Full name William Faizi McCants Name Will McCants | Alma mater Princeton University Doctoral advisor Michael Cook | |
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William McCants on ISIS and the future of the caliphate
Will McCants (born 1975), also known as William Faizi McCants, is a scholar of militant Islamism. He is a fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. An adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, he is a former senior advisor on violent extremism to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Founder and co-editor of the website Jihadica, he is also a former research analyst for CNA, a non-profit organization that encompasses the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research.
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Career
Described by William Maclean, the security correspondent for Reuters, as "a leading scholar of militant Islamism", McCants was one of a number of experts to be singled out for criticism in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 Norway attacks. His message on Twitter saying Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or the Helpers of the Global Jihad, had posted a claim of responsibility for the attacks was given prominence in The New York Times, though he expressed skepticism about the authenticity of the claim and The Times noted it could not be confirmed.
In an article published by Brookings, McCants explained the strong Salafist representation in the Egyptian government.
McCants is author of a 2011 book titled Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam, based on his doctoral research at Princeton University.
In an August 2016 New York Times article, McCants described Saudis as “both the arsonists and the firefighters” regarding Islamic extremism.
McCants is co-editor of Jihadica.com, which The Economist described as "a respected website".
Criticism
Following the revelation by Norwegian police that the prime suspect was a Norwegian man holding anti-Muslim views, McCants was heavily criticized by other bloggers. In a piece for Electronicintifada.net entitled "How a clueless 'terrorism expert' set media suspicion on Muslims", Benjamin Doherty described how McCants' tweets were presented in The New York Times and then spread by the BBC, and other mainstream news outlets. There has been criticism by some academics of Doherty's article for unfairly blaming McCants for the media's mistakes.