularly pleased and honored to be joined by Mr. Ranil Vikramasinghe, the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka today for this press conference. And without further ado, Mr. Prime Minister, please. Thank you for inviting me, both to Davos and to meet the press. The first time we've been invited. It's also for Sri Lanka a unique occasion when we have formed a government of the two main parties. This has never happened in any part of South Asia or Southeast Asia. And we have started off on a great experiment. Firstly, of reconciliation or bringing the country together where people had grown apart as a result of a long drawn out war of nearly 30 years. One of establishing a constitutional, re-establishing a constitutional democracy and also having a framework of agreement on the major economic and social problems that the day that we do a part company after the next elections or thereafter, there will still be a national policy in place and whoever governs will not change it. So these are the challenges that we are facing as you have already been, those of you are following Sri Lanka, where are the progress we've made of the resolution, the unanimous resolution that has been passed in Geneva, the opening up of the economy. But I don't like to take too much of the time describing what we have done, but leave it open to you to ask for any questions or any clarifications which you require. Thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister. So we have microphones. If I can see a show of hands for any questions and if you could then state your name and organization for the sake of our online audience, please. Yes, the lady in the front here, please. So Jathara with Reuters. Mr. Prime Minister, I wanted to ask you about the possibility of an IMF loan deal or a standby agreement, whatever you had in mind with the IMF. When do you expect to sign this? What kind of agreement are you looking for? What kind of amount? We are having discussions with the IMF. We have not concluded discussions. I'm even meeting with the managing director of the IMF while here in Davos. But we've also been discussing with many of the others. One is the Sri Lankan economy needs has to be restructured. Our sources of foreign exchange journey are limited. As a result, the imbalance in the balance of payment cannot be corrected without any major restructuring. There has been certainly a drop in the revenue collection of this country. The mechanism is not working. We are also being buffeted by what's happening internationally. Certainly the global economy has not recovered fast enough and then it's compounded by the fact that China has decided now to become a consumption oriented economy and it's going through adjustments as their currency becomes one of the SDR currencies in the IMF but that's having an impact on the world. Price of oil coming down, that is advantages but there are also certain problems we have. We did have the Sri Lanka economic forum where we discussed fully some of the issues of Sri Lanka. We've been discussing the private sector. Once I talk with the IMF, we'll look at a contingency plans for the future. We are not, no one is sure in this world how it eventually turn out in 2016. Secondly, we want to be strong enough to face any contingency and to carry out our restructuring and everyone has found out in the last few months they've all had to devise their budgets and devise their targets for the uncertain global situation. So it's not surprising that we're having discussions and if need be, we'll come to an appropriate arrangement with the IMF. Thank you very much. We have a question, the gentleman in the back. Can we get the microphone to the side of the room please? David Williams from Agence France-France. I just want to ask if in your plans for reconciliation in the country, if you have any further plans to reach out to the Tamils and in particular if there are any plans or is there any possibility for a release of Tamil political prisoners? Well, we have reached out with the Tamils. We are discussing with the Tamil parties and other organizations. The Minister, under the Minister of Foreign Affairs, there's one group that is working on the questions of accountability. We are having discussions with the Tamil parties on the new constitution, on the election system which affects all the parties on further devolution in the country. As far as the, then we have also handed back some more land from the military back to the people. There are more land that will be handed back in the coming few months or we'll identify the time or we'll lay down the time frame for the handing of those lands. Tamils are being recruited into the police force. We started by asking for 500. Tamils to be recruited. Gradually things are getting back onto track. We have no political prisoners any more in the country in the, among the signallies or Tamils. There are 290 of whom some of them are already convicted while there are trials in case of others. This is the residue after a large number of them were released. As it is, they are now still looking at some of these cases to see what relief could be given. And the Minister for Prison Reform, Mr. Swaminathan is holding discussions on the issue with the Minister of Justice and the representatives of the Tamil National Alliance. Thank you. There's another question, please. Hi, I'm with China-Shinhua News Agency. So as a developing country, do you think what opportunities or challenges does Sri Lanka faces when engaging into the first industrial revolution? And concerning China's role, do you think, how do you evaluate China's role in the regional development or the security situation? Thank you. Well, China is one of the largest economic powers in the world, and therefore China is reaching out to the rest of the world. As a result, they're also operating here in our part of the world, in the Indian Ocean. Within Sri Lanka, there's a large number of projects, infrastructure development, which have been funded by the Chinese government. So we are going ahead with many of those projects, including the Port City, the further development of the Hambantu Rahab, but we've also said we'd like to see Chinese investments. Infrastructure development alone is not sufficient. Now we are discussing of bringing in Chinese investments in here, as I think the Chinese government has also decided that some of its manufacturing industry should move out. And Sri Lanka seems to be one of the locations for their industries to move out. We are looking at the Chinese participation in the Logistics Hub of Sri Lanka, as well as further investments in the real estate sector. So I don't... Yes, we have one more question there. It's slightly moving to a different topic. I'm just wondering if... I think for many people, at least in the Commonwealth region, the Sri Lankan cricket team is probably one of the highest profile parts of the country. I just wondering if you have any comment or feelings about the allegations of corruption and match-pixing, which at the moment are swirling around the Sri Lankan cricket team. Bit of an off-topic question, but... All allegations have to be investigated. In fairness to the players and in fairness to the Sri Lankan team and to Sri Lanka. We have not... I have two questions, sir. You mentioned the need to restructure the economy. So what is your priority? What is the main thing that you want to tackle first? The second question is that this year's budget has a deficit of 5.9%, I think, of GDP. So how do you propose to fill that? Will you come to bond markets again? Or do you think you might get financing from China? As we said, since the budget, the whole global situation has changed. I don't think any country in the world can forecast what the budget deficit should be. This is why we are talking with the IMF on what's the program that we should have. And fiscal consolidation, value for money would be one of the important parts of the budget. The depreciation of the Asian currencies started with the adjustment of the Chinese currencies means that we will have to re-look at our figures as we go, not only Sri Lanka, but all countries are getting affected by what's happening there. So it's very, very uncertain here where we have to raise money on the bond markets. We'll do that. But gradually, we'd like to see more and more private investments coming in over a period of time. Thank you. That allows us to squeeze in a question that reached us through social media. So the climate negotiations and the climate agreement COP21 in Paris was widely hailed as a success. And people were asking us through Facebook about your perspective for the agreement. Would you agree that it's been a success? It depends on how many people sign it up, how many countries, until the numbers are their requisite numbers. So I think our strategy is to ensure that everyone signs up. Then it really becomes a success. But it's a great achievement. What I've done in Paris is a great achievement. We've got to ensure sufficient number of countries sign up to meet the criteria put down in the agreement. Sri Lanka is all be establishing a Sustainable Development Council, which has oversight of all sustainable development legislation in action. We are fully committed to it. And we will do our role as far as sustainable development is concerned and climate change. But we would have to see how they react and how many countries signed the agreement. We are hopeful that the quota would be reached. But this is a great achievement. And let's hope we can top it off by getting the requisite numbers. Thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister. If there are no further questions at the moment, we will close the press conference. Thank you very much, Mr. Prime Minister, for joining us and for sharing your insights. And thank you all for watching and being here. Thank you. Thank you for being with me.