Tag: Terrorism

There have been many articles on this website discussing the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of declaring "offensive jihad" in modern times. Daniel is compiling a list of scholars who have argued that today, the only legitimate reasons for a Muslim state to declare war is for defensive or humanitarian reasons. Though our accomplished scholars declare this to be the case today, iFaqeer pointed out that declaring jihad as the province solely of the Muslim state is not a new concept. Willow once wrote about how the beauty of the Quran is dishonestly inverted, and fed to young men whose youthful arrogance makes them impudently and imprudently go forth and wreak havoc, man's law be damned. There are many other great articles here on the topic. Search for them.

I wanted to expand on Willow's piece again, in light of this NYTimes article which takes a closer look at some of these footsoldiers of jihad. The rising suicide bombings in Iraq, fueled by the bodies and lives of these young men, is not the offensive jihad of a state. Neither is it an organized effort for defense of a nation under attack. Rather, this jihad or "struggle," is one of youthful hubris, thwarted ambitions, festering dreams, and good old-fashioned peer pressure.

One of these would be foot soldiers, from a poor family of 17 children became sullen, withdrawn, and more "religious" after failing to get a scholarship to study medicine in England. Another went to fight because he was promised a job. What would have happened if these young men did get the education or the jobs they were after? Would their lives have been different? Maybe. If their brothers and friends, rather than pressuring their comrades to follow their lead by fighting and dying, had instead peer-pressured them into loving and living life, would their decisions have been different? Maybe.

The causes that lead these men to become fodder for an unholy canon are many.  Do I think that young men should strap a bomb to themselves, if they dont get into medical school, or if their brother or friends are killed? No, I dont promote such nihilism under any circumstances. Nor do I think education is the pill to solve all that ails these young men. After all, Ayman Al-Zawahiri is a physician. I am also hesitant to become an arm-chair critic and exhort these young men to love life rather than death, when all they see, hear, and perceive is annihilation around them. But disagreement with their choices does not mean that I cannot lament the loss of potential in their lives, and those they take with them in their attempt to attain glory and God. It is such a terrible, unnecessary waste.

I think I know the answer to Langston Hughes' question - what happens to a dream deffered? For young minds steeped in ever-present destruction, eager for a paradise that is just seconds away from being theirs - that deferred dream can quite literally explode.

One of the central aspects of Sunni Islam is that it has no center. There is no central figure or hierarchical authority that speaks for us, which leads to diverging discussions and interpretations of nearly every aspect of what governs our earthly affairs. What provides structure in this "marketplace of ideas" is a loose consensus that forms around certain key aspects, a consensus that shifts from time to time and place to place. The flexibility provided by this model of authority is desirable. It means a wide range of opinions and ideas can come under the umbrella of Islam, and inclusion is more desirable than exclusion. At the same time, the loose nature of this model of authority makes it difficult for non-Muslims interacting with Muslims to know who speaks for us. There seem to be as many claims to authority as there are voices in the wind.

In the midst of this "crisis of authority," how is the US government to know who to interact with in order to devise a more effective foreign policy dealing with the Muslim world? Certainly the events in Iraq have amply demonstrated that change cannot come at the barrel of a gun - the fact that one of its own retired 4-star generals said that the US government "doesnt know where the hell they're going" with Iraq speaks volumes about the failure of the current policy. In fact, there's evidence that hardline conservative and neo-con positions may be softening in the face of this failure, and calling for a "case by case approach" with each country when engaging in dialogue with them. Softening hardline positions is an encouraging sign that perhaps this administration (or more likely, the next) will make diplomacy rather than confrontation its default policy. It might be a lesson we could learn well from the British.

But for diplomacy to occur, the US needs a better understanding of the complexity of the way Islam manifests itself within Muslim cultures. At the very least, it should know the difference between Shia and Sunni, and the significance (or lack thereof) of these differences. There is evidence that quite a few lawmakers and counterterrorism officials do not have a clue about this most basic of divisions. To fill this gap of understanding, and to have a better counterterrorism strategy, US News and World Report suggests the following:

So, what, if anything, can the United States do, even if it is simply to do no harm? Some have called for a radically different kind of organization dedicated to dealing with the war within Islam, an organization that is sensitive, above all, to the power of culture and religion. "Just as we created the OSS to deal with the challenge of the Axis powers in World War II, so we now need an organization to come to terms with this new, religiously grounded ideological struggle," says Ross Newland, a former CIA station chief. This outfit-call it, tentatively, the Organization of Islamic Affairs-would not be a government agency, though it would receive funding from the government. An independent think tank and advocacy group, it would employ a range of specialists, including foreign nationals, to give direction and coherence to government programs. Above all, its specialists would know how to listen to what is going on in the Muslim world. As things are now, says Williams College political scientist Marc Lynch, "we don't listen to the terms in which Muslims are carrying on their debates. Or we listen through American filters."

This proposal has a chance of working out well if the group is made up of the right people. Involving foreign nationals in its make up would be key to making sure the group does not "listen through American filters."  Ali earlier wrote a great post for Huffington Post that sheds some light on who which types of people these foreign nationals could be drawn from: "opposition groups and human rights dissenters in the Muslim world who can advance an alternative vision of religion" - a vision that is at once peaceful, tolerant, and true to its religious core. That this vision will necessarily be a religious one is something that Washington will have to accept.

Muslims do like a good moan. Most often their target is the 'mainstream' media.

Both rarely do themselves any favours, it has to be said. Journalists know the Big Bad Muslim angle is good copy and will do anything to get it; even flying all the way to Beirut to speak to Omar Bakri Mohammed who preaches Armchair Terrorism whilst sipping strawberry juice. And certain Muslims like playing to their own gallery, indulge in victimhood and double-standards of their own, and enjoy the media spotlight despite their claims to be self-professed anti-modernists.

However, towards the end of 2006 and in early 2007, there was a story that I believe justified the scepticism that Muslims have towards the media.

The story involved the arrest of an ex-BNP member in Halifax, with what was described in the local press as 'the biggest haul' of chemicals of its kind ever found in Britain. That story did not make the mainstream news outlets, and it was left to bloggers and left-wing media outlets to try and get the story an airing. The BBC pathetically told one blogger they were too busy.

Now the trial has started, we learn that one of the men arrested, Robert Cottage, wanted to shoot the Prime Minister. But this isn't 'terrorism'. The word does not appear in the media coverage of this story (and he was not tried under any anti-terror legislation, but I concede that is a legal argument).

Let me be quite clear. My point has nothing to do with the actual case. This man, Robert Cottage, is innocent of all charges until he is found guilt in a court of law (I've put that in bold so it is clear for people who suffer from PostCommentsBeforeReadingSitis), regardless of his supposed political views, which he is perfectly free to profess and extol.

(Irony: how adherence to political correctness actually ensures an ex-BNP member can say is innocent.)

My point is to do with the blatent double-standards at work here. Even a Conservative blogger (who can't be accused of pandering to Muslim sensibilities) noted:

Maybe I have missed the [Robert Cottage] story, but I have not seen this covered in any of our national newspapers or national broadcast media. Why? If these kind of things had been discovered in the home of a British Muslim I suspect the media would be playing a rather different tune. Think of the front page headlines recently when similar discoveries were made elsewhere in the country.

The national media need to be very careful on these issues. I can't understand the news judgement which says it's not a story when explosives are found in a BNP member's house, yet when the same thing happens in the Muslim community it is on the front page.

I wonder when Comrade Reid will show up in Lancashire to preach British values?

His services are also required in Bath it seems.

Promoted to the front page 

After 9/11, there has been a shift in the cultural representations of Muslims towards more direct political themes and about the use of terrorist violence. In particular, there has been the emergence of a shared political rhetoric, particularly between Washington and London, that is central to “war on terror”. Rhetoric, which is part and parcel of political speech making, is vulnerable still to the ancient criticism of Plato that it is too concerned with the means of persuasion rather than the framing of good argument itself. One species of rhetoric identified by Aristotle commonly features an unstated premiss, the enthymeme, the veracity of which is a probable rather than an established truth. A comparison with actual policy would show that rhetoric can have a contested relationship with reality.

This essay offers an analysis of this rhetoric to see what it seeks to persuade Muslims to do, what its unspoken premises are and which categories it uses to mobilise Muslim sentiment. Five years on after 9/11 and with the descent of Iraq into bloody civil war, it is essential that Muslims develop a critical distance from this rhetoric, not only because it can be internalised and have negative consequences for Muslims and how they evaluate themselves and their faith, but also because the rhetoric does much to justify an aggressive militarism that feeds the very terrorism it purports to be ending.

The Crude Form of War on Terror Rhetoric

There is a crude form of rhetoric in the “war on terror”, which is summarized as “Islam verses the West” or “the clash of civilizations”, which, because it serves generally to antagonise Muslims, is not commonly used. In fact the evidence is that, if used, it is quickly modified or retracted. In the crude form, “war on terror” rhetoric is tied explicitly to the dictates of nationalism and anti-terrorism. The most famous example is George W. Bush’s “You are either with us or you are with the terrorists”, of which we can find a rare British echo in a comment from Dennis MacShane in 2003, then the British Minister for Europe: “It is time for the elected and community leaders of British Muslims to make a choice: it is the British way – based on political dialogue and non-violent protests – or it is the way of the terrorists against which the whole democratic world is now uniting.” The reason why this crude form is not normally employed is that it does nothing to mobilise Muslim sentiment in favour of the “war on terror”. Another good example was Bush’s use of the word “crusade” to describe the war on terror a few days after 9/11, which was quickly retracted. It could also be suggested that this crude form does not necessarily represent the most prevalent view among American and British political elites either.

The crude form has some historic pedigree. With the falling of the Berlin Wall, a new Muslim enemy comes to be constructed by right wing academics, policymakers and politicians associated with the neo-conservative wing of the Republican party. The story is too well-known to be rehashed here at any great length. But, briefly, the two key figures who give the idea proper substance are Bernard Lewis, the British-American Middle East studies specialist, who in a 1990 article introduces the term “the clash of civilizations” which is subsequently popularised by the political scientist, Samuel Huntingdon, in which ideological clashes in global politics are replaced by civilizational ones. The chief antagonists for the West are now Islam with its “bloody borders” and Confucian China.

It is not Christianity as such that is opposed to Islam, for the “clash of civilsation” argument has its roots in a secularised form of American Protestantism. At the end of the Cold War, conflict would no longer be an ideological clash between communism and liberal capitalist democracy but based on civilisational conflict. It compares an idealised West – based on democracy, human rights, free enterprise and globalisation, with its opposite portrayed as “unsympathetic, adversarial and incapable of betterment”. [1] It is a correction of the post-war modernisation thesis that said that religion would simply fade away. Instead after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, there was a revision so that religion could still play a part in political conflict, and this was seen in a negative and combative way. These are different civilisations and they are destined to clash on the basis of value-difference. The crude version relies on persistently asking the question, can Islam meet the test of civilisation, for although it is a civilisation, it is an inferior one. It allows for purveyors on the “clash” thesis to be blind to the many occasions when they fall short of their own civilisational standards. Muslims are judged by the most extreme adherents of their faith, whereas Christian extremists are exceptional.

Huntingdon’s thesis is largely discredited, and is not taken seriously by many neoconservatives, including, for example, Daniel Pipes, who criticized it in a recent debate in London with Mayor Ken Livingstone. The Muslim World and Europe have had a deeply enmeshed interraction, which certainly cannot be defined as characterised largely or solely by conflict. Fourteen of today’s 34 European countries were at one time wholly or partly ruled by Muslims for a century or more, and similarly all Muslim societies except for three have experienced direct European rule in the last 200 years. Yet this deep interaction is written out of European history and self-definition. Instead it is written only as a relationship of rivalry and conflict, but with no proper assessment of long periods of peaceable co-existence or of profound cultural interchange. In particular there is the huge legacy of late medieval and philosophical Muslim thought later drawn on by European Jews and Christians to create the modern West. Richard Bulliet has even coined a new term, “Islamo-Christian civilization” to denote “a prolonged and faithful intertwining of sibling societies enjoying sovereignty in neighbouring geographical regions and following parallel historical trajectories. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian historical path can be fully understood without relation to the other.” [2]

If we take these Muslim and Christian societies to denote one civilisation then conflicts between them take on an internecine character. After periods of conflict, then the realisation of a common heritage would make eventual reconciliation easier and would allow prevent the conception of conflict as the result of a “clash”. The terrible treatment of Jews in Europe did not prevent after the Holocaust the development of an idea of Judeo-Christian civilisation, emphasising what was held in common. There is no reason why commonalities between the Muslim world and the West should not be similarly achieved, despite the current round of conflict.

Promoted to the frontpage by Ali Eteraz 

Yesterday, MSNBC broke the story of the arrest of Derrick Shareef, a 22 year old Muslim convert who allegedly plotted to blow up a Rockford, IL mall.  After a few hours, the story faded away from the headlines.  The media realized there wasn't too much too Shareef's "plot."

The story shouldn't end there.  The affidavit filed by the lead FBI agent on the case is a revealing document, because of both its content and its omissions.  I have analyzed it extensively here at my blog, The Polemicist.

The case is not simply disturbing in the sense of Shareef's  hatred and possible lunacy.  Beyond that, the role of a government informant in shaping, and in fact, very much creating this "plot" is shocking.  This "plot" would not have existed without the government informant.  It was he who provided the strategic objective, timing, target, victims, and means of attack.  He seems to have worked diligently to foster up anger within the accused and channel it toward violent activity.  The informant is not a source of information; no, he is the story.

There are strong indications that this is just one example of a broader trend of the FBI entrapping alleged Muslim terrorists.  Many, most, or all of the cases lack substance.  

So let the dialogue begin.  Don't be afraid.  This is your government.  This is our government.  Why is it doing this?

Outsiders will tend to see this simply as an example of a war against Islam.  I disagree.  I think their are behavioral reasons for why the FBI acts this way. 

Perhaps this is part of its instinctual behavior with minority groups.  The FBI's behavior with the African American community has been less than stellar. 

Additionally, there could be pressure on the FBI from the White House and Congress to perform, to demonstrate its results on a regular basis (e.g. 'This year, we busted 10 terror plots.')  And that pressure can be from within the FBI as well and ultimately placed on agents.  Something also to consider is the role of paid informants.  To what extent do they produce these plots in order to advance themselves, in terms of their relationship with the FBI and, of course, financially?  To what extent are they overly trusted by FBI agents, and others within the federal government?

Finally, there could also be a misguided sense of suspicion of the Muslim populace; a belief that something dangerous lurks in its silence and/or daily, mundane normality; that these cats aren't simply doing their 9-5 and trying to make a living (or doing their 8-6, making a whole lot of $$). What contributes to this perception?  Seeing the Muslim as "the Other." An inability to see Muslims as regular Americans, regular human beings.  A perception that "any one of them" could be up to something.  Knowledge of actually crazy and/or extreme Muslims.  Bias toward and/or hatred of Muslims.  And, of course, the memory of 9/11.

Government Man thinks that there has to be something insidious going on.  It is somewhat latent, and must be forced to the surface and wiped out, before it can act on its own.  And others must be made an example of.  Demonstration of governmental vigilance discourages other potential terrorists.  

Anyway, I hope to hear your thoughts on this case and its broader implications.

[Editorial note: some thoughts from the Right and some followup on whether this was entrapment, which has a good roundup of articles that have argued this might be entrapment]. 

I sit here, my hands still shaking, my jaw and teeth hurt from clenching my teeth so hard.  At the pit of my stomach a knot and a nauseau that I don’t know if I’ll be able to control.

1 mile from my children’s Islamic School a local Rockford Il. Muslim had plotted to blow up the Cherry Vale Mall, the bombing was foiled by the FBI. 

I have spoken with the local Imam and was informed that this was a 22 year old male from the Rockford area, one that no one seems to have heard of.  Maybe the news is too fresh, maybe we are all in shock.

No links to articles, you will have to do the research for yourselves, I am currently working with the Imam to organize a demonstration against what could have been a horrific act of violence.  I can't sit here and do nothing - this shit has got to stop and we have to be loud about this not being acceptable.

I will update if I can.  You can also watch http://www.samaha.wordpress.com for further updates.

Step by step, the thugs and brutes, who have emptied jihad of its moral doctrines, and who call themselves 'defenders of Islam', are exposed for the brutal, vicious, evil murderers they are:

The gunmen came at night to drag Mohammed Halim away from his home, in front of his crying children and his wife begging for mercy.

The 46-year-old schoolteacher tried to reassure his family that he would return safely. But his life was over, he was part-disembowelled and then torn apart with his arms and legs tied to motorbikes, the remains put on display as a warning to others against defying Taliban orders to stop educating girls.

I do not have time to do this topic justice, but in short, I adamantly disagree with the argument of Brother Haroon, one of my favorite bloggers, that there are no civilians in Israel.

It is likely Umar Lee didn't actually closely read my argument, or else he read the post and decided that what I really meant was the exact opposite of what I actually wrote. (A case of unliteralism, I suppose.) Let me clarify before all hell breaks loose.