Category Archives: Lands

American donors funding West Bank settlements

Mitchell Plitnick writes: A great deal of support for Israeli settlements comes from the United States in the form of tax-deductible contributions from private donors. The Obama administration, like all administrations before it, opposes Israeli settlement in the West Bank and considers it an obstacle to peace. Yet, at the same time, the United States government effectively incentivizes support for the settlements by allowing American charities to disburse millions of tax-deductible dollars in support for them.

This problem has not gone unnoticed, even though it continues unimpeded at this point. The Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, is publishing a series of reports and data uncovered by journalist Uri Blau detailing the extent of private American support for the settlements.

This investigation by Blau pushes forward efforts that a number of US-based groups have made in the past. Most recently, T’Ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights brought attention to this issue by filing a complaint against one such group, Honenu, in New York. Earlier in 2015, the group Avaaz petitioned the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of The Hebron Fund, which directly supports the flashpoint Israeli settlement in that Palestinian city. [Continue reading…]

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Russian bombs halt relief work in northern Syria, as hundreds of thousands of civilians flee and ISIS advances

McClatchy reports: In the days since Turkey downed a Russian warplane that flew into its airspace, Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a bombing campaign that’s destroyed bakeries and relief convoys in northern Syria, cutting the flow of food to more than half a million civilians.

The result has been a complete halt in relief operations by major humanitarian aid groups, all of which operate out of Turkey. It’s also brought the region to the brink of further catastrophe as hundreds of thousands of residents are caught in the crossfire and are unable to flee their homes.

Since Russia began bombing Sept. 30, “there’s been a huge wave of internally displaced,” said Karl Schembri, regional coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council. The situation has grown worse since the shoot-down Nov. 24. “People cannot move at all, and there is nowhere for them to flee to,” he told McClatchy.

All of Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, have now shut their borders to fleeing refugees, and informal camps for displaced persons just inside the Syrian border are reported to be packed.

The stepped-up Russian bombing campaign has had another effect, rebels and aid workers say, allowing the Islamic State to move into areas that it previously had not controlled close to the Turkish border. [Continue reading…]

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The most intensive state-building project currently in operation is run by ISIS

The Guardian reports: John Kerry has branded its members psychopathic monsters, François Hollande calls them barbarians, and David Cameron describes them as a death cult. But Islamic State is much more than that.

As newly obtained documents demonstrate, Isis is also made up of bureaucrats, civil servants and jobsworths. Hundreds if not thousands of cadres have set themselves to work creating rules and regulations on everything from fishing and dress codes to the sale of counterfeit brands and university admission systems.

About 340 official documents, notices, receipts, and internal memos seen by the Guardian show that they have been trying to rebuild everything from roads to nurseries to hotels to marketplaces, from the Euphrates to the Tigris. They have also established 16 centralised departments including one for public health and a natural resources department that oversees oil and antiquities.

This has been the plan all along. A 24-page statecraft blueprint obtained by the Guardian, written in the months after Isis’s declaration of a caliphate, shows how deliberate the state-building exercise has been, and how central it is to its overall aims. [Continue reading…]

The researcher, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who translated the document and gave it to The Guardian, asks to what extent ISIS is following its own plan and among several observations says this:

The text calls for breaking down the differences between muhajireen (foreign fighters) and ansar (local Iraqis and Syrians) by integrating them together in the military ranks, uniformly accepting a fundamentally Arabic and Islamic character to their identity of affiliation with the Caliphate alone. In the pre-Caliphate era, one will have noted the existence of foreign fighter battalions for what was then ISIS fundamentally based around single nationalities and ethnicities, such as Katiba al-Battar al-Libi (Libyan while attracting some Europeans of Maghrebi and north African origin) and the Abu al-Nur al-Maqdisi Battalion (Gazan). However, since the Caliphate declaration, these battalions have generally dropped off the radar of social media, and as colleague Michael Weiss was able to establish in an interview with an Islamic State defector, the Katiba al-Battar al-Libi was in fact disbanded for precisely these reasons of discouraging affiliations on ethncity, which of course may give rise to loyalties beyond those owed to the Caliph.

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Sorry, we can’t negotiate with ISIS

As Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician, once said: “If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”

So why not negotiate with ISIS?

Hilary Benn, the Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Minister who led a revolt of opposition MPs by voting in favor of Britain’s entry into the air campaign against ISIS in Syria, went back to his Leeds Central constituency this weekend to explain his position.

Members of the Stop the War Coalition, challenged Benn, saying that Britain should negotiate with ISIS.

In Britain and elsewhere, a lot of people are going to see an exchange like this as an argument between diplomacy and militarism, remembering perhaps Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Anyone who says we can’t negotiate with ISIS, is easy to cast as being addicted to the use of brute force. This perception gets further reinforced as politicians hammer their podiums declaring, we must destroy ISIS.

So again: why not negotiate with ISIS?

Here’s why: Negotiation requires compromise and the discovery of common ground and for ISIS to negotiate it would have to abandon the goals which are the reason for its existence.

In the latest issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s 65-page color magazine, the possibility of a truce between the West and ISIS is raised and they say that in such an event “nothing changes for the Islamic State… It will continue to wage war against the apostates until they repent from apostasy. It will continue to wage war against the pagans until they accept Islam… Thereafter, the slave markets will commence in Rome by Allah’s power and might.”

Wild rhetoric, no doubt, but what we already know is that on a more limited territorial scale, ISIS practices exactly what it preaches. It has no interest in co-existing with those it opposes. It is engaged in what it regards as a Manichean struggle which allows for no other possibility than the death, subjugation, or submission of its enemies.

The contents of Dabiq might be dismissed as propaganda written merely to appeal to the grandiose fantasies of ISIS recruits, but a newly published translation of an internal ISIS document appearing in The Guardian today shows that the organization is not only earnest in its goals but also in their meticulous application.

As far as foreign policy is concerned, again we see an utterly uncompromising position, modeled, it is claimed, on the example of earlier caliphates.

The objective in relation to “heretic communities” is “dispersing their groupings so there no longer remained any impeding opinion, strength or ability, and the Muslim alone remains the master of the state and decision-making and no one is in conflict with him.”

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Residents of Raqqa now more terrified of airstrikes than ISIS

Financial Times reports: “This is what daily life is like. You wake up in the morning and if you don’t hear the sound of shelling, or a jet breaking the sound barrier, you feel like it could be a good day,” says Abu Hadi. “The first thing I do next is look outside for clouds and pray for them to come — or better yet a storm.”

Sorties are always fewer in number during bad weather, he says. On Monday it rained — a good day.

Abu Hadi lives 2km from the centre of Raqqa, Isis’s de facto capital in Syria. The city has become the focal point of an intensified air campaign by the US-led international coalition since the Isis attacks on Paris. France has led with stepped up air strikes and has been joined by the UK. But Raqqa is also home to hundreds of thousands of civilians who are prevented from leaving by the jihadis. One of the only ways to leave the city is to prove a health condition requiring treatment that Isis hospitals cannot provide.

Abu Hadi speaks to the Financial Times on an internet connection he had secretly rigged and uses only at dead of night. Like all those interviewed for this report, he asks for his real name not to be used.

The 50-year-old used to worry more about Isis brutality — he speaks of militants on motorcycles dragging mangled corpses behind them as he was walking his son to school. Now, terror for him is waking to the sound of warplanes. “If someone looks upwards without an obvious reason, everyone around will be terrified . . . When there is quiet, you spend all your time thinking, OK now a plane is coming.” [Continue reading…]

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Government attacks on Syria’s health care system

In the New England Journal of Medicine, Michele Heisler, M.D., M.P.A., Elise Baker, B.A., and Donna McKay, M.S., write: In July 2015, a 26-year-old pediatrician described to our team of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) investigators his experiences in Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city. When he was a medical student in 2012, government forces detained and severely beat him. He now works as an emergency medicine physician and surgery resident in a hospital that has twice been bombed by the Syrian government. He lives in fear of being killed by bombs on his way to work or while there. His family wants him to leave Syria as they did, but he explained, “It’s our country, and if we leave, it will fall apart. At times, I think maybe I will leave and specialize and come back with better skills, but then I see how much the people need me. Maybe that’s the biggest thing that’s keeping me inside.”

Media coverage of Syria has focused on the exodus of refugees fleeing the sectarian warfare and the atrocities committed by the Islamic State. Less attention is paid to the Syrian government’s destruction of hundreds of hospitals and clinics in opposition-controlled areas and deaths of doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel. Since the conflict began in 2011, PHR has documented the killings of 679 medical personnel, 95% of them perpetrated by government forces. Some personnel were killed in bombings of their hospitals or clinics; some were shot dead; at least 157 were executed or tortured to death.

In July, a PHR team investigated the state of the health care system in eastern Aleppo.3 Though Aleppo does not reflect the worst of the destruction in Syria today, conditions there illustrate the consequences of these repeated attacks: the city’s medical facilities have been attacked nearly 50 times since opposition groups gained control of eastern Aleppo in 2012. The government has rained rockets, missiles, and since 2013, “barrel bombs” (100-to- 1000-kg barrels filled with explosives, shrapnel, nails, and oil that are dropped from helicopters and break into thousands of fragments on impact) on homes and civilian infrastructure, including hospitals. The number of barrel-bomb attacks reached an all-time high between April and July 2015. These bombs, which obliterate everything they hit and inflict head-to-toe injuries on anyone in their large blast radius, have had a devastating impact on life in eastern Aleppo. Only a quarter of the city’s 1.2 million residents remain, more than two thirds of the hospitals have stopped functioning, and roughly 95% of doctors have been killed or have fled. [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan stops foreign reporters’ probe into radicalization of California shooters

The Times of India reports: Pakistan has begun preventing western reporters from investigating the radicalization of the San Bernardino terrorists even as it emerged that the Pakistani wife of the Chicago-born Pakistani-American Syed Rizwan Farooq may have “honey-trapped” him into entering the United States.

Correspondents who made their way to the city of Multan in Pakistan’s Punjab province, considered the hotbed of sunni extremism where Farooq’s jihadi wife Tashfeen Malik studied pharmacy, reported they had been corralled in a local hotel and are not being permitted to go out to investigate.

“Pakistani ‘officials’ not letting some journalists out of our hotel in Multan this morning to do reporting. I am still barred from leaving hotel in Multan and Pakistani ‘officials’ strongly suggest I, as foreign journalist, ‘go back to Islamabad”‘ tweeted Washington Post’s Tim Craig, who has been reporting from Pakistan.

“On one hand officials say Tashfeen Malik wasn’t radicalized here in Multan, yet on other hand they say ‘it’s too dangerous’ for foreigners,” Craig tweeted, adding, “I’ve lost track of how many different security/intel officials I’ve had to talk to, copy my passport, etc in past 17 hours – think 12 to 16.”

By putting “officials” in quotes, the correspondent seemed to indicate they are ISI roughnecks who are frequently tasked with tailing foreign reporters to make sure they do not get too close to the truth, in this case the fact that Multan and surrounding areas in Pakistan’s Punjab is the hotbed of state sponsored Sunni sectarianism and extremism.

The country’s security apparatus uses rough methods, including beating up foreign journalists as it happened with New York Times’ Carlotta Gall, to protect its interests. It also uses the grisly example of Daniel Pearl’s murder to advise foreign reporters that they are treading in dangerous territory, which in this case appears to be the state-protected Southern Punjab region. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Dr. Shah, of the [Bahauddin Zakariya] university faculty, said he was shocked by the news that Ms. Malik was suspected of committing a mass killing. He said he did not think she had become radicalized at the university, because it does not have a reputation for extremism.

But neither Multan nor Ms. Malik’s university have been immune to extremist currents. A proliferation of hard-line religious schools across southern Punjab have obtained a reputation as incubators for sectarian and militant groups, some of which enjoy the tacit support of political leaders and elements of the Pakistani security forces.

In response, the university kept a “very vigilant eye” on its students, said Dr. Janbaz, the lecturer, and coordinated with intelligence agencies to install surveillance cameras. Ms. Malik, however, never came under scrutiny, he said.

“We never heard anything suspicious about her activities,” he said. “She kept to herself and seemed to just focus on her studies.”

But the authorities did little to stop a virtual witch hunt on campus that led to a nationally publicized death after Ms. Malik left the university.

In 2013, Islamist students there accused Junaid Hafeez, a young lecturer in English who had traveled to the United States as a Fulbright scholar, of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in comments he made on his Facebook page. Mr. Hafeez was later charged with blasphemy, a crime that carries a possible death penalty in Pakistan, and he is currently in jail awaiting trial.

Mr. Hafeez has struggled to find legal representation since two men fatally shot his lawyer, Rashid Rehman, in May 2014, in what was seen as punishment for daring to defend someone accused of blasphemy.

Pakistani security officials say there is no indication yet that Ms. Malik moved in extremist circles on campus or in the city. Yet they have sought to restrict reporting from the area in recent days, often by issuing quiet threats to Pakistani reporters to back off. The officials conducted a search of Ms. Malik’s former home in Multan on Saturday. [Continue reading…]

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#YouAintNoMuslimBruv said it better than Cameron ever could

I can’t decide if this is Vine at its best or worst:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I think that applies to the phrase “bruv” coming out of David Cameron’s mouth.

Still, he meant well:

As Muhbeer Hussain, founder of British Muslim Youth, says, the man who defiantly challenged the Leytonstone attacker, is “a hero for the British Muslim community for speaking out against this.”

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Yes, it’s fair to compare the plight of the Syrians to the plight of the Jews. Here’s why

Josh Zeitz writes: Peter Shulman, an associate professor of American history at Case Western Reserve University, [recently] caused a political stir when he tweeted results from a Fortune Magazine poll dated July 1938. “What’s your attitude towards allowing German, Austrian & other political refugees to come into the US?” Fortune asked its survey audience. Over two-thirds of respondents answered in the negative.

Shulman’s tweet went viral, igniting a spirited debate about whether opposition to welcoming Syrian refugees is morally or situationally equivalent to American indifference in the 1930s toward Jewish victims of the Nazi state. In what can only be described as a sharp reversal of prevailing norms, many conservatives, who these days seem inclined to liken every government overreach to Nazism, are incensed by the analogy, while many liberals, who have grown accustomed to rolling their eyes each time that Bill Kristol invokes the Munich Agreement, are sticking by it.

So is the analogy a good one? In short, yes. Contrary to what conservatives are saying these days, language commonly invoked in opposition to admitting Syrian refugees bears striking similarity to arguments against providing safe harbor to Jewish refugees in the late 1930s. Then as now, skepticism of religious and ethnic minorities and concerns that refugees might pose a threat to national security deeply influenced the debate over American immigration policy. For conservatives, this likeness is an inconvenient truth.

But the analogy doesn’t stop there. There may be no historic precedent for the rise of the Islamic State, but many current-day conditions in the Middle East are reminiscent of the broader context in which the Holocaust occurred. Europe in the 1930s and 1940s witnessed a systemic breakdown of national borders and civil society; brutal ethnic cleansing and population transfers; and a refugee crisis that strained the world’s creativity and resources. These human-made disasters do not just befall majority-Muslim countries.

For liberals, this raises its own inconvenient truth. Even had the United States admitted a large number of Jewish refugees in 1938, the underlying forces tearing Europe apart would not have abated. Winning this particular argument is important, but it does not resolve the larger challenge facing Syria or Iraq. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s identity crisis is at the heart of its conflicts

Joseph Dana writes: In remarks delivered at the Saban Forum in Washington last week, US secretary of state John Kerry warned that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heading towards a one-state reality. For close observers of the conflict, Israel and Palestine have long been mired in a one-state situation. It is one in which Israel administers rights and privileges based solely on ethnicity and religion.

The pressing question now is not how the international community can avoid such a situation – it won’t – but how the conflict reached this stage and what can be done to reverse the current regime of inequality.

To address these issues requires an honest evaluation of Israel’s identity politics and the various manifestations of exclusionary policy that define Israeli governance. Since its founding in 1948, the country has been struggling to create a coherent identity for itself. How can a state remain democratic when it favours the rights of one ethnic or religious group over others? [Continue reading…]

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#YouAintNoMuslimBruv — Muslims and non-Muslims stand in solidarity

As a formal exercise, denunciations and condemnations nearly always ring hollow.

“We strongly condemn the recent attacks…”

Blah blah blah… Ya don’t say?

That’s not to suggest these statements are insincere; it’s just that they are generally so predictable they have become a somewhat pointless ritual.

What’s radically different is when the denunciation comes from someone in the moment who in that moment spontaneously uses words to upend the meaning of an act of violence. This is when language grasps its real power.

This is what happened last night at the Leytonstone Underground station in London after a 29-year-old man stabbed a 56-year-old man, while shouting, “this is for Syria.”

I’m going to make some wild guesses and see if I can deconstruct what happened here:

1. The man with the knife was a Muslim (and probably British).
2. He had no idea who he was stabbing other than that he assumed his victim was British and not a Muslim and thus could be held responsible for the actions of the British government following its recent decision to start bombing Syria.
3. The attacker felt like he was standing up for Muslims.

A bystander, a Muslim Londoner, having witnessed what happened, videos the arrest and as a Muslim policemen handcuffs the attacker, the bystander calls out: “You ain’t no Muslim bruv [brother].”

Again, another assumption: he was directing this statement at the attacker, not the policeman.

For good reason, the bystander has received widespread praise.


Echoing the gunmen in the Paris attacks, the attacker in London chose the phrase “this is for Syria,” but in spite of ISIS’s large presence on Twitter, the hashtag that’s trending now is #YouAintNoMuslimBruv — it isn’t #ThisIsForSyria.

Some Muslims aren’t happy about this.


I understand why Muslims feel like they shouldn’t be expected to denounce the actions of extremists — such condemnations inevitably sound like an expression of collective guilt. But this isn’t what happened in London.

At a moment when a guy has posed a threat to everyone around him and he’s claiming to be acting in the name of Muslims, another Muslim deftly cuts down that claim in an expression of solidarity that unites Muslims and non-Muslims, Londoners (who come from all quarters of the globe) and everyone else.

ISIS wants Muslims and non-Muslims to spill each other’s blood in an apocalyptic war, but instead we have to stand together.

#YouAintNoMuslimBruv shows how it can be done.

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Two men armed with knives — one gets arrested, the other gets killed

A shirtless man, armed with a straight razor from a barbershop and suspected of having just attempted to rob a bank, stands surrounded by at least five Miami Beach Police officers. After failing to comply with their commands, the suspect is shot and killed.

Meanwhile, in London a suspected terrorist who is not only armed with a knife but has already stabbed and seriously injured a 56-year-old man, gets surrounded by British police officers. The suspect doesn’t just fail to comply with demands from the police — he continues threatening anyone nearby with his knife. Nevertheless, the police are able use a taser to bring him down, handcuff and arrest him.

Are the British police more courageous than their American counterparts?

I don’t know.

The immediate difference derives from police tactics. But the wider difference is that Britain isn’t burdened by a popular gun fetish or a cartoon culture in which adults talk about “good guys” and “bad guys.”

A commenter on YouTube sarcastically asks: “In America, do you have more chance of being killed by ISIS or the cops?”

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Donald Trump’s demagogy leavened with a smile and joke

The New York Times reports: “Something bad is happening,” Donald J. Trump warned New Hampshire voters Tuesday night, casting suspicions on Muslims and mosques. “Something really dangerous is going on.”

On Thursday evening, his message was equally ominous, as he suggested a link between the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., and President Obama’s failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“There is something going on with him that we don’t know about,” Mr. Trump said of the president, drawing applause from the crowd in Washington.

The dark power of words has become the defining feature of Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House to a degree rarely seen in modern politics, as he forgoes the usual campaign trappings — policy, endorsements, commercials, donations — and instead relies on potent language to connect with, and often stoke, the fears and grievances of Americans.

The New York Times analyzed every public utterance by Mr. Trump over the past week from rallies, speeches, interviews and news conferences to explore the leading candidate’s hold on the Republican electorate for the past five months. The transcriptions yielded 95,000 words and several powerful patterns, demonstrating how Mr. Trump has built one of the most surprising political movements in decades and, historians say, echoing the appeals of some demagogues of the past century. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s moneymaking streams take a hit as it loses territory

The Washington Post reports: By most estimates, the Islamic State is the world’s richest terrorist organization. But it appears to be wrestling with money problems that could affect its ability to wage war while trying to govern millions of people in its self-declared caliphate.

U.S.-backed forces in Iraq and Syria have retaken significant amounts of territory from the group, depriving it of traditional sources of income, analysts say. Towns and villages that the Islamic State had relied on for tax revenue have been captured by Arab and Kurdish opponents. And lucrative spoils of war, including oil fields, properties to confiscate and captives to ransom off, have become scarcer as the group struggles to seize new areas.

“A problem they face is that much of their income over the last two years has been through conquest, confiscation and extortion, and those are all one-time things that aren’t sustainable,” said Quinn Mecham, an assistant professor of political science at Brigham Young University. “And now they’re losing territory, and that makes it difficult to continue to extract revenues. The pressure is on.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. struggling over what to do with Syrian rebels once tied to al Qaida

McClatchy reports: Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

But that’s a tough reality for U.S. diplomats, who are keenly aware that many of Ahrar’s members still cling to a hard-line ideology that’s caused Secretary of State John Kerry to liken the group to the Islamic State, al Qaida’s Nusra Front and Hamas – all designated terrorist organizations. A seemingly ascendant reformist faction within the group offers only slight encouragement, they say.

Faysal Itani, a Syria specialist with the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, says Ahrar al Sham itself is riven by debate over what direction to go. [Continue reading…]

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As America’s fear of terrorism grows, a ‘wacky gun enthusiast’ supposedly threatens no one

“Right now it looks like he’s a wacky gun enthusiast and a police buff, yet he was going around pretending to be a federal agent – that’s troubling,” a source told the New York Daily News.

Mark Vicars

He had a fake federal air marshal ID in one pocket, a Ruger .380-caliber pistol in the other and was driving around Long Island with ballistic body armor and a loaded AR-15 assault rifle. He also had an arsenal of weapons at his gated home.

But don’t worry folks, Mark Vicars wasn’t a threat to anyone, Nassau County officials insisted Friday.

The amount of firepower is comparable to what terror couple Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik had during the massacre they committed Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif.

So why did the Nassau County Police Department spokesman Det. Lt. Richard LeBrun tell reporters, “At this time we don’t see any immediate threat to the public”?

[C]ops don’t believe that Vicars was up to anything nefarious — except for masquerading as a federal agent.

“We don’t see any nexus to any terrorism at this time,” LeBrun said, adding that no anti-American literature or links to terrorism were found at his home.

How about links to organizations such as Stop Islamization of America? Or indications of support for any of the current xenophobic, anti-immigrant GOP presidential candidates?

(Note also that in the current climate, “anti-American literature” is apparently a red flag raising suspicions of terrorism. It sounds like the police were less alarmed by the weapons Vicars owned, than they would have been had they found in his possessions a few books by Noam Chomsky.)

Even if it turns out that there’s no evidence to suspect Vicars might be ideologically motivated to engage in an act of terrorism, why should a heavily armed individual like this be any less a cause for public concern?

Along with his arsenal of weapons (“seven illegal firearms, three high-capacity magazines and 8,300 rounds of ammunition”) he was found (without prescription) to be in possession of steroids used for muscle growth — drugs known to cause aggression and violence.

For America’s gun lovers, pieces of steel are symbols of personal freedom, even though for many such individuals, this bond of affection thinly masks underlying fears of the rest of society.

This is the paradox of gun-bound right-wing patriotism: the country in whose name so much red-blooded passion gets vented, is one upon whose streets it is supposedly only safe to walk while carrying a weapon.

If Mark Vicars needed body armor, muscle armor, an arsenal, and a fake identity in order to feel strong, there must be a very weak and vulnerable man on the inside.

Unfortunately, fear is contagious and nowadays grips some sections of American society.

Unfortunately, the fearful are liable to lash out — to shoot first and ask questions later.

At a time such as this, a country needs leaders who through their own example can demonstrate that courage is stronger than fear. Instead, we are left to choose between the strident and the timid — an environment in which the loudest voices easily drown out all others.

A society built on fear will ultimately be no society at all, since fear leads to isolation.

As much as ISIS and other terrorist groups do indeed pose a real threat to America, a much greater threat is posed by fear itself because of the corrosive effect this has on social bonds.

Far from making America stronger, the easy availability of weapons simply makes this country more dangerous.

Rather than looking for ways to individually and collectively become more defended, reinforcing and amplifying our fears, what we need are more expressions of human solidarity and mutual support.

Unity built around antipathy is just another way of validating fear. Our real strength, however, can only be found on common ground — an understanding of and commitment towards a shared destiny.

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San Bernardino gunwoman pledged allegiance to ISIS, officials say

The New York Times reports: The woman who helped carry out the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a Facebook posting, according to federal law enforcement officials.

There’s no evidence the group directed the woman, Tashfeen Malik, and her husband Syed Rizwan Farook, to launch the attacks, which killed 14 and wounded 21, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

“At this point we believe they were more self-radicalized and inspired by the group than actually told to do the shooting,” one of the officials said.

The posting had been removed from the social media site and it’s not clear when federal authorities obtained it.

In recent months, the F.B.I. has been particularly concerned about individuals inspired by the Islamic State staging attacks in the United States, law enforcement officials say. Even before the shootings and bombings in Paris last month, the agency had under heavy surveillance at least three dozen individuals who the authorities were concerned might commit violence in the group’s name. [Continue reading…]

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Don’t make San Bernardino a victory for ISIS

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick writes: I am an American Muslim. I have spent my adult life teaching and advising senior military leaders in the fight against terror. On Wednesday night, as I watched representatives of the American Muslim community in San Bernardino, Calif., denounce the shooters who had just killed 14 people in their city, I recognized in their bearing and words their feelings of humiliation, horror and loyalty to the United States — alongside a great fear that a new round of Islamophobia will now follow.

I know from my own experience that more Islamophobia would be the worst outcome for American efforts to defeat the Islamic State.

As a naval officer I’ve taken an oath to defend the American Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’ve trained members of the Navy SEAL teams, and my mentors include the former head of the National Rifle Association, the supreme allied commander of NATO, and the commanding general of the war in Afghanistan.

I have been deeply troubled by the anti-Muslim vitriol in our country since Islamist fanatics wreaked havoc in Paris. Fearmongers have already called for registering Muslims and closing mosques. The F.B.I. has warned Muslims about possible attacks from white supremacist militias.

If we don’t want to play into the hands of Islamic State propaganda that America is at war with Islam, we must stand up against Islamophobia. We should separate the few extremists from the vast majority of law-abiding patriotic American Muslims by working with the moderates, not against them.

The Islamic State has little to no support in most Muslim-majority countries, according to a Pew Research Center poll after the Paris attacks. Instead, with more than 60 countries aligned against it, the Islamic State is banking on Western societies to alienate their Muslim populations to increase recruitment. [Continue reading…]

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