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Slavoj Žižek writes: In July 2008, the Viennese daily Die Presse published a caricature of two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!”
This joke turns around the standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the State of Israel: Like every other state, the State of Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticized, but the country’s critics misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes.
When today’s Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israeli policies reject leftist critiques of those policies, is their implicit line of argumentation not uncannily close to the caricature from Die Presse? Remember Anders Breivik, the Norwegian anti-immigrant mass murderer: He was anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel, since he saw the State of Israel as the first defence line against Muslim expansion—he even wanted to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt.
His view is that Jews are okay as long as there aren’t too many of them — or, as he wrote in his Manifesto: “There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the U.K. and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the U.K. The U.S., on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.”
His figure thus realizes the ultimate paradox of a Zionist anti-Semite — and we find the traces of this bizarre stance more often than one would expect.
On his visit to France to commemorate the victims of the recent Paris killings, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a call to France’s Jewish community (which is the largest in Europe) to move to Israel for safety reasons. Even before his departure for Paris, Netanyahu announced that he planned to tell French Jews that they would be “welcomed with open arms” in Israel.
The title in the main Polish daily Gazeta wyborsza tells it all: “Israel wants France without Jews.” So do the French anti-Semites, one might add. [Continue reading…]
I remember once hearing a highly respected American academic (who I will decline to name but who is frequently denounced in Israel as an anti-Semite simply for shining a light on Israel’s influence on American politics) going out of his way to make it clear to any Jews within earshot that he has always been a philo-Semite.
I have no doubt his declaration was heartfelt, yet I suspect that if one is Jewish, expressions of philo-Semitism are a bit awkward to hear. At least to my ear, to say that one loves Jews is a bit like loving Red Pandas, making them all too exotic, endangered, and other.
Jews in France or anywhere else where there is evidence of rising anti-Semitism surely don’t want or need additional love as much as to be able to sustain the reasonable expectation that they will be treated as no different from anyone else.
In response to Netanyahu’s appeal that they should flee their homes, a lot of French Jews seemed to have less interest in expressing gratitude for his offer of refuge than they felt the need to underline that they are French.
The proposal has been widely criticised for possible unintended consequences, such as ozone depletion, ocean acidification and reduced rainfall in the tropics. Perhaps even more troubling, geoengineering is a technological fix that leaves the economic and industrial system causing climate change untouched.
The mindset behind geoengineering stands in sharp contrast to an emerging ecological, systems approach taking shape in the form of regenerative agriculture. More than a mere alternative strategy, regenerative agriculture represents a fundamental shift in our culture’s relationship to nature.
Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic herd animals. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, remineralises soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertiliser runoff.
But these methods are impractical, expensive and slow in feeding a growing population, right?
Wrong. While comprehensive statistics are hard to come by, yields from regenerative methods often exceed conventional yields (see here and here for scientific research, and here and here for anecdotal examples). Likewise, since these methods build soil, crowd out weeds and retain moisture, fertiliser and herbicide inputs can be reduced or eliminated entirely, resulting in higher profits for farmers. No-till methods can sequester as much as a ton of carbon per acre annually (2.5 tons/hectare). In the US alone, that could amount to nearly a quarter of current emissions. [Continue reading…]
Contrary to Eisenstein’s claim that the NAS “endorsed” geoengineering, its reports were an attempt to assess “the potential impacts, benefits, and costs of two different proposed classes of climate intervention: (1) carbon dioxide removal and (2) albedo modification (reflecting sunlight).” And they reached this conclusion:
Climate change is a global challenge, and addressing it will require a portfolio of responses with varying degrees of risk and efficacy. There is no substitute for dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the negative consequences of climate change, together with adaptation of human and natural systems to make them more resilient to changing climate. However, if society ultimately decides to intervene in Earth’s climate, the Committee most strongly recommends any such actions be informed by a far more substantive body of scientific research — encompassing climate science and economic, political, ethical, and other dimensions — than is available at present.
Far from endorsing geoengineering, the unfortunately-named Committee on Geoengineering Climate, put its foot firmly on the brakes. They did not, as Eisenstein claimed, endorse a proposal to “envelop the planet in a layer of sulphate aerosols.” On the contrary, they said that such a method of attempting to reduce CO₂ would be “irrational and irresponsible.”
John Gray writes: Considering the alternatives that are on offer, liberal societies are well worth defending. But there is no reason for thinking these societies are the beginning of a species-wide secular civilisation of the kind of which evangelical atheists dream.
In ancient Greece and Rome, religion was not separate from the rest of human activity. Christianity was less tolerant than these pagan societies, but without it the secular societies of modern times would hardly have been possible. By adopting the distinction between what is owed to Caesar and what to God, Paul and Augustine – who turned the teaching of Jesus into a universal creed – opened the way for societies in which religion was no longer coextensive with life. Secular regimes come in many shapes, some liberal, others tyrannical. Some aim for a separation of church and state as in the US and France, while others – such as the Ataturkist regime that until recently ruled in Turkey – assert state control over religion. Whatever its form, a secular state is no guarantee of a secular culture. Britain has an established church, but despite that fact – or more likely because of it – religion has a smaller role in politics than in America and is less publicly divisive than it is in France.
There is no sign anywhere of religion fading away, but by no means all atheists have thought the disappearance of religion possible or desirable. Some of the most prominent – including the early 19th-century poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the Austro-Hungarian philosopher and novelist Fritz Mauthner (who published a four-volume history of atheism in the early 1920s) and Sigmund Freud, to name a few – were all atheists who accepted the human value of religion. One thing these atheists had in common was a refreshing indifference to questions of belief. Mauthner – who is remembered today chiefly because of a dismissive one-line mention in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – suggested that belief and unbelief were both expressions of a superstitious faith in language. For him, “humanity” was an apparition which melts away along with the departing Deity. Atheism was an experiment in living without taking human concepts as realities. Intriguingly, Mauthner saw parallels between this radical atheism and the tradition of negative theology in which nothing can be affirmed of God, and described the heretical medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart as being an atheist in this sense.
Above all, these unevangelical atheists accepted that religion is definitively human. Though not all human beings may attach great importance to them, every society contains practices that are recognisably religious. Why should religion be universal in this way? For atheist missionaries this is a decidedly awkward question. Invariably they claim to be followers of Darwin. Yet they never ask what evolutionary function this species-wide phenomenon serves. There is an irresolvable contradiction between viewing religion naturalistically – as a human adaptation to living in the world – and condemning it as a tissue of error and illusion. What if the upshot of scientific inquiry is that a need for illusion is built into in the human mind? If religions are natural for humans and give value to their lives, why spend your life trying to persuade others to give them up?
The answer that will be given is that religion is implicated in many human evils. Of course this is true. Among other things, Christianity brought with it a type of sexual repression unknown in pagan times. Other religions have their own distinctive flaws. But the fault is not with religion, any more than science is to blame for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or medicine and psychology for the refinement of techniques of torture. The fault is in the intractable human animal. Like religion at its worst, contemporary atheism feeds the fantasy that human life can be remade by a conversion experience – in this case, conversion to unbelief. [Continue reading…]
Conversion can be thought of as an example of the miracle of neuroplasticity: that beliefs, firmly held, can in the right circumstances, suddenly be upturned such that the world thereafter is perceived in a radically different way.
That transition is usually described in terms of a bridge that leads from weak faith, no faith, or false faith, to conviction, but as Gray points out, that bridge could also be imagined to be traversable in the opposite direction.
The mistake that all evangelicals make (be they religious evangelicals or new atheists) is to imagine that they have the right and ability to march others across this bridge.
Real conversion, by its nature, cannot be coercive, since it entails some kind of discovery and no one discovers anything under pressure from others.
In a world that remains predominantly religious, the new atheists have ostensibly embarked on a mission of staggering proportions in their effort to purge humanity of its unreasonable superstitions.
This could be viewed as a heroically ambitious undertaking, but there seem to be plenty of reasons not to see it that way.
If the new atheists genuinely hope to persuade religious believers to see the error of their ways, how can they make any progress if they start out by viewing their prospective converts with contempt?
When was it ever the first step in a genuine process of persuasion, to start with the assumption that the person you are addressing is a fool?
As much as the new atheists may appear to be possessed by evangelical fervor, they’re appetite to condemn religion sometimes mirrors the religious fanaticism that condemns apostates.
“Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them,” writes Sam Harris in apparent agreement with the leaders of ISIS. Their only disagreement is over which propositions warrant a death sentence.
Still, much as the new atheists are often guilty of evangelical errors, I seriously doubt that their mission truly is to mount a challenge against the reign of religion.
On the contrary, I think their mission seems to have less to do with changing the world than it has with preaching to the converted. It’s about selling books, going on speaking tours, appearing on TV, amassing followers on Twitter, and doing everything else it takes to carve out a profitable cultural niche.
Who would have thought that it’s possible to pursue a career as a professional atheist? Sam Harris has, and I’m sure he has been rewarded handsomely and his success will continue, irrespective of the fate of religion.
Simon Cottee writes: ISIS’s métier is shock and gore, whereas the [U.S. State Department’s Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications] CSCC’s, to put it unkindly, is more mock and bore, more Fred Flintstone than Freddy Krueger. Shock and gore, needless to say, is where the action is — and hence where the Internet traffic tends to go. “You’re never going to be able to match the power of their outrageousness,” Fernandez said, conceding this disadvantage.
ISIS has a vast network of “fanboys,” as its virtual supporters are widely and derisively known, who disseminate the group’s online propaganda. (ISIS ennobles them with the title “knights of the uploading.”) They are dedicated, self-sufficient, and even, Fernandez said, occasionally funny. And they are everywhere on Twitter, despite the social-media network’s efforts to ban them. Fernandez described the group’s embrace of social media as “a stroke of genius on their part.” The CSCC doesn’t have fanboys.
More crucially, ISIS has a narrative. This is often described by the group’s opponents as “superficial” or “bankrupt.” Only it isn’t. It is immensely rich. The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence estimates that of the 20,000 or more foreign jihadists believed to have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq, around 100 are from the United States. These fighters may be naive or stupid, but they didn’t sacrifice everything for nothing. John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at University of Massachusetts Lowell, told me that people who join groups like ISIS “are trying to find a path, to answer a call to something, to right some perceived wrong, to do something truly meaningful with their lives.”
The CSCC doesn’t have a narrative — not one, at any rate, remotely comparable in emotional affect and resonance to that of ISIS. No one is more sharply aware of this than Fernandez himself. “ISIS’s message,” he said, “is that Muslims are being killed and that they’re the solution. … There is an appeal to violence, obviously, but there is also an appeal to the best in people, to people’s aspirations, hopes and dreams, to their deepest yearnings for identity, faith, and self-actualization. We don’t have a counter-narrative that speaks to that. What we have is half a message: ‘Don’t do this.’ But we lack the ‘do this instead.’ That’s not very exciting. The positive narrative is always more powerful, especially if it involves dressing in black like a ninja, having a cool flag, being on television, and fighting for your people.” [Continue reading…]
It’s a bit misleading to keep on talking about the need for a counter-narrative when narratives are nothing more than marketing strategies.
ISIS’s marketing strategy is coupled with the realities it has created on the ground. It might be marketing hype to pronounce the territory under its control as a caliphate, but the fact is, it does control real territory as large as a medium-sized country. Without that territory, it would have next to nothing to market.
Countering ISIS requires much more than coming up with a better pitch — it has to be a pitch for something tangible and not just some vacuous promise of a better future. Such a narrative (if it can be found) can neither be crafted nor delivered by the U.S. government
After the end of the Cold War, the political movement striving for nuclear disarmament lost most of its momentum. Supposedly, even though enough missiles remained armed that life as we know it could be destroyed in minutes, the threat of Armageddon had fallen away because there was no plausible reason why the two largest remaining nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, should risk mutual destruction.
Because of this nuclear complacency, the opportunity provided by the 1990s, when giant strides towards disarmament could have been made, was wasted.
As animosity between the United States and Russia is once again on the rise, it’s worth being reminded of exactly what would happen if, for instance, a single 800-kiloton intercontinental ballistic missile (of which Russia possesses 700 such warheads) were to be detonated over Manhattan.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists describes the effects: The warhead would probably be detonated slightly more than a mile above the city, to maximize the damage created by its blast wave. Within a few tenths of millionths of a second after detonation, the center of the warhead would reach a temperature of roughly 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius), or about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.
A ball of superheated air would form, initially expanding outward at millions of miles per hour. It would act like a fast-moving piston on the surrounding air, compressing it at the edge of the fireball and creating a shockwave of vast size and power.
After one second, the fireball would be roughly a mile in diameter. It would have cooled from its initial temperature of many millions of degrees to about 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 4,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.
On a clear day with average weather conditions, the enormous heat and light from the fireball would almost instantly ignite fires over a total area of about 100 square miles. [Continue reading…]
When an American man reaches that juncture in life where he’s ready to buy a Toyota Camry, he can be confident he’s now living the American dream: a reliable car, a house in the suburbs and then the final act that will prove his boldness and manhood — he tearfully ships off his teenage daughter to join the U.S. Army.
I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, so I didn’t see this ad until today. My reaction to Toyota’s message: WTF?
It seems like the writers for Saturday Night Live also took exception to Toyota’s message and thought that it was worth a parody — a parody which a segment of SNL’s audience thought was in bad taste.
As much as some viewers are applauding SNL for being so bold as to take on ISIS, I think that what the show really did was use ISIS to give themselves some cover while taking an indirect punch at U.S. militarism and the Americanist dogma that military service is the closest thing to saintliness.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Toyota to seize the marketing opportunity that has been staring them in the face for decades: to launch The Technical — a four-wheel drive pickup truck with a factory-installed gun-mount, and “fully loaded” with all the features that an organization like ISIS needs for desert warfare.
But joking aside, when the military history of the 21st century gets written, among the tools of warfare of preeminent importance, the Toyota pickup truck is probably going to rank higher than the drone. And it’s not just any Toyota truck; the truck of choice is the Hilux.
“The Toyota Hilux is everywhere,” says Andrew Exum, a former Army Ranger and now a fellow of the Center for a New American Security. “It’s the vehicular equivalent of the AK-47. It’s ubiquitous to insurgent warfare. And actually, recently, also counterinsurgent warfare. It kicks the hell out of the Humvee.”
Whether you’re an American dad, or you’re fighting for ISIS, there’s only #OneBoldChoice: Toyota.
Now if there’s any way Toyota could trick ISIS to trade in their Hiluxes for the Toyota Isis minivan — that’s right, Toyota makes an “Isis” — there’s no question the militant group could swiftly be defeated.
Hassan Hassan writes: ISIL is not an apocalyptic cult as people tend to make it out to be. It employs Islamic eschatological ideas but only as part of its wider religious and political project. Messianic movements do not attract large followings in the way ISIL seems to.
The disproportionate focus on this part of its propaganda, which might be a result of familiarity with the concept in the West, risks misdiagnosis of the appeal of ISIL.
ISIL has a strategy for a clear religious and political project. Its focus on Dabiq [the location in Syria of an epic battle between Muslims and Christians, which prophecies predict] is nothing new. Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, ISIL’s founding father, spoke about the prophecy during his jihadi operation in Iraq. According to Yaroslav Trofimov, author of Siege of Mecca, Al Zarqawi took the idea from his Jordanian mentor Abu Mohammed Al Maqdisi.
In its videos, ISIL refers to its fighters as the “soldiers of the caliphate”, not the soldiers of Dabiq. It is the caliphate, or the Islamic state, that draws the attention of new recruits and invigorates them to fight for the group. It claims to represent the interest of Sunnis in Iraq, Syria and beyond. So it is this idea that must be the focus of attention for those fighting ISIL.
As politicians and commentators repeatedly warn about the danger of radicalization and the need for effective de-radicalization programs, this way of framing the threat posed by ISIS seems to me to involve an implausible proposition: that those who have a passionate desire to create a caliphate can be persuaded to abandon that desire.
Much as the issue of radicalization has in recent months focused on European Muslims who have been drawn into the ranks of ISIS, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the bulk of ISIS’s fighters did not abandon the comforts (or alienation) of Western societies. They came from Muslim countries that hold out no promise of becoming Islamic states and whose governments have little interest in representing the interests of the populations over whom they rule.
Millions of Muslims, without being extremists of any variety, see the Islamic world as having been carved up by Western colonialism, robbed of its sovereignty, and placed under the control of compliant and corrupt rulers. Broadly speaking, what’s on offer right now is a brutal ISIS caliphate vs. a fractious status quo. That seems like a lousy choice.
As Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Libya demonstrated over the last half century, the project of pan-Arab secular nationalism was a spectacular failure.
On the other hand, the Arab monarchies have the durability of a chronic disease — their ability to survive has accomplished little more than cripple the region.
If ISIS and the other forms of Islamic extremism are seen for what they are — symptoms of a disease, rather than the disease itself — then the remedy cannot be found by merely looking for ways to suppress its symptoms.
What is called for is a better vision that can be embraced on a larger scale than what ISIS or anyone else is currently offering.
This isn’t about de-radicalization but instead, real radicalism which goes to the root and is built around a vision of what it wants to create rather than what it endeavors to destroy.
The New York Times reports: The reports are like something out of a distant era of ancient conquests: entire villages emptied, with hundreds taken prisoner, others kept as slaves; the destruction of irreplaceable works of art; a tax on religious minorities, payable in gold.
A rampage reminiscent of Tamerlane or Genghis Khan, perhaps, but in reality, according to reports by residents, activist groups and the assailants themselves, a description of the modus operandi of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate this week. The militants have prosecuted a relentless campaign in Iraq and Syria against what have historically been religiously and ethnically diverse areas with traces of civilizations dating to ancient Mesopotamia.
The latest to face the militants’ onslaught are the Assyrian Christians of northeastern Syria, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, some speaking a modern version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
Assyrian leaders have counted 287 people taken captive, including 30 children and several dozen women, along with civilian men and fighters from Christian militias, said Dawoud Dawoud, an Assyrian political activist who had just toured the area, in the vicinity of the Syrian city of Qamishli. Thirty villages had been emptied, he said. [Continue reading…]
In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, some Americans, perceiving echoes of the government-fueled national hysteria that followed 9/11, now regard the attention being given to ISIS as disproportionate to the size of the threat.
A few days ago, one commentator described ISIS as: “A nasty nuisance, which has killed thousands in the Middle East, but a nuisance nonetheless.”
If one subscribes to the Steven Pinker view of the world, then how bad the current situation is, just comes down to numbers.
Fewer people have been killed by ISIS than by barrel bombs dropped by the Assad regime in Syria, or were killed during the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The threat to humanity posed by climate change, far exceeds all other global threats, including what can arguably be called a minor threat from ISIS.
But if an issue is defined as not rising above the threshold of being a nuisance, solely based on numbers, then since between 1882 and 1968 only 3,446 blacks were lynched in America, should the racial violence occurring during that chapter in this country’s history be described as having been no more than a nasty nuisance?
The very fact that we view lynching as emblematic of a chapter in history, illustrates the fact that significance can never be reduced to numbers.
In France, the death toll from the Charlie Hebdo shootings was little more than the average number of fatalities that occur every day on France’s roads.
Since statistically, the French face little more risk from terrorism than they face from traffic accidents, does that mean the French government should devote the same amount of time and resources to addressing road safety as they do to tackling terrorism?
Again, this doesn’t just come down to numbers. For one thing, there’s no reason to view road safety as a problem that risks escalating. Neither is there reason to imagine that individuals or groups of people have a specific interest in making the roads more dangerous. Road safety is an issue that gains ongoing and appropriate attention from every relevant constituency from central government to local government, town planners to school teachers, and vehicle manufacturers to medics.
The fact that it is the type of issue that generally gets effectively addressed, is the very reason it is largely ignored in political and popular discourse.
Conversely, while it’s easy to say that ISIS presents a problem that needs “to be dealt with,” the very fact that it remains unclear what mechanisms might be effective in tackling this problem, is one of the main reasons ISIS continues to grab the headlines.
ISIS might not represent an unstoppable force and yet its campaign of violence has proved very difficult to contain.
Politicians glibly talk about the strategy for defeating ISIS, yet no one has made a convincing case that such a strategy has been found.
Some observers believe that each time another ISIS headline appears, the group has simply been served up the attention it craves, but to dismiss this as a group of attention-seekers is to gravely misjudge ISIS’s ambitions.
A year ago, before ISIS had become a household name but after it taken over Fallujah, President Obama wanted to downplay its significance in what became an infamous dismissal — he said they were just “a jayvee team.”
In those early months of 2014, ISIS used America’s inattention to its full advantage.
Whether showered with or starved of attention, ISIS pursues its goals because they have less concern about how they are perceived by Americans, or for that matter the rest of the world, than we might imagine.
The issue now is less about the quantity of attention ISIS garners that it is about the quality of that attention.
When viewed through the paradigm of the war on terrorism, it’s natural and appropriate to point to that neocon project’s manifold failures. We might also see this as the latest manifestation in a problem that cannot wholly be solved. In other words, that we need to learn how to live with what can be regarded as a manageable amount of terrorism.
But maybe we are being distracted by the category of terrorism itself.
In spite of the fact that ISIS has engaged in what are generally viewed as some of the most grotesque acts of terrorism ever carried out, it differs from all other terrorist groups in at least two fundamental ways:
It has spawned a mass movement, and
It has captured and now governs large tracts of territory.
While there was recent furious debate about whether ISIS should be called Islamic, there has been little discussion about its claim to have created a state.
That claim is treated as too preposterous as to merit consideration — the so-called Islamic State is surely destined to implode.
And yet that hasn’t happened and it isn’t about to happen. Neither is this a state that stands any chance of being recognized by any other, but nor does it seek such recognition. On the contrary, the recognition it seeks is from all those who reject the legitimacy of nation states — and this constituency is large and growing.
British aid worker, Alan Henning, and his executioner, alleged to be British jihadist, Mohammed Emwazi.
The Washington Post reports: The world knows him as “Jihadi John,” the masked man with a British accent who has beheaded several hostages held by the Islamic State and who taunts audiences in videos circulated widely online.
But his real name, according to friends and others familiar with his case, is Mohammed Emwazi, a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming. He is believed to have traveled to Syria around 2012 and to have later joined the Islamic State, the group whose barbarity he has come to symbolize.
“I have no doubt that Mohammed is Jihadi John,” said one of Emwazi’s close friends who identified him in an interview with The Washington Post. “He was like a brother to me. . . . I am sure it is him.”
A representative of a British human rights group who had been in contact with Emwazi before he left for Syria also said he believed Emwazi was Jihadi John, a moniker given to him by some of the hostages he once held.
“There was an extremely strong resemblance,” Asim Qureshi, research director at the rights group, CAGE, said after watching one of the videos. “This is making me feel fairly certain that this is the same person.” [Continue reading…]
Qureshi, in a statement on the CAGE website, portrays Emwazi as a victim of British counter-terrorism policies:
This case should trigger thinking about British domestic and foreign policy. What risk assessments, if any, have been made about British counter-terrorism policy and the key part it plays in radicalising individuals? How have the security services been allowed to get away with abusing British citizens without redress? Why are the long-standing grievances over Western interventions in the Muslim world been ignored?
Propagandists have a habit of becoming the most devout believers in their own narrative, but I think it requires a particularly distorted mindset to portray Emwazi, given his alleged actions, as a victim.
In a press conference today, Qureshi described Emwazi as a “kind” and “gentle” young man.
In a video released today, Qureshi says: “The questions shouldn’t be about Jihadi John but they should be about what role our security services have played in alienating people in this society and turning them away from being able to find solutions to the problems they have.”
Moazzam Begg, CAGE’s director of outreach and a former detainee at Guantánamo, can also reasonably argue that he has been a victim of Britain’s counter-terrorism policy and what some see as its over-zealous security services.
Given Qureshi’s reasoning, are we to imagine that Begg or anyone else finding themselves in a similar position might be just as likely to follow in Emwazi’s footsteps and become another of ISIS’s executioners?
In fact, Begg has no illusions about ISIS: “You have no idea how dangerous these people are,” he wrote on Facebook in early 2014.
“I saw muhajireen (foreigners), locked in cages, by Allah worse, than my Guantanamo cell.
“They beat people to make them confess…just like the Arab regimes, there is no difference.
“I have been to many places, Bosnia, Afghan… but never seen this kind of fitnah [turmoil] and such dangerous extremism and readiness for takfeer [excommunication].
“Syrians on the ground have started to hate foreigners because of them.
“ISIS have even detained and killed aid workers…brothers from UK who have taken convoys [have] been looted by ISIS, guns shoved in faces of brothers who have crossed Europe to bring aid.
“And what’s the basis of detaining the non-Muslim aid worker [Alan Henning] who came in as a guest of Muslims, under their protection? They’ve probably murdered him too, just like many Muslims they’ve done that to.”
The world is full of people who for multitudes of justifiable reasons regard themselves as victims, yet this doesn’t absolve them of responsibility for their own actions.
The Guardian adds: “Jihadi John” is one of a trio of Britons who held hostage Spanish, French, Danish, British and US nationals. The hostages were captured in northern Syria, some in Idlib province, others in Aleppo and a third group in and around Raqqa province, which has since become the main Syrian stronghold of Isis.
The jihadi cell that spawned Isis was initially strong in Idlib province, having taken root there in the summer of 2012. From there it spread to Aleppo, where hostages that had been captured at that point were held in one of two locations – under the eye hospital in the centre of the city or in a factory deep in an industrial zone on its northern outskirts.
By February last year, all the hostages, including Briton John Cantlie, who is one of two remaining western hostages, were moved to Raqqa.
It was in Raqqa that the hostages first became aware of the status that Emwazi had developed among Isis. One former hostage described him as “cold, sadistic and merciless”.
Is ISIS Islamic? Indeed, is it — as The Atlantic claims — very Islamic?
Strangely, these questions have been treated by many commentators in the West as questions about the nature of Islam rather than questions about the nature of ISIS.
Understandably, many Muslims, appalled by ISIS’s actions, naturally want to assert vigorously that ISIS does not represent Islam and in that sense should not be called Islamic. Fine.
But once one moves beyond the headlines about the atrocities committed by ISIS and beyond the intra-Islamic discourse on the religion’s true nature, it soon becomes clear why the group should indeed be described as being Islamic.
That observation need not be treated as a slur on Islam or a condemnation of Muslims, but seen simply for what it is: a characterization of the religious foundation upon which ISIS rests, in its conception, expression, and goals.
To claim that ISIS is Islamic, is not to claim that it is “an inevitable product of Islam,” or that it reveals the true nature of Islam.
To understand why in objective terms without making qualitative judgements, ISIS can very reasonably be described as Islamic, consider the following report by Ali Hashem. (Based in Beirut, he is a columnist for Al-Monitor who also reports for Al Mayadeen, and has previously reported for Al Jazeera, the BBC, and numerous Arab newspapers.)
When the average Islamic State (IS) member is asked why he is fighting, he typically responds, “So that Sharia prevails and Islam’s banner stays high.”
Marwan Shehade, an Islamic scholar and expert on jihadist groups, told Al-Monitor, “There’s no doubt the organization is built on three main elements: the Sharia, the military might and media. Their main slogan is derived from Ibn Taymiyyah’s famous saying, ‘The foundation of this religion is a book that guides and a sword that supports.’ By ‘a book’ they mean the Quran and religion.”
Despite the debate over whether IS represents Islam and what “true Islam” is, Islamic movements, sects and scholars perceive IS as truly believing it is enforcing the rule of Allah according to the Quran and the Hadith under the guidance of the organization’s Sharia Council, probably the group’s most vital body. The council’s responsibilities include overseeing the speeches of the self-declared Caliph Ibrahim (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and those under him, dictating punishments, preaching, mediating, monitoring the group’s media, ideologically training new recruits and advising the caliph on how to deal with hostages when it is decided to execute them.
Underlining the central decision-making role of the Sharia Council, Hashem goes on to quote a former ISIS mufti he spoke to in Iraq in January, who told him: “There’s nothing that is decided without the Sharia Council’s approval.”
The average American may not know much about Islam, but by this point most have heard the term caliphate and know that it refers to a kind of Islamic state.
They also know the term Sharia but typically have a distorted understanding of what this means and easily succumb to irrational fears about its implementation.
The effect of hearing President Obama insist that ISIS is not Islamic is to make many Americans believe that the commander-in-chief is in a state of denial. They question whether he really understands who the U.S. is fighting against in its war on ISIS.
Worse, denying that ISIS is Islamic, has the perverse effect of empowering Islamophobes by making them sound like realists — the only people willing to speak the truth about ISIS.
If the only people in America willing to say that ISIS is Islamic are also people who make a radically different claim — that ISIS reveals the real nature of Islam — then Islamophobes will dominate popular discourse on ISIS.
According to the logic of a few boneheads, if ISIS is Islamic, then the real problem isn’t with ISIS — it’s with Islam.
To refute that logic by refusing to call ISIS Islamic, is equally boneheaded, since it implies that conceding ISIS’s Islamic roots will inevitably then tarnish all Muslims.
Asra Q. Nomani and Hala Arafa write: At the White House summit on “countering violent extremism,” President Obama declared that violent jihad in the name of Islam isn’t the work of “religious leaders” but rather “terrorists.” American-Muslim leaders, attending the summit, cheered and applauded, later taking selfies in front of the president’s seal.
But, as liberal Muslim feminist journalists who reject the vision of the Islamic State, we can say that the Islamic State, al Qaeda and the alphabet soup of Islamic militant groups, like HUM (Harkut-ul Mujahideen) and LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), rely very much on the scholarship of “religious leaders,” from Ibn Tamiyyah in the 14th century to Sayyid Qutb in the 20th century, who very much have credibility and authority among too many Muslims as “religious leaders.”
A very nuanced and thorough Atlantic article by journalist Graeme Wood this week, arguing “The Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” set off a firestorm of “derision,” as labeled by an article at ThinkProgress, a media site affiliated with the Center for American Progress, a think tank started by former Democratic operative John Podesta. ThinkProgress religion reporter Jack Jenkins wrote that the Atlantic article elicited “staunch criticism and derision from many Muslims and academics who study Islam.”
Wood argues the Islamic State views itself as “a key agent of the coming Apocalypse.” He is absolutely right, and we have been seeing the symbols for months. After spending about 200 hours combined over the last few weeks, analyzing every word and symbol in the burning video of the Jordanian Air Force pilot and the execution video of the Coptic Christians, we can tell you that both videos reveal Islamic State strategists, propagandists and recruiters are very much grounded in a logical interpretation of the Quran, the hadith, or sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, and fatwa, or religious rulings. [Continue reading…]
There are an estimated 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If one knows nothing else about Islam, that number alone provides sufficient reason to understand why there is no intrinsic relationship between Islam and terrorism. If Islam did indeed breed terrorists, how could there be so many Muslims and so few terrorists?
To view ISIS as revealing the true nature of Islam makes no more sense than believing that a small fundamentalist sect might define Christianity.
Fundamentalists of all stripes see themselves as the standard bearers of “true” religion in a wider context which, by definition, they view as corrupt. Pure religion only needs to be promoted where impure religion supposedly runs rampant.
As soon as we enter into debates about true or false Islam, good or bad Muslims, we are granting ISIS one of its key claims: that Muslims need to defend Islam by policing who does or does not have the right to call themselves a Muslim.
Both ethically and practically, it should be sufficient to recognize that anyone who identifies themselves as a Muslim, is a Muslim — no litmus test required.
In the following interview, Bernard Haykel addresses the question of whether ISIS is truly Islamic.
In Washington, conceding the fact that ISIS probably can’t be bombed out of existence, there is much talk nowadays about the need to challenge the group’s ideology.
Whoever came up with the slogan, “think again, turn away,” must have been a graduate of the Nancy Reagan school of psychology.
Right! That’s sure to work — just like a program to pacify violent urban ghetto gang members by recruiting them to the Boy Scouts of America.
It should be axiomatic that in the art of persuasion you will never make a connection with your target audience if you treat them like vulnerable fools, susceptible to being led astray.
Such an approach is bound to be ineffective and likely rests on a false premise: that ones adversary is engaged in willful deception.
The threat from ISIS derives less from deception than it does from the fact that its leaders actually believe what they are saying.
In his closing address at the White House’s Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, President Obama yesterday referred to the “false promises of extremism.” In using that phrase, he echoed a widely held belief that the leaders of extremist organizations do not genuinely believe in the ideologies they promote — that their intent is to dupe naive recruits.
This is all part of the prevailing narrative that emphasizes the importance of de-legitimizing terrorism. In the same vain, ISIS is described as having perverted Islam, for which reason it should not be called Islamic.
This is a wrong-headed approach because it disregards the foundation of radicalization: the rejection of what are perceived as inauthentic expressions of religion, corrupt political systems, and failed societies.
The radical believes he is tapping into the pure root of something that has in its wider manifestations lost its authenticity. Those who don’t share that perception are themselves seen as having no legitimacy and no capacity to distinguish between authenticity and inauthencity.
When an American president, attempts to engage in PR on behalf of the global Muslim community, those Muslims with whom ISIS’s message resonates, will most likely respond to Obama’s words with howls of scorn.
In Congress last week, as the New York Timesreported, there was a rare note of realism from an unlikely source who provided a reality check on the ability of the U.S. government to challenge ISIS ideologically.
“Unfortunately, as we all know, the government is probably not the best platform to try to communicate with the set of actors who are potentially vulnerable to this kind of propaganda and this kind of recruitment,” Nicholas Rasmussen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.
“We try to find ways to stimulate this kind of counternarrative, this kind of countermessaging, without having a U.S. government hand in it,” Mr. Rasmussen continued. “People who are attracted to this don’t go to the government for their guidance on what to do, not the U.S. government and certainly not their governments in the Middle East.”
Neither do they go to their parents, or their imams, or other community leaders.
Obama suggested, among other things, that we need to: “lift up the voices of those who know the hypocrisy of groups like ISIL firsthand, including former extremists.”
That could be useful, but I wouldn’t overestimate the power of such voices. The disaffected have a tendency of being perceived as dropouts — people who didn’t have what it takes, whose commitment wasn’t deep enough, and whose fears undermined their faith.
What would cut the ground from under the extremists’ feet is not a counter-narrative that deligitimizes their claims, but instead a vision that is even more radical than the one ISIS offers.
Obama said:
When governments oppress their people, deny human rights, stifle dissent, or marginalize ethnic and religious groups, or favor certain religious groups over others, it sows the seeds of extremism and violence. It makes those communities more vulnerable to recruitment. Terrorist groups claim that change can only come through violence. And if peaceful change is impossible, that plays into extremist propaganda.
So the essential ingredient to real and lasting stability and progress is not less democracy; it’s more democracy. It’s institutions that uphold the rule of law and apply justice equally. It’s security forces and police that respect human rights and treat people with dignity. It’s free speech and strong civil societies where people can organize and assemble and advocate for peaceful change. It’s freedom of religion where all people can practice their faith without fear and intimidation. All of this is part of countering violent extremism.
The trouble is, these are all observations that have been made many times before, and especially coming from Obama’s lips they sound like nothing more than a wish-list.
For decades, the United States has consistently undermined democracy in the Middle East. Even after the Arab Spring erupted, Obama was only halfhearted in his support for grassroots democracy movements.
The United States does not have it in its power to deliver democracy to the region. What it could do is set expiration dates on the support it provides to its many corrupt allies.
Ultimately it is the choice of these governments to either continue concerning themselves exclusively with their own survival, or to collectively construct a new Middle East in which its people matter more than its rulers.
Right now, the only choices on offer are between two forms of managed chaos. On one side the institutionalized violence of authoritarian and corrupt rulers and on the other the savagery of ISIS.
Neither side has a vision of the future in which the dignity and respect that ordinary people deserve is even being offered.
If Glenn Greenwald had more interest in investigation and less interest in being a celebrity, he could find no better tutor than Steven Aftergood — someone who most of Greenwald’s followers have most likely never heard of. Even so, Greenwald certainly understand what plays well with a large audience: a simple story.
Aftergood writes: For some of Edward Snowden’s partisans and supporters…, the possibility that his leaks had negative as well as positive consequences involves more complexity than they can tolerate. If Snowden intended to defend constitutional values, as he insists, then how dare anyone suggest that he may have also aided America’s enemies, even indirectly?
This sort of complexity does not arise in Laura Poitras’s award-winning film Citizenfour about Snowden, as its few critical reviewers have noted.
Many of the documents Snowden disclosed “go far beyond exposures of spying on Americans,” wrote Fred Kaplan in a review of the film in Slate. “If Snowden and company wanted to take down an intelligence agency, they should say so. But that has nothing to do with whistleblowing or constitutional rights.”
Likewise, wrote George Packer in The New Yorker, “Among the leaked documents are details of foreign-intelligence gathering that do not fall under the heading of unlawful threats to American democracy–what Snowden described as his only concern. [Former NSA official William] Binney, generally a fervent Snowden supporter, told USA Today that Snowden’s references to ‘hacking into China’ went too far: ‘So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor’.”
And from Michael Cohen in The Daily Beast: “What is left out of Poitras’s highly sympathetic portrayal of Snowden is so much of what we still don’t know about him. For example, why did he steal so many documents that have nothing to do with domestic surveillance but rather overseas–and legal–intelligence-gathering operations?”
But for a discussion of Citizenfour that presents no such dissonant, skeptical notes or troublesome opposing views, see the late David Carr’s final interview with Snowden, Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.
For me, one of the most memorable moments in that interview came when the participants scoffed at the United State’s poor ranking in the latest Borders Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.
At 46, the U.S. falls below countries such as Botswana — proximity which for Greenwald appeared to insult America’s reputation much more than it complimented Botswana.
While enjoying the freedom to speak from a stage in New York City (Greenwald’s fear of getting arrested in the U.S. seemed to disappear as soon as he got a Pulitzer and published his book), no mention was made of the fact that the country where Snowden resides ranks 148, while Greenwald’s home country of Brazil ranks 111.
No doubt, for as long as the U.S. retains the conceit of being “the leader of the free world,” it has little excuse for failing to rank number one in press freedom. At the same time, those who choose to characterize the U.S. government as the preeminent threat to personal freedom in the world, are either willfully ignoring or simply ignorant of much more egregious threats to freedom that can be seen in China, the Middle East, Russia and elsewhere.
Ian Sample writes: The tranquil chorus of the natural world is in danger of being lost to today’s generation as people screen out the noises that surround them, a senior US researcher warns.
Rising levels of background noise in some areas threaten to make people oblivious to the uplifting sounds of birdsong, trickling water, and trees rustling in the wind, which can often be heard even in urban centres, said Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service.
The problem was exacerbated by people listening to iPods through their earphones instead of tuning in to the birds and other sounds of nature that can easily be drowned out by traffic, music and others noises, he said.
“This learned deafness is a real issue,” Fristrup told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in San Jose. “We are conditioning ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears.”
“This gift that we are born with – to reach out and hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds – is in danger of being lost through a generational amnesia,” he said. [Continue reading…]
On a forest trail I frequent, I witness this almost every day — usually it’s runners, under 45, who prefer sound to travel down earbuds rather than come through the air that surrounds them.
I never cease to be baffled by this choice. Why go to the woods if not to soak in everything they have to offer?
I understand that there are lots of situations in which people feel the desire to be somewhere else — phones and the internet cater to this insatiable need for dislocation. But if one cannot be in the woods without wanting to be transported somewhere else, it seems like the very sense of being is at risk of becoming utterly lost.
On February 23, 2011, CNN’s Ben Wedeman gave this report from a rally in Benghazi:
Some of us are suckers for these kinds of expression of “people power,” but for Glenn Greenwald and other prescient anti-interventionists, such scenes of joy must have been deeply depressing.
How could the Libyans (and those of us who supported their revolution) be so foolish as to not understand that they were hoping for too much if they imagined they might be entitled to the peace and freedom we in the West take for granted?
Less than a month later, as Gaddafi’s forces advanced on Benghazi, its residents warned of an impending bloodbath and appealed for international intervention. Their call was answered by NATO.
But just over two years later, Alan Kuperman, after gazing into his special crystal ball that reveals alternative futures, confidently asserted that “there was virtually no risk of such an outcome” — contrary to its residents fears, Benghazi was never really in danger, said the Texas-based scholar.
Again we were reminded of how ill-equipped ordinary Libyans are to recognize their own interests.
Some observers might think it’s hard to be sure what would have happened to Libya had NATO not intervened. Prophet Kuperman suffers no such doubts:
The biggest misconception about NATO’s intervention is that it saved lives and benefited Libya and its neighbors. In reality, when NATO intervened in mid-March 2011, Qaddafi already had regained control of most of Libya, while the rebels were retreating rapidly toward Egypt. Thus, the conflict was about to end, barely six weeks after it started, at a toll of about 1,000 dead, including soldiers, rebels, and civilians caught in the crossfire. By intervening, NATO enabled the rebels to resume their attack, which prolonged the war for another seven months and caused at least 7,000 more deaths.
Anti-interventionists such as Greenwald, believe that from the vantage point of the intervention’s architects, it was not actually a failure, since the secret motive of all such policies is — so he says — to create a justification for endless war.
[T]here is no question that U.S. militarism constantly strengthens exactly that which it is pitched as trying to prevent, and ensures that the U.S. government never loses its supply of reasons to continue its endless war.
Far from serving as a model, this Libya intervention should severely discredit the core selling point of so-called “humanitarian wars.” Some non-governmental advocates of “humanitarian war” may be motivated by the noble aims they invoke, but humanitarianism is simply not why governments fight wars; that is just the pretty wrapping used to sell them.
From both inside and outside Libya, there are now renewed calls for intervention, this time to thwart the rise of ISIS following the group’s latest atrocity.
Anti-interventionists, ever true to their convictions, presumably believe that no intervention is justifiable or could conceivably help.
But given that such a conviction must be based on an uncanny ability to foresee the future, why wait until the future is past to tell us what it might have been? Why not tell us all now what will happen if the world’s leaders follow your wise counsel?
Anti-interventionists might believe that it is their destiny to be ignored, but that really isn’t true. In 2011 they warned that Libya would set a dangerous precedent — that similar interventions were bound to follow the so-called Libya model. First Libya, next Syria.
It didn’t happen. Indeed, Syria can really be heralded as a triumph of anti-interventionism. Not even the use of chemical weapons was enough to trigger U.S. missile strikes. And once Obama finally mustered a nominal coalition of military forces, it wasn’t with the aim of toppling the regime. Instead they have become de facto allies of Assad, in a combined effort to push back ISIS.
If the lesson from Libya was that dictatorial rule is not such a bad thing, then Washington’s relations with Damascus and Cairo indicate that it has already taken many of the anti-interventionists’ cautions to heart.
Both in the U.S. and Europe, anti-interventionism, seemingly unbeknown to its loudest advocates, is altogether mainstream. In the aftermath of Iraq and Libya, Western governments are far from trigger-happy.
“Wisdom, prudence and a sense of the situation is needed with regards to Libya,” Renzi said. “But you cannot go from total indifference to hysteria”.
Likewise, the UK has ruled out intervention in Libya “at the moment.”
Such caution may soothe some anti-interventionist fears, but there is little evidence supporting the sentiment behind the anti-interventionist position — that being, that if throwing fuel on the fire makes the fire burn more strongly then the converse will necessarily be true.
Sometimes it will be true and at others it will not, but those who refuse to remove their ideological blinkers will find it impossible to differentiate one case from the other.
The New York Times: Largely overshadowed by the crises in Syria, Iraq and Ukraine, Libya’s unraveling has received comparatively little attention over the past few months. As this oil-rich nation veers toward complete chaos, world leaders would be wise to redouble efforts led by the United Nations to broker a power-sharing deal among warring factions.
A few of the Islamist groups vying for control in Libya have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and carried out the type of barbaric executions that have galvanized international support for the military campaign against the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria. The growth and radicalization of Islamist groups raise the possibility that large parts of Libya could become a satellite of the Islamic State.
“Libya has the same features of potentially becoming as bad as what we’re seeing in Iraq and Syria,” Bernardino León, the United Nations envoy to Libya, said in an interview. “The difference is that Libya is just a few miles away from Europe.” [Continue reading…]
Jenan Moussa sardonically observes:
What does #Libya teach us? With intervention, you get ISIS. What does #Syria teach us? Without intervention, you get ISIS. #sigh
Now as always, those who reflexively argue against all forms of intervention will maintain the conceit that to do nothing is to do no harm. The unspoken assumption is: if we do nothing, we will suffer no harm. It’s not so much a mind your own business, live and let live, philosophy. More like, live and let die.
But as Richard Haass points out, intervention does not simply involve a binary choice:
real #Libya scandal is not Benghazi but rather decisions to intervene & then walk away. result is 3 failed states http://t.co/LF44DGDOqE
When Barack Obama reluctantly led from behind in 2011, joining in the NATO intervention which toppled Gaddafi, his attention was much more keenly focused on domestic politics and an upcoming election, than it was on the fate of Libya. He placed higher value on the intervention ending than on what might follow. That Libyan oil quickly started flowing again looked like a success — from a Western and myopic vantage point.
But even though Libyans understandably did not want to see international powers controlling what essentially amounted to the construction of a new state, it seems like the international community missed an opportunity to use oil revenues as a political tool. If revenues had been paid into a UN-controlled account instead of directly to the National Oil Company, their release to the central bank and government could have been made contingent on a set of political milestones being passed such as disarming the militias.
The Libyan economy is totally dependent on oil and the desire to continue selling oil is the one common interest that unites all political factions. Left to their own devises, each will vie for control of the oil supply and revenues. But the power to determine whether oil is a source of division or unity could rest in the hands of the buyers. The world can manage without Libyan oil but Libya can’t survive without selling oil.
No one — apart from ISIS — has an interest in Libya becoming an irretrievably failed state.
The Economist has ingeniously created a way of making Russian defense spending look much greater than European NATO defense spending, even though the latter is almost four times as much as the former:
