How did the media cover the Munich attack?
Munich killer was troubled, but had no terrorist ties, Germany says
The New York Times reports: He had been bullied at more than one school. He played violent video games, and developed a fascination with mass shootings. He kept a copy of the German edition of “Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters,” a study by an American academic psychologist, and he was treated for psychiatric problems.
Somewhere along the way, Ali Sonboly got his hands on a 9-millimeter Glock handgun, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition for it. And at 5:52 p.m. on Friday, at a McDonald’s in Munich a few miles from where he lived with his mother, father and brother, he started shooting.
Mr. Sonboly, 18, moved on to a shopping mall across the street, then to the top level of an adjacent parking garage. By the time his rampage was done, he had killed eight other young people and one middle-aged person. Then, in front of two police officers, he killed himself with his own gun, the police said. [Continue reading…]
The Guardian reports: A copy of a German translation of the 2009 work, by the American academic Peter Langman, was found by police in the bedroom of the gunman, identified as Ali Sonbaly.
The book examines the factors that combine to turn young people into mass murderers. It classifies 10 school killers into three groups: psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatised.
The 10 include the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot dead 12 students and one teacher in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999; and the Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung-hui, who killed 32 people at the university in April 2007.
Katherine Newman, a professor of sociology at Princeton University and senior author of the book Rampage: the Social Roots of School Shootings, described Why Kids Kill as a dispassionate but clinically powerful analysis.
“It provides an interior view of the mind of rampage school-shooters that helps us understand the origins of the narcissism, paranoia, sadism, and thwarted rage that appears to motivate them … We come to understand the differences between shooters who are psychopaths and those who are schizophrenics, and why these distinctions matter,” she said. [Continue reading…]
The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating
Kimberley Brownlee writes: Great loners are fascinating. Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, Buddhist monks in their hermitage, and fictional heroes such as Robinson Crusoe are all romantic figures of successful solitary survival. Their setting is the wilderness. Their apparent triumph is the outcome of grit, ingenuity and self-reliance.
One reason that such characters seem appealing is that, ironically, they are reassuring. They give the comforting impression that anyone could thrive in isolation as they do. This reassurance can be summed up in the declaration made by Henrik Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann at the end of An Enemy of the People (1882), after the locals have persecuted him for revealing that the town’s tourist baths are contaminated. Stockmann declares: ‘The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.’
The great loners embody an idea of freedom from the vagaries and stresses of social life. As human beings, we are vulnerable to each other’s moods, proclivities, ideologies, perceptions, knowledge and ignorance. We are vulnerable to our society’s conventions, policies and hierarchies. We need other people’s blessing and often their help in order to get resources. When we’re young and when we’re old, we are vulnerable enough that our lives are happy only if other people choose to care about us.
No wonder then that Robinson Crusoe is one of the best-known novels in history; there is solace in the hermit’s self-governing independence. But this romantic image of the eremitic life rests on a mistaken idea of both the great loners’ circumstances and the nature of social isolation. [Continue reading…]
Music: Grover Washington, Jr. — ‘A Secret Place’
Why is Trump so popular with governments that claim to despise America?
Patrick Hilsman writes: Donald Trump is everything the Russian, Syrian and Iranian governments claim to despise about America. More than any US presidential candidate in modern history, he resembles a Soviet propaganda poster. Trump is a greedy, vain, Islamophobic, sexually amoral capitalist. He received a standing ovation at the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, he believes in mass violence against America’s perceived opponents, especially Muslims.
So why is Trump so popular with governments that claim to despise America?
Trump has a proven record of praising or at the very least making excuses for authoritarians, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to deposed Libyan leader Gaddafi and most recently Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Trump’s wave of authoritarian populism comes at a perfect time for strongmen like Putin, Assad, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who are circling the wagons, not against invading armies or perceived threats from abroad, but rather against creeping modernity that threatens the closed belief systems their regimes are built on.
Trump has come to embody 21st century authoritarian principals and the rejection of long standing multiculturalism, and the message is resonating with governments and organizations that ostensibly hate one another. [Continue reading…]
NATO allies respond to Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. might not protect them from Russia
The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump has long suggested that he takes a skeptical view of the United States’ alliances. However, in an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday evening, the Republican presidential nominee went further than before, appearing to suggest that the United States should not be required to automatically defend NATO allies if they are attacked.
Trump specifically pointed to the Baltic states that sit near Russia’s borders and often complain of belligerence from Moscow. He said they would be helped only if they had “fulfilled their obligations to us.” For some in those in the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — the American businessman’s comments provoked confusion and surprise.
“Estonia is of 5 NATO allies in Europe to meet its 2% def expenditures commitment,” Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves wrote on Twitter, referring to the percentage of gross domestic product that NATO members are expected to spend on defense.
The Estonian president also pointed to his country’s role in the war in Afghanistan as proof of the country’s commitment, retweeting a message that said Estonia had one of the highest casualty rates per capita in that conflict. “Estonia’s commitment to our NATO obligations is beyond doubt and so should be the commitments by others,” the Estonian Foreign Ministry added in an emailed statement.
“We take our commitments seriously,” Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said in Washington, where he was attending meetings to coordinate military action against the Islamic State. “We hope and expect that all our allies, big and small, take their commitments the same.”
“There is no reason to doubt NATO’s commitment to the core function of the Alliance — collective defense,” Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Bergmanis wrote on Twitter.
A more pointed tone was taken by Ojars Eriks Kalnins, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Latvia’s Parliament, who called Trump’s remarks “dangerous” in comments also reported by Diena newspaper. Kalnins noted that it was unclear whether Trump was talking about the spending commitments or about generally being helpful to the United States.
“Too bad the NY Times didn’t ask Trump if he would defend NATO member Slovenia if attacked,” the U.S.-raised Latvian politician wrote on Twitter, referring to the Eastern European state where the Republican nominee’s wife, Melania Trump, was born and has family. [Continue reading…]
Inspired by Trump, ex-KKK leader David Duke says he plans to run for U.S. Senate
The Associated Press reports: Former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke announced Friday on his website that he plans to run for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.
“I’m proud to announce my candidacy for the United States Senate,” Duke said in a video. “I believe in equal rights for all and respect for all Americans. However, what makes me different is I also demand respect for the rights and heritage of European Americans.”
Duke’s announcement came as the state is grappling with deep racial tensions after the shooting death of a black man by white police officers and the killing of three law enforcement officers by a black man. It also came one day after Donald Trump accepted the GOP nomination for president.
Duke said in the video, “I’m overjoyed to see Donald Trump and most Americans embrace most of the issues that I’ve championed for years. My slogan remains America first.” [Continue reading…]
George Harrison estate latest to blast Trump song abuse
AFP reports: George Harrison’s estate has denounced Donald Trump for playing The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” at the Republican convention, joining a slew of artists angry at the candidate.
The classic ode to optimism and rebirth, written by Harrison for the Fab Four’s 1969 album “Abbey Road,” featured on the playlist at the Cleveland arena as the Republican Party nominated the populist tycoon as its presidential contender.
The use of the song at the convention “is offensive and against the wishes of the George Harrison estate,” it wrote on Twitter late Thursday.
“If it had been ‘Beware of Darkness,’ then we MAY have approved it! #TrumpYourself,” the estate tweeted.
It was referring to a 1970 solo track by Harrison who, influenced by Hindu spirituality, warned against material attachment and sang: “Beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go.”
Trump, who has rose to prominence with strident denunciations of immigrant groups, has faced repeated protests from artists who oppose his playing of their songs at his rallies, which have repeatedly been marred by violence.
The Rolling Stones, Adele, Neil Young, R.E.M., Aerosmith and Queen are among acts that have lodged objections. [Continue reading…]
How Brexit has inspired Europe’s far right
Politicians to blame for rise of ‘respectable racism’ in Britain, says Lady Warsi
The Guardian reports: Politicians have allowed xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism to enter the mainstream as a result of their toxic and divisive campaigning, according to Lady Warsi.
The Conservative peer and former party co-chair told the Guardian she was deeply worried about the current political climate, claiming a surge in “respectable racism” was feeding the far right.
“I was still disgusted but more comfortable with the racism of the 70s and 80s that was overt and thuggish, than this new form of respectable xenophobia where it is done in political circles, journalism and academia,” she said.
Warsi argued that the EU referendum and London mayoralty campaigns had helped create a climate in which people feel it is acceptable to tell long-established British communities “it’s time for you to leave”. [Continue reading…]
Turkey’s president is destroying the democracy that Turks risked their lives to defend
The Economist: Much is unknown about the attempted military coup in Turkey on the night of July 15th. Why was it botched so badly? How far up the ranks did the conspiracy reach? Were the putschists old-style secularists, as their initial communiqué suggested; or were they followers of an exiled Islamist cleric, Fethullah Gulen, as the government claims?
But two things are clear. First, the people of Turkey showed great bravery in coming out onto the streets to confront the soldiers; hundreds died (see article here and here). Opposition parties, no matter how much they may despise President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, united to denounce the assault on democracy. Better the flawed, Islamist-tinged strongman than the return of the generals for the fifth time since the 1960s.
The second, more alarming conclusion is that Mr Erdogan is fast destroying the very democracy that the people defended with their lives. He has declared a state of emergency that will last at least three months. About 6,000 soldiers have been arrested; thousands more policemen, prosecutors and judges have been sacked or suspended. So have academics, teachers and civil servants, though there is little sign they had anything to do with the coup. Secularists, Kurds and other minorities feel intimidated by Mr Erdogan’s loyalists on the streets.
The purge is so deep and so wide — affecting at least 60,000 people — that some compare it to America’s disastrous de-Baathification of Iraq. It goes far beyond the need to preserve the security of the state. Mr Erdogan conflates dissent with treachery; he is staging his own coup against Turkish pluralism. Unrestrained, he will lead his country to more conflict and chaos. And that, in turn, poses a serious danger to Turkey’s neighbours, to Europe and to the West.
The failed putsch may well become the third shock to Europe’s post-1989 order. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 destroyed the idea that Europe’s borders were fixed and that the cold war was over. The Brexit referendum last month shattered the notion of ineluctable integration in the European Union. Now the coup attempt in Turkey, and the reaction to it, raise troubling questions about the reversibility of democracy within the Western world — which Turkey, though on its fringe, once seemed destined to join. [Continue reading…]
How Erdogan’s erstwhile allies turned into an existential threat
Mustafa Akyol writes: When Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., came to power in 2002, they felt threatened by the hard-core secularists who have dominated Turkey’s military since the days of Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic. Mr. Erdogan viewed the Gulenist cadres in the state as an asset, and an alliance was born. The Erdogan government supported Gulenist police officers, prosecutors and judges as they went after secularists. Starting in 2007, hundreds of secularist officers and their civilian allies were jailed.
This witch hunt was driven by Mr. Erdogan’s political agenda, but the Gulenists were even more aggressive than the A.K.P. More worrying: Some of the evidence turned out to be overblown. Two secular journalists and a police chief who exposed the fake evidence, and blamed the “The Imam’s Army,” were soon themselves imprisoned on bogus charges.
“How can they justify using fake evidence to blame innocent people?” I once asked my disillusioned Gulenist friend. “Since their end goal is so great,” he said, referring to the movement’s global, apocalyptic ambition, “they think all means are justified.”
It eventually became clear why the Gulenists had been so fervent in their persecution of the secularists: They wanted to replace them. Many of the officers who reportedly took part in last week’s coup attempt had been promoted thanks to a major purge of the military in 2009 that supposedly saved Mr. Erdogan from a coup.
By 2012, the old secularist guard had been quelled and the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were left more or less alone to run Turkey. It took less than two years before the two Islamist groups developed distrust and, ultimately, enmity. This tension came to a head in December 2013, when Gulenist police officers and prosecutors arrested dozens of government officials in a corruption investigation, most likely in the hope of toppling Mr. Erdogan, who condemned the inquiry as a “coup attempt.” At the time, this sounded like a self-serving exaggeration.
But the bloody plot of July 15 is far more destructive than anything Turkey has seen in recent years. Notably, the plot came as Mr. Erdogan was supposed to be planning a major purge of suspected Gulenists from the military. [Continue reading…]
Inside a failed coup and Turkey’s fragmented military
Aaron Stein writes: The recent coup attempt in Turkey revealed profound political cleavages in the Turkish armed forces. The coup pitted a minority — but nevertheless significant — faction of the Turkish military against the majority of the country’s armed forces, which remained loyal to their commander in chief, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The coup nearly succeeded in achieving what, in retrospect, appears to have been its primary objective: the killing or capture of Erdogan, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, and Hakan Fidan, the chief of the country’s intelligence agency, MIT. The plotters, using a number of well-placed insiders, did manage to take the chief of the general staff, Hulusi Akar, hostage. The clashes resulted in 240 deaths. Turkish government officials allege that the plot was hatched by followers of Fetullah Gulen, a self-exiled Turkish cleric, currently living in Pennsylvania.
The following account remains incomplete and relies on a Whatsapp conversation between some of the coup plotters, open source data, compiled by blogs like The Aviationist, as well as discussions I have had with Turkey based journalists and colleagues, all whom prefer to remain anonymous. I relied on pro-government sources, including state-owned and government aligned media outlets, but sought to compensate for their biases in my analysis. The complete story has yet to be told and all of the details have yet to be released publicly.
The story of the coup suggests a relatively large plot that drew support from numerous parts of the Turkish Armed Forces, spanning various commands around Turkey. The number of senior officers involved, including the commander of Incirlik air force base where U.S. aircraft are now based for the fight against the Islamic State, suggest that the Turkish military is divided. The narrative following the coup is that this was a small, ill-conceived group of plotters who failed to overthrow the elected government, but this narrative is at odds with information coming out about the extent of the plot. This was a larger and far more credible attempt than has thus far been reported.
The fact that this was relatively well planned — if hastily implemented — coup attempt has several implications — namely that the Turkish military’s senior leadership is deeply factionalized, with one sizeable minority of officers willing to use force, even though their decision risked civil war. This suggests that Turkey is unstable and faces serious challenges in the near term in ways that will surely impact American and Western security interests in the Middle East and Europe. [Continue reading…]
‘I was an ISIS jihadist — until they arrested and tortured me’
Michael Weiss writes: Now in exile in Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey, the 31-year-old Abu Omar laid out a story that was equal parts Midnight Express and Darkness at Noon.
It purports to be a first-hand account of an ISIS prison system, which is every bit as gruesome as you’d imagine it to be. His account is also a useful documentary insight into how an organization that once thrived on its shrewd guerrilla intelligence and counterintelligence tradecraft, able to spot informants, spies, and sleepers, and find agents with whom to infiltrate and vitiate rival factions, has come to resemble all totalitarianisms by devouring its own.
Originally from Kafr Zita in Hama province, which, among other things, would later be the site of a deadly chlorine and ammonia gas attack by the Assad regime, Abu Omar was a house painter by trade before the revolution began — a revolution that was supposed to be gloriously concluded by now.
Instead, the uprising is entering its sixth year as an endless series of slow-burning civil wars.
Abu Omar became a protestor in 2011 after the Syrian security services and military opened fire on others carrying banners calling for economic and social reforms in the spring of 2011. [Continue reading…]
The story of the caliph
Your gut bacteria predates appearance of humans, genetic study finds
The Guardian reports: The evolutionary history of the bacteria in your guts predates the appearance of humans, and mirrors that of our great ape relatives, according to a genetic study.
The research suggests that microbes in our ancestors’ intestines split into new evolutionary lineages in parallel with splits in the ape family tree.
This came as a surprise to scientists, who had thought that most of our gut bacteria came from our surroundings – what we eat, where we live, even what kind of medicine we take. The new research suggests that evolutionary history is much more important than previously thought.
“When there were no humans or gorillas, just ancestral African apes, they harboured gut bacteria. Then the apes split into different branches, and there was also a parallel divergence of different gut bacteria,” said Prof Andrew Moeller of the University of California, Berkeley who led the study, published in Science. This happened when gorillas separated somewhere between 10-15 million years ago, and again when humans split from chimps and bonobos 5 million years ago. [Continue reading…]
Music: Saieen Zahoor — ‘Toumba’
Trump camp inciting murderous hatred of Hillary Clinton
If an assassination attempt is made on Hillary Clinton, will Donald Trump come under investigation for inciting murder?
Al Baldasaro, a New Hampshire state representative who advises Donald Trump on veterans’ issues, says that Clinton is “a piece of garbage,” and says that she should be “put in the firing line and shot for treason.”
The Guardian reports: “Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Trump and his campaign did not agree with Baldasaro’s remarks.”
There’s a difference between disavowing such a statement and not agreeing with it. Maybe the disagreement is on the method of execution. Perhaps like West Virginia Republican lawmaker, Mike Folk, Trump prefers public hangings to firing squads.
Although Baldasaro’s statement grabbed headlines and has caught the attention of the Secret Service, the sentiment he expressed is far from being out of line with the unmeasured hostility towards Clinton that is constantly being fueled by the Trump campaign.
The comments, coming from a chief adviser for a signature issue of Trump’s campaign, are far from the only incendiary remarks directed at the former secretary of state during the Republican national convention, where Clinton has loomed large. On Superior Avenue in downtown Cleveland, men hawking T-shirts reading “Trump This Bitch!” and “Hillary Sucks, But Not Like Monica” have done brisk business.
The anti-Clinton fervor has often dominated the primetime stage of the convention itself. During a highly charged speech on Tuesday night, New Jersey governor Chris Christie presided over arena-wide chants of “Guilty!” and “Lock her up!” as the former federal prosecutor argued in a mock trial “the case now, on the facts, against Hillary Clinton”.
Later that evening, the former presidential candidate Ben Carson departed from his prepared remarks to imply that Clinton admired Satan.
Whenever Trump and the tone of his campaign inspire individuals to engage in acts of violence, the Republican presidential campaign can always claim he had no intention of having this effect.
The more relevant question, however, is what if anything he has done to discourage violence and the growth of hatred. In that regard, the evidence seems clear that he has done little to nothing.
This gets to the heart of incitement: It’s not simply about outsourcing criminal behavior, but it’s about doing this in such a way that a false separation is constructed between the direct and indirect perpetrators of the crime.
Trump may never face prosecution, but that does nothing to absolve him from responsibility for spreading lethal rage across this country.
