Author Archives: Paul Woodward

NYT reporters parrot unsubstantiated statements from U.S. counterterrorism officials. What’s new?

A report in the New York Times claims in its opening paragraph:

The younger of the two brothers who killed 12 people in Paris last week most likely used his older brother’s passport in 2011 to travel to Yemen, where he received training and $20,000 from Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, presumably to finance attacks when he returned home to France.

The source of that information is presumably the American counterterrorism officials referred to in the second paragraph.

Reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti, too busy scribbling their notes, apparently didn’t bother asking these officials how they identified the money trail.

That’s an important question, because an alternative money trail has already been reported that has no apparent connection to AQAP.

French media have reported that Amedy Coulibaly — who in a video declared his affiliation with ISIS — purchased the weapons, used both by him and the Kouachi brothers, from an arms dealer in Brussels and that he paid for these with:

a standard loan of 6,000 euros ($7,050) that Coulibaly took out on December 4 from the French financial-services firm Cofidis. He used his real name but falsely stated his monthly income on the loan declaration, a statement the company didn’t bother to check, the reports say.

Whereas the New York Times reports receipt of the money and its amount as fact, CNN — no doubt briefed by the same officials — makes it somewhat clearer that this information is quite speculative:

U.S. officials have told CNN it’s believed that when Cherif Kouachi traveled to Yemen in 2011, he returned carrying money from AQAP earmarked to carry out the attack. Investigators said the terrorist group could have given as much as $20,000, but the exact amount has not been verified. [Emphasis mine.]

This isn’t a money trail — it’s speculation. And even if AQAP did put up some seed capital, that was four years ago. In the intervening period, the gunmen seem to have been busy engaged in their own entrepreneurial efforts:

Former drug-dealing associates of Coulibaly told AP he was selling marijuana and hashish in the Paris suburbs as recently as a month ago. Multiple French news accounts have said the Kouachi brothers sold knockoff sporting goods made in China.

Another gaping hole in the NYT report is its failure to analyze the AQAP videos — there were two.

The first video, released on January 9, praised the attacks but made no claim of responsibility. Were its makers restrained by their own modesty? The second video, which does claim that AQAP funded and directed the operation, provides no evidence to support these claims.

The top spokesman for the Yemen branch of al-Qaida publicly took credit Wednesday for the bloody attack on a French satirical newspaper, confirming a statement that had been emailed to reporters last week.

But the 11-minute video provided no hard evidence for its claims, including that the operation had been arranged by the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki directly with the two brothers who carried it out before Awlaki was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

The video includes frames showing Awlaki but none of him with the brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, nor any images of the Kouachis that haven’t been shown on Western news broadcasts for days.

So it seems premature for the New York Times to start talking about how the attacks might:

serve as a reminder of the continued danger from the group [AQAP] at a time when much of the attention of Europe and the United States has shifted to the Islamic State, the militant organization that controls large swaths of Syria and Iraq and has become notorious for beheading hostages.

The NYT report also makes a claim that I have not seen elsewhere:

In repeated statements before they were killed by the police, the Kouachi brothers said they had carried out the attack on behalf of the Qaeda branch in Yemen, saying it was in part to avenge the death of Mr. Awlaki.

Are we to suppose that Awlaki was funding an operation to avenge his own death before he had been killed?

Based on the information that has been reported so far — and obviously, new information might significantly change this picture — the evidence seems to lean fairly strongly in the direction that the Paris attacks should be seen to have been inspired rather than directed by Al Qaeda.

And to the extent that Anwar al-Awlaki played a pivotal role in these attacks, the lesson — a lesson that should be reflected on by President Obama and the commanders of future drone strikes — is that Awlaki’s capacity to inspire terrorist attacks seems to be just as strong now as it was when he was alive.

Indeed, the mixed messages coming from AQAP might reflect an internal debate on whether it can wield more power as an inspirational force or alternatively needs to sustain the perception that it retains control over operations carried out in its name.

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Erdogan is losing touch with reality


Mahmoud Abbas usually looks miserable but this time he looks genuinely perplexed — as though he just got transported through a time-warp and landed on another planet.

Kadri Gursel writes: In Turkish culture, the “gate” image is known to symbolize power and dominance. In President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “New Turkey,” it is being reinforced with the image of “stairs,” symbolizing the ascent to “prosperity and power.” In this context, Turkey’s newest and most famous staircase is in Erdogan’s pompous new 1,150-room palace. Made of fancy gray marble, the 25-step stairway leads from the palace’s ground floor ceremonial entrance up to the official presidential quarters.

The international audience had a first glimpse of the palace’s staircase on Oct. 31 when The New York Times published a picture of Erdogan posing alone in front of it. On Jan. 12, the same staircase made the headlines again as 16 men, clad in ancient eastern warrior costumes and holding replica swords, maces and spears, lined up on both sides of the staircase, eight on each side. Some were bedecked in chain mail and helmets, sporting fake mustaches and beards.

Climbing down between the warriors in the glimmer of their armor — some golden, others chromate — Erdogan walked to the ceremonial door to greet his guest, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The pair saluted the Presidential Guard of Honor before walking to the bottom of the staircase, where they posed for a picture, shaking hands. The scene looked surreal with the costumed men — believed to represent Turkic-Mongolian and Ottoman warriors — standing proudly upright in the background. [Continue reading…]

Today’s Zaman reports: Soldiers in the presidential palace wearing different ceremonial clothes of various Turkic tribes — photos of which garnered laughter in Turkey and around the world when they were released on Monday — will remain permanent, the Turkish media said, citing presidential sources.

The sources said it was still not clear how the soldiers will be displayed, but the Presidency will continue to have the same dressed-up soldiers at future ceremonies while hosting foreign state dignitaries.

The Independent reports: The Turkish president has accused the West of “playing games” with Muslims in the wake of the Paris attacks and urged its governments to crack down on Islamophobia.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan chided the French security services for not preventing the attack on the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and said that Muslims would suffer as a result of the murders.

“French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price. That’s very meaningful … Doesn’t their intelligence organisation track those who leave prison?” he said.

He cited an increase in attacks on mosques after the incidents as indicative of double standards in France and other countries.

“The West’s hypocrisy is obvious. As Muslims, we’ve never taken part in terrorist massacres. Behind these lie racism, hate speech and Islamophobia,” Erdoğan said.

When Erdogan says that “as Muslims, we’ve never taken part in terrorist massacres,” he’s reiterating the conspiracy theory widely promoted in the Middle East over the last decade that terrorism is instigated by non-Muslims — it’s usually Mossad or the CIA — and this is all part of a Western/Zionist effort to suppress Muslims and vilify Islam.

During this period, American and Israeli wars in which hundreds of thousands of Muslims have died, have helped reinforce the narrative.

But we’re now living in the age of ISIS and those who want to keep on peddling the line that Muslims are only victims and never perpetrators of gruesome brutality, are either being disingenuous or they’re delusional.

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Steven Emerson: Fox News ‘terrorism expert’ and ‘complete idiot’

Steven Emerson, who describes himself as “one of the leading authorities on Islamic extremist networks, financing and operations,” and is treated as such by Fox News had this to say after the Charlie Hebdo shootings:

Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, completely Muslim! Naturally, this is a source of much city pride. Here’s the reaction from “Mobeen” (Gunam Khan):

(Since I’m not a brummie, I can’t make out everything this character is saying, but I get the gist of it. And since humor doesn’t often feature on this site, for those who don’t already get it, Khan is a stand-up comic.)

It wasn’t long before British Prime Minister David Cameron and others pointed out that Emerson is, in the PM’s words, “a complete idiot.”

Emerson was asked on the BBC how he reached his conclusions and how he feels about being called “a complete idiot.”

Needless to say, Emerson’s comments have generated an abundance of priceless tweets:

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Charlie Hebdo promotes radical idea: forgiveness

The Guardian reports: The front cover of Wednesday’s edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the first since last week’s attack on its Paris offices that left 12 people dead, is a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.

The cover shows the prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign reading “Je suis Charlie” in sympathy with the dead journalists. The headline says “All is forgiven”.

Zineb El Rhazoui, a surviving columnist at Charlie Hebdo magazine who worked on the new issue, said the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week, saying she did not feel hate towards Chérif and Saïd Kouachi despite their deadly attack on the magazine, and urged Muslims to accept humour.

“We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The angle much of the media wants to play on this story is that publishing another cartoon of the prophet Muhammad is yet another provocation.

Britain’s Anjem Choudray wants to up the ante a few notches more and says this is an “act of war.”

But let’s take Rhazoui at her word and see this cover as a call to forgiveness. (During the attack, she was vacationing in her native Morocco.)

Christians can’t make an exclusive claim on forgiveness as a spiritual value, yet there probably isn’t any other religion that makes forgiveness so central to its message.

So here’s the irony: a stridently secular magazine is promoting a message that’s more Christian than anything one regularly hears from the camp that so often sees its Christian culture and Western values threatened by Islam.

The cover image is also a taunt to the media and everyone else who has so vigorously been declaring “Je suis Charlie” for the last week. How do we defend free speech while objecting to its practice?

Yet the image and text are ambiguous. Most viewers will see it without hearing Rhazoui’s interpretation and like Joseph Harker, many will wonder: who is being forgiven?

Is this aimed at the killers – which would be strange because they barely deserve this after their acts of terror, and they are not referenced in the drawing?

More likely, given the image of the prophet, it’s aimed at Muslims in general. But why do Muslims need to be forgiven?

“All is forgiven” can be read as a Christian message in which case it might seem directed at Muslims, but it’s coming from a very secular and satirical magazine so it might be better read as a challenge to the assumptions we make about power dynamics.

The popular response to terrorism — the one that George Bush reflexively tapped into on 9/11 — was that we must fight back. We either crush them or they will crush us.

Ultimately the drive to survive will always be more powerful than the willingness to forgive, but the deception of terrorism is that by its very nature it can never pose a threat as large as the one it assumes.

Our ability to forgive does not depend on us being willing to martyr ourselves, but simply that we retain a sense of proportion.

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Netanyahu greeted by French Jews who seem to have no intention of fleeing to Israel

French President Francois Hollande requested Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to attend yesterday’s march in Paris:

Hollande wanted the event to focus on demonstrating solidarity with France, and to avoid anything liable to divert attention to other controversial issues, like Jewish-Muslim relations or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Audibert said that Hollande hoped that Netanyahu would understand the difficulties his arrival might pose and would announce that he would not be attending.

The source noted that one of the French concerns – not conveyed to representatives of the Israeli government – was that Netanyahu would take advantage of the event for campaign purposes and make speeches, especially about the Jews of France. Such statements, the Elysee Palace feared, would hurt the demonstration of solidarity the French government was trying to promote as part of dealing with the terror attacks.

Netanyahu came anyway and one of his first challenges was to elbow his way to the front:

As Lisa Goldman writes:

The day of bad behavior was just getting started. That evening, after a meeting with Jewish community leaders (who later said they wished Netanyahu would stop telling the Jews of France that they should all move to Israel), Netanyahu gave a speech at Paris’s main synagogue. The crowd greeted him with enthusiastic cheers and listened warmly as he told them that their true home was in Israel, which was waiting with open arms to embrace them.

But in a photograph of the capacity crowd in the synagogue sanctuary tweeted by foreign ministry spokesperson Ofir Gindelman, one can see only French flags, with not a single Israeli flag visible. This is a remarkable contrast with U.S. synagogues, where the pulpit is usually decorated with American and Israeli flags. But the piece de resistance came immediately after Netanyahu had finished delivering his speech, and had already turned his back on the crowd to leave. Before he could step down from the bimah, one of the Jewish leaders grabbed a microphone and launched into a spontaneous rendition of the French national anthem. Not Hatikvah, but the Marseillaise. Within seconds the entire audience had joined in, singing loudly and emotionally.

Gal Beckerman says:

Whether you think Israel has brought this upon itself or that it is being judged by a grossly unfair double standard, when the Israeli prime minister is asked not to attend a march celebrating solidarity with Western values because his presence would be an irritant, there’s a problem.

As far as double standards go, which other state is there that can send its prime minister to visit a close ally where he then encourages some of its citizens to flee from their own country? To view that kind of behavior as an irritation seems like quite an understatement.

By the time Netanyahu got back to Israel he was probably wishing he’d stayed home. Haaretz reported:

Netanyahu’s biggest humiliation was a video that has since gone viral, in which he is seen waiting for a bus to take him to the rally, after missing the bus that ferried other world leaders to the march.

The footage, captured by a French TV station, is remarkable: The prime minister of Israel looks nervous, dejected, beaten down, surrounded by his security detail yet still standing in the middle of the street, looking exposed to danger in a way world leaders should never be. Netanyahu appears furious, annoyed, confused, trying to busy himself with talking on his phone or fixing his hair, constantly looking over his shoulder to check whether his bodyguards are still there. Even the French news anchors had to sympathize with his distress.

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Charlie Hebdo: Why not mock Al Qaeda and ISIS?

IBT reports: The next issue of Charlie Hebdo will feature cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed in the first copy of the satirical magazine to be published after the massacre of its cartoonists and other staff by terrorists enraged by previous cartoons of Islam’s most sacred figure.

Lawyers announced the typically combative move as they prepared a bumper issue of one million copies which will hit the news stands on Wednesday (14 January), exactly one week after gunmen claiming to be members of al-Qaeda stormed Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices, killing 12 people.

“We will not give in to anything,” Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer, Richard Malka, told Le Figaro. “The spirit of ‘Je suis Charlie [I am Charlie] also means the right to blasphemy”.

I understand that the magazine refuses to cower in the face of the most extreme form of intimidation, but satire is a precision weapon. It won’t have the right effect if it’s aimed at the wrong target.

Last week, no one in Paris got killed by the Prophet Mohammed. France is not under attack from Islam.

The killers were nihilistic, egotistical, young hotheads who by their own declarations acted in the name of Al Qaeda and ISIS and whose actions were applauded by the supporters of these two groups.

Satirists short on ideas for skewering those who deserve to be mocked, only need to turn to social media where an endless supply of often funny and often tasteless parody can be found from the likes of @CaliphIbrahimAR and @ISIS_Med.

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Anonymous ‘AQAP source’ leaks information about group’s role in Charlie Hebdo?

Someone alleged to be a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula says the group directed the Paris attack this week “as revenge for the honor” of the Prophet Muhammad, according to the Associated Press. “The member provided the statement on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized by the group to give his name.”

Another statement also provided by an anonymous “AQAP source” to The Intercept said: “Do not look for links or affiliation with Jihadi fronts. It is enough they are Muslims. They are Mujahideen. This is the Jihad of the Ummah.”

This “source” appears to be someone who tweets as @AL_hezbr1. Since neither the AP nor The Intercept offer any indication as to how or if they know that their source actually belongs to AQAP, it sounds like more accurate reporting would require referring to an anonymous source who claims to be a member of AQAP. But of course, a report that was sourced to some guy on Twitter probably wouldn’t get published.

A video released today by AQAP’s official media contains a statement by Harith al-Nazari its top sharia official who apparently praises the Paris attack without claiming responsibility.


Before he was killed today, Cherif Kouachi told BMFTV, a CNN affiliate in France, “I was sent, me, Cherif Kouachi, by al Qaeda in Yemen. I went there and Sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki financed my trip.”

The Long War Journal reports:

Separately, BMFTV was also in contact today with Amedy Coulibaly, who was not involved in the assault on Charlie Hebdo, but is suspected of killing a Paris police officer and holding hostages at a kosher market.

Coulibaly apparently did not mention any ties to AQAP, but did say he was a member of the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that claims to rule over parts of Iraq and Syria as a “caliphate.” Coulibaly also claimed that he had coordinated his actions with the Kouachi brothers.

It is not clear at this point if Coulibaly had any ties to the Islamic State, or was simply claiming an affiliation.

That the gunmen had ties to AQAP and ISIS seems unlikely.

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Submission

I am powerless and my life is out of control.
I believe a higher power can restore my sanity.
I submit to the will of God, the only power that can guide my life.

OK. I neither believe in God nor am I an alcoholic, but I based the lines above on the first three steps of the twelve-step program created by Alcoholics Anonymous just to convey the fact that submission to the will of God is a practice (or aspiration) that shapes the lives of millions of Americans — people who might not necessarily describe themselves as religious.

Soumission (Submission) is the title of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel — a book which even before its release this week and before the Charlie Hebdo shootings took place, had stirred a huge amount of controversy in France since it depicts a not-too-distant future in which the French submit to Islamic rule.

Given that premise, it’s not hard to see why Houellebecq is being accused of pandering to the fears of the far right — of those who believe in the National Front’s slogan, “France for the French.” But while Houellebecq’s appetite for controversy is undeniable, he says he’s neither trying to defend secularism nor fuel Islamophobia.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Houellebecq says that he thought he was an atheist but was really an agnostic.

Usually that word serves as a screen for atheism but not, I think, in my case. When, in the light of what I know, I reexamine the question whether there is a creator, a cosmic order, that kind of thing, I realize that I don’t actually have an answer.

The Economist summarizes Soumission in this way:

The novel, which has not yet been translated into English, is narrated by François, a literature professor at the Sorbonne, who drifts between casual sex and microwaved ready-made meals in a state of wry detachment and ennui. Then, in an imaginary France of 2022, a political earthquake shakes him out of his torpor. The two mainstream parties, on the left and the right, are eliminated in the first round of a presidential election. This leaves French voters with the choice between Marine Le Pen’s populist National Front—and the Muslim Fraternity, a new party led by Mohammed Ben Abbes. Thanks to an anti-Le Pen front, Mr Ben Abbes is elected and thus begins Muslim rule.

After a period of disorder, France returns to a strange calm under its apparently moderate new Muslim president; and François, who fled briefly, returns to Paris. But the city, and his university, are unrecognisable. More women are veiled, and give up work to look after their menfolk (helping to bring down France’s unemployment rate). Polygamy is made legal. France embarks on a geopolitical project to merge Europe with Muslim Mediterranean states. Saudi Arabia has poured petrodollars into better pay for professors and posh apartments on the city’s left bank. And his own university has been rebranded the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne. Will François, an atheist, resist, or flee the new regime or compromise with it?

While this sounds like a graphic representation of Islamophobic fears prevalent not only in France but across much of Europe, Houellebecq says:

I tried to put myself in the place of a Muslim, and I realized that, in reality, they are in a totally schizophrenic situation. Because overall Muslims aren’t interested in economic issues, their big issues are what we nowadays call societal issues. On these issues, obviously, they are very far from the left and even further from the Green Party. Just think of gay marriage and you’ll see what I mean, but the same is true across the board. And one doesn’t really see why they’d vote for the right, much less for the extreme right, which utterly rejects them. So if a Muslim wants to vote, what’s he supposed to do? The truth is, he’s in an impossible situation. He has no representation whatsoever.

I think there is a real need for God and that the return of religion is not a slogan but a reality, and that it is very much on the rise.

That hypothesis is central to the book, but we know that it has been discredited for many years by numerous researchers, who have shown that we are actually witnessing a progressive secularization of Islam, and that violence and radicalism should be understood as the death throes of Islamism. That is the argument made by Olivier Roy, and many other people who have worked on this question for more than twenty years.

This is not what I have observed, although in North and South America, Islam has benefited less than the evangelicals. This is not a French phenomenon, it’s almost global. I don’t know about Asia, but the case of Africa is interesting because there you have the two great religious powers on the rise — evangelical Christianity and Islam. I remain in many ways a Comtean, and I don’t believe that a society can survive without religion.

[I]n your book you describe, in a very blurry and vague way, various world events, and yet the reader never knows quite what these are. This takes us into the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it, into the politics of fear.

Yes, perhaps. Yes, the book has a scary side. I use scare tactics.

Like imagining the prospect of Islam taking over the country?

Actually, it’s not clear what we are meant to be afraid of, nativists or Muslims. I leave that unresolved.

Have you asked yourself what the effect might be of a novel based on such a hypothesis?

None. No effect whatsoever.

You don’t think it will help reinforce the image of France that I just described, in which Islam hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles, like the most frightening thing of all?

In any case, that’s pretty much all the media talks about, they couldn’t talk about it more. It would be impossible to talk about it more than they already do, so my book won’t have any effect.

Doesn’t it make you want to write about something else so as not to join the pack?

No, part of my work is to talk about what everyone is talking about, objectively. I belong to my own time.

[Y]our book describes the replacement of the Catholic religion by Islam.

No. My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.

You who have become an agnostic, you can look on cheerfully and watch the destruction of Enlightenment philosophy?

Yes. It has to happen sometime and it might as well be now. In this sense, too, I am a Comtean. We are in what he calls the metaphysical stage, which began in the Middle Ages and whose whole point was to destroy the phase that preceded it. In itself, it can produce nothing, just emptiness and unhappiness. So yes, I am hostile to Enlightenment philosophy, I need to make that perfectly clear.

[I]f Catholicism doesn’t work, that’s because it’s already run its course, it seems to belong to the past, it has defeated itself. Islam is an image of the future. Why has the idea of the Nation stalled out? Because it’s been abused too long.

Some might be surprised that you chose to go in this direction when your last book was greeted as such a triumph that it silenced your critics.

The true answer is that, frankly, I didn’t choose. The book started with a conversion to Catholicism that should have taken place but didn’t.

Isn’t there something despairing about this gesture, which you didn’t really choose?

The despair comes from saying good-bye to a civilization, however ancient. But in the end the Koran turns out to be much better than I thought, now that I’ve reread it — or rather, read it. The most obvious conclusion is that the jihadists are bad Muslims. Obviously, as with all religious texts, there is room for interpretation, but an honest reading will conclude that a holy war of aggression is not generally sanctioned, prayer alone is valid. So you might say I’ve changed my opinion. That’s why I don’t feel that I’m writing out of fear.

In its crudest expressions, the Clash of Cultures discourse presents a Christian West threatened by Islam, but many of those who reject this narrative use one that is no less polarizing. It presents secular moderates challenged by Islamic extremists — it’s still Religion vs. The Enlightenment, superstition vs. reason.

Much as the West promotes the idea of religious freedom in the context of civil liberties, religion is meant to be a private affair that doesn’t intrude into the social sphere outside the carefully circumscribed territories of church, temple, and mosque. We expect religious freedom to be coupled with religious restraint.

The real struggle, it seems to me, is not ultimately philosophical and theological — it’s not about the existence or non-existence of God. It’s about values.

What count are not values that serve as emblems of identity (often wrapped around nationalism), but instead those that guide individual action and shape society.

We profess values which are libertarian and egalitarian and yet have created societies in which the guiding values are those of materialism, competition, and personal autonomy — values that are all socially corrosive.

Society is relentlessly being atomized, reduced to a social unit of one, captured in the lonely image of the selfie. This is what we’ve been sold and what we’ve bought, but I don’t think it’s what we want.

Spellbound by technological progress, we have neither expected nor demanded that material advances should lead to social advances — that better equipped societies should also be better functioning, happier, more caring societies.

What the false promise of materially sustained, individual autonomy has created is the expectation that the more control we possess over life, the better it will get. We imagine that we must either be in control or fall under control.

From this vantage point, the concept of submission provokes fears of domination, and yet what it really all it means is to come into alignment with the way things are.

Where religion intrudes and so often fails is through the forcible imposition of rigid representations of such an alignment. But submission itself means seeing we belong to life — something that cannot be possessed or controlled.

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Double standards on free speech

Maurice Sinet just turned 86. In 2008 he wrote a column in which he expressed views described by Claude Askolovitch, a high-profile political commentator in France, as being as anti-Semitic. This later resulted in Sinet facing charges of “inciting racial hatred.”

He also received a death threat posted on a Jewish Defense League website, saying: “20 centimeters of stainless steel in the gut, that should teach the bastard to stop and think.”

Sinet, who works under the pen name Siné, got fired from his job but later won a €40,000 court judgment against his former publisher for wrongful termination.

Had he not been fired, he might now be dead — his employer was the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Is there a double standard in the West when it comes to alleged anti-Semitism versus insults to Islam? Absolutely.

To a great extent, the media and those engaged in public discourse police themselves faithfully and fearfully because even if being accused of anti-Semitism doesn’t typically put the target’s life in danger it can certainly destroy someone’s career.

What is overtly a campaign of intimidation continues to be highly effective. Moreover, as an accusation explicit or implied, this is now the weapon of choice for deflecting criticisms of Israel.


But as MJ Rosenberg notes:


Among those concerned that the response to the Paris attacks is a reflection of Western double standards is a sheikh in Australia called Ustadh Mohammed Junaid Thorne. He tweets:


On Facebook the sheikh amplifies:

They were warned and even threatened more than once. On one occasion, their premises was fire-bombed, yet they forbade to learn a lesson. I’m not condoning what happened, but I’m just stating that there must be a line/limit for freedom of speech, and when people or religions are being affected, the boundaries shouldn’t be crossed.

He’s “not condoning” — just implying the journalists at Charlie Hebdo got what they deserved?

Unless you’re among those who believe that an insult warrants an execution, I’d say that focusing on Western hypocrisy right now — real as it is — risks offering excuses for murder.

After the attacks, Maurice Sinet wrote: “It is too much, it’s unbearable, abominable, inhuman. I have no words to describe how devastated and sad I am.”

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How to spot terrorism

ter·ror·ism noun: the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Yesterday, when asked whether he viewed the Paris attack as an act of terrorism, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told ABC News: “Based on what we know right now it does seem like that is what we are confronting here, and this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn and if based on this investigation, it turns out to be an act of terrorism, we would condemn it with the strongest possible terms.”

I’m all in favor of avoiding rushing to judgement, but by the time Earnest spoke, as much of the world had already seen video footage of the gunmen conducting their operation and the target of their attack was known, it didn’t require the conclusion of an investigation to establish that this was an act of terrorism. Part of the purpose of the ongoing investigation must be to establish the motives of the suspects and what kind of organizational support they had, but I don’t think anyone in France is trying to figure out whether this was terrorism.

Not long after Earnest was hesitant about using the word “terrorism,” President Obama used it himself — not because of significant advances in the investigation, but most likely because he realized he’d sound like an idiot if he refused to use the expression.

It’s one thing to argue that terrorism is a term too imprecise to be clearly defined in law, yet in everyday language — even that used by a White House press secretary — there should be neither confusion nor controversy in calling yesterday’s bloodbath an act of terrorism.

Moreover, a White House that only two weeks ago exercised very little caution when concluding that North Korea instigated the Sony hacking — even though no hard evidence has been made public to back up this claim and an FBI investigation is still ongoing — seems to attach little value to its own credibility. Either that, or it sees value in confusion.

Lastly, here’s a nitpicky note for Earnest and the many others who believe that religions and other belief systems have tenants. What would those be? The occupants of a belief system?

The correct term is tenet — noun: a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.

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How to talk about a hashtag without using it. Time for metahashtags?

My heart sank when I saw #KillAllMuslims was trending yesterday. But then I saw how it was being used. Nearly all the tweets were condemning the hashtag with tweets like this:


And this:


Twitter needs to create metahashtags.

They would work something like this: Put a hashtag in front of a hashtag creating a metahashtag like ##KillAllMuslims. The extra hashtag would mean that this is a hashtag about a hashtag.

Metahashtags should be counted separately from hashtags in which case in the current situation it might be apparent that what is trending is conversation about the hashtag; not the hashtag itself.

If anyone at Twitter sees this, why not toss the idea around. The need seems to be real and the coding couldn’t be that difficult — at least in the eyes of someone who writes no code 😉

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Who are the #CharlieHebdo killers?

One of the hallmarks of terrorism is that provokes its audience to prematurely assign meaning.

Today’s brutal attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has swiftly been taken to be an attack on free speech and this meaning seems so obvious, no one pauses to consider whether it is accurate.

The attackers identities remain unknown but there is little reason to doubt that they are Islamic extremists of some description. Exactly who is a detail that is probably of less concern to those whose first need is to condemn violence and to defend free speech.

I neither doubt the sincerity of these condemnations nor the need to defend free speech, but it’s important to try and understand exactly what happened.

A few hours before the attack, the magazine tweeted:

The caption says “Greetings from al-Baghdadi as well” and the ISIS leader is saying, “…and especially health.” The magazine adds, “Best wishes, by the way.”

But Kim Willsher at The Guardian notes this important detail about the timing of the attack:


If the attackers had studied the work schedule of the journalists that carefully, it’s reasonable to infer that this operation was painstakingly planned and its occurrence right after the Baghdadi tweet was either pure coincidence or just a useful pretext.

It’s now reported that the gunmen told a bystander that the attack was carried out by Al-Qaeda in Yemen. The gunmen have been described as wearing military dress and armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher.


Drawing a distinction between AQAP and ISIS may seem like a distinction without a difference. But the two jihadist groups have different objectives and competing interests.

In late November, NBC News reported:

Escalating a war of words between terrorism’s old and new schools, an Islamic scholar with al Qaeda’s Yemen-based offshoot on Friday accused ISIS of “planting … disunity” among the various Islamic extremist factions fighting to topple the Syrian government and rejcted the authority of the Iraq- and Syria-based group’s self-declared caliphate.

Harith Al-Nadhari, a spiritual leader and Shariah law scholar with the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said in a videotape released on YouTube and other social media that the infighting among Syrian rebel groups was “the biggest disaster that hit the Ummah (Arabic for the Muslim community) at this stage.”

He blamed ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, for the divisions, saying that it had exported “infighting and fitna (Arabic for strife) to other fronts,” according to a translation of his comments by Flashpoint Partners, which monitors terrorist group’s online communications.

Al-Nadhari also criticized ISIS for what he described as an overreach by calling for Muslims everywhere to “pledge allegiance to the caliph.”

While AQAP acuses ISIS of sowing discord between Muslims, the Charlie Hebdo attack is clearly aimed at sharpening the divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims and between the East and the West.

To the extent that this message resonates with those whose support for ISIS has become shaky, the attack may serve a strategic goal: to present al Qaeda rather than ISIS as the preeminent defender of Muslims.

An ISIS critic, noting the difference in expressions of concern about deaths in Syria versus those in Paris, tweets:


At the same time, there is also apparently an ongoing effort to use the attack to coral support for ISIS:


Naturally, the conspiracy theorists — yet to agree on their narrative — are busy at work:


Meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldberg tweets:


Many have retweeted a 2012 New Yorker cartoon which depicts the price of capitulating to the opponents of free speech.


And in defense of the satirists, it’s worth noting that as much as they were criticized for being provocative, their sharp statements were not lacking in nuance:


And neither was their critical focus reserved for Islam:


Before too many voices get raised in an unreflective and uninformed defense of Western ideals, let’s hope the gunmen are caught and they are carefully questioned.

An eyewitness description of the attack may turn out to be quite significant:

“Everything happened very calmly, without shouting, without insults.”

That the attackers operated with clinical efficiency suggests that their operation was not only planned meticulously but there was probably as much thought put into anticipating its effect.

That’s why I’m inclined to think that this was designed not simply to send a narrow message — this is the price for insulting Islam — but to have a much wider impact, deepening the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.

It’s largely our choice whether the attack has this effect.

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2014: A year of feminist insurrection against male violence

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” [Source]

Rebecca Solnit writes:

I have been waiting all my life for what 2014 has brought. It has been a year of feminist insurrection against male violence: a year of mounting refusal to be silent, refusal to let our lives and torments be erased or dismissed. It has not been a harmonious time, but harmony is often purchased by suppressing those with something to say. It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said – not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before.

It was a watershed year for women, and for feminism, as we refused to accept the pandemic of violence against women – the rape, the murder, the beatings, the harassment on the streets and the threats online.

Further into her essay, Solnit says:

Sometimes at big political demonstrations – against the war in Iraq in early 2003, for example – the thousands of placards with handwritten statements, jokes, and facts, for all their brevity, constitute a cumulative critique that covers a lot of angles. Social media can do the same, building arguments comment by comment, challenging, testing, reinforcing and circulating the longer arguments in blogs, essays and reports. It’s like a barn-building for ideas: innumerable people bring their experiences, insights, analysis, new terms and frameworks. These then become part of the fabric of everyday life, and when that happens, the world has changed. Then, down the road, what was once a radical idea becomes so woven into everyday life that people imagine that it is self-evident and what everyone always knew. But it’s not; it’s the result of a struggle – of ideas and voices, not of violence.

Strangely, in a piece that runs close to 5,000 words, the women who have been the targets of ISIS’s violence and the women who have been fighting against ISIS earned not a single mention.

Silence leaves a vacuum that can only be filled with speculation, but the reason for this omission seems to be spelt out in the terms by which Solnit describes effective political activism: it is defined by the absence of violence.

But did this Yazidi girl betray feminism by picking up an AK-47?


Since the battle for Kobane began and due to its convenient location right next to the Turkish border gained several weeks of intense international media attention — the battle continues but the media has mostly lost interest — the heroism of Kurdish women has been highlighted.

Zîlan Diyar, a Kurdish guerrilla fighter, wrote last month:

The whole world is talking about us, Kurdish women. It has become a common phenomenon to come across news about women fighters in magazines, papers, and news outlets. Televisions, news sites, and social media are filled with words of praise. They take photos of these women’s determined, hopeful, and radiant glances. To them, our rooted tradition is a reality that they only recently started to know. They are impressed with everything. The women’s laughter, naturalness, long braids, and the details of their young lives feel like hands extending to those struggling in the waters of despair. There are even some, who are so inspired by the clothes that the women are wearing, that they want to start a new fashion trend! They are amazed by these women, who fight against the men that want to paint the colors of the Middle East black, and wonder where they get their courage from, how they can laugh so sincerely. And I wonder about them. I am surprised at how they noticed us so late, at how they never knew about us. I wonder how they were so late to hear the voices of the many valiant women who expanded the borders of courage, belief, patience, hope, and beauty.

The fact that Solnit is not talking about Kurdish women, seems to imply that for her and perhaps many other activists in the West, the use of violence can never be defended.

If this interpretation is correct, this dedication to the principle of non-violence seems to me less a matter of principle than a luxury only available to those whose own lives are not under immediate threat.

I also have to wonder whether those who have chosen to ignore the Kurds, failed to notice that in Rojava — the Kurdish-controlled part of Syria — a political experiment has been underway for the last three years that deserves the interest and support of anyone who believes in the creation of an egalitarian and truly democratic society.

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U.S. imposes sanctions on North Korea while ‘FBI continues its investigation’ into Sony attack

“Ongoing investigation” is a stock phrase frequently used by government officials when they want to duck awkward questions.

“I can’t really comment on that while there is an ongoing investigation …” etc, etc.

When it comes to the Sony hacking however, we’ve entered new political and legal territory.

Secretary of the Treasury Jacob J. Lew announced today that, “Even as the FBI continues its investigation into the cyber-attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment,” the U.S. has already decided to impose sanctions on North Korea.

This is like a trial in which midway through the proceedings, the judge interrupts the prosecution and defense and says, “I still intend to complete the trial but first I’ll pass sentence on the accused and then we can continue.”

The New York Times reports: The Obama administration doubled down on Friday on its allegation that North Korea’s leadership was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures as it announced new sanctions on 10 senior North Korean officials and several organizations. Administration officials said the action was part of what President Obama promised would be a “proportional response” against the country.

But White House officials said there was no evidence that the 10 officials took part in ordering or planning the Sony attack, although they described them as central to a number of provocative actions against the United States.

“It’s a first step,” one of the officials said. “The administration felt that it had to do something to stay on point. This is certainly not the end for them.”

I guess the rationale here is that the North Koreans deserve to be punished, because even if it turns out they didn’t commit the crime, this is the kind of thing they would do if they could.

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Is Glenn Greenwald still in bed with Sony?

Five weeks after the Sony hacking story broke, Glenn Greenwald has leapt into the fray with this: “North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims.”

Wow! American journalists still haven’t broken their habit of mindlessly repeating what U.S. government officials tell them.

Thanks for pointing that out Glenn. Who would have imagined that this still happens in America today?

I guess I missed how media coverage of this story has been so corrupt because I was relying on reporting from hard-hitting alternative investigative news organizations like CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Daily Beast, all of who showed why there were lots of reasons to doubt the official story.

The reason I’ve eagerly awaited Greenwald’s angle on this story is because he has a personal interest in how this all plays out.

The Intercept reported that Sony has scheduled to send a screenwriter to Brazil to meet with Greenwald this month.

Last March, Sony optioned the rights to turn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide, into a movie. But emails leaked from the November hacking revealed that Sony executives along with George Clooney — a champion of the project — have concluded they can’t successfully compete with Oliver Stone whose own movie based on Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man will get released sooner than anything Sony can produce.

Clooney wrote:

Stone will do a hatchet job on the movie but it will still be the film of Snowdon….and even if we made a kick ass version it would be using all the same story points…

If Stone’s movie — hatchet job or not — turns out to be commercial success, Luke Harding will presumably be reaping some of the rewards even though he had a rather modest stake among those who have tried to own the Snowden story.

Even though the basis of Greenwald’s confidence is now hard to understand, on December 22, The Intercept reported that “he believes the movie is still going forward…”.

As the hacking story has played out in Hollywood, stars including some of those embarrassed by the revelations, have lined up to express their support for Sony’s management. One doesn’t have to be a cynic to perceive this as a shamelessly self-serving exercise designed to shore up future working relations. Even those who spoke out in defense of free speech, accusing Sony of a cowardly capitulation, clearly also had a commercial interest in defending their own movie projects.

In this context, it seems important to understand where Greenwald’s own commercial relationship with Sony currently stands.

This is what his latest post reveals:

[Blank space]

Sometimes, silence can say more than 2,000 words.

The Sony hacking story is a story about Sony and hacking, but for executives who have been doing all they could to ride this out without getting fired, welcome support can come in the form of stories that turn this into something else — a story, for instance, which casts this as yet another episode in the never-ending saga of corrupt journalism subservient to the national security state.

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The Intercept and others fall for a hoax Sony hacker ‘threat’

The Daily Mail reports: A hacking threat against CNN that rose to the FBI attention is actually a hoax, claims a freelance writer from Tennessee who is claiming responsibility for the post.

David Garrett Jr., from Nashville, says he we the one who posted to the anonymous site ‘pastebin’ claiming to be Sony hackers the ‘Guardians of Peace.’ It included the bizarre demand that CNN should turn over anchor Wolf Blitzer.

It is believed that the FBI issued a Joint Intelligence Bulletin based on that post that warned CNN and other media companies that hack attacks could be in the works.

Mr Garrett, who rights[sic] about security issues for Examiner.com, revealed himself on Twitter today after news media organizations, including Daily Mail Online, picked up the story about the FBI warning.

‘My fake pastbin post is being investigated by the FBI. I wrote for CNN to “give us the Wolf” and the FBI is actually taking it as a threat,’ he tweeted.

‘It was a joke. And to show that no one investigates anything. Everything is rumors. I had no idea it would be taken seriously.’

Judith Miller applauded The Intercept:


At this time The Intercept has so far failed to correct or update its original report:

intercept-hoaxed

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A war against childhood

isis-children

The Wall Street Journal reports: Jomah, a 17-year-old Syrian who joined Islamic State last year, sat in a circle of trainees for a lesson in beheading, a course taught to boys as young as 8.

Teachers brought in three frightened Syrian soldiers, who were jeered and forced to their knees. “It was like learning to chop an onion,” Jomah said. “You grab him by the forehead and then slowly slice across the neck.”

A teacher asked for volunteers and said, “Those who behead the infidels will receive gifts from God,” recalled Jomah, who didn’t want his full name revealed. The youngest boys shot up their hands and several were chosen to participate. Afterward, the teachers ordered the students to pass around the severed heads.

“I’d become desensitized by that time,” said Jomah, who has since defected to Turkey with his family. “The beheading videos they’d shown us helped.”

The enrollment of hundreds of boys in such militant training camps is another tragic facet of Syria’s nearly four-year-long civil war — and its impact could trouble the Middle East for years to come. Parents worry their boys will be forever lost to the indoctrination of Islamic State. [Continue reading…]

A TSG IntelBrief concludes:
• Through systemic indoctrination, intimidation, and extermination, violent extremist groups such as the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and both Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, are targeting children with unprecedented ferocity

• Children are no longer accidental casualties in extremist conflicts but rather they are a primary target

• Extremists are trying to steal the future away from vulnerable regions by stealing the future generation through relentless messaging and violence that separates the youth from their society, government, and culture

• The damage already done by the Syrian civil war, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, and violent extremist groups in in Pakistan pales in comparison to what is yet to come if even a small percentage of their focus on youth pays off.

In the midst of pervasive war-weariness and deeply felt opposition to military intervention following the war in Iraq, social media has not only desensitized children living under ISIS’s rule, serving as a primer on brutality, but it has also desensitized opponents of war.

Images which provoke instinctive revulsion, trigger a desire not only to look away, but also turn away in every way possible, such that both ISIS and those who have become its victims can be cloaked in otherness.

When we see children in masks, it’s easier to see the masks than see the children.

Paradoxically, among the many who readily acknowledge that ISIS came into existence primarily as a result of the war in Iraq and that in this sense, ISIS is an American creation, far fewer are willing to admit that the U.S. has a huge responsibility in now trying to thwart the monster that it unwittingly released.

At the same time, even if we acknowledge that we are part-owners of the problem, no one will be served well by casting America in its traditional self-ascribed role as rescuer.

Now, as has long been the case, the U.S. needs to break out of its bipolar relationship with the rest of the world, neither seeking to dominate, nor retreat.

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James Fallows and the chickenhawks

James Fallows writes: Every institution has problems, and at every stage of U.S. history, some critics have considered the U.S. military overfunded, underprepared, too insular and self-regarding, or flawed in some other way. The difference now, I contend, is that these modern distortions all flow in one way or another from the chickenhawk basis of today’s defense strategy.

At enormous cost, both financial and human, the nation supports the world’s most powerful armed force. But because so small a sliver of the population has a direct stake in the consequences of military action, the normal democratic feedbacks do not work.

I have met serious people who claim that the military’s set-apart existence is best for its own interests, and for the nation’s. “Since the time of the Romans there have been people, mostly men but increasingly women, who have volunteered to be the praetorian guard,” John A. Nagl told me. Nagl is a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar who was a combat commander in Iraq and has written two influential books about the modern military. He left the Army as a lieutenant colonel and now, in his late 40s, is the head of the Haverford prep school, near Philadelphia.

“They know what they are signing up for,” Nagl said of today’s troops. “They are proud to do it, and in exchange they expect a reasonable living, and pensions and health care if they are hurt or fall sick. The American public is completely willing to let this professional class of volunteers serve where they should, for wise purpose. This gives the president much greater freedom of action to make decisions in the national interest, with troops who will salute sharply and do what needs to be done.”

I like and respect Nagl, but I completely disagree. As we’ve seen, public inattention to the military, born of having no direct interest in what happens to it, has allowed both strategic and institutional problems to fester.

“A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2012. Bacevich himself fought in Vietnam; his son was killed in Iraq. “Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do.”

[Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Mike Mullen thinks that one way to reengage Americans with the military is to shrink the active-duty force, a process already under way. “The next time we go to war,” he said, “the American people should have to say yes. And that would mean that half a million people who weren’t planning to do this would have to be involved in some way. They would have to be inconvenienced. That would bring America in. America hasn’t been in these previous wars. And we are paying dearly for that.” [Continue reading…]

Mullen says “inconvenienced” — presumably that’s a euphemism for drafted — but Fallows claims that reintroduction of the draft would be “unimaginable.”

Perhaps the draft is not so unimaginable as a policy recommendation as much as it is unimaginable coming from Fallows.

During the Vietnam War, Fallows dodged the draft rather than resisting it, an option he made because, as he wrote in 1975: “What I wanted was to go to graduate school, to get married, and to enjoy those bright prospects I had been taught that life owed me.”

Having told an examining doctor at his Cambridge draft board that he had contemplated suicide, and having thus been deemed “unqualified” for military service, Fallows said: “I was overcome by a wave of relief, which for the first time revealed to me how great my terror had been, and by the beginning of the sense of shame which remains with me to this day.”

No doubt that sense of shame would now make it impossible for Fallows to be an advocate for the draft.

But by now dodging this issue, he avoids drilling deeply into the most basic questions about the role of the military in America.

Fallow’s war-weariness and that of many other Americans seems to stem not so much from the fact that the United States has engaged in so much unnecessary war over the last decade or so, than the fact that its military efforts have been such a colossal and expensive failure.

Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years. No decent person who is exposed to today’s troops can be anything but respectful of them and grateful for what they do.

Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign for telling The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years.

Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

That Fallows views the killing of bin Laden as the “one clear strategic success” — without his intention — goes right to the heart of his polemic on America’s chickenhawk culture.

The celebration of bin Laden’s death is no less cowardly than support for wars triggered by 9/11.

If this killing could have served America in any way, it might conceivably have functioned as the symbolic end to an era. Clearly it did not have that effect.

A strategic success would be defined by its effect — by its ability to forestall undesirable outcomes and create a better future. Killing bin Laden had no such effect. Had he been captured and put on trial, it is conceivable that justice would have been served in a constructive way.

The willingness of Americans to support or acquiesce to a succession of military misadventures after 9/11 flowed very much from the fact that so few people were willing to question America’s need for vengeance. Moreover, America’s need to look strong was the product much less of the magnitude of the threat it faced than of a fear of looking weak.

Fallows hopes that America might be able to choose its wars more wisely and win them, but in that hope lies the most basic fallacy: that war should be a matter of choice.

In a war of true necessity, a nation goes to war because it has no choice. It fights not because it is convinced it will win but because the alternative would be worse than war.

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