Germany convicts home-grown militants.
I seriously think the only suitable punishment for such people is that they are parachuted into the middle of a war zone so they can play out their stupid fantasies.
Latest Updates: Terrorism RSS
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thabet
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thabet
British newspapers ‘racially profile’ terror suspects too:
It’s strange then that almost no coverage whatsoever has been given to the case of Ian Davison, although perhaps that name itself somewhat gives the game away.
I noticed that the Jihad Jane story was on the front of major British news outlets. Yet the arrest of Crusader Christopher wasn’t on the front page (and still isn’t) despite: a. the regional nature of the threat compared to someone tapping from their computer in the US; and b. the fact that ricin and handbooks on making bombs (i.e. ‘terrorist materials’) were actually found in his possession (unlike in the case of a number of high-profile, non-white, terrorists).
If this doesn’t highlight the racism of the British press, nothing short of headlines screaming “Kill All Pakis” ever will.
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midwinterspring
Update: It isn’t terrorism if you are a white guy with a plane or … pretty much anyone else who happens to be killing people in countries the US government doesn’t like.
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abunoor
Imam Zaid Shakir — Thomas Friedman : Prisoner in a Glass House
I will make Mr. Friedman a wager. I bet that Muslims will wage an ideological civil war to address their violent extremists long before Americans will. I bet that long after Muslims have reclaimed their subjectivity in this regard, most “objectified” Americans will still be passively acquiescing to the imperatives of the military, and now, terrorist, industrial complexes. Like Mr. Friedman, their failure to meaningfully address America’s militarism, aggression and violence will render them prisoners in a glass house.
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johnpi
New Newsweek article: ‘How moderate Muslim leaders waged war on extremists—and won.’
More than eight eventful years have passed, but in some ways it still feels like 2001. Republicans have clearly decided that fanning the public’s fears of rampant jihadism continues to be a winning strategy. Commentators furnish examples of backwardness and brutality from various parts of the Muslim world—and there are many—to highlight the grave threat we face.
But, in fact, the entire terrain of the war on terror has evolved dramatically. Put simply, the moderates are fighting back and the tide is turning. We no long-er fear the possibility of a major country succumbing to jihadist ideology. In most Muslim nations, mainstream rulers have stabilized their regimes and their societies, and extremists have been isolated. This has not led to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy or liberalism. But modern, somewhat secular forces are clearly in control and widely supported across the Muslim world. Polls, elections, and in-depth studies all confirm this trend.
….The most influential statement on Islam to come out of the post-9/11 era was not a presidential speech or an intellectual’s essay. It was, believe it or not, a United Nations report. In 2002 the U.N. Development Program published a detailed study of the Arab world. The paper made plain that in an era of globalization, openness, diversity, and tolerance, the Arabs were the world’s great laggards. Using hard data, the report painted a picture of political, social, and intellectual stagnation in countries from the Maghreb to the Gulf. And it was written by a team of Arab scholars. This was not paternalism or imperialism. It was truth.
There are a lot of assertions made in this article that are disputable.
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johnpi
I am so completely unsympathetic to Pakistani criticism of America for its conduct in Afghanistan as represented in this Imran Khan documentary.
Early in the video a group of “young cosmopolitan” Pakistani women at a pop music concert are portrayed razing America for imperialism and terrorism.
My response as an American is to just throw it right back in their faces.
The lack of self-awareness or self-examination is just amazing. America left the region after the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan in 1989. Gone. And in that time until 2001 Pakistan decided to play ‘masters of the universe’ and support the Taliban throughout its campaign to take over Afghanistan. Pakistan provided unlimited military equipment and supplies, it provided military intelligence and advisors that traveled with the Taliban forces, and tens of thousands of Pakistanis volunteered and fought with the Taliban in Afghan campaigns that had the character of ethnic violence in parts of the country largely inhabited by the Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc. And these educated middle-class Pakistanis are sitting around getting all indignant about America’s conduct?
Please…I wonder if any Pakistani veterans of the Afghan campaigns brought captive Hazara concubines with them back to Pakistan…
Related: Speaking of foreign fighters marines and Afghan troops have started their attack on the Taliban-held city of Marjah. A tribal elder reports most of the Afghan Taliban have already fled the area, but
Militant commanders from the Middle East or Pakistan have stayed on “and they want to fight,” he said.
I guess it will be foreign fighters versus foreign fighters then. Too bad the Pakistani and Middle Eastern fighters in Marjah won’t allow Afghan civilians to flee the city, thereby putting them potentially in the line of fire.
How nice of the Pakistani volunteers to come to Afghanistan and take the Afghans hostage…
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johnpi
Pentagon quietly explores de-citizenship of US citizen terrorists.
At the highest levels of the US military, a quiet discussion is going on about putting in place a legal framework that would permit the US government to strip American citizenship from terrorists.
The case of Las Cruces, New Mexico born al Qaeda commander Anwar al-Aulaqi, who has been a key organizer and recruiter for the terrorist organization in Yemen is the primary driver of this exploration of possibly modifying US law to allow “de-citizening.”
As the Washington Post’s Dana Priest recently revealed, al-Alaqi was added recently to a short list of other Americans for whom there are kill orders in place.
A senior Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has told me that to his knowledge, there has been no serious discussion in the Committee of stripping US citizenship from terrorists, but a senior Pentagon official has confirmed that some in the military are exploring the upsides and downsides of such a more routenized mechanism for stripping citizenship.
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johnpi
Al Qaeda sympathisers detained in West Bank, Gaza.
Palestinian security forces detained six radical Islamists with explosives in the West Bank in the first known arrests of al Qaeda-inspired militants in the territory, a senior Palestinian officer said.
In the Gaza Strip, controlled by a separate, Hamas-run administration, the authorities announced the arrest of a leader of a pro-al Qaeda group, the latest sign of a crackdown on radicals accused of bombing security offices and Internet cafes.
….Hamas security officials cited 12 bombings which they believed were carried out by radical movements in recent weeks, the highest number of such attacks since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.
Vehicles belonging to two Hamas officials and the office of a Hamas security service were blown up in the bombings. There were no casualties.
The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said the head of a fundamentalist group known as the Jaljalat was arrested late on Tuesday and that several other members of groups supporting al Qaeda were detained in recent days. “A preliminary investigation linked (him) to several if not all of the bombing attacks against security offices and personnel and Internet cafes. He is being interrogated,” said Ehab al-Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.
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abunoor
AlJazeerah has video evidence of Nigerian police massacre of unarmed civilians in wake of Boko Haram clashes. Warning: extremely hard to watch:
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johnpi
Karachi bombings: Ulema rally Pakistanis to call for restraint.
Ulema from different schools of thought have condemned the two blasts on Friday, appealed to the people to exercise restraint and pointed out that terrorists are trying to distort the image of Islam and the country.
The Islamic scholars said the perpetrators of the incidents of terrorism were neither Muslims nor Pakistanis, adding that they were trying to divide the people of the same faith.
….Maulana Hassan Zafar Naqvi ruled out any sectarian aspect of the tragedy, recalling that Shias and Sunnis lived together and would not allow any such conspiracy to succeed in future. However, the series of attacks on mourners was a bad omen, he said, adding that conspiracies were being hatched to distort the image of Islam across the world.
He said the terrorists were enemies of Islam, Muslims and Pakistan, but, the government could not be absolved from its responsibility. “The government should tell people how many of the criminals arrested in the past had been sentenced to death,” he said.
Mufti Muneeb-ur-Rehman, the chief of the Central Ruet Hilal Committee, had the same views to share. He said those behind the tragedy were bringing a bad name to Islam, Muslims and Pakistan. He asked the people to keep their sentiments under control, as violence would only strengthen those who were trying to destablise the country.
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midwinterspring
Assalaamu Aleikum everyone. Aziz has generously given me the ability to post to Talk Islam’s front page. So, to test it out, I will shamelessly plug my latest side blog piece on al-Qaeda’s new-found fondness for leftist causes:
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johnpi
Conservative Muslim village raided by Bosnian cops.
A remote Bosnian village that’s home to highly conservative Wahhabi Muslims was raided Tuesday by hundreds of police who said they were searching for an unspecified security threat.
The Office of the State Prosecutor said the raid in the northeastern village of Gornja Maoca was the largest police operation in Bosnia since the 1992-1995 war that killed tens of thousands and left millions homeless as Muslim Bosnians, Christian Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats clashed.
The isolated village is home to ethnic Bosnian families belonging to the Wahhabi sect — an austere brand of Sunni Islam promoted by extremists, including the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida fighters. Some of the villagers had fought in Bosnia’s war.
About 600 police officers raided the village looking for people suspected of “jeopardizing Bosnia’s constitutional order and spreading national, racial and religious hatred,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
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johnpi
Malaysian government arrests eight foreigners and two locals to – among other things – ‘control Wahhabism amid concerns it could feed violence among extremist Muslims in Malaysia.’
Malaysia’s arrest of 10 terror suspects was part of a sweep targeting the hard-line Islamic sect often associated with al-Qaida, but any link to the Nigerian suspected in the attempted bombing of a U.S. airliner remains unclear, a senior official said Friday.
Malaysia’s home minister announced the arrests Wednesday under the Internal Security Act, which allows indefinite detention without trial, saying they were mainly foreigners linked to an international terrorist network and posed a security threat. He declined to give further details.
Activists said they included four men from Syria, two from Nigeria and one each from Yemen and Jordan.
….The senior Malaysian official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the suspects were believed to be followers of the orthodox Wahhabi sect, which seeks to purify Islamic beliefs and supports the establishment of Muslim states based on Islamic laws. Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida are believed to have been influenced by Wahhabi doctrines.
….The newspaper said Friday that police were investigating the possibility that some of the suspects were in Yemen at the same time as Abdulmutallab when he was allegedly undergoing training. It didn’t say how it obtained the information.
However, the Malaysian official said there were no confirmed links at this stage between the suspects and Abdulmutallab. He said the arrests were aimed at controlling Wahhabism amid concerns it could feed violence among extremist Muslims in Malaysia.
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plimfix
The British government’s Prevent anti-terrorism strategy has been educating young Muslims about ‘propaganda’. Only I wouldn’t call it education. I’d call it indoctrination. But perhaps that’s because I subscribe to Terry Pratchett’s ideals on education: build a library, and open the doors.
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johnpi
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abunoor
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johnpi
Report: New York ex-cons who traveled to Yemen pose ’significant threat.’
As many as three dozen criminals who converted to Islam in American prisons have moved to Yemen where they could pose a “significant threat” to attack the U.S., according to a report on al Qaeda from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be released Wednesday.
“The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States,” said Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass., the committee chairman.
The Senate report said that while the ex-convicts “ostensibly” moved to Yemen to study Arabic, U.S. diplomats and law enforcement officials in Yemen “feared that these Americans were radicalized in prison and traveled to Yemen for training.”
And some blonds have finally converted to Islam, so sit up and take notice:
Also of concern to U.S. officials, the Senate staff found, is a group of “nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.”
An American official described them as “blond-haired, blue eyed-types” who fit the profile of Americans who al Qaeda has sought to recruit for terror missions.
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johnpi
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johnpi
Elite US troops ready to combat Pakistani nuclear hijacks.
The US army is training a crack unit to seal off and snatch back Pakistani nuclear weapons in the event that militants, possibly from inside the country’s security apparatus, get their hands on a nuclear device or materials that could make one.
The specialised unit would be charged with recovering the nuclear materials and securing them.
The move follows growing anti-Americanism in Pakistan’s military, a series of attacks on sensitive installations over the past two years, several of which housed nuclear facilities, and rising tension that has seen a series of official complaints by US authorities to Islamabad in the past fortnight.
“What you have in Pakistan is nuclear weapons mixed with the highest density of extremists in the world, so we have a right to be concerned,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer who used to run the US energy department’s intelligence unit.
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aziz
Imams issue fatwa against attacks on the US and Canada: I praise the intention but question the strategy.
Credit to Abu Noor (and to Naeem) for almost single-handedly changing my opinion on this issue.
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johnpi
Imams in US and Canada jointly declare in new fatwa that an attack on either country constitutes an attack on all 10 million Muslims living in North America.
A group of Canadian and U.S. Islamic leaders on Friday issued a fatwa, or religious edict, declaring that an attack by extremists on the two countries would constitute an attack on the 10 million Muslims living in North America.
The 20 imams associated with the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada said this marked the first fatwa by the Muslim clergy declaring attacks on Canada and the U.S. to be attacks on Muslims.
“In our view, these attacks are evil, and Islam requires Muslims to stand up against this evil,” the imams said in their fatwa.
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johnpi
Two more associates of Najibullah Zazi were arrested in New York City this morning. A search warrant issued yesterday said one of the men was being investigated on conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction.
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johnpi
The Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a U.S. passenger plane on Christmas met in a remote mountainous area of Yemen with regional al-Qaida leaders, possibly including a radical American cleric who was also in contact with the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Yemen’s deputy prime minister said Thursday.
However, Rashad al-Alimi insisted that 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was recruited by al-Qaida in Britain, before he arrived in Yemen last summer, and that he obtained the explosives used in the failed attack after he left Yemen.
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johnpi
Responses in the national medias of countries that are on the new list of states whose citizens will receive heightened security attention entering the US in the wake of the Flight 253 attack.
In forcing the administration to be reactive and blindly discriminatory in the aftermath of the bombing attempt, Al Qaeda may have scored an even more significant ideological victory than would have been afforded by an attack on a plane.
[Quoting an American analyst] “The vast majority of the Lebanese have nothing, and want nothing, to do with terrorism. And we should want them and welcome them here in the United States,” he said.
The extra check means, he said [Abdul Rahman Al-Zamil, president of the Riyadh-based Export Development Center], Saudi companies would not be able to send their executives and representatives to the US easily.
“No doubt, the new measures will also affect delegations that play a big role in boosting trade ties,” he said.
Al-Zamil said most countries would avoid participation in exhibitions or conferences in the US in order to avoid a possibility of their officials and representatives being harassed and getting into trouble in the US.
“This measure is going to affect major projects in the Kingdom, as some products related to these projects are being manufactured in the US and engineers from Saudi Arabia have to go there to inspect them. Importing these products from other countries will affect the standards set by the projects,” he pointed out.
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johnpi
A thoughtful article about the contexts where radicalization of young Muslim men may begin or begin to accelerate by Haroon Moghul.
Three points:
The first point: radicalism is most likely to emerge from zones of overlap. By this I mean the people, places or other contexts where Western and Islamic perspectives come together in negative contrast.
….The second point: these material contrasts between Muslim-majority and Western societies are real, in many places accelerating, and cannot be wished away by zeroing in on a specific individual or blaming an abstract cultural difference…The radicals have narratives that explain reality in attractively absolutist ways, placing blame wholly on the West or wholly on insufficiently prayerful Muslims.
….The third: the great divisions across Islam, the intellectual and actual battles for hearts and minds, are also the great unity of the modern Muslim world. The radical narrative is a symptom of a larger disagreement within the Muslim world, a fracture whose primary cause is the absence of consensus on the moral responsibility of the individual in modernity and the relationships between individuals and their societies.
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johnpi
Child porn fears block under 18s from full body scanners.
Airport security personnel in British airports have been barred from scanning passengers under 18 years old with the newly adopted full body scanners due to warnings that the new devices may breach child pornography laws.
The full-body scanners adopted by British airports in the wake of the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt have come under fire over fears that the graphic images produced by the x-ray machines may violate child pornography laws.
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johnpi
The first suicide attack in Pakistan happened in 2001. The casualty figure for suicide attacks inside Pakistan today stands at 25,000 people.
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johnpi
The New York Times is reporting that Abdullah al Faisal may have been a source of radicalization or inspiration to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day suicide attacker.
Mr. Faisal’s name surfaced much more recently in investigations into Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of the attempted attack on a Northwest Airlines flight.
In an online posting in May 2005, under the name “farouk1986,” Mr. Abdulmutallab referred to Mr. Faisal as a cleric he had listened to, according to American military and law enforcement authorities.
In his posting, Mr. Abdulmutallab wrote: “I thought once they are arrested, no one hears about them for life and the keys to their prison wards are thrown away. That’s what I heard Sheik Faisal of U.K. say (he has also been arrested I heard).”
Al Faisal was also Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui’s imam in the UK at the Brixton mosque. More background on al Faisal here.
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johnpi
Gloom, fury as Pakistan volleyball tournament death toll nears 100.
Tribal elders in a Pakistani village where a suicide car bomber killed nearly 100 people insisted Saturday that residents will keep defying the Taliban, even as the bloodshed laid bare the risks facing the citizens’ militias that make up a key piece of Pakistan’s arsenal against extremism.
Apparently, the lashkar meeting that was going on at the time of the blast was considering punishing the relatives of Taliban militants who had participated in the killing of another tribal elder.
One reason militancy has spread in Pakistan’s tribal belt — a semi-autonomous region where tribes, not the government, have long wielded the most authority — is because insurgents have slain dozens of elders and filled the resulting power vacuum.
And the tribal leader in the afflicted town speaks of the tribe’s response:
“Such attacks will only strengthen our resolve — being Pashtun, revenge is the only answer to the gruesome killings,” said Mushtaq Khan, 50, the head of the tribal council.
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johnpi
The Pakistani Taliban have been trying to take credit for the recent bombing that killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, but Syed Saleem Shahzad reports that it was actually Ilyas Kashmiri and his 313 brigade, which is comprised of veteran combatants from the Kashmir conflict that were highly trained by the Pakistani military.
Supporting Kashmir ain’t what it used to be: Militant groups fighting for Kashmiri liberation seem to have largely been colonized and absorbed into Al Qaeda’s global caliphate project. Some Islamist national liberation movements, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, have resisted being assimilated into the Al Qaeda borg.
