*** Scary thing is, the people entrusted with guarding the gate - don't know where to start. MANY from the Muslim community have given their feedback but it falls on deaf ears. There needs to be a serious change in culture otherwise we're in for a some real trouble. MS ***
Fighting the Ideological Battle: The Missing Link in U.S. Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism
By Matthew Levitt
As nonaffiliate terrorist actors begin to take center stage and al-Qaeda's core strength diminishes, it has become clear that America is at war with a larger enemy: the extremist ideology that fuels and supports Islamist violence. Unfortunately, the United States is not well equipped to fight on this ideological battleground, and U.S. efforts to confront the ideology worldwide have not kept pace with more successful military targeting of high-level al-Qaeda leaders.
In a new Washington Institute Strategic Report my co-authors and I argue that rather than avoid any mention of the religious motivation behind the terrorism of al-Qaeda and other like-minded organizations, the Obama administration should sharpen the distinction between the religion of Islam and the political ideology of radical Islamism to successfully defeat Islamist terrorism at its most fundamental source.
Engagement and counterterrorism are key elements of this comprehensive strategy, we argue, but the wide space between them must be addressed. Missing are the policies and programs that should suffuse the space between these two poles on the counterradicalization spectrum, including efforts to contest the extremist narrative of radicalizers, empower and network mainstream voices countering extremism, promote diversity of ideas and means of expression, and challenge extremist voices and ideas in the public domain. Contesting the radical Islamist narrative does not mean arresting or banning despicable but protected speech; rather, it means openly contesting extremist views by offering alternatives and fostering deeper ideological debate. The objective in either case is to strengthen the moderate center against the extremist pole and help Muslim communities become more resilient in confronting the challenge.
This report, Fighting the Ideological Battle: The Missing Link in U.S. Strategy to Counter Violent Extremism, follows on the Institute's 2009 bipartisan Presidential Task Force report Rewriting the Narrative: An Integrated Strategy for Counterradicalization. It is a joint project of The Washington Institute's Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence and Project Fikra: Defeating Extremism through the Power of Ideas.
This new report recognizes the important steps the Obama administration has taken to address violent extremism and suggests ways to address remaining gaps in U.S. homeland security and foreign policy. The report has benefited from a series of interviews with administration officials at numerous cabinet level agencies and the White House and is the product of a small study group including myself, my Washington Institute colleague J Scott Carpenter, and former White House counterterrorism officials Steven Simon and Juan Zarate.
Access the report at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC04.php?CID=332
Showing posts with label homegrown terrorism in the west. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homegrown terrorism in the west. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Sunday, May 16, 2010
AMERICAN AL QAEDA - HOMEGROWN U.S. TERRORISM
*** Governments need to take steps immediately to counter this existential threat - it has already started to take on a life of its own and by the time someone decides enough is enough, it may be well too late. Who really wants the military deployed in urban centres? This is a game of action/reaction, change the rules already! MS ***
FROM: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/11/vinas.cruickshank.analysis/?hpt=C1
See the link - it's a lengthy piece.
Story highlights state the painfully obvious: "More Americans are turning to radical Islam, U.S. counterterrorism officials say".
FROM: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/05/11/vinas.cruickshank.analysis/?hpt=C1
See the link - it's a lengthy piece.
Story highlights state the painfully obvious: "More Americans are turning to radical Islam, U.S. counterterrorism officials say".
YOUNG AMERICAN MUSLIMS ON TRIAL IN PAKISTAN
*** The first casualty of war is not the truth, it is humanity itself. MS ***
FROM: http://napavalleyregister.com/news/world/article_6e2e3567-90c9-5535-ab20-0e51f6c74981.html
The prosecution concluded its case Saturday against five Americans on trial in a Pakistani court facing life sentences after being charged with planning terrorist attacks in the South Asian country.
The men _ all Muslims in their late teens or early 20s from the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia _ have pleaded not guilty to five charges.
The accused were given a last chance to respond to the prosecution before the defense presents its side on June 9, prosecutor Nadeem Akram said.
In a written statement, the men said the charges against them were trumped up and police planted discriminating evidence. "We just wanted to go to Afghanistan to help our Muslim brother on humanitarian grounds," they said.
The prosecution presented 19 witnesses and evidence including e-mail contacts allegedly with the Pakistani Taliban, and receipts of money they allegedly donated to banned militant groups in Pakistan, Akram said. There was a "strong case" for conviction in the trial being heard by one judge, he said.
The case is among several of foreigners allegedly signing up to join insurgents.
U.S. and Pakistan are continuing to investigate the Pakistani-American suspect in the botched Times Square bombing on May 1. Family members have said Faisal Shahzad never exhibited signs of extremism, raising questions as to why men who spent much of their lives in the West would seemingly be drawn to militant Islam.
The five men were arrested in Pakistan in December after being reported missing by their families. One had left behind a farewell video showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended.
Pakistani police have publicly made several accusations against the young men, claiming the suspects contacted Pakistani-based jihadi groups. They accused the five of using the social networking site Facebook and video-sharing site YouTube while they were in the U.S. to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan.
Their lawyer has said they were heading to Afghanistan and had no plans to stage attacks inside Pakistan.
The trial is taking place inside a high-security prison in the eastern city of Sargodha and media have not been allowed to cover the proceedings.
The men have been identified as Ramy Zamzam of Egyptian descent, Waqar Khan and Umar Farooq of Pakistani descent, and Aman Hassan Yemer and Ahmed Minni of Ethiopian descent.
FROM: http://napavalleyregister.com/news/world/article_6e2e3567-90c9-5535-ab20-0e51f6c74981.html
The prosecution concluded its case Saturday against five Americans on trial in a Pakistani court facing life sentences after being charged with planning terrorist attacks in the South Asian country.
The men _ all Muslims in their late teens or early 20s from the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia _ have pleaded not guilty to five charges.
The accused were given a last chance to respond to the prosecution before the defense presents its side on June 9, prosecutor Nadeem Akram said.
In a written statement, the men said the charges against them were trumped up and police planted discriminating evidence. "We just wanted to go to Afghanistan to help our Muslim brother on humanitarian grounds," they said.
The prosecution presented 19 witnesses and evidence including e-mail contacts allegedly with the Pakistani Taliban, and receipts of money they allegedly donated to banned militant groups in Pakistan, Akram said. There was a "strong case" for conviction in the trial being heard by one judge, he said.
The case is among several of foreigners allegedly signing up to join insurgents.
U.S. and Pakistan are continuing to investigate the Pakistani-American suspect in the botched Times Square bombing on May 1. Family members have said Faisal Shahzad never exhibited signs of extremism, raising questions as to why men who spent much of their lives in the West would seemingly be drawn to militant Islam.
The five men were arrested in Pakistan in December after being reported missing by their families. One had left behind a farewell video showing scenes of war and casualties and saying Muslims must be defended.
Pakistani police have publicly made several accusations against the young men, claiming the suspects contacted Pakistani-based jihadi groups. They accused the five of using the social networking site Facebook and video-sharing site YouTube while they were in the U.S. to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan.
Their lawyer has said they were heading to Afghanistan and had no plans to stage attacks inside Pakistan.
The trial is taking place inside a high-security prison in the eastern city of Sargodha and media have not been allowed to cover the proceedings.
The men have been identified as Ramy Zamzam of Egyptian descent, Waqar Khan and Umar Farooq of Pakistani descent, and Aman Hassan Yemer and Ahmed Minni of Ethiopian descent.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
DUTCH REPORT ON COUNTERING EXTREMIST NARRATIVES
FROM: Intelwire
The Dutch counterterrorism agency the NCTb, and the University of Leiden have released a volume of essays, focusing on how to more effectively counter al Qaeda's dangerous narrative. While al Qaeda's popularity has slipped over the past year, it remains a serious threat to the US and its allies. The organization has demonstrated that it can still plot potentially devastating attacks, as the Najibullah Zazi case illustrated, and it still is able to spread its destructive propaganda and message.
The complete Report is at: http://english.nctb.nl/Images/Countering%20Violent%20Extremist%20Narratives_tcm92-259489.pdf?cp=92&cs=25496
"As the United States continues to fight militarily to disrupt the efforts of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the U.S. government has slowly come to the realisation that military force alone cannot defeat violent extremism. There has been increased recognition that capturing and killing all terrorists is not a realistic strategy, and that we must spend more time understanding how and why individuals are becoming terrorists."
Michael Jacobson's Report "Learning Counter-Narrative Lessons from Cases of Terrorist Dropouts" is at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/opedsPDFs/4b7aaf56ca52e.pdf
The Dutch counterterrorism agency the NCTb, and the University of Leiden have released a volume of essays, focusing on how to more effectively counter al Qaeda's dangerous narrative. While al Qaeda's popularity has slipped over the past year, it remains a serious threat to the US and its allies. The organization has demonstrated that it can still plot potentially devastating attacks, as the Najibullah Zazi case illustrated, and it still is able to spread its destructive propaganda and message.
The complete Report is at: http://english.nctb.nl/Images/Countering%20Violent%20Extremist%20Narratives_tcm92-259489.pdf?cp=92&cs=25496
"As the United States continues to fight militarily to disrupt the efforts of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the U.S. government has slowly come to the realisation that military force alone cannot defeat violent extremism. There has been increased recognition that capturing and killing all terrorists is not a realistic strategy, and that we must spend more time understanding how and why individuals are becoming terrorists."
Michael Jacobson's Report "Learning Counter-Narrative Lessons from Cases of Terrorist Dropouts" is at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/opedsPDFs/4b7aaf56ca52e.pdf
ZAZI PLEADS GUILTY TO TERRORISM IN NEW YORK
FROM: http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/769922--n-y-subway-bomb-plotter-was-ready-to-sacrifice-himself
NEW YORK–A former Denver airport shuttle driver admitted Monday to a plot to bomb the New York City subways, saying he was recruited by Al Qaeda in Pakistan for a "martyrdom plan" against the United States.
"I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the U.S. military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan," Najibullah Zazi, 25, told a federal judge in a Brooklyn courtroom.
The Afghan native pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support for a terrorist organization.
He faces life in prison without parole at a sentencing in June.
Zazi said he went to Pakistan in 2008 to join the Taliban and fight against the American military but was recruited by the terrorist network and went into a training camp.
He admitted building homemade explosives with beauty supplies purchased in the Denver suburbs and cooked up in a Colorado hotel room, then driving them to New York City just before the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Zazi told authorities he disposed of the explosives once arriving in New York.
He said the terrorism plot was aimed at the city subway system but wouldn't name a specific target when asked by U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie.
Zazi was arrested Sept. 20, 2009, after arousing authorities' suspicions by his cross-country drive to New York around the anniversary of 9/11.
Authorities allege Zazi travelled twice to Canada in the months prior to his arrest. Zazi has family in Mississauga.
Law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that the jailed Zazi recently volunteered information about the bomb plot during a meeting with his attorney and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
One of the people familiar with the Zazi case said Zazi decided to offer the information after being warned that his mother could face criminal immigration charges.
One of the people familiar with the investigation said Zazi told prosecutors he made roughly two pounds of a powerful and highly unstable explosive called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP.
The same explosive was used by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001 and the terrorists who carried out the London bombings in 2005 that killed 52 people.
Others charged in the terror case include Zazi's father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, who was accused this month of trying to get rid of chemicals and other evidence.
NEW YORK–A former Denver airport shuttle driver admitted Monday to a plot to bomb the New York City subways, saying he was recruited by Al Qaeda in Pakistan for a "martyrdom plan" against the United States.
"I would sacrifice myself to bring attention to what the U.S. military was doing to civilians in Afghanistan," Najibullah Zazi, 25, told a federal judge in a Brooklyn courtroom.
The Afghan native pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support for a terrorist organization.
He faces life in prison without parole at a sentencing in June.
Zazi said he went to Pakistan in 2008 to join the Taliban and fight against the American military but was recruited by the terrorist network and went into a training camp.
He admitted building homemade explosives with beauty supplies purchased in the Denver suburbs and cooked up in a Colorado hotel room, then driving them to New York City just before the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Zazi told authorities he disposed of the explosives once arriving in New York.
He said the terrorism plot was aimed at the city subway system but wouldn't name a specific target when asked by U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie.
Zazi was arrested Sept. 20, 2009, after arousing authorities' suspicions by his cross-country drive to New York around the anniversary of 9/11.
Authorities allege Zazi travelled twice to Canada in the months prior to his arrest. Zazi has family in Mississauga.
Law enforcement officials told The Associated Press that the jailed Zazi recently volunteered information about the bomb plot during a meeting with his attorney and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
One of the people familiar with the Zazi case said Zazi decided to offer the information after being warned that his mother could face criminal immigration charges.
One of the people familiar with the investigation said Zazi told prosecutors he made roughly two pounds of a powerful and highly unstable explosive called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP.
The same explosive was used by would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001 and the terrorists who carried out the London bombings in 2005 that killed 52 people.
Others charged in the terror case include Zazi's father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, who was accused this month of trying to get rid of chemicals and other evidence.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
TERRORISM IS SPECIAL SAYS NATIONAL POST ASSISTANT EDITOR
*** I like this one better than its progenitor article. MS ***
In yesterday's National Post, Ottawa-area lawyer, scientist and professor Amir Attaran offered a thoughtful column lauding the success of Canada's criminal court system, backed by our able police forces, at detecting and arresting members of several Canadian terrorist groups, some of whom have now received lengthy prison terms. (Disclosure: Attaran and I have debated unrelated topics before, in a respectful and amicable fashion.) Attaran suggests in part that such successes prove that it is old fashioned police work that will defeat terror, and "those who operated outside the rules do not have a single guilty verdict to show for their troubles."
While Attaran offers worthy commentary, I posit that he misses the overall point. In a war on terrorism, victory cannot be measured in convictions alone.
Terrorism is special because it is not a crime conducted by individuals (alone or in groups) against other individuals. It is politically motivated violence intended to bring about some change in a government's policy, or simply to brutalize a population that holds beliefs that the attackers deem offensive, whether those beliefs reflect political ideology, economic theory or religious worship. Further complicating the matter is that in today's interconnected world, while the terrorist groups themselves may not be operating on behalf of any particular nation-state, their targets are often sovereign countries. I'd hate to be the NYPD officer driving a squad car through Taliban-controlled Kandahar keeping a watchful eye out for bin Laden and his boys, eager to make an arrest.
Attaran's arguments hold weight when dealing with home-grown domestic terrorists, who commit crimes before they ever have a chance to carry out their attacks. If diligent police work can catch them committing these lesser crimes and sentence them to long terms, like Attaran, I would celebrate this. But the good work of our police services and courts will be of little help preventing a terrorist cell outside our borders from striking us, nor would they be of any utility carrying out the bleaker but vitally necessary response to any terrorist attack — a crushing retaliatory response.
Further, Attaran's contention that the "more aggressive" counter-terror policies can be shown to be failures due to a failure to garner convictions ignores some entirely different ways of keeping score in the constant race against those who wish us harm. Success against terrorism can also be measured in the body counts of militants torn apart by our military power, and most important, in the lives of Canadians who might have perished in the absence of aggressive and assertive preemptive action against emerging terrorist threats. As many before me have pointed out, the fight against terrorism is hard to keep track of, since almost by default, the most successful operation by a government agency against a shadowy enemy will by design go unreported.
Once again, Attaran's championing of our long-standing legal principles is warranted, and the convictions he lauds are indeed worth celebrating as victories for the forces of civilization against those who seek our culture's downfall and replacement by a backwards-looking theocracy. But by establishing an arbitrary goalpost for victory and declaring his preferred option the victor by that measure, Attaran provides a perspective on the fight against terrorism akin to criticizing the Maple Leafs as an NHL franchise because they don't kick many field goals.
Effective policing, efficient courts and robust laws are an essential component in defeating terrorism at home. But powerful military forces operating under expansive rules of engagement, and well-funded intelligence agencies with wide-ranging mandates are just as important, if less palatable to many Canadians still pretending our former soft-power delusions still apply. Like Attaran, I cheer each time the courts hand out a lengthy sentence to a terrorist arrested by our clever Canadian police. But as a realist determined to see terrorism defeated by whatever means necessary, rather than those I find most palatable, I suggest that a jury, plus tanks, artillery, special forces units, spies and forceful diplomacy is a better response to terrorism than juries alone.
National Post
Matt Gurney is Assistant Editor, Comment, and a member of the National Post Editorial Board.
mgurney@nationalpost.com
In yesterday's National Post, Ottawa-area lawyer, scientist and professor Amir Attaran offered a thoughtful column lauding the success of Canada's criminal court system, backed by our able police forces, at detecting and arresting members of several Canadian terrorist groups, some of whom have now received lengthy prison terms. (Disclosure: Attaran and I have debated unrelated topics before, in a respectful and amicable fashion.) Attaran suggests in part that such successes prove that it is old fashioned police work that will defeat terror, and "those who operated outside the rules do not have a single guilty verdict to show for their troubles."
While Attaran offers worthy commentary, I posit that he misses the overall point. In a war on terrorism, victory cannot be measured in convictions alone.
Terrorism is special because it is not a crime conducted by individuals (alone or in groups) against other individuals. It is politically motivated violence intended to bring about some change in a government's policy, or simply to brutalize a population that holds beliefs that the attackers deem offensive, whether those beliefs reflect political ideology, economic theory or religious worship. Further complicating the matter is that in today's interconnected world, while the terrorist groups themselves may not be operating on behalf of any particular nation-state, their targets are often sovereign countries. I'd hate to be the NYPD officer driving a squad car through Taliban-controlled Kandahar keeping a watchful eye out for bin Laden and his boys, eager to make an arrest.
Attaran's arguments hold weight when dealing with home-grown domestic terrorists, who commit crimes before they ever have a chance to carry out their attacks. If diligent police work can catch them committing these lesser crimes and sentence them to long terms, like Attaran, I would celebrate this. But the good work of our police services and courts will be of little help preventing a terrorist cell outside our borders from striking us, nor would they be of any utility carrying out the bleaker but vitally necessary response to any terrorist attack — a crushing retaliatory response.
Further, Attaran's contention that the "more aggressive" counter-terror policies can be shown to be failures due to a failure to garner convictions ignores some entirely different ways of keeping score in the constant race against those who wish us harm. Success against terrorism can also be measured in the body counts of militants torn apart by our military power, and most important, in the lives of Canadians who might have perished in the absence of aggressive and assertive preemptive action against emerging terrorist threats. As many before me have pointed out, the fight against terrorism is hard to keep track of, since almost by default, the most successful operation by a government agency against a shadowy enemy will by design go unreported.
Once again, Attaran's championing of our long-standing legal principles is warranted, and the convictions he lauds are indeed worth celebrating as victories for the forces of civilization against those who seek our culture's downfall and replacement by a backwards-looking theocracy. But by establishing an arbitrary goalpost for victory and declaring his preferred option the victor by that measure, Attaran provides a perspective on the fight against terrorism akin to criticizing the Maple Leafs as an NHL franchise because they don't kick many field goals.
Effective policing, efficient courts and robust laws are an essential component in defeating terrorism at home. But powerful military forces operating under expansive rules of engagement, and well-funded intelligence agencies with wide-ranging mandates are just as important, if less palatable to many Canadians still pretending our former soft-power delusions still apply. Like Attaran, I cheer each time the courts hand out a lengthy sentence to a terrorist arrested by our clever Canadian police. But as a realist determined to see terrorism defeated by whatever means necessary, rather than those I find most palatable, I suggest that a jury, plus tanks, artillery, special forces units, spies and forceful diplomacy is a better response to terrorism than juries alone.
National Post
Matt Gurney is Assistant Editor, Comment, and a member of the National Post Editorial Board.
mgurney@nationalpost.com
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
LONDON RADICALS BARK...I MEAN SPEAK
*** There are people who know this mindset - so why not work with them instead of taking a we-know-best approach? Because we can all see how well that worked out. MS ***
FROM: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/February/How-London-Became-a-Terrorist-Hotbed/
Great Britain recently raised its terror alert to "severe" following reports that al Qaeda was plotting new attacks.
But Britain may be facing an even greater threat from within -- one the British government helped to create.
CBN News recently traveled to London to interview a number of leading Islamic radicals who have settled there with the full knowledge of the British government.
All Eyes on London
Just one year before attempting to blow up an airliner over Detroit, Christmas Day bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied engineering at University College London.
During his stay there, he networked with known Islamic radicals. Security sources believe he may have linked up with al Qaeda.
Abdulmutallab is just one of many Islamic terrorists with ties to London. Some live there with help from the state.
One example is Yasser al-Sirri, who faces a death sentence in Egypt.
Then there is Anjem Choudary. To date, he has not been charged with terrorism, but his pro-jihad views have led some to call him Great Britain's most hated man.
"Many people love the idea of jihad, you know?" Choudary told CBN News. "And they want to engage in it."
A radical Islamist can find a little bit of everything in London. Ex-jihadists, current jihadists, "wannabe" jihadists: they're all there. So how did this happen?
During the 1980s and 1990s, British authorities granted asylum to a number of Islamic terrorists wanted in their home countries.
"All of this happened under the assumption that if you allowed these people to operate in London, if you allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, they would not be attacking Britain," terrorism expert Peter Neumann explained.
Neumann is author of the book Old and New Terrorism and heads the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization in London.
"The government, quite cynically, thought that whatever happened in other countries, whatever these people were plotting in other countries, was of no concern to the British government," he added.
Policy Backfires
On July 7, 2005, explosions proved the British government's open door strategy horribly wrong, as al Qaeda-linked terrorists killed 52 people in a series of bombings against London's mass transit system.
One year later, London was the staging ground for a massive al Qaeda plot to blow up 10 transatlantic airliners.
"Only then did the policy change," Neumann said. "However, the seeds of the radical Islamists' activity had already been sown."
Yasser al-Sirri has lived in London since 1994. In Egypt, he belonged to a terrorist organization led by al Qaeda's second-in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1993, he was found guilty of participating in a failed assassination plot against Egypt's then-prime minister and sentenced to death.
His recent interview with CBN News marked his first appearance on an American television network.
"The British government knows about my activities, my situation," al-Sirri said. "Everything is clear and I have done nothing to break the law."
The British government locked al-Sirri up in 2001 on terrorism charges. He was found not guilty and later released, but American officials still want to get their hands on al-Sirri.
In 2005, he was found guilty in a U.S. federal court of assisting terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious "blind sheikh" behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
False Accusations?
Both the U.S. and Egypt have tried to extradite al-Sirri from Britain for years. He declares he is innocent.
"Many times the American government uses the wrong people for spies or to get intelligence information," al-Sirri claimed. "Some people do business with the FBI, CIA and give them wrong information and sometimes the wrong decision is made."
Al-Sirri didn't help his cause in 2008 when he was photographed walking on a London street with Abu Qatada, al Qaeda's spiritual leader in Europe.
Qatada received asylum in London in 1993 and collected welfare benefits for years. He is now in prison and awaiting deportation to Jordan, where he has been convicted on terrorism charges.
"There was a permissive environment to some extent," said Oxford-based terrorism expert Mahan Abedin. "There was the issue of a lot of foreigners, foreign fighters for instance, and foreign ideologues basing themselves here in London and finding a receptive audience."
Aaad al-Faqih is wanted in his native Saudi Arabia for allegedly seeking to overthrow the Saudi regime.
CBN News recently conducted an off-camera interview with al-Faqih in his London home.
He was designated by the U.S. and U.N. as a global terrorist in 2004 for alleged links to al Qaeda but maintains his innocence. Al Faqih says he meets with British government officials regularly and that they respect his work.
He believes there will be more confrontation between the West and the Muslim world, including terrorist attacks "even bigger than in 2001."
British officials have pushed to deport men like al-Faqih and Yasser al-Sirri back to their home countries. But the European Union and a number of British judges have blocked these efforts over human rights concerns.
"Over years, perhaps decades, a whole sub-culture had grown up," Neumann observed. "And to get to grips with that only through law enforcement and intelligence is very difficult. This subculture of jihadism still exists."
In April 2008, Britain's then home secretary said that British intelligence was monitoring some 2,000 individuals, as well as 200 radical Islamic networks and 30 active terrorist plots.
The British government banned Anjem Choudary's group, Islam4UK, last month under the country's counter-terrorism laws.
Choudary calls for Islamic Sharia law to be enforced in the United Kingdom. His group praised the 9/11 hijackers as "the magnificent 19."
"There is a huge amount of support for people like sheikh Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri [among British Muslims]," Choudary told CBN News.
A Ticking Time Bomb?
Choudary -- who collects welfare benefits from the state -- says his group is a non-violent political and ideological movement. But several former members have been convicted on terrorism charges.
"There are many youth out there who do contact us and do come to our talks and they have other ideas," Choudary said. "And we can make sure that those energies are channeled through discussion, dialogue, interaction. But if you take us out of the picture, then you have a very volatile situation."
"It's not a threat. It's a warning. It's a reality check," he added.
Abedin said things have improved significantly in London since 2005 and the British government has taken important steps to battle radicalism among young Muslims.
"The permissive environment that prevailed prior to July 7, 2005 is no longer the case," he said. "Radical preachers like Omar Bakri Mohammed, like Abu Hamza, for instance, have departed the arena. They've either been deported, expelled, or imprisoned.
But others like Anjem Choudary walk the streets of London as free men.
"I think that the British government is sitting on a tinderbox, you know, full of dynamite" he said. "And they have the matches in their hand and they're being very flippant."
"They're not dealing with it properly," Choudary continued. "It could all blow up in their face and it could be a very vicious situation."
FROM: http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2010/February/How-London-Became-a-Terrorist-Hotbed/
Great Britain recently raised its terror alert to "severe" following reports that al Qaeda was plotting new attacks.
But Britain may be facing an even greater threat from within -- one the British government helped to create.
CBN News recently traveled to London to interview a number of leading Islamic radicals who have settled there with the full knowledge of the British government.
All Eyes on London
Just one year before attempting to blow up an airliner over Detroit, Christmas Day bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab studied engineering at University College London.
During his stay there, he networked with known Islamic radicals. Security sources believe he may have linked up with al Qaeda.
Abdulmutallab is just one of many Islamic terrorists with ties to London. Some live there with help from the state.
One example is Yasser al-Sirri, who faces a death sentence in Egypt.
Then there is Anjem Choudary. To date, he has not been charged with terrorism, but his pro-jihad views have led some to call him Great Britain's most hated man.
"Many people love the idea of jihad, you know?" Choudary told CBN News. "And they want to engage in it."
A radical Islamist can find a little bit of everything in London. Ex-jihadists, current jihadists, "wannabe" jihadists: they're all there. So how did this happen?
During the 1980s and 1990s, British authorities granted asylum to a number of Islamic terrorists wanted in their home countries.
"All of this happened under the assumption that if you allowed these people to operate in London, if you allowed them to do whatever they wanted to do, they would not be attacking Britain," terrorism expert Peter Neumann explained.
Neumann is author of the book Old and New Terrorism and heads the International Centre for the Study of Radicalization in London.
"The government, quite cynically, thought that whatever happened in other countries, whatever these people were plotting in other countries, was of no concern to the British government," he added.
Policy Backfires
On July 7, 2005, explosions proved the British government's open door strategy horribly wrong, as al Qaeda-linked terrorists killed 52 people in a series of bombings against London's mass transit system.
One year later, London was the staging ground for a massive al Qaeda plot to blow up 10 transatlantic airliners.
"Only then did the policy change," Neumann said. "However, the seeds of the radical Islamists' activity had already been sown."
Yasser al-Sirri has lived in London since 1994. In Egypt, he belonged to a terrorist organization led by al Qaeda's second-in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1993, he was found guilty of participating in a failed assassination plot against Egypt's then-prime minister and sentenced to death.
His recent interview with CBN News marked his first appearance on an American television network.
"The British government knows about my activities, my situation," al-Sirri said. "Everything is clear and I have done nothing to break the law."
The British government locked al-Sirri up in 2001 on terrorism charges. He was found not guilty and later released, but American officials still want to get their hands on al-Sirri.
In 2005, he was found guilty in a U.S. federal court of assisting terrorist mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious "blind sheikh" behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
False Accusations?
Both the U.S. and Egypt have tried to extradite al-Sirri from Britain for years. He declares he is innocent.
"Many times the American government uses the wrong people for spies or to get intelligence information," al-Sirri claimed. "Some people do business with the FBI, CIA and give them wrong information and sometimes the wrong decision is made."
Al-Sirri didn't help his cause in 2008 when he was photographed walking on a London street with Abu Qatada, al Qaeda's spiritual leader in Europe.
Qatada received asylum in London in 1993 and collected welfare benefits for years. He is now in prison and awaiting deportation to Jordan, where he has been convicted on terrorism charges.
"There was a permissive environment to some extent," said Oxford-based terrorism expert Mahan Abedin. "There was the issue of a lot of foreigners, foreign fighters for instance, and foreign ideologues basing themselves here in London and finding a receptive audience."
Aaad al-Faqih is wanted in his native Saudi Arabia for allegedly seeking to overthrow the Saudi regime.
CBN News recently conducted an off-camera interview with al-Faqih in his London home.
He was designated by the U.S. and U.N. as a global terrorist in 2004 for alleged links to al Qaeda but maintains his innocence. Al Faqih says he meets with British government officials regularly and that they respect his work.
He believes there will be more confrontation between the West and the Muslim world, including terrorist attacks "even bigger than in 2001."
British officials have pushed to deport men like al-Faqih and Yasser al-Sirri back to their home countries. But the European Union and a number of British judges have blocked these efforts over human rights concerns.
"Over years, perhaps decades, a whole sub-culture had grown up," Neumann observed. "And to get to grips with that only through law enforcement and intelligence is very difficult. This subculture of jihadism still exists."
In April 2008, Britain's then home secretary said that British intelligence was monitoring some 2,000 individuals, as well as 200 radical Islamic networks and 30 active terrorist plots.
The British government banned Anjem Choudary's group, Islam4UK, last month under the country's counter-terrorism laws.
Choudary calls for Islamic Sharia law to be enforced in the United Kingdom. His group praised the 9/11 hijackers as "the magnificent 19."
"There is a huge amount of support for people like sheikh Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri [among British Muslims]," Choudary told CBN News.
A Ticking Time Bomb?
Choudary -- who collects welfare benefits from the state -- says his group is a non-violent political and ideological movement. But several former members have been convicted on terrorism charges.
"There are many youth out there who do contact us and do come to our talks and they have other ideas," Choudary said. "And we can make sure that those energies are channeled through discussion, dialogue, interaction. But if you take us out of the picture, then you have a very volatile situation."
"It's not a threat. It's a warning. It's a reality check," he added.
Abedin said things have improved significantly in London since 2005 and the British government has taken important steps to battle radicalism among young Muslims.
"The permissive environment that prevailed prior to July 7, 2005 is no longer the case," he said. "Radical preachers like Omar Bakri Mohammed, like Abu Hamza, for instance, have departed the arena. They've either been deported, expelled, or imprisoned.
But others like Anjem Choudary walk the streets of London as free men.
"I think that the British government is sitting on a tinderbox, you know, full of dynamite" he said. "And they have the matches in their hand and they're being very flippant."
"They're not dealing with it properly," Choudary continued. "It could all blow up in their face and it could be a very vicious situation."
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
MC LADEN : FRANCHISED TERRORISM
*** This is no way suggests McDonalds (all rights reserved) is a terrorist organization - the "MC-something" makes for great writing. :) MS ***
FROM: http://www.kelowna.com/2010/02/02/marketing-the-al-qaida-brand-the-evolution-of-franchised-terrorism-under-osama-bin-laden-column/
Canwest News Service
It's a bleak commentary on how this conflict with the al-Qaida terrorism network has been managed that over eight and approaching nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington there is considerable dissent among western intelligence analysts and military leaders about the importance of Osama bin Laden.
Some say killing or capturing bin Laden would be the trigger that leads to the swift collapse of the international terror network he created and the various insurgencies that have spun off from it. (MS: This is totally false.)
This view is suggested by a United States Senate report published in November that looked in detail at the failure to catch bin Laden and the top al- Qaida leaders when U.S. forces led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
"The failure to finish the job" – that is to neutralize bin Laden – "represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," said the report.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sees bin Laden as a potent symbol whose survival "emboldens al-Qaida. I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until he is captured or killed," he told a Senate committee last month.
An even firmer picture of bin Laden as the essential, central ingredient for al-Qaida's survival comes from Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism who interviewed bin Laden in 1997. "Al-Qaida is bin Laden's idea, it is his baby and 9/11 was his operation and it would psychologically be a victory for the civilized world if he was killed or captured," Bergen told the Financial Times newspaper last month. (MS: Not correct. AQ is an idea that uses long-standing Muslim desires for a utopian Islamic state. If OBL goes, another 100 are already waiting to replace him.)
The U.S. attacks with missile-armed drone aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership are believed to be hiding, has eliminated a large number of the organization's leaders, Bergen said. "There is nobody who could replace him as head of this network," Bergen said.
I could continue quoting people who believe killing or capturing bin Laden would be the key to defeating this wave of radical Islamic terrorism. But it is far from being a universal view. There is a significant school of thought that argues that Islamic terrorism is no longer a monopoly of al-Qaida core leaders and bin Laden. Indeed, major terrorist attacks may not even be under their control and direction.
David Livingstone, a security expert at Chatham House, Britain's premier think-tank on international affairs, said recently he doesn't believe removing bin Laden from the equation will have much effect because al-Qaida has become a brand name. The al-Qaida product of Islamic terrorism is now so well established it will survive with or without bin Laden.
The most persistent and in many ways the most persuasive proponent of this view is Marc Sageman. Sageman is an interesting man whose qualifications make it clear he is well worth listening to. Sageman has a doctorate in political sociology and is a practising psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. In the late 1980s he was based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, liaising with the Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In 2004, Sageman produced an important book called Understanding Terrorism, which was based on detailed dissection of the lives of the approximately 400 al- Qaida members then in captivity. It is a book full of fascinating and significant information – for example, that about half the known al-Qaida terrorists attended only 20 mosques worldwide and that most of them were intelligent and privileged middle class young men, not brainwashed, ill- educated cannon fodder.
In his latest book published in 2008, Leaderless Jihad, Sageman argues that al-Qaida is not an organization that can be systematically destroyed, because it has evolved into a social network that has to be disrupted by undermining the relationships that sustain it. This is what he says:
"The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaida masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These homegrown wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad."
Sageman argues that al-Qaida has ceased to exist as an organizational entity and that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, he says, the main terrorism threat today is from low-level groups that are self-recruiting and have adopted the al-Qaida brand, largely from the Internet.
This analysis, as you can imagine, is at some odds with the official view in Washington. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell is an example. In the publicly released portions of his evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he said:
"[Al-Qaida] is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni [Muslim] communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities."
More recently in Senate evidence McConnell said that while al-Qaida "has lost many of its senior operational planners of the years, the group's adaptable decision-making process and bench of skilled operatives have enabled it to identify effective replacements."
This characterization of al-Qaida as a resourceful adversary that is highly disciplined and in full control of its network is dramatically different from the amorphous and fluid picture of al-Qaida presented by Sageman and others who view this terror campaign more as a social phenomenon than an evil conspiracy. But such a characterization has few appeals to politicians and administrations that much prefer to be able to draw the threats facing their citizens with clear and distinct lines. The enemy must have a face.
While I do not buy Sageman's arguments entirely, I think that what he has identified is an aspect of the insurgencies and terrorist campaign that is new to the world. The Internet as a source of information, a provider of instant communication and access among both associates and strangers, and a facilitator for the swift construction of global networks has undoubtedly sustained al- Qaida. And it is, of course, deeply ironic that an organization whose proclaimed aim is to gather the Middle East and, given a chance, the rest of the world under a regime of early medieval puritanical theocracy should be relying heavily on 21st century technological wizardry to do it.
Jihadi kit on Web
The full kit for becoming a jihadi is available on the Web. By some estimates there are tens of thousands of sites either aimed at, involving or somehow of benefit to people vulnerable to the call of militant Islam. At the most basic level is propaganda, which feeds and reinforces already well entrenched suspicions among very many Muslim people that the West in the broadest sense is out to destroy them. The pictures of American mistreatment of prisoners amounting to torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad must have been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida beyond bin Laden's dreams. If you want to get an idea of what's out there, influencing young Muslims every day, just go to Google Image and type in Abu Ghraib. I'm sure I don't need to warn you, many of the pictures were not printed in western media and are even more troubling than those that were.
The Abu Ghraib pictures are an extreme and lasting example of the kind of material that can and does inflame the passions of susceptible Muslims, especially in this context restless young men unsure of their own identity and purpose. But there's plenty more incitement and it's up there on the Internet on a daily basis. It may be pictures or video of the aftermath of attacks with missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft on houses or villages in Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan. Or the pictures may be of villages in Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Somalia and Yemen after attacks by drones or regular American bomber aircraft. I'm sure the Americans try to be as meticulous as they can be in assessing intelligence information before striking a house where a militant is believed to be staying. But there is no doubt a lot of wives, children and other innocent civilians get killed in these attacks.
Then, of course, there are the pictures and videos from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Israel responds, often with a heavy hand, to attacks by the followers of Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This daily diet of pictures of the ruins and the dead reinforces the feeling among some young Muslims that they are powerless against what they see as the hatred of the West and instant death from the skies.
For many young Muslims, even the most angry, that is where the trail ends. Indeed, some try to turn their anger into a positive force to attack the problems within their own societies or to come to grips with the divisions between Islam and West. But some, a few, have the misfortune to be spotted by the lurking recruiters for al-Qaida.
Others are self-recruiting. A good example is the five young American Muslims from West Virginia now under arrest in Pakistan. From sites they found on the Internet they adopted radical Islamic views and decided they wanted to go to fight with the Taliban against their countrymen in Afghanistan. They had some sort of preliminary contact with people in Pakistan claiming to be radicals. But from what we know now, the real radicals were suspicious of them and Pakistani police arrested them soon after their arrival.
But any diligent search of the Web can reveal enough training information on how to be a jihadi, from religious justification of terrorism to making car bombs with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Most of those thousands of websites useful to the would-be jihadi are in Arabic, but I think of particular interest to us are the Canadian, American, British or other western young men of Muslim heritage who have tried, some successfully, to become terrorists.
Men lured to terrorism
Only this week, for example, we have had the sentencing of some members of the so-called Toronto 18 who planned in 2004 to make massive truck bombs and attack the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.
Their families came from Somalia, Egypt and Jamaica, but to any casual observer they were normal immigrant Canadian kids.
The young men who launched the July 2005 attack on the London Underground subway system were even more acclimatized. They were Britishborn.
In both cases the groups first got involved in radical Muslim online chat rooms, which are watched by fundamentalist Muslim imams for potential recruits. The process of luring these young men towards terrorism is not unlike the way pedophiles lure young girls or boys towards meetings.
In the case of both the Toronto 18 and the London subway bombers there was one main radical Muslim cleric who latched on to them and changed them from being the awkward, unsure and emotional youths, of which we've all had experience, into dedicated killers.
That cleric's name is Anwar al Awlaki and he's an American of Yemeni background. Awlaki was involved with two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Toronto and London groups. There's evidence he radicalized Major Nidal Hasan, the American army psychiatrist who massacred 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last year, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, the young Nigerian who nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Awlaki was born in New Mexico 38 years ago, but his family returned to Yemen with him when he was young. He came back to the United States in 1991 to attend Colorado State University, received his master's degree in education at San Diego and later enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University. Awlaki has been an active Muslim cleric since his postgraduate years when he was an imam at San Diego's Rabat mosque. Then he was a Muslim chaplain at the Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia outside Washington. Somewhere along the way he became a radical and turned up on the FBI's radar following the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was interviewed then about his association with two of the hijackers and has been high on the FBI and CIA's lists of persons of interest ever since.
Doubtless fearing pursuers on his trail, in 2002 he moved to London and two years later he returned to Yemen, where he has been ever since, so far as is known.
He has spent some time in prison in Yemen for unspecified crimes and since then he has become more radical and more of a presence on the Internet both on his own Web page and as a blogger. In December, for example, he wrote a blog praising al Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qaida in neighbouring Somalia, for the rape and stoning to death of a young woman accused of theft. Al Shabaab, Awlaki said, should take no notice of malicious stories in the western press that the girl was only 13 years old. Well, I can tell you that those stories in the western press were true.
Awlaki has now found his calling as an online preacher of hatred and terrorism. You can find his sermons easily on You-Tube. His value to al-Qaida is that he is, of course, fluent in English, has an undeniable understanding of American and contemporary youth culture, and has an engaging sense of humour. His Facebook page has nearly 5,000 fans.
But like all good salesmen and con artists, Awlaki's most important talent is that he can take very complex ideological and religious thoughts and make them very simple. He has the ability to make impressionable young men believe that slaughtering as many people as possible is not only an affirmative political statement, but is a religious duty. If you look at his YouTube sermons you'll see he has the glib ability to construct verbal fantasy worlds and make his young acolytes believe them.
And once he has cast his spell over his targets it seems that he constantly reinforces the indoctrination. We know, for example, that he kept buttressing the resolve of the two 9/11 hijackers he knew right up to the moment they set out on their mission.
Killer praised as a hero
The same happened with Hasan at Fort Hood with whom Awlaki kept up an e-mail correspondence intended to sustain the major's resolve. Among those 21 e-mails are several instances of Hasan asking for religious validation for what he was about to do, and Awlaki replied with comforting interpretations of Islam.
Soon after the attack Awlaki praised Hasan as a hero. On his website he reacted angrily to condemnation of Hasan by U.S. Muslim groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Their rejection of Hasan's killings was, he said, treason against the Muslim community.
It was also, of course, a significant political blow at Awlaki, which soiled his reputation among American Muslims. Manipulating Abdulmutalab and sending him off as a plane bomber seems, by some perverted logic, to have been an attempt to re-establish Awlaki's reputation as the indispensable mentor for English-speaking would-be jihadis.
And by late December last year Awlaki had a personal reason for wanting to down an American airliner. Shortly before the attempted Christmas Day attack, an American drone made a missile attack on a compound in Yemen where several local al-Qaida leaders, including Awlaki, were believed to be staying. It seems Awlaki missed retribution that time, but I suspect he is a man with a very short life expectancy. Indeed, he seems to have been a target of another air attack in Yemen earlier this week.
But we need to constantly remind ourselves that Awlaki, bin Laden and al- Qaida are not superhuman evil geniuses. Far from it. Bin Laden's objective was to inspire and lead a spreading revolution that would recreate the old Middle Eastern caliphate, bringing Muslim people under the administration of a state governed by purist and puritan Shariah law. Instead, 12 years after bin Laden began his campaign with the truck bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a decade after his followup attack on the USS Cole while it was anchored in Aden Port in Yemen, he and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding out somewhere along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. Or they might be in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, or perhaps Somalia or even bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen.
At any rate, they have only a few dozen hard core supporters left with them and the worldwide army of true believers is no more than a few thousand. Al- Qaida in Iraq, which once had the U.S. military tied up in knots, has ceased to exist. Bin Laden's relations with the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are far from secure. He has achieved no sound political base as has been done by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and even Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, all the indications are that more and more of the world's 112 billion Muslims are increasingly disgusted by his strategy of murdering civilians of any race, creed or religion, as well as with his puritanical and brutal interpretations of Islam.
That said, al-Qaida is not yet defeated and it or its adherents – self- recruited from the Internet or otherwise -will doubtless be a danger for some years to come.
But I always think one is approaching a breaking point of some kind when history starts getting played as farce.
And with al-Qaida, we are now in the realms of Monty Python. For even among the most troubled and impressionable would-be jihadis there must be a very limited supply of young men willing to believe there will be 47 virgins waiting in Paradise for a willing martyr who goes into battle armed only with a pair of exploding underpants.
FROM: http://www.kelowna.com/2010/02/02/marketing-the-al-qaida-brand-the-evolution-of-franchised-terrorism-under-osama-bin-laden-column/
Canwest News Service
It's a bleak commentary on how this conflict with the al-Qaida terrorism network has been managed that over eight and approaching nine years after the attacks on New York and Washington there is considerable dissent among western intelligence analysts and military leaders about the importance of Osama bin Laden.
Some say killing or capturing bin Laden would be the trigger that leads to the swift collapse of the international terror network he created and the various insurgencies that have spun off from it. (MS: This is totally false.)
This view is suggested by a United States Senate report published in November that looked in detail at the failure to catch bin Laden and the top al- Qaida leaders when U.S. forces led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
"The failure to finish the job" – that is to neutralize bin Laden – "represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism," said the report.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, sees bin Laden as a potent symbol whose survival "emboldens al-Qaida. I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until he is captured or killed," he told a Senate committee last month.
An even firmer picture of bin Laden as the essential, central ingredient for al-Qaida's survival comes from Peter Bergen, an expert on terrorism who interviewed bin Laden in 1997. "Al-Qaida is bin Laden's idea, it is his baby and 9/11 was his operation and it would psychologically be a victory for the civilized world if he was killed or captured," Bergen told the Financial Times newspaper last month. (MS: Not correct. AQ is an idea that uses long-standing Muslim desires for a utopian Islamic state. If OBL goes, another 100 are already waiting to replace him.)
The U.S. attacks with missile-armed drone aircraft in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where bin Laden and the al-Qaida leadership are believed to be hiding, has eliminated a large number of the organization's leaders, Bergen said. "There is nobody who could replace him as head of this network," Bergen said.
I could continue quoting people who believe killing or capturing bin Laden would be the key to defeating this wave of radical Islamic terrorism. But it is far from being a universal view. There is a significant school of thought that argues that Islamic terrorism is no longer a monopoly of al-Qaida core leaders and bin Laden. Indeed, major terrorist attacks may not even be under their control and direction.
David Livingstone, a security expert at Chatham House, Britain's premier think-tank on international affairs, said recently he doesn't believe removing bin Laden from the equation will have much effect because al-Qaida has become a brand name. The al-Qaida product of Islamic terrorism is now so well established it will survive with or without bin Laden.
The most persistent and in many ways the most persuasive proponent of this view is Marc Sageman. Sageman is an interesting man whose qualifications make it clear he is well worth listening to. Sageman has a doctorate in political sociology and is a practising psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon and joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. In the late 1980s he was based in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, liaising with the Afghan mujahedeen guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
In 2004, Sageman produced an important book called Understanding Terrorism, which was based on detailed dissection of the lives of the approximately 400 al- Qaida members then in captivity. It is a book full of fascinating and significant information – for example, that about half the known al-Qaida terrorists attended only 20 mosques worldwide and that most of them were intelligent and privileged middle class young men, not brainwashed, ill- educated cannon fodder.
In his latest book published in 2008, Leaderless Jihad, Sageman argues that al-Qaida is not an organization that can be systematically destroyed, because it has evolved into a social network that has to be disrupted by undermining the relationships that sustain it. This is what he says:
"The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al-Qaida masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These homegrown wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad."
Sageman argues that al-Qaida has ceased to exist as an organizational entity and that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, he says, the main terrorism threat today is from low-level groups that are self-recruiting and have adopted the al-Qaida brand, largely from the Internet.
This analysis, as you can imagine, is at some odds with the official view in Washington. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell is an example. In the publicly released portions of his evidence to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he said:
"[Al-Qaida] is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni [Muslim] communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities."
More recently in Senate evidence McConnell said that while al-Qaida "has lost many of its senior operational planners of the years, the group's adaptable decision-making process and bench of skilled operatives have enabled it to identify effective replacements."
This characterization of al-Qaida as a resourceful adversary that is highly disciplined and in full control of its network is dramatically different from the amorphous and fluid picture of al-Qaida presented by Sageman and others who view this terror campaign more as a social phenomenon than an evil conspiracy. But such a characterization has few appeals to politicians and administrations that much prefer to be able to draw the threats facing their citizens with clear and distinct lines. The enemy must have a face.
While I do not buy Sageman's arguments entirely, I think that what he has identified is an aspect of the insurgencies and terrorist campaign that is new to the world. The Internet as a source of information, a provider of instant communication and access among both associates and strangers, and a facilitator for the swift construction of global networks has undoubtedly sustained al- Qaida. And it is, of course, deeply ironic that an organization whose proclaimed aim is to gather the Middle East and, given a chance, the rest of the world under a regime of early medieval puritanical theocracy should be relying heavily on 21st century technological wizardry to do it.
Jihadi kit on Web
The full kit for becoming a jihadi is available on the Web. By some estimates there are tens of thousands of sites either aimed at, involving or somehow of benefit to people vulnerable to the call of militant Islam. At the most basic level is propaganda, which feeds and reinforces already well entrenched suspicions among very many Muslim people that the West in the broadest sense is out to destroy them. The pictures of American mistreatment of prisoners amounting to torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad must have been a recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida beyond bin Laden's dreams. If you want to get an idea of what's out there, influencing young Muslims every day, just go to Google Image and type in Abu Ghraib. I'm sure I don't need to warn you, many of the pictures were not printed in western media and are even more troubling than those that were.
The Abu Ghraib pictures are an extreme and lasting example of the kind of material that can and does inflame the passions of susceptible Muslims, especially in this context restless young men unsure of their own identity and purpose. But there's plenty more incitement and it's up there on the Internet on a daily basis. It may be pictures or video of the aftermath of attacks with missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft on houses or villages in Pakistan's tribal border region with Afghanistan. Or the pictures may be of villages in Afghanistan or Iraq, and now Somalia and Yemen after attacks by drones or regular American bomber aircraft. I'm sure the Americans try to be as meticulous as they can be in assessing intelligence information before striking a house where a militant is believed to be staying. But there is no doubt a lot of wives, children and other innocent civilians get killed in these attacks.
Then, of course, there are the pictures and videos from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Israel responds, often with a heavy hand, to attacks by the followers of Hamas, Fatah or Hezbollah in Lebanon.
This daily diet of pictures of the ruins and the dead reinforces the feeling among some young Muslims that they are powerless against what they see as the hatred of the West and instant death from the skies.
For many young Muslims, even the most angry, that is where the trail ends. Indeed, some try to turn their anger into a positive force to attack the problems within their own societies or to come to grips with the divisions between Islam and West. But some, a few, have the misfortune to be spotted by the lurking recruiters for al-Qaida.
Others are self-recruiting. A good example is the five young American Muslims from West Virginia now under arrest in Pakistan. From sites they found on the Internet they adopted radical Islamic views and decided they wanted to go to fight with the Taliban against their countrymen in Afghanistan. They had some sort of preliminary contact with people in Pakistan claiming to be radicals. But from what we know now, the real radicals were suspicious of them and Pakistani police arrested them soon after their arrival.
But any diligent search of the Web can reveal enough training information on how to be a jihadi, from religious justification of terrorism to making car bombs with ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Most of those thousands of websites useful to the would-be jihadi are in Arabic, but I think of particular interest to us are the Canadian, American, British or other western young men of Muslim heritage who have tried, some successfully, to become terrorists.
Men lured to terrorism
Only this week, for example, we have had the sentencing of some members of the so-called Toronto 18 who planned in 2004 to make massive truck bombs and attack the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Toronto.
Their families came from Somalia, Egypt and Jamaica, but to any casual observer they were normal immigrant Canadian kids.
The young men who launched the July 2005 attack on the London Underground subway system were even more acclimatized. They were Britishborn.
In both cases the groups first got involved in radical Muslim online chat rooms, which are watched by fundamentalist Muslim imams for potential recruits. The process of luring these young men towards terrorism is not unlike the way pedophiles lure young girls or boys towards meetings.
In the case of both the Toronto 18 and the London subway bombers there was one main radical Muslim cleric who latched on to them and changed them from being the awkward, unsure and emotional youths, of which we've all had experience, into dedicated killers.
That cleric's name is Anwar al Awlaki and he's an American of Yemeni background. Awlaki was involved with two of the 9/11 hijackers, as well as the Toronto and London groups. There's evidence he radicalized Major Nidal Hasan, the American army psychiatrist who massacred 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood last year, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutalab, the young Nigerian who nearly brought down a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.
Awlaki was born in New Mexico 38 years ago, but his family returned to Yemen with him when he was young. He came back to the United States in 1991 to attend Colorado State University, received his master's degree in education at San Diego and later enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University. Awlaki has been an active Muslim cleric since his postgraduate years when he was an imam at San Diego's Rabat mosque. Then he was a Muslim chaplain at the Hijrah Islamic Centre in Virginia outside Washington. Somewhere along the way he became a radical and turned up on the FBI's radar following the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was interviewed then about his association with two of the hijackers and has been high on the FBI and CIA's lists of persons of interest ever since.
Doubtless fearing pursuers on his trail, in 2002 he moved to London and two years later he returned to Yemen, where he has been ever since, so far as is known.
He has spent some time in prison in Yemen for unspecified crimes and since then he has become more radical and more of a presence on the Internet both on his own Web page and as a blogger. In December, for example, he wrote a blog praising al Shabaab, the militant group linked to al-Qaida in neighbouring Somalia, for the rape and stoning to death of a young woman accused of theft. Al Shabaab, Awlaki said, should take no notice of malicious stories in the western press that the girl was only 13 years old. Well, I can tell you that those stories in the western press were true.
Awlaki has now found his calling as an online preacher of hatred and terrorism. You can find his sermons easily on You-Tube. His value to al-Qaida is that he is, of course, fluent in English, has an undeniable understanding of American and contemporary youth culture, and has an engaging sense of humour. His Facebook page has nearly 5,000 fans.
But like all good salesmen and con artists, Awlaki's most important talent is that he can take very complex ideological and religious thoughts and make them very simple. He has the ability to make impressionable young men believe that slaughtering as many people as possible is not only an affirmative political statement, but is a religious duty. If you look at his YouTube sermons you'll see he has the glib ability to construct verbal fantasy worlds and make his young acolytes believe them.
And once he has cast his spell over his targets it seems that he constantly reinforces the indoctrination. We know, for example, that he kept buttressing the resolve of the two 9/11 hijackers he knew right up to the moment they set out on their mission.
Killer praised as a hero
The same happened with Hasan at Fort Hood with whom Awlaki kept up an e-mail correspondence intended to sustain the major's resolve. Among those 21 e-mails are several instances of Hasan asking for religious validation for what he was about to do, and Awlaki replied with comforting interpretations of Islam.
Soon after the attack Awlaki praised Hasan as a hero. On his website he reacted angrily to condemnation of Hasan by U.S. Muslim groups such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. Their rejection of Hasan's killings was, he said, treason against the Muslim community.
It was also, of course, a significant political blow at Awlaki, which soiled his reputation among American Muslims. Manipulating Abdulmutalab and sending him off as a plane bomber seems, by some perverted logic, to have been an attempt to re-establish Awlaki's reputation as the indispensable mentor for English-speaking would-be jihadis.
And by late December last year Awlaki had a personal reason for wanting to down an American airliner. Shortly before the attempted Christmas Day attack, an American drone made a missile attack on a compound in Yemen where several local al-Qaida leaders, including Awlaki, were believed to be staying. It seems Awlaki missed retribution that time, but I suspect he is a man with a very short life expectancy. Indeed, he seems to have been a target of another air attack in Yemen earlier this week.
But we need to constantly remind ourselves that Awlaki, bin Laden and al- Qaida are not superhuman evil geniuses. Far from it. Bin Laden's objective was to inspire and lead a spreading revolution that would recreate the old Middle Eastern caliphate, bringing Muslim people under the administration of a state governed by purist and puritan Shariah law. Instead, 12 years after bin Laden began his campaign with the truck bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a decade after his followup attack on the USS Cole while it was anchored in Aden Port in Yemen, he and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding out somewhere along the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. Or they might be in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir, or perhaps Somalia or even bin Laden's ancestral homeland of Yemen.
At any rate, they have only a few dozen hard core supporters left with them and the worldwide army of true believers is no more than a few thousand. Al- Qaida in Iraq, which once had the U.S. military tied up in knots, has ceased to exist. Bin Laden's relations with the Taliban on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier are far from secure. He has achieved no sound political base as has been done by the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and even Hamas in Gaza. Indeed, all the indications are that more and more of the world's 112 billion Muslims are increasingly disgusted by his strategy of murdering civilians of any race, creed or religion, as well as with his puritanical and brutal interpretations of Islam.
That said, al-Qaida is not yet defeated and it or its adherents – self- recruited from the Internet or otherwise -will doubtless be a danger for some years to come.
But I always think one is approaching a breaking point of some kind when history starts getting played as farce.
And with al-Qaida, we are now in the realms of Monty Python. For even among the most troubled and impressionable would-be jihadis there must be a very limited supply of young men willing to believe there will be 47 virgins waiting in Paradise for a willing martyr who goes into battle armed only with a pair of exploding underpants.
Friday, January 29, 2010
NEXT TIME I WALK AND LET THE BOMBS GO OFF : TORONTO 18 MEMBER
*** Either you walk away or you step up. MS ***
FROM: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2010/01/29/next-time-i-ll-walk-away-from-bomb-plot-toronto-18-member.aspx
BRAMPTON — In a passionate outburst before a Superior Court judge yesterday, "Toronto 18" member Shareef Abdelhaleem vowed that should he ever hear of another bomb plot, he would simply "walk away" and allow events to take their course.
"I tried my best to reduce everything," testified Abdelhaleem, who insisted yesterday his participation in the Toronto 18 plot was aimed at mitigating harm to civilians.
"Next time -- well, there will be no next time -- but next time I hear someone trying to blow something up, I'm just going to walk away," Abdelhaleem told the court.
If the hypothetical plot then succeeded, he said, he would walk into a police station and inform authorities: "I knew all about this and did absolutely nothing to stop it."
He said he would tell families who lost loved ones the same thing.
Abdelhaleem was found guilty last week of participating in a 2006 terrorist plot to bomb three targets in southern Ontario, including a regional Canadian Security Intelligence Service facility, a military base and the Toronto Stock Exchange. The defence argues he was entrapped by police, and Abdelhaleem has been testifying at a hearing on that matter.
Abdelhaleem says he gained an inside line on the bomb plot so he could have the power to stop it -- actions he believes the Crown is now persecuting him for.
Under cross-examination by Crown attorney Croft Michaelson, Abdelhaleem admitted he helped bomb plot leader Zakaria Amara in his plans to acquire three tonnes of ammonium nitrate -- even placing chemical orders on his own initiative at times -- while at the same time failing to voice opposition to the bombings themselves.
But Abdelhaleem attempted to focus the court's attention on his efforts to reduce the amount of harm done by the attacks, dismissing as "outrageous" Amara's alleged plan to include metal shards in the bombs to cause more civilian casualties. Abdelhaleem said he felt obliged to stop that from happening.
"I didn't know what I was going to do. I had no plan," he told the court. But he testified that if Amara moved that part of the plot forward, "I was going to sabotage it somehow."
Abdelhaleem, 34, said he also encouraged the group to make smaller bombs to "reduce" the explosive impact.
"I was not taking an initiative to blow something up," he told the judge, noting he was determined to get the address of the terrorist group's chemical storehouse so "if I were to intervene, I'd know where the store was."
One idea Abdelhaleem says he considered was putting a humidifier inthe storehouse to destroy the bomb chemicals, which were supposed to be kept free of moisture, once they arrived.
Abdelhaleem, who referred to himself as a "middleman" between Amara and undercover police agent Shaher Elsohemy, told the court he volunteered to play that role because he believed he was doing nothing to advance the plot and thus doing nothing wrong, "so if I'm seen with Amara, that would be OK."
It was also a way to protect Mr. Elsohemy-- whom he considered a friend at the time -- and to gain information about the chemical storehouse, Abdelhaleem testified.
An adamant and animated Abdelhaleem, speaking in a quick burst, told the judge he wanted to "highlight and bold" that point.
FROM: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/toronto/archive/2010/01/29/next-time-i-ll-walk-away-from-bomb-plot-toronto-18-member.aspx
BRAMPTON — In a passionate outburst before a Superior Court judge yesterday, "Toronto 18" member Shareef Abdelhaleem vowed that should he ever hear of another bomb plot, he would simply "walk away" and allow events to take their course.
"I tried my best to reduce everything," testified Abdelhaleem, who insisted yesterday his participation in the Toronto 18 plot was aimed at mitigating harm to civilians.
"Next time -- well, there will be no next time -- but next time I hear someone trying to blow something up, I'm just going to walk away," Abdelhaleem told the court.
If the hypothetical plot then succeeded, he said, he would walk into a police station and inform authorities: "I knew all about this and did absolutely nothing to stop it."
He said he would tell families who lost loved ones the same thing.
Abdelhaleem was found guilty last week of participating in a 2006 terrorist plot to bomb three targets in southern Ontario, including a regional Canadian Security Intelligence Service facility, a military base and the Toronto Stock Exchange. The defence argues he was entrapped by police, and Abdelhaleem has been testifying at a hearing on that matter.
Abdelhaleem says he gained an inside line on the bomb plot so he could have the power to stop it -- actions he believes the Crown is now persecuting him for.
Under cross-examination by Crown attorney Croft Michaelson, Abdelhaleem admitted he helped bomb plot leader Zakaria Amara in his plans to acquire three tonnes of ammonium nitrate -- even placing chemical orders on his own initiative at times -- while at the same time failing to voice opposition to the bombings themselves.
But Abdelhaleem attempted to focus the court's attention on his efforts to reduce the amount of harm done by the attacks, dismissing as "outrageous" Amara's alleged plan to include metal shards in the bombs to cause more civilian casualties. Abdelhaleem said he felt obliged to stop that from happening.
"I didn't know what I was going to do. I had no plan," he told the court. But he testified that if Amara moved that part of the plot forward, "I was going to sabotage it somehow."
Abdelhaleem, 34, said he also encouraged the group to make smaller bombs to "reduce" the explosive impact.
"I was not taking an initiative to blow something up," he told the judge, noting he was determined to get the address of the terrorist group's chemical storehouse so "if I were to intervene, I'd know where the store was."
One idea Abdelhaleem says he considered was putting a humidifier inthe storehouse to destroy the bomb chemicals, which were supposed to be kept free of moisture, once they arrived.
Abdelhaleem, who referred to himself as a "middleman" between Amara and undercover police agent Shaher Elsohemy, told the court he volunteered to play that role because he believed he was doing nothing to advance the plot and thus doing nothing wrong, "so if I'm seen with Amara, that would be OK."
It was also a way to protect Mr. Elsohemy-- whom he considered a friend at the time -- and to gain information about the chemical storehouse, Abdelhaleem testified.
An adamant and animated Abdelhaleem, speaking in a quick burst, told the judge he wanted to "highlight and bold" that point.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
MUSLIM EXTREMISTS PROTEST WHILE POACHERS PARADE
*** Do these self-righteous zealots have some evidence regarding the crimes they have accused all of these soldiers of? I don't understand: why the hell are they living in the UK if they hate it so much? Go to Yemen - lemme know how that works out for ya. MS ***
FROM: http://news.scotsman.com/news/Army-supporters-abused--protesting.6007959.jp
Published Date: 23 January 2010
By Rosa Silverman
TWO supporters of the British army shouted abuse about Osama bin Laden at Muslim protesters at a soldiers' homecoming parade, a court has heard.
Bryan Kelso, 27, and Kevin Carroll, 40, deny committing a public order offence at the parade in Luton, Bedfordshire, to welcome home the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, known as The Poachers.
Angry scenes broke out at the parade on 10 March last year after a group of Muslim extremists brandished placards with slogans including "Butchers of Basra", "British soldiers burn in hell" and "Baby killers".
Kelso, of Chapel Street, Luton, and Carroll, of Bollingbroke Road, Luton, pleaded not guilty at Luton Magistrates' Court to using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
Both men were part of a hostile crowd who confronted the Muslim protesters and told them to "f*** off", prosecutor Avirup Chaudhuri said.
They also sung a song with the words "Bin Laden's mother is a whore", he told the court.
Kelso, a father who had wanted to join the army himself, told the Muslims to "get out of my f****** country" and made obscene gestures, Mr Chaudhuri said.
He can be seen on CCTV footage approaching the protesters aggressively and having to be pushed back by the police, he added.
Carroll called the Muslims "scum" and "w******", he said, and could be seen on CCTV footage shouting and gesticulating at them.
Mr Chaudhuri said: "The two men were in the vanguard of the hostile crowd."
The Muslim protesters had links to the recently banned group Islam4UK, the court heard.
Kelso said in his police interview, which was read out in court: "They were just giving so much abuse to people who I consider to be heroes.
"They were shouting at the people who are defending this country. I ain't going to lie to you, I would have hit one."
A large crowd of well-wishers turned out on the day of the parade and Kelso had attended with his daughter and his former partner, the court heard.
He and Carroll were arrested in September after police viewed CCTV footage recorded on the day.
Giving evidence, Inspector David Atraghji, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "(The) counter-demonstrators ... were collectively loud, the chants were obviously abusive and I would say they were physically intimidating."
Both men accepted that the language they had used was abusive.
Father-of-one Carroll, a carpenter, told the court he was "extremely angry and outraged" at the Muslims' protest against the British army.
Giving evidence, he said: "(My language) was meant to be abuse because that was how I felt at the time.
"I went there to greet my home-town regiment because one of the chaps that was killed there, I knew him, and I felt I owed it to him to turn up."
"What made me intensely angry was that these extremists were allowed to stand in front of the these troops, who had just lost three of their best friends." He was not a member of the National Front and was not a racist, he said in his police interview.
Kelso, who worked as a market trader at the time, said he had two friends in the local regiment.
He said he was "close to tears" when he heard the Muslims' protest.
Giving evidence, he told the court: "The march made me really proud, so happy ...
"(The protesters) were just abusing people that defend this country."
The trial was adjourned to 5 March and both men were released on bail.
FROM: http://news.scotsman.com/news/Army-supporters-abused--protesting.6007959.jp
Published Date: 23 January 2010
By Rosa Silverman
TWO supporters of the British army shouted abuse about Osama bin Laden at Muslim protesters at a soldiers' homecoming parade, a court has heard.
Bryan Kelso, 27, and Kevin Carroll, 40, deny committing a public order offence at the parade in Luton, Bedfordshire, to welcome home the 2nd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, known as The Poachers.
Angry scenes broke out at the parade on 10 March last year after a group of Muslim extremists brandished placards with slogans including "Butchers of Basra", "British soldiers burn in hell" and "Baby killers".
Kelso, of Chapel Street, Luton, and Carroll, of Bollingbroke Road, Luton, pleaded not guilty at Luton Magistrates' Court to using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
Both men were part of a hostile crowd who confronted the Muslim protesters and told them to "f*** off", prosecutor Avirup Chaudhuri said.
They also sung a song with the words "Bin Laden's mother is a whore", he told the court.
Kelso, a father who had wanted to join the army himself, told the Muslims to "get out of my f****** country" and made obscene gestures, Mr Chaudhuri said.
He can be seen on CCTV footage approaching the protesters aggressively and having to be pushed back by the police, he added.
Carroll called the Muslims "scum" and "w******", he said, and could be seen on CCTV footage shouting and gesticulating at them.
Mr Chaudhuri said: "The two men were in the vanguard of the hostile crowd."
The Muslim protesters had links to the recently banned group Islam4UK, the court heard.
Kelso said in his police interview, which was read out in court: "They were just giving so much abuse to people who I consider to be heroes.
"They were shouting at the people who are defending this country. I ain't going to lie to you, I would have hit one."
A large crowd of well-wishers turned out on the day of the parade and Kelso had attended with his daughter and his former partner, the court heard.
He and Carroll were arrested in September after police viewed CCTV footage recorded on the day.
Giving evidence, Inspector David Atraghji, of the Metropolitan Police, said: "(The) counter-demonstrators ... were collectively loud, the chants were obviously abusive and I would say they were physically intimidating."
Both men accepted that the language they had used was abusive.
Father-of-one Carroll, a carpenter, told the court he was "extremely angry and outraged" at the Muslims' protest against the British army.
Giving evidence, he said: "(My language) was meant to be abuse because that was how I felt at the time.
"I went there to greet my home-town regiment because one of the chaps that was killed there, I knew him, and I felt I owed it to him to turn up."
"What made me intensely angry was that these extremists were allowed to stand in front of the these troops, who had just lost three of their best friends." He was not a member of the National Front and was not a racist, he said in his police interview.
Kelso, who worked as a market trader at the time, said he had two friends in the local regiment.
He said he was "close to tears" when he heard the Muslims' protest.
Giving evidence, he told the court: "The march made me really proud, so happy ...
"(The protesters) were just abusing people that defend this country."
The trial was adjourned to 5 March and both men were released on bail.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
FACING HOMEGROWN RADICALIZATION
FROM: http://www.thewashingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=3113
By Myriam Benraad
September 3, 2009
Last month, Kamal Hassan, a Somali-American living in Minnesota, pled guilty to training and fighting with al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Somalia. In July, two other Somali-Americans in Minnesota pled guilty to similar charges, with the FBI continuing to investigate more than a dozen others who may have traveled from the United States to Somalia. The FBI also recently arrested seven individuals in North Carolina on terrorism-related charges, including one who had spent time in Afghan training camps. These and other recent events have raised new concerns in the United States about the threat of homegrown radicalization. As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder acknowledged in a July speech, the "whole notion of radicalization is something that did not loom as large a few months ago...as it does now." While the U.S. government has focused primarily on Europe as a source of potential terrorists, Washington should also look to the continent as a model in confronting homegrown radicalization.
A Troubling Phenomenon
During his first major speech in July, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan provided an overview of the current administration's approach to protecting American citizens from violent extremism and terrorism. Although Brennan emphasized President Barack Obama's new partnership with Muslim communities and the administration's commitment to defeating al-Qaeda's capacities overseas, little was said about homegrown Islamist radicalization. This fundamental issue has long been downplayed by U.S. federal authorities and counterterrorism experts, who believe that Muslims and Arabs are generally better integrated into U.S. society -- as opposed to their counterparts in European society -- and are thus less vulnerable to the al-Qaeda narrative.
Homegrown radicalization has now returned to the spotlight after the watershed Somali cases. Court hearings have revealed that Islamist leaders approached most of the Minneapolis recruits and urged them to attend clandestine meetings where they were persuaded to travel to Somalia and become part of the local armed insurgency. Most troublingly, however, is that a number of the Somali-Americans who joined al-Shabab suffer from identity and integration issues similar to those of radicalized youth in Europe. Until now, the United States had seemingly been immune from this particular phenomenon.
Building on Europe's Lessons
Although American policymakers have long worried that Islamists radicalized in Europe would attack the United States, Washington can learn valuable lessons from Europe in addressing the challenge of homegrown radicalization. Consider, for example, some of the measures undertaken in France. Although the internal dynamics nurturing radicalization in France and the United States differ significantly, comparable trends exist. The impact of socioeconomic deprivation, political alienation, and identity issues as vehicles of radical narratives -- a factor that looms large in the Somali-American cases -- appears to be a common pattern. The malaise experienced by nonintegrated second- and third-generation immigrants, as well as the lack of educational and professional prospects for young people, has nurtured homegrown radicalization in France. While this phenomenon is far less widespread in the United States, the recent Somali cases indicate that it is occurring, at least to some extent.
France's law enforcement and intelligence efforts have been fairly far reaching and certainly go beyond what might be politically acceptable in the United States. French counterterrorism magistrates have frequently used their preventive detention powers to target individuals suspected of inciting violence, incarcerating some and deporting others. In 2004, for example, a wave of French prosecutions targeted radical imams and included the deportation of Chelali Benchellali, the Salafist imam of Venissieux's now famous mosque -- an act that would certainly have been more controversial in the United States. (MS: Why would it be controversial, I don't understand.)
France has also prosecuted a number of its citizens after they returned home from jihadist activities overseas -- a move the United States is now taking in the Somali cases as well. In May 2008, for instance, France condemned and jailed members of a Parisian network of jihadists recruited by young Salafi imam Farid Benyettou to fight in Iraq. Court hearings showed how Benyettou, a French citizen of Algerian background, managed to radicalize a group of men in 2003 through private readings of online Islamist propaganda and vehement anti-American rhetoric.
Following the massive riots of 2005 -- which witnessed the uprising of deprived multiethnic youth in French suburbs -- France has been forced to acknowledge the necessity of coupling its often harsh police methods with greater social dialogue and political engagement. After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy made ethnoreligious discrimination one of his top priorities. As such, he appointed Rachida Dati as the minister of justice, the first individual of North African/Muslim origin to access a top cabinet position.
In addition, France has undertaken efforts to better understand the ideological motivations of Islamists. Monitoring and counterradicalization programs have been implemented in the French prison system, historically a crucible for radical ideology and recruitment. Interestingly, official sources indicate that many American homegrown Islamists have also been radicalized while incarcerated, including the members of the prison-formed Jamiyat al-Islam al-Sahih cell in California that was convicted in 2007 for its plans to attack not only synagogues but also the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Indeed, prisons provide an ideal place for radicalizing the young and disenchanted in search of a sense of belonging and importance. Within the prison setting, Islam has the added appeal of addressing feelings of inequality and injustice. Fresh converts are protected by fellow inmates and accepted into a new world where the slate is wiped clean. Radicalization often occurs very quickly in this setting, and it is only recently that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pushed for an increased and systematic monitoring of radical material in U.S. prisons. To their credit, however, U.S. authorities have lately engaged in enhanced cooperation with France regarding prison issues, such as the training of Muslim chaplains.
Conclusion
Information regarding Islamist radicalization in America currently remains limited, and recent developments should therefore serve as a clear warning. Already, the Obama administration is favoring a new approach that shifts from exclusively military options to increased law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Much remains to be done, however, and while U.S. policies are still mainly focused on defeating al-Qaeda's narrative and capacities overseas, dealing with radicals at home might prove all the more critical. Since al-Qaeda is evolving into a "franchise" operation, homegrown recruits could become the most serious threat to the United States. The phenomenon has become all the more worrying in light of many recent attempts by U.S. extremists to link up with foreign Islamist movements and inscribe their struggle at a global level.
In addressing homegrown radicalization, the French experience could provide the Obama administration with policy inspiration. France, although not a parallel model -- especially since it is still addressing the pervasive discontent of poorly integrated Muslim populations -- has witnessed no terrorist attack since the 1990s. Its success in handling the grassroots Islamist phenomenon has resulted from effective interagency coordination and the establishment of specific legal provisions and structures charged with the antiterrorist struggle. Figuring out ways to replicate this in the United States, including the possibility of establishing separate counterterrorism courts, would be an important step forward.
Myriam Benraad is the Keston Family scholar for The Washington Institute's Project Fikra, focusing on radicalization and counterradicalization in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States.
By Myriam Benraad
September 3, 2009
Last month, Kamal Hassan, a Somali-American living in Minnesota, pled guilty to training and fighting with al-Shabab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group in Somalia. In July, two other Somali-Americans in Minnesota pled guilty to similar charges, with the FBI continuing to investigate more than a dozen others who may have traveled from the United States to Somalia. The FBI also recently arrested seven individuals in North Carolina on terrorism-related charges, including one who had spent time in Afghan training camps. These and other recent events have raised new concerns in the United States about the threat of homegrown radicalization. As U.S. attorney general Eric Holder acknowledged in a July speech, the "whole notion of radicalization is something that did not loom as large a few months ago...as it does now." While the U.S. government has focused primarily on Europe as a source of potential terrorists, Washington should also look to the continent as a model in confronting homegrown radicalization.
A Troubling Phenomenon
During his first major speech in July, White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan provided an overview of the current administration's approach to protecting American citizens from violent extremism and terrorism. Although Brennan emphasized President Barack Obama's new partnership with Muslim communities and the administration's commitment to defeating al-Qaeda's capacities overseas, little was said about homegrown Islamist radicalization. This fundamental issue has long been downplayed by U.S. federal authorities and counterterrorism experts, who believe that Muslims and Arabs are generally better integrated into U.S. society -- as opposed to their counterparts in European society -- and are thus less vulnerable to the al-Qaeda narrative.
Homegrown radicalization has now returned to the spotlight after the watershed Somali cases. Court hearings have revealed that Islamist leaders approached most of the Minneapolis recruits and urged them to attend clandestine meetings where they were persuaded to travel to Somalia and become part of the local armed insurgency. Most troublingly, however, is that a number of the Somali-Americans who joined al-Shabab suffer from identity and integration issues similar to those of radicalized youth in Europe. Until now, the United States had seemingly been immune from this particular phenomenon.
Building on Europe's Lessons
Although American policymakers have long worried that Islamists radicalized in Europe would attack the United States, Washington can learn valuable lessons from Europe in addressing the challenge of homegrown radicalization. Consider, for example, some of the measures undertaken in France. Although the internal dynamics nurturing radicalization in France and the United States differ significantly, comparable trends exist. The impact of socioeconomic deprivation, political alienation, and identity issues as vehicles of radical narratives -- a factor that looms large in the Somali-American cases -- appears to be a common pattern. The malaise experienced by nonintegrated second- and third-generation immigrants, as well as the lack of educational and professional prospects for young people, has nurtured homegrown radicalization in France. While this phenomenon is far less widespread in the United States, the recent Somali cases indicate that it is occurring, at least to some extent.
France's law enforcement and intelligence efforts have been fairly far reaching and certainly go beyond what might be politically acceptable in the United States. French counterterrorism magistrates have frequently used their preventive detention powers to target individuals suspected of inciting violence, incarcerating some and deporting others. In 2004, for example, a wave of French prosecutions targeted radical imams and included the deportation of Chelali Benchellali, the Salafist imam of Venissieux's now famous mosque -- an act that would certainly have been more controversial in the United States. (MS: Why would it be controversial, I don't understand.)
France has also prosecuted a number of its citizens after they returned home from jihadist activities overseas -- a move the United States is now taking in the Somali cases as well. In May 2008, for instance, France condemned and jailed members of a Parisian network of jihadists recruited by young Salafi imam Farid Benyettou to fight in Iraq. Court hearings showed how Benyettou, a French citizen of Algerian background, managed to radicalize a group of men in 2003 through private readings of online Islamist propaganda and vehement anti-American rhetoric.
Following the massive riots of 2005 -- which witnessed the uprising of deprived multiethnic youth in French suburbs -- France has been forced to acknowledge the necessity of coupling its often harsh police methods with greater social dialogue and political engagement. After his election in 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy made ethnoreligious discrimination one of his top priorities. As such, he appointed Rachida Dati as the minister of justice, the first individual of North African/Muslim origin to access a top cabinet position.
In addition, France has undertaken efforts to better understand the ideological motivations of Islamists. Monitoring and counterradicalization programs have been implemented in the French prison system, historically a crucible for radical ideology and recruitment. Interestingly, official sources indicate that many American homegrown Islamists have also been radicalized while incarcerated, including the members of the prison-formed Jamiyat al-Islam al-Sahih cell in California that was convicted in 2007 for its plans to attack not only synagogues but also the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles. Indeed, prisons provide an ideal place for radicalizing the young and disenchanted in search of a sense of belonging and importance. Within the prison setting, Islam has the added appeal of addressing feelings of inequality and injustice. Fresh converts are protected by fellow inmates and accepted into a new world where the slate is wiped clean. Radicalization often occurs very quickly in this setting, and it is only recently that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has pushed for an increased and systematic monitoring of radical material in U.S. prisons. To their credit, however, U.S. authorities have lately engaged in enhanced cooperation with France regarding prison issues, such as the training of Muslim chaplains.
Conclusion
Information regarding Islamist radicalization in America currently remains limited, and recent developments should therefore serve as a clear warning. Already, the Obama administration is favoring a new approach that shifts from exclusively military options to increased law enforcement and intelligence efforts. Much remains to be done, however, and while U.S. policies are still mainly focused on defeating al-Qaeda's narrative and capacities overseas, dealing with radicals at home might prove all the more critical. Since al-Qaeda is evolving into a "franchise" operation, homegrown recruits could become the most serious threat to the United States. The phenomenon has become all the more worrying in light of many recent attempts by U.S. extremists to link up with foreign Islamist movements and inscribe their struggle at a global level.
In addressing homegrown radicalization, the French experience could provide the Obama administration with policy inspiration. France, although not a parallel model -- especially since it is still addressing the pervasive discontent of poorly integrated Muslim populations -- has witnessed no terrorist attack since the 1990s. Its success in handling the grassroots Islamist phenomenon has resulted from effective interagency coordination and the establishment of specific legal provisions and structures charged with the antiterrorist struggle. Figuring out ways to replicate this in the United States, including the possibility of establishing separate counterterrorism courts, would be an important step forward.
Myriam Benraad is the Keston Family scholar for The Washington Institute's Project Fikra, focusing on radicalization and counterradicalization in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the United States.
Monday, January 18, 2010
LONDONISTAN : THREAT FROM THE UK ?
FROM: http://news.rediff.com/interview/2009/dec/31/americans-blame-uk-for-rise-in-islamic-extremism.htm
Accusing Britain of being a "menace to the outside world", Americans have blamed their closest ally in Europe for the rise of Islamic extremism amid growing anger over the UK's perceived failure to tackle extremism.
Senior policymakers in the United States point to the recent attempt to bomb a transatlantic jetliner by Nigerian man Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is thought to have become radicalised in London.
They said it was further evidence that one of the biggest threats to US security came from Britain, where the capital has been dubbed "Londonistan" by critics.
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, they also criticised the "ghettoisation" of British Muslims, compared with the "assimilation" of Muslims in America.
Muslim immigrants to the US were much better integrated in society and considered themselves Americans "within a generation" because the US embraced the "melting pot" concept, Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for President George W Bush and a former Pentagon aide, was quoted as saying by the British daily.
"The British have an immense problem. There are more challenges in Muslim immigrants integrating into British society than there is in America, a lack of assimilation, a great deal of alienation," said Charles Allen, a recently-retired veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer who was intelligence chief at the department of homeland security under Bush.
British universities are coming under the spotlight in the anti-terrorism campaign, with critics calling them a hotbed of extremism.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown [ Images ] recently highlighted the universities as one of the key areas where authorities needed to act against extremist influences.
The failed suicide bomber Abdulmutallab was president of the Islamic Society at University College London between 2006 and 2007, while he was studying for an engineering degree, the report said.
"The UK is a menace to the outside world. It's been a problem for years now. This is just one more example," said Daniel Pipes, a scholar on radical Islam and former adviser to Rudolph Giuliani during his presidential campaign, said.
Professor Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, has suggested that dozens of British universities have become a breeding ground for extremists.
"The problem stems from the fact that extremists and extremist recruiters have seen universities as safe spaces from which to recruit students," Glees said, adding authorities are "not properly supervising what goes on at campuses, they weren't and they're still not, and it is clear they don't intend to do so in the future."
Though the UK Home Office refused Abdulmutallab a student visa in May and put him on an immigration watch list, they did not pass this information to the US.
Thiessen underlined that the US was "in grave danger" as "we are lowering our defences" "in response to the hue and cry from the European Left and to appease European opinion".
As a result, the Al Qaeda [ Images ] had "worked much harder to get Westerners, people who live in the West, who may be citizens of the West" to become recruits and train in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, he said.
Accusing Britain of being a "menace to the outside world", Americans have blamed their closest ally in Europe for the rise of Islamic extremism amid growing anger over the UK's perceived failure to tackle extremism.
Senior policymakers in the United States point to the recent attempt to bomb a transatlantic jetliner by Nigerian man Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is thought to have become radicalised in London.
They said it was further evidence that one of the biggest threats to US security came from Britain, where the capital has been dubbed "Londonistan" by critics.
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, they also criticised the "ghettoisation" of British Muslims, compared with the "assimilation" of Muslims in America.
Muslim immigrants to the US were much better integrated in society and considered themselves Americans "within a generation" because the US embraced the "melting pot" concept, Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for President George W Bush and a former Pentagon aide, was quoted as saying by the British daily.
"The British have an immense problem. There are more challenges in Muslim immigrants integrating into British society than there is in America, a lack of assimilation, a great deal of alienation," said Charles Allen, a recently-retired veteran Central Intelligence Agency officer who was intelligence chief at the department of homeland security under Bush.
British universities are coming under the spotlight in the anti-terrorism campaign, with critics calling them a hotbed of extremism.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown [ Images ] recently highlighted the universities as one of the key areas where authorities needed to act against extremist influences.
The failed suicide bomber Abdulmutallab was president of the Islamic Society at University College London between 2006 and 2007, while he was studying for an engineering degree, the report said.
"The UK is a menace to the outside world. It's been a problem for years now. This is just one more example," said Daniel Pipes, a scholar on radical Islam and former adviser to Rudolph Giuliani during his presidential campaign, said.
Professor Anthony Glees, director of Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, has suggested that dozens of British universities have become a breeding ground for extremists.
"The problem stems from the fact that extremists and extremist recruiters have seen universities as safe spaces from which to recruit students," Glees said, adding authorities are "not properly supervising what goes on at campuses, they weren't and they're still not, and it is clear they don't intend to do so in the future."
Though the UK Home Office refused Abdulmutallab a student visa in May and put him on an immigration watch list, they did not pass this information to the US.
Thiessen underlined that the US was "in grave danger" as "we are lowering our defences" "in response to the hue and cry from the European Left and to appease European opinion".
As a result, the Al Qaeda [ Images ] had "worked much harder to get Westerners, people who live in the West, who may be citizens of the West" to become recruits and train in places like the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen, he said.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
WEB OF TERROR: LIVING IT UP BY KILLING?
FROM: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/the-global-internet-jihad-web-of-terror/article1424955/
The global Internet jihad: Web of terror
This is not the language of resistance against foreign occupation. It's the language of apocalyptic salvation
As I arrive three hours early at the airport for a one-hour flight, so that I can shed my shoes, my liquids, my carry-on, my blankie, and all my other forbidden objects (too bad about my metal hips – I'm stuck with them), I can't help feeling that somewhere in Waziristan, OBL is cackling in his cave. A pious, baby-faced jihadist has managed to wreak worldwide havoc in his name – even though the underwear bomb plot was a miserable failure.
What's going on here? Can we stop it? If so, how? I can't help thinking that all those extra high-tech screeners and scanners, our heightened vigilance and our plans to profile people from entire countries, along with Barack Obama's freshly declared war against al-Qaeda, somehow miss the point. Mass screenings and enhanced harassment of the flying public can't really be the best way to find needles in haystacks.
Do we really understand these young men who want to kill us? How did they get that way? Why do they do it? Wouldn't they stop attacking the West if we just abandoned our meddling in Muslim countries and went home?
Probably not. Suicide attacks against the West, the experts say, have at least as much to do with existential issues of identity as they do with history or politics. “ ‘Happiness is martyrdom' can be as emotionally contagious to a lonely boy on the Internet as ‘Yes, we can,' ” writes anthropologist Scott Atran, who has been studying terrorism – and interviewing radical young men – for years. “That is a psychologically stunning and socially far-reaching development that scientists have hardly begun to explore.”
Mr. Atran argues that we get a lot wrong about terrorists. To start with, most of the ones who are likely to attack the West are already here. By one estimate, 80 to 90 per cent of known jihadis come from the great Muslim diaspora. Which means that if we want to engage in national profiling, we might be better off profiling young Muslims from Britain than ones from Nigeria.
The baby-faced underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a textbook example of the new wave of jihadis. He was radicalized not in Nigeria or Yemen, but in Britain. He came from an affluent family and was educated in elite Western schools, but he felt like an outsider. “I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do,” he wrote on an Islamic chat site when he was 18. Eventually, he was born again into radical Islam, and found his sense of purpose and belonging.
British universities are fertile breeding grounds for the new generation of jihadis. Many are hotbeds of Islamic radicalism. Mr. Abdulmutallab's former university in London – where he was head of the Islamic Society – extended speaking invitations to such charmers as Abu Usama adh Dhahabee, who believes that women are mentally deficient and that apostates from Islam should die. “Such poison has spread throughout our universities,” writes Douglas Murray, who is director of London's Centre for Social Cohesion. An authoritative poll published in 2008 bears him out. It found that a third of Muslim students in Britain – and 60 per cent of those who, like Mr. Abdulmutallab, were active in their campus Islamic societies – believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified.
But you don't need personal contact to inspire you to holy war – not when there's the Internet. It's likely that both the Fort Hood gunman and the British-educated student from Nigeria drew online inspiration from Anwar al Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric who hails originally from New Mexico. As Mr. Atran writes, they and many others were “self-bound into a virtual community whose Internet Imams spin Web dreams of glory in exchange for real and bloody sacrifice.”
Terror groups and radical imams don't need to bother with aggressive recruiting. Most would-be jihadis recruit themselves. Their attraction to the cause is (in their view) profoundly moral. “I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads another Internet posting from Mr. Abdulmutallab.
This is not the secular, political language of resistance against foreign occupation. It is the language of apocalyptic salvation. It has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinians, although countless young Muslims identify passionately with stories of perceived injustice. Radical Islam claims that martyrdom is the ultimate act of faith – the highest duty of a believer, next to the worship of Allah itself.
(MS: I respectfully disagree: it has everything to do with what is happening in the "Muslim lands" and the language of "apocalyptic salvation" does not see martyrdom as an act in and of itself, but one intrinsically tied to correcting those "perceived injustices".)
“The movement is from the bottom up,” terror expert Marc Sageman told the New York Times. “Young people … are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe.” One of the most popular clerics, reports the Times, is Khalid bin Abdul Rahman al-Husainan of Kuwait, who mixes contemporary politics with talk of martyrdom. “Obama, in the same way that you raised the slogan, ‘Yes We Can,' I too have a slogan,” he wrote. “My slogan in this life – and memorize this slogan – is ‘Happiness is the day of my martyrdom.' ”
We tend to think of al-Qaeda as an entity that is directing and organizing martyrs around the world. But it's really more like a phenomenally successful global brand. It is the inspiration for dozens of other terror groups with which it may or may not be connected. These groups are provisional, opportunistic and ever-shifting. They aren't armies. They're networks. And you can't fight networks with armies.
Many of us used to think the Internet would be a powerful force for progress and modernity, shrinking divisions and differences, in the world and uniting educated people everywhere in the quest for more democracy and freedom. But it turns out that far from dissolving the age-old problems of tribalism, identity and belonging, the Internet can exacerbate them. By connecting politically restless young adults with a noble cause, it gives them a powerful new sense of purpose.
As Mr. Atran suggests, globalization and the Internet have made the world more flat and fluid, and also more divisive and tribal, all at the same time. Maybe what we need is not more high-tech airport scanners. Maybe what we need is more people who can make friends with lonely, disaffected guys on the Internet.
*** This is the kind of soul searching analysis that will help to form a better strategy to counter Islamic extremism. Good job. MS ***
The global Internet jihad: Web of terror
This is not the language of resistance against foreign occupation. It's the language of apocalyptic salvation
As I arrive three hours early at the airport for a one-hour flight, so that I can shed my shoes, my liquids, my carry-on, my blankie, and all my other forbidden objects (too bad about my metal hips – I'm stuck with them), I can't help feeling that somewhere in Waziristan, OBL is cackling in his cave. A pious, baby-faced jihadist has managed to wreak worldwide havoc in his name – even though the underwear bomb plot was a miserable failure.
What's going on here? Can we stop it? If so, how? I can't help thinking that all those extra high-tech screeners and scanners, our heightened vigilance and our plans to profile people from entire countries, along with Barack Obama's freshly declared war against al-Qaeda, somehow miss the point. Mass screenings and enhanced harassment of the flying public can't really be the best way to find needles in haystacks.
Do we really understand these young men who want to kill us? How did they get that way? Why do they do it? Wouldn't they stop attacking the West if we just abandoned our meddling in Muslim countries and went home?
Probably not. Suicide attacks against the West, the experts say, have at least as much to do with existential issues of identity as they do with history or politics. “ ‘Happiness is martyrdom' can be as emotionally contagious to a lonely boy on the Internet as ‘Yes, we can,' ” writes anthropologist Scott Atran, who has been studying terrorism – and interviewing radical young men – for years. “That is a psychologically stunning and socially far-reaching development that scientists have hardly begun to explore.”
Mr. Atran argues that we get a lot wrong about terrorists. To start with, most of the ones who are likely to attack the West are already here. By one estimate, 80 to 90 per cent of known jihadis come from the great Muslim diaspora. Which means that if we want to engage in national profiling, we might be better off profiling young Muslims from Britain than ones from Nigeria.
The baby-faced underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a textbook example of the new wave of jihadis. He was radicalized not in Nigeria or Yemen, but in Britain. He came from an affluent family and was educated in elite Western schools, but he felt like an outsider. “I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do,” he wrote on an Islamic chat site when he was 18. Eventually, he was born again into radical Islam, and found his sense of purpose and belonging.
British universities are fertile breeding grounds for the new generation of jihadis. Many are hotbeds of Islamic radicalism. Mr. Abdulmutallab's former university in London – where he was head of the Islamic Society – extended speaking invitations to such charmers as Abu Usama adh Dhahabee, who believes that women are mentally deficient and that apostates from Islam should die. “Such poison has spread throughout our universities,” writes Douglas Murray, who is director of London's Centre for Social Cohesion. An authoritative poll published in 2008 bears him out. It found that a third of Muslim students in Britain – and 60 per cent of those who, like Mr. Abdulmutallab, were active in their campus Islamic societies – believed that killing in the name of their religion could be justified.
But you don't need personal contact to inspire you to holy war – not when there's the Internet. It's likely that both the Fort Hood gunman and the British-educated student from Nigeria drew online inspiration from Anwar al Awlaki, a Yemeni cleric who hails originally from New Mexico. As Mr. Atran writes, they and many others were “self-bound into a virtual community whose Internet Imams spin Web dreams of glory in exchange for real and bloody sacrifice.”
Terror groups and radical imams don't need to bother with aggressive recruiting. Most would-be jihadis recruit themselves. Their attraction to the cause is (in their view) profoundly moral. “I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads another Internet posting from Mr. Abdulmutallab.
This is not the secular, political language of resistance against foreign occupation. It is the language of apocalyptic salvation. It has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinians, although countless young Muslims identify passionately with stories of perceived injustice. Radical Islam claims that martyrdom is the ultimate act of faith – the highest duty of a believer, next to the worship of Allah itself.
(MS: I respectfully disagree: it has everything to do with what is happening in the "Muslim lands" and the language of "apocalyptic salvation" does not see martyrdom as an act in and of itself, but one intrinsically tied to correcting those "perceived injustices".)
“The movement is from the bottom up,” terror expert Marc Sageman told the New York Times. “Young people … are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe.” One of the most popular clerics, reports the Times, is Khalid bin Abdul Rahman al-Husainan of Kuwait, who mixes contemporary politics with talk of martyrdom. “Obama, in the same way that you raised the slogan, ‘Yes We Can,' I too have a slogan,” he wrote. “My slogan in this life – and memorize this slogan – is ‘Happiness is the day of my martyrdom.' ”
We tend to think of al-Qaeda as an entity that is directing and organizing martyrs around the world. But it's really more like a phenomenally successful global brand. It is the inspiration for dozens of other terror groups with which it may or may not be connected. These groups are provisional, opportunistic and ever-shifting. They aren't armies. They're networks. And you can't fight networks with armies.
Many of us used to think the Internet would be a powerful force for progress and modernity, shrinking divisions and differences, in the world and uniting educated people everywhere in the quest for more democracy and freedom. But it turns out that far from dissolving the age-old problems of tribalism, identity and belonging, the Internet can exacerbate them. By connecting politically restless young adults with a noble cause, it gives them a powerful new sense of purpose.
As Mr. Atran suggests, globalization and the Internet have made the world more flat and fluid, and also more divisive and tribal, all at the same time. Maybe what we need is not more high-tech airport scanners. Maybe what we need is more people who can make friends with lonely, disaffected guys on the Internet.
*** This is the kind of soul searching analysis that will help to form a better strategy to counter Islamic extremism. Good job. MS ***
FATWA AGAINST TERROR - TEXT AND SIGNATORIES
*** I motion that the GTA Imams & organizations follow suit. MS ***
FROM: http://www.muslimbridges.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=107
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
MUSLIM RELIGIOUS COUNCIL ISSUES FATWA AGAINST TERRORISM
The Fiqh Council of North America wishes to reaffirm Islam's absolute condemnation of terrorism and religious extremism.
Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives. There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians' life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram - or forbidden - and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not "martyrs."
The Qur'an, Islam's revealed text, states: "Whoever kills a person [unjustly]...it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind." (Qur'an, 5:32)
Prophet Muhammad said there is no excuse for committing unjust acts: "Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong to them. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and not to do wrong (even) if they do evil." (Al-Tirmidhi)
God mandates moderation in faith and in all aspects of life when He states in the Qur'an: "We made you to be a community of the middle way, so that (with the example of your lives) you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind." (Qur'an, 2:143)
In another verse, God explains our duties as human beings when he says: "Let there arise from among you a band of people who invite to righteousness, and enjoin good and forbid evil." (Qur'an, 3:104)
Islam teaches us to act in a caring manner to all of God's creation. The Prophet Muhammad, who is described in the Qur'an as "a mercy to the worlds" said: "All creation is the family of God, and the person most beloved by God (is the one) who is kind and caring toward His family."
In the light of the teachings of the Qur'an and Sunnah we clearly and strongly state:
* 1. 1. All acts of terrorism targeting civilians are haram (forbidden) in Islam.
* 2. 2. It is haram for a Muslim to cooperate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence.
* 3. 3. It is the civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of all civilians.
We issue this fatwa following the guidance of our scripture, the Qur'an, and the teachings of our Prophet Muhammad - peace be upon him. We urge all people to resolve all conflicts in just and peaceful manners.
We pray for the defeat of extremism and terrorism. We pray for the safety and security of our country, the United States, and its people. We pray for the safety and security of all inhabitants of our planet. We pray that interfaith harmony and cooperation prevail both in the United States and all around the globe.
FIQH COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICA July 28, 2005
MEMBERS OF THE FIQH COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICA
Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi,
Chairman Dr. Deina Abdulkadir
Shaikh Muhammad Nur Abdallah
Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani
Shaikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti
Shaikhah Zainab Alwani
Dr. Jamal Badawi
Dr. Ihsan Bagby
Dr. Nazih Hammad
Shaikh Yahya Hindi
Dr. Abdul Hakim Jackson
Dr. Mukhtar Maghraoui
Dr. Akbar Muhammad
Shaikh Hassan Qazwini
Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah
Dr. Muhammad Adam
Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Shleibak
Dr. Salah Soltan
ENDORSED BY THE FOLLOWING NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS:
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
Muslim American Society (MAS)
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)
Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
Mosque Cares, Imam W D Muhammad
Muslim Student Association of the US & Canada (MSA)
Association of Muslim Social Scientists
American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin
American Muslim Alliance
Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers
Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations
Council of Shia Muslim Scholars of North America
Islamic Networks Group & Affiliates
Islamic Resource Group
Islamic Schools League of America
Islamic Sharia Advisory Institute of North America
Kashmiri American Council
Latino American Dawah Organization
Minaret of Freedom Institute
Muslim Ummah of North America
Project Islamic HOPE
United Muslims of America
USA Halal Chamber of Commerce, Inc & The Islamic Center for Halal Certification
ENDORSED BY THE FOLLOWING MOSQUES AND ISLAMIC CENTERS
Afghan Cultural Center Al Nur Islamic Center Al Nur Islamic Center, Rashid Ahmed, Director Albanian Islamic Center, Shuaib Gerguri, Imam Al-Fatiha Islamic Center Al-Huda Islamic Center, Hisham Ahmed, Imam All Dulles Area Muslim Society, Mohamed Magid, Imam Al-Mu'minun Islamic Center, Samuel Ansari Alvin Masjid American Islamic Academy, Shaykh Al-Tayyab American Islamic Organization, Afzal Ahmad, Chairman American Moslem Mission, American Moslem Society, Mahdi Ali, Imam American Muslim Society of the Tristate Area American Muslim Voice As Salaam Islamic Center of Raleigh, Oliver S. Mohammed, Imam Assadiq Foundation Assadiq Islamic Educational Foundation, Sayed Mohammad Jawad Qazwini, Imam Auburn Islamic Center, Mark Hamza Dougherty, President Azzahrah Islamic Ctr. Bay County Islamic Society Inc, Hashem Mubrak, Baytown Masjid Bear Creek Masjid Bell Islamic & Cultural Center Belleville Mosque and Islamic Education Center, Dr. Abdul W. Kazi, Bilal Islamic Center Blossom Valley Muslim Community Center, Allaedin Ezzedin, Imam Bob ul Ilm Islamic Center Bosnian-American Islamic Center, Mirsad Hassecic, Imam Boston Dialogue Foundation New Mosque, Salih Yucel, Imam Campus Mosque of Scranton, Imam Canton Masjid, Ali S. Ali Cham American Muslim Com. Champions Masjid Cincinnati Islamic Center, Ilyas Nashid, Imam Concerned Muslims of Annapolis Concerned Muslims of Greater Cleveland (CMGC) Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, Abdul Malik Mujahid, Imam Council of Masajid, Cleveland Daar-ul-Islam Masjid, Muhammad Nur Abdallah Dalton Islamic Center, Hammad El-Ameen, President Dar Almanar, Fouad Reda, President Dar Al-Uloom Al-Islamia Dar Al-Uloom Flahidarin Darassalam, Mohammed M. Safa Darul Uloom of Los Angeles Des Plaines Islamic Center Des Plaines Islamic Center Discover Islam Foundation, Muhammad Quadir, Downtown Islamic Center Downtown Islamic Center Elmhurst Islamic Center, Riaz Ahmad, Mufti Ershad Institute First Cleveland Mosque, Abbas Ahmad, Imam Five Pillars Center Foundation for Islamic Education, Sheikh Mustafa Ahmad Fox Valley Islamic Society, Delwar Mian, Secretary Fullerton Mosque Greenway Islamic Center, Didmar Faja Heartland Muslim Women's Network, Maisha Liwaru, President Hemet Masjid Hidaya Foundation High Desert Islamic Center Howard County Muslim Council, Anwer Hasan, President Huseini Mousque
I.M.A.N Imperial Valley Islamic Center Indian Muslim Relief & Charities Indo Chinese Muslim Relief Association IntraCity Muslim Action Network (IMAN), Ohio Islamic Association of Carrollton, Azhar Azeez, Secretary General Islamic Association of Cary, Shakil Ahmed Islamic Association of Central Florida, Dr. Zafer Sabawi, Imam Islamic Association of Greater Shreveport, Sayed Jumaa Salam Islamic Association of Kokomo Islamic Association of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Riaz Hussain, Treasurer Islamic Association of West Virginia, Mohamad Jamal Daoudi, Imam Islamic Center Inland Valley Islamic Center of America, Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, Imam Islamic Center of Blacksburg Islamic Center of Boca Raton, Jalal Khan, Imam Islamic Center of Calremont Islamic Center of Canejo Valley Islamic Center of Cape Girardeau, Shafiq Malik, Imam Islamic Center of Carbondale, Muhammad Kamran, President Islamic Center of Cleveland, Fawaz Damra, Imam Islamic Center of Contra Costa, Abdul Quddus Saleh, Imam Islamic Center of Cypress Islamic Center of Des Moines, Ibrahim Dremali, Imam Islamic Center of El Paso, Yaser Birjas Issa, Imam Islamic Center of Fremont, Mubashir Ahmed, President Islamic Center of Granada Hills Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, Saleem Foad, Director of Education Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, Farooq S. Aboelzahab, Imam Islamic Center of Hawthorne Islamic Center of Inland Empire Islamic Center of Little Rock, Islam Mossaad, Imam Islamic Center of Marietta, Amjad Taufique, President Islamic Center of Maryland, Amin Ezzeddine, Imam Islamic Center of Moreno Valley Islamic Center of Morgantown, Diaa Eldin M. Nassar, General Secretary Islamic Center of New England, Talal Eid, Imam Islamic Center of New Mexico, Isam Rajab, Imam Islamic Center of North County Islamic Center of North Ridge Islamic Center of Northeast Florida, Zaid Malik, Imam Islamic Center of Oakland Islamic Center of Old Bridge, Alvi Fakhruddin, Imam Islamic Center of Omaha, Dr. Ahmad Az-Zaare, Imam Islamic Center of Passaic County, Mohammad Qatanani, Imam Islamic Center of Pleasanton/Dublin Islamic Center of Pomona Islamic Center of Pomona Islamic Center of Portland, Samir Horani, Board Member Islamic Center of the Quad Cities, Julie Abdel-Fattah, Dir. Public Relations Islamic Center of Raleigh, Mohammed Bainonie, Imam Islamic Center Of Reseda, Ali Shakoor, Imam Islamic Center of Rialto Islamic Center of Riverside, Mohammad Ashrif, Chairman of the Board Islamic Center of San Deigo Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley Islamic Center of Santa Claria Valley Islamic Center of Somerset, Husein Turki Islamic Center of South Florida, Hassan Sabri, Imam Islamic Center of Southern California, Jamil Momand, Chairman Islamic Center of Stockton Islamic Center of Tampa, Ziad Taha, Director Islamic Center Of Temecula Islamic Center of Temecula Valley, Imam Mahmoud Harmoush Islamic Center of Topeka, Imam Omar Hazim Islamic Center of Virginia, Shaheed Coovadia, Imam Islamic Center South Bay Islamic Center. of Mid City Islamic Council of Ohio, Sohail Khan, Secretary Islamic Cultural Center of Eugene (Oregon), Dr. Tammam Adi, Director Islamic Cultural Center of Illinois Islamic Education & Services Institute, Abdoulrahman Kattih, Director Islamic Education Center, Ahmad Bahriny, Imam Islamic Education Center, Dr. Ahmad Sakr, Director Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson, Mohamed Alhayek, Imam Islamic Educational Center of Orange County Islamic Education Foundation, Animar M Daghestani, Teacher Islamic Foundation of America, Mohammad M. Billah, President Islamic Foundation of Central Ohio, Siraj Haji Islamic Foundation of Chicago Islamic Foundation of Chicago, IL Islamic Foundation of Peoria, Muhammad F. Malik, Secretary Islamic Foundation of South Florida, Rashid Ahmad, Imam Islamic House of Wisdom, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi Islamic Jaffaria Association, Mohamed Banglori, Imam Islamic Learning and Practicing, Dr. Misbah Eldereiny Islamic Mosque of Cleveland (Masjid al-Islam) Islamic Movement of Florida, Moneer Khan, Imam Islamic of Northern Valley Islamic School of Greater Kansas City, Fadi Banyalmarjeh, Chairman Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, Shakeel Syed, Executive Director Islamic Society of Norco/Corona Islamic Society of Akron and Kent Islamic Society of Annapolis, Mohammad Arrafa, Imam Islamic Society of Baltimore, Abid Husain, General Secretary Islamic Society of Boston, Shaykh Besyouni Nehela Islamic Society of California Islamic Society of Central Florida, Mohammed al Masri, Imam Islamic Society of East Bay, Dr. Mohamed Rajabally Islamic Society of Essex County, Ismail Elshikh, Imam Islamic Society of Greater Columbus, Dr. M. N. Tarazi, President Islamic Society of Greater Houston, Rodwan M. Saleh, President Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City, Shahir Safi, President Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, Imad Enchassi, Imam Islamic Society of Greater Portland, Zafar Hassan, Board Member Islamic Society of Greater Valley Forge Islamic Society of Michiana, Mohammed Sirajuddin, Imam Islamic Society of Milwaukee, Ahmed Quereshi, Secretary Islamic Society of Orange County, Ismail Majoo, President Islamic Society of Palm Springs Islamic Society of Pinellas County, Haitham Barazangi, Imam Islamic Society of Salt Lake City, Ali Mohammed, Imam Islamic Society of San Fransisco, Souleiman Ghali, President Islamic Society of San Luis Obispo County, Hisham Assal, President Islamic Society of Santa Barbra Islamic Society of Schuylkill County, Shiraz Mansoor, Imam Islamic Society of Tampa Bay Area, Muhammad Sultan, Imam Islamic Society of the Coachella Valley, T. Themam Wassil, Imam Islamic Society of Washington Area, Faizul Khan, Imam Islamic Society of Wichita Falls, Abdullah Shamsid-Deen, Director Jafaria Islamic Center Jamat Masjid Ul-Islam Inc Jumaa'atu Masjidul-Muminiin Inc., L.M. Martin, Imam Kalamazoo Islamic Center, Tariq Jameel, President Karbala Islamic Educational Center, Hisham Al-Hussany King Fahad Mosque Long Beach Islamic Center, Tarek Mohamed Makki Masjid, Amaan Bhim, President Masjid AbuBakr AlSiddique, Abdur Rahman Bashir, Imam Masjid Al Heyder, Hafiz Inayadullah Masjid Al- Madina Al-Munawar Masjid Al Muminun, Furqan Muhammad, Imam Masjid Al-Ansar Masjid Al-Ansar, Nasir Ahmad, Imam Masjid Al-Faizal, Roshan Ali, Imam Masjid Alfalah Masjid Al-Falah, Abdul Latif Azom, Imam Masjid Al-Haqq, Luqman Al-Amin, Imam Masjid Al-Hijrah, Kamruz Hosein Masjid Al-Ihsan, Tarik Chebbi, Imam Masjid Al-Ikhlas, Tauheed Rashad, Imam Masjid Al-Ittihaad Masjid Al-Kauthar, Rudolph Ali, Imam Masjid Al-Momin Masjid Al-Nahl , Rashad Mujahid, Imam Masjid Al-Noor Masjid Al-Noor, Danish Siddiqui, President Masjid Al-Qudoos Masjid Al-Rashid Masjid Al-Rasul, Mujahid Abdul-Karim, Imam Masjid Al-Salaam Masjid Al-Sharif Masjid Al-Taqwa Masjid Al-Taqwa, Abdul Karim Salih, Imam Masjid An-noor Masjid An-Noor, Mohamed Zakaria Badat, Imam Masjid Annour Islamic Community, Mohammad Afzaluddin, Imam Masjid Ar-Ribat Al-Islami Masjid Bilal Ibn-Rabah Masjid Centralia, Dr. Zahir Ansari Masjid Dalal Masjid Dalal, Clyde Rahman, Imam Masjid Darul Huda, Abdul Hameed, Director Masjid Dar-ul-Argum Masjid Gibreal Masjid Hamza Masjid Ibadullah Masjid Iman Bukhari Masjid Jama Al Mumineen, Khalil Hussain, Imam Masjid Jihad, Imam Maajid Faheem Ali Masjid Mohammed, Said Mohammed Masjid Mumineen Masjid Muttaqeen, Usman Rahman Masjid of Anteloap Valley Masjid of Irvine Masjid of Long Beach Masjid Omar Masjid Omar Al Farouk Masjid Omar Ibn-Alkhetab Masjid Qurtubah Masjid Saad Foundation, Ziad Abu Hummos, President Masjid Sahmsuddin, Foad Farahi, Imam Masjid Taqwa, Imam Abdul-Malik Ali Masjid Tawheed-Afghan Cultural Center Masjid Usman Masjid Wali Muhammad, Gary Al-Kasib, Imam Masjidullah, Imam Abdul-Wali Muhammad Mecca Learning Center Mecca Masjid Medical Center Musallah Miami Gardens Masjid, Abdul Hamid Samra, Imam Mission Bend Masjid Momin Lodge Mosque Foundation, Sheikh Kifah Mustapha Mosque of Sheikh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Muhammad Abdul Lateef Hayden Mosque of Riverside Muslim Association of Huntington, Jamil M. Chaudri, Spokesperson Muslim Association of Lehigh Valley, Mohammad Sadiq Bajwa, President Muslim Association of Virginia, Rafi Uddin Ahmed, President Muslim Center of Middlesex County, Abubakr Nadwi Muslim Children Education & Civic Center, Abdul Wahid Muslim Community Association of the Peninsula Muslim Community Association of the San Francisco Bay Area Muslim Community Center, Azad Ejaz, President Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburg Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburg, Sayed Jafri, President Muslim Community Center of San Francisco Muslim Community of the Western Suburbs of Detroit, Sajid Siddiqui, President Muslim Community of Greater San Diego, Imam Abdur Rahim Khan Muslim Community of Knoxville, Dr. Mohammad Islam, President Muslim Community of North East Tennessee, Taneem Aziz, President Muslim Community of Palm Beach County, Murtaza Kakli, President Muslim Community Service Muslim Community Service Muslim Community Services, Inc., M. Rezar Rahman Muslim Federation of New Jersey, Saif Ul-Nabi, Qari Muslim Home Education Alliance, Cherrie J Karima Webb, Director Muslim Majlis of Staten Island (Masjid Al-Noor), Abdul Rehman, Director Muslim Youth of Minnesota, Kashif Saroya, President Muslims Association of Cleveland East (MACE) Mustafa Center, M. Zia, Imam New Territory Masjid North Hollywood Islamic Center Northshore Masjid Nur Ul Islam, Roshan Ali, Imam Omar Mosque, Nimer Judeh Orange County Islamic Foundation Palm Beach Mosque, Osman Chowdhury, President Pearland Musallah Qur'an Memorization Center Rhode Island Council for Muslim Advancement, Mamoun Najjar, Outreach Director
S. Jamaludeen Afghan Islamic Center Salaam Cleveland (Greater Cleveland Muslim Women's Association) Salaam in the Ummah (Peace in the Hood), Ohio San Ramon Valley Islamic Center Shi'a Islam Student Association, George Mason University, Seyede Katayon Kasmai, Founder Siddiquia Jamia Masjid, Tariq Khawaja South Bay Islamic Association, Tahir Anwar, Imam South Valley Islamic Center, Ilyas Anwar, Imam South Zone Masjid Southeast Zone Masjid Spring Branch Center Synott Road Masjid The Islamic Center of Tucson, Mohammed Elfarooqui, Imam The Muslim Center, Abdullah El-Amin, Imam The Muslim Community Center, Sheikh Elkheir Elkheir The Muslim Unity Center, Muhammad Muhammad Musa United Muslim Association of Toledo, M.Y. Ahmed, President United Sisterhood, Ohio Uqbah Mosque Foundation, Ramez Islambouli, President Vallejo Islamic Center, Mohamed Yunus Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee Wilcrest Masjid Woodlands Masjid Yaseen Foundation and the Muslim Community Center Zaytuna Institute
FROM: http://www.muslimbridges.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=266&Itemid=107
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
MUSLIM RELIGIOUS COUNCIL ISSUES FATWA AGAINST TERRORISM
The Fiqh Council of North America wishes to reaffirm Islam's absolute condemnation of terrorism and religious extremism.
Islam strictly condemns religious extremism and the use of violence against innocent lives. There is no justification in Islam for extremism or terrorism. Targeting civilians' life and property through suicide bombings or any other method of attack is haram - or forbidden - and those who commit these barbaric acts are criminals, not "martyrs."
The Qur'an, Islam's revealed text, states: "Whoever kills a person [unjustly]...it is as though he has killed all mankind. And whoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved all mankind." (Qur'an, 5:32)
Prophet Muhammad said there is no excuse for committing unjust acts: "Do not be people without minds of your own, saying that if others treat you well you will treat them well, and that if they do wrong you will do wrong to them. Instead, accustom yourselves to do good if people do good and not to do wrong (even) if they do evil." (Al-Tirmidhi)
God mandates moderation in faith and in all aspects of life when He states in the Qur'an: "We made you to be a community of the middle way, so that (with the example of your lives) you might bear witness to the truth before all mankind." (Qur'an, 2:143)
In another verse, God explains our duties as human beings when he says: "Let there arise from among you a band of people who invite to righteousness, and enjoin good and forbid evil." (Qur'an, 3:104)
Islam teaches us to act in a caring manner to all of God's creation. The Prophet Muhammad, who is described in the Qur'an as "a mercy to the worlds" said: "All creation is the family of God, and the person most beloved by God (is the one) who is kind and caring toward His family."
In the light of the teachings of the Qur'an and Sunnah we clearly and strongly state:
* 1. 1. All acts of terrorism targeting civilians are haram (forbidden) in Islam.
* 2. 2. It is haram for a Muslim to cooperate with any individual or group that is involved in any act of terrorism or violence.
* 3. 3. It is the civic and religious duty of Muslims to cooperate with law enforcement authorities to protect the lives of all civilians.
We issue this fatwa following the guidance of our scripture, the Qur'an, and the teachings of our Prophet Muhammad - peace be upon him. We urge all people to resolve all conflicts in just and peaceful manners.
We pray for the defeat of extremism and terrorism. We pray for the safety and security of our country, the United States, and its people. We pray for the safety and security of all inhabitants of our planet. We pray that interfaith harmony and cooperation prevail both in the United States and all around the globe.
FIQH COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICA July 28, 2005
MEMBERS OF THE FIQH COUNCIL OF NORTH AMERICA
Dr. Muzammil H. Siddiqi,
Chairman Dr. Deina Abdulkadir
Shaikh Muhammad Nur Abdallah
Dr. Taha Jabir Alalwani
Shaikh Muhammad Al-Hanooti
Shaikhah Zainab Alwani
Dr. Jamal Badawi
Dr. Ihsan Bagby
Dr. Nazih Hammad
Shaikh Yahya Hindi
Dr. Abdul Hakim Jackson
Dr. Mukhtar Maghraoui
Dr. Akbar Muhammad
Shaikh Hassan Qazwini
Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah
Dr. Muhammad Adam
Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Shleibak
Dr. Salah Soltan
ENDORSED BY THE FOLLOWING NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS:
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA)
Muslim American Society (MAS)
Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)
Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)
Mosque Cares, Imam W D Muhammad
Muslim Student Association of the US & Canada (MSA)
Association of Muslim Social Scientists
American Federation of Muslims of Indian Origin
American Muslim Alliance
Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers
Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations
Council of Shia Muslim Scholars of North America
Islamic Networks Group & Affiliates
Islamic Resource Group
Islamic Schools League of America
Islamic Sharia Advisory Institute of North America
Kashmiri American Council
Latino American Dawah Organization
Minaret of Freedom Institute
Muslim Ummah of North America
Project Islamic HOPE
United Muslims of America
USA Halal Chamber of Commerce, Inc & The Islamic Center for Halal Certification
ENDORSED BY THE FOLLOWING MOSQUES AND ISLAMIC CENTERS
Afghan Cultural Center Al Nur Islamic Center Al Nur Islamic Center, Rashid Ahmed, Director Albanian Islamic Center, Shuaib Gerguri, Imam Al-Fatiha Islamic Center Al-Huda Islamic Center, Hisham Ahmed, Imam All Dulles Area Muslim Society, Mohamed Magid, Imam Al-Mu'minun Islamic Center, Samuel Ansari Alvin Masjid American Islamic Academy, Shaykh Al-Tayyab American Islamic Organization, Afzal Ahmad, Chairman American Moslem Mission, American Moslem Society, Mahdi Ali, Imam American Muslim Society of the Tristate Area American Muslim Voice As Salaam Islamic Center of Raleigh, Oliver S. Mohammed, Imam Assadiq Foundation Assadiq Islamic Educational Foundation, Sayed Mohammad Jawad Qazwini, Imam Auburn Islamic Center, Mark Hamza Dougherty, President Azzahrah Islamic Ctr. Bay County Islamic Society Inc, Hashem Mubrak, Baytown Masjid Bear Creek Masjid Bell Islamic & Cultural Center Belleville Mosque and Islamic Education Center, Dr. Abdul W. Kazi, Bilal Islamic Center Blossom Valley Muslim Community Center, Allaedin Ezzedin, Imam Bob ul Ilm Islamic Center Bosnian-American Islamic Center, Mirsad Hassecic, Imam Boston Dialogue Foundation New Mosque, Salih Yucel, Imam Campus Mosque of Scranton, Imam Canton Masjid, Ali S. Ali Cham American Muslim Com. Champions Masjid Cincinnati Islamic Center, Ilyas Nashid, Imam Concerned Muslims of Annapolis Concerned Muslims of Greater Cleveland (CMGC) Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago, Abdul Malik Mujahid, Imam Council of Masajid, Cleveland Daar-ul-Islam Masjid, Muhammad Nur Abdallah Dalton Islamic Center, Hammad El-Ameen, President Dar Almanar, Fouad Reda, President Dar Al-Uloom Al-Islamia Dar Al-Uloom Flahidarin Darassalam, Mohammed M. Safa Darul Uloom of Los Angeles Des Plaines Islamic Center Des Plaines Islamic Center Discover Islam Foundation, Muhammad Quadir, Downtown Islamic Center Downtown Islamic Center Elmhurst Islamic Center, Riaz Ahmad, Mufti Ershad Institute First Cleveland Mosque, Abbas Ahmad, Imam Five Pillars Center Foundation for Islamic Education, Sheikh Mustafa Ahmad Fox Valley Islamic Society, Delwar Mian, Secretary Fullerton Mosque Greenway Islamic Center, Didmar Faja Heartland Muslim Women's Network, Maisha Liwaru, President Hemet Masjid Hidaya Foundation High Desert Islamic Center Howard County Muslim Council, Anwer Hasan, President Huseini Mousque
I.M.A.N Imperial Valley Islamic Center Indian Muslim Relief & Charities Indo Chinese Muslim Relief Association IntraCity Muslim Action Network (IMAN), Ohio Islamic Association of Carrollton, Azhar Azeez, Secretary General Islamic Association of Cary, Shakil Ahmed Islamic Association of Central Florida, Dr. Zafer Sabawi, Imam Islamic Association of Greater Shreveport, Sayed Jumaa Salam Islamic Association of Kokomo Islamic Association of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Riaz Hussain, Treasurer Islamic Association of West Virginia, Mohamad Jamal Daoudi, Imam Islamic Center Inland Valley Islamic Center of America, Sayed Hassan Al-Qazwini, Imam Islamic Center of Blacksburg Islamic Center of Boca Raton, Jalal Khan, Imam Islamic Center of Calremont Islamic Center of Canejo Valley Islamic Center of Cape Girardeau, Shafiq Malik, Imam Islamic Center of Carbondale, Muhammad Kamran, President Islamic Center of Cleveland, Fawaz Damra, Imam Islamic Center of Contra Costa, Abdul Quddus Saleh, Imam Islamic Center of Cypress Islamic Center of Des Moines, Ibrahim Dremali, Imam Islamic Center of El Paso, Yaser Birjas Issa, Imam Islamic Center of Fremont, Mubashir Ahmed, President Islamic Center of Granada Hills Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, Saleem Foad, Director of Education Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, Farooq S. Aboelzahab, Imam Islamic Center of Hawthorne Islamic Center of Inland Empire Islamic Center of Little Rock, Islam Mossaad, Imam Islamic Center of Marietta, Amjad Taufique, President Islamic Center of Maryland, Amin Ezzeddine, Imam Islamic Center of Moreno Valley Islamic Center of Morgantown, Diaa Eldin M. Nassar, General Secretary Islamic Center of New England, Talal Eid, Imam Islamic Center of New Mexico, Isam Rajab, Imam Islamic Center of North County Islamic Center of North Ridge Islamic Center of Northeast Florida, Zaid Malik, Imam Islamic Center of Oakland Islamic Center of Old Bridge, Alvi Fakhruddin, Imam Islamic Center of Omaha, Dr. Ahmad Az-Zaare, Imam Islamic Center of Passaic County, Mohammad Qatanani, Imam Islamic Center of Pleasanton/Dublin Islamic Center of Pomona Islamic Center of Pomona Islamic Center of Portland, Samir Horani, Board Member Islamic Center of the Quad Cities, Julie Abdel-Fattah, Dir. Public Relations Islamic Center of Raleigh, Mohammed Bainonie, Imam Islamic Center Of Reseda, Ali Shakoor, Imam Islamic Center of Rialto Islamic Center of Riverside, Mohammad Ashrif, Chairman of the Board Islamic Center of San Deigo Islamic Center of San Gabriel Valley Islamic Center of Santa Claria Valley Islamic Center of Somerset, Husein Turki Islamic Center of South Florida, Hassan Sabri, Imam Islamic Center of Southern California, Jamil Momand, Chairman Islamic Center of Stockton Islamic Center of Tampa, Ziad Taha, Director Islamic Center Of Temecula Islamic Center of Temecula Valley, Imam Mahmoud Harmoush Islamic Center of Topeka, Imam Omar Hazim Islamic Center of Virginia, Shaheed Coovadia, Imam Islamic Center South Bay Islamic Center. of Mid City Islamic Council of Ohio, Sohail Khan, Secretary Islamic Cultural Center of Eugene (Oregon), Dr. Tammam Adi, Director Islamic Cultural Center of Illinois Islamic Education & Services Institute, Abdoulrahman Kattih, Director Islamic Education Center, Ahmad Bahriny, Imam Islamic Education Center, Dr. Ahmad Sakr, Director Islamic Educational Center of North Hudson, Mohamed Alhayek, Imam Islamic Educational Center of Orange County Islamic Education Foundation, Animar M Daghestani, Teacher Islamic Foundation of America, Mohammad M. Billah, President Islamic Foundation of Central Ohio, Siraj Haji Islamic Foundation of Chicago Islamic Foundation of Chicago, IL Islamic Foundation of Peoria, Muhammad F. Malik, Secretary Islamic Foundation of South Florida, Rashid Ahmad, Imam Islamic House of Wisdom, Imam Mohammad Ali Elahi Islamic Jaffaria Association, Mohamed Banglori, Imam Islamic Learning and Practicing, Dr. Misbah Eldereiny Islamic Mosque of Cleveland (Masjid al-Islam) Islamic Movement of Florida, Moneer Khan, Imam Islamic of Northern Valley Islamic School of Greater Kansas City, Fadi Banyalmarjeh, Chairman Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, Shakeel Syed, Executive Director Islamic Society of Norco/Corona Islamic Society of Akron and Kent Islamic Society of Annapolis, Mohammad Arrafa, Imam Islamic Society of Baltimore, Abid Husain, General Secretary Islamic Society of Boston, Shaykh Besyouni Nehela Islamic Society of California Islamic Society of Central Florida, Mohammed al Masri, Imam Islamic Society of East Bay, Dr. Mohamed Rajabally Islamic Society of Essex County, Ismail Elshikh, Imam Islamic Society of Greater Columbus, Dr. M. N. Tarazi, President Islamic Society of Greater Houston, Rodwan M. Saleh, President Islamic Society of Greater Kansas City, Shahir Safi, President Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City, Imad Enchassi, Imam Islamic Society of Greater Portland, Zafar Hassan, Board Member Islamic Society of Greater Valley Forge Islamic Society of Michiana, Mohammed Sirajuddin, Imam Islamic Society of Milwaukee, Ahmed Quereshi, Secretary Islamic Society of Orange County, Ismail Majoo, President Islamic Society of Palm Springs Islamic Society of Pinellas County, Haitham Barazangi, Imam Islamic Society of Salt Lake City, Ali Mohammed, Imam Islamic Society of San Fransisco, Souleiman Ghali, President Islamic Society of San Luis Obispo County, Hisham Assal, President Islamic Society of Santa Barbra Islamic Society of Schuylkill County, Shiraz Mansoor, Imam Islamic Society of Tampa Bay Area, Muhammad Sultan, Imam Islamic Society of the Coachella Valley, T. Themam Wassil, Imam Islamic Society of Washington Area, Faizul Khan, Imam Islamic Society of Wichita Falls, Abdullah Shamsid-Deen, Director Jafaria Islamic Center Jamat Masjid Ul-Islam Inc Jumaa'atu Masjidul-Muminiin Inc., L.M. Martin, Imam Kalamazoo Islamic Center, Tariq Jameel, President Karbala Islamic Educational Center, Hisham Al-Hussany King Fahad Mosque Long Beach Islamic Center, Tarek Mohamed Makki Masjid, Amaan Bhim, President Masjid AbuBakr AlSiddique, Abdur Rahman Bashir, Imam Masjid Al Heyder, Hafiz Inayadullah Masjid Al- Madina Al-Munawar Masjid Al Muminun, Furqan Muhammad, Imam Masjid Al-Ansar Masjid Al-Ansar, Nasir Ahmad, Imam Masjid Al-Faizal, Roshan Ali, Imam Masjid Alfalah Masjid Al-Falah, Abdul Latif Azom, Imam Masjid Al-Haqq, Luqman Al-Amin, Imam Masjid Al-Hijrah, Kamruz Hosein Masjid Al-Ihsan, Tarik Chebbi, Imam Masjid Al-Ikhlas, Tauheed Rashad, Imam Masjid Al-Ittihaad Masjid Al-Kauthar, Rudolph Ali, Imam Masjid Al-Momin Masjid Al-Nahl , Rashad Mujahid, Imam Masjid Al-Noor Masjid Al-Noor, Danish Siddiqui, President Masjid Al-Qudoos Masjid Al-Rashid Masjid Al-Rasul, Mujahid Abdul-Karim, Imam Masjid Al-Salaam Masjid Al-Sharif Masjid Al-Taqwa Masjid Al-Taqwa, Abdul Karim Salih, Imam Masjid An-noor Masjid An-Noor, Mohamed Zakaria Badat, Imam Masjid Annour Islamic Community, Mohammad Afzaluddin, Imam Masjid Ar-Ribat Al-Islami Masjid Bilal Ibn-Rabah Masjid Centralia, Dr. Zahir Ansari Masjid Dalal Masjid Dalal, Clyde Rahman, Imam Masjid Darul Huda, Abdul Hameed, Director Masjid Dar-ul-Argum Masjid Gibreal Masjid Hamza Masjid Ibadullah Masjid Iman Bukhari Masjid Jama Al Mumineen, Khalil Hussain, Imam Masjid Jihad, Imam Maajid Faheem Ali Masjid Mohammed, Said Mohammed Masjid Mumineen Masjid Muttaqeen, Usman Rahman Masjid of Anteloap Valley Masjid of Irvine Masjid of Long Beach Masjid Omar Masjid Omar Al Farouk Masjid Omar Ibn-Alkhetab Masjid Qurtubah Masjid Saad Foundation, Ziad Abu Hummos, President Masjid Sahmsuddin, Foad Farahi, Imam Masjid Taqwa, Imam Abdul-Malik Ali Masjid Tawheed-Afghan Cultural Center Masjid Usman Masjid Wali Muhammad, Gary Al-Kasib, Imam Masjidullah, Imam Abdul-Wali Muhammad Mecca Learning Center Mecca Masjid Medical Center Musallah Miami Gardens Masjid, Abdul Hamid Samra, Imam Mission Bend Masjid Momin Lodge Mosque Foundation, Sheikh Kifah Mustapha Mosque of Sheikh M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Muhammad Abdul Lateef Hayden Mosque of Riverside Muslim Association of Huntington, Jamil M. Chaudri, Spokesperson Muslim Association of Lehigh Valley, Mohammad Sadiq Bajwa, President Muslim Association of Virginia, Rafi Uddin Ahmed, President Muslim Center of Middlesex County, Abubakr Nadwi Muslim Children Education & Civic Center, Abdul Wahid Muslim Community Association of the Peninsula Muslim Community Association of the San Francisco Bay Area Muslim Community Center, Azad Ejaz, President Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburg Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburg, Sayed Jafri, President Muslim Community Center of San Francisco Muslim Community of the Western Suburbs of Detroit, Sajid Siddiqui, President Muslim Community of Greater San Diego, Imam Abdur Rahim Khan Muslim Community of Knoxville, Dr. Mohammad Islam, President Muslim Community of North East Tennessee, Taneem Aziz, President Muslim Community of Palm Beach County, Murtaza Kakli, President Muslim Community Service Muslim Community Service Muslim Community Services, Inc., M. Rezar Rahman Muslim Federation of New Jersey, Saif Ul-Nabi, Qari Muslim Home Education Alliance, Cherrie J Karima Webb, Director Muslim Majlis of Staten Island (Masjid Al-Noor), Abdul Rehman, Director Muslim Youth of Minnesota, Kashif Saroya, President Muslims Association of Cleveland East (MACE) Mustafa Center, M. Zia, Imam New Territory Masjid North Hollywood Islamic Center Northshore Masjid Nur Ul Islam, Roshan Ali, Imam Omar Mosque, Nimer Judeh Orange County Islamic Foundation Palm Beach Mosque, Osman Chowdhury, President Pearland Musallah Qur'an Memorization Center Rhode Island Council for Muslim Advancement, Mamoun Najjar, Outreach Director
S. Jamaludeen Afghan Islamic Center Salaam Cleveland (Greater Cleveland Muslim Women's Association) Salaam in the Ummah (Peace in the Hood), Ohio San Ramon Valley Islamic Center Shi'a Islam Student Association, George Mason University, Seyede Katayon Kasmai, Founder Siddiquia Jamia Masjid, Tariq Khawaja South Bay Islamic Association, Tahir Anwar, Imam South Valley Islamic Center, Ilyas Anwar, Imam South Zone Masjid Southeast Zone Masjid Spring Branch Center Synott Road Masjid The Islamic Center of Tucson, Mohammed Elfarooqui, Imam The Muslim Center, Abdullah El-Amin, Imam The Muslim Community Center, Sheikh Elkheir Elkheir The Muslim Unity Center, Muhammad Muhammad Musa United Muslim Association of Toledo, M.Y. Ahmed, President United Sisterhood, Ohio Uqbah Mosque Foundation, Ramez Islambouli, President Vallejo Islamic Center, Mohamed Yunus Virginia Muslim Political Action Committee Wilcrest Masjid Woodlands Masjid Yaseen Foundation and the Muslim Community Center Zaytuna Institute
Sunday, December 27, 2009
U.S. SEES GROWING HOMEGROWN THREAT
FROM: http://www.hiiraan.com/news2/2009/Dec/u_s_sees_homegrown_muslim_extremism_as_rising_threat.aspx
Reporting from Washington - The Obama administration, grappling with a spate of recent Islamic terrorism cases on U.S. soil, has concluded that the country confronts a rising threat from homegrown extremism.
Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims, driven by a wave of English-language online propaganda and reflected in aspiring fighters' trips to hot spots such as Pakistan and Somalia.
Europe had been the front line, the target of successive attacks and major plots, while the U.S. remained relatively calm. But the number, variety and scale of recent U.S. cases suggest 2009 has been the most dangerous year domestically since 2001, anti-terrorism experts said:
* There were major arrests of Americans accused of plotting with Al Qaeda and its allies, including an Afghan American charged in a New York bomb plot described as the most serious threat in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.
* Authorities tracked other extremism suspects joining foreign networks, including Somali Americans going to the battlegrounds of their ancestral homeland and an Albanian American from Brooklyn who was arrested in Kosovo.
* The FBI rounded up homegrown terrorism suspects in Dallas, Detroit and Raleigh, N.C., saying that it had broken up plots targeting a synagogue, government buildings and military facilities.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued her strongest public comments yet on the homegrown threat.
"We've seen an increased number of arrests here in the U.S. of individuals suspected of plotting terrorist attacks, or supporting terror groups abroad such as Al Qaeda," Napolitano said in a speech in New York. "Home-based terrorism is here. And, like violent extremism abroad, it will be part of the threat picture that we must now confront."
Officials acknowledged that her tone had changed, though they said terrorism has been her focus since becoming Homeland Security chief.
In some of the 2009 cases, extremist leanings are suspected but motives are not known.
Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- accused of killing 13 people in a Ft. Hood, Texas, shooting rampage last month -- has apparently suffered emotional problems. But in interviews, officials and experts have also raised his Muslim beliefs as an alleged motive.
A previous attack on the U.S. military, a shooting in June by an American convert who killed a soldier and wounded another at an Arkansas recruiting center, was apparently a case of a lone wolf radicalized in Yemen, according to Homeland Security officials.
"You are seeing the full spectrum of the threats you face in terrorism," former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.
"Radicalization is clearly happening in the U.S.," said Mitchell Silber, director of analysis for the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department. "In years past, you couldn't say that about the U.S. You could say it about Europe."
Europe has suffered a militant onslaught: transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, an assassination in the Netherlands in 2004, and close calls such as the fiery failed attack on the Glasgow airport in 2007.
Hard borders have helped the U.S. ward off the threat. But experts also said that Islamic radicalization is more widespread in Europe. Crime, alienation and extremism roil Muslim immigrant communities in places like tiny Denmark and the vast slums of France.
In contrast, American Muslims are wealthier, better educated and better integrated because the United States does a good job of absorbing immigrants and fostering tolerance, experts said. During the last decade, Americans have been a rare presence in the Al Qaeda-connected camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have trained hundreds of Westerners and thousands of recruits from Muslim-majority nations.
Nonetheless, recent investigations have run across Americans suspected of being operatives of Al Qaeda and its allies who were trained overseas and, in several cases, allegedly conspired with top terrorism bosses. They include a convert from Long Island, N.Y, who was captured in Pakistan late last year; a Chicago businessman accused of scouting foreign targets for a Pakistani network; and at least 15 Somali American youths from Minneapolis who returned to fight in their ancestral homeland.
"A larger trend has emerged that is not surprising, but is disturbing," Chertoff said. "You are beginning to see the fruits of the pipeline that Al Qaeda built to train Westerners and send them back to their homelands. . . . This underscores the central significance of disrupting the pipeline at its source."
A campaign of U.S. airstrikes launched last year has pounded Al Qaeda hide-outs in Pakistan. But the flow of trainees gathered momentum in 2007 when Pakistani security forces ceded turf to militant groups, officials said. The suspect in the New York plot, Najibullah Zazi, and the Long Island convert, Bryant Neal Vinas, allegedly met in Pakistan in 2008 and discussed attacks on U.S. targets with Al Qaeda chiefs.
Vinas and Zazi are the first Americans to be accused of joining Al Qaeda in several years.
Meanwhile, Silber said in recent congressional testimony: "There have been a half-dozen cases of individuals who, instead of traveling abroad to carry out violence, have elected to attempt to do it here. This is substantially greater than what we have seen in the past, and may reflect an emerging pattern."
Some feel radicalization in the United States has been worse than authorities thought for some time.
"People focused on the idea that we're different, we're better at integrating Muslims than Europe is," said Zeyno Baran, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. "But there's radicalization -- especially among converts [and] newcomers, such as the Somali case shows. I think young U.S. Muslims today are as prone to radicalization as Muslims in Europe."
In proportion to population, extremism still appears less intense in the United States. But the Internet functions as the global engine of extremism. Websites expose Americans to a wave of slick, English-language propaganda from ideologues such as Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni American described as a spiritual guide for the accused Ft. Hood shooter and other Westerners.
And socioeconomic success will not necessarily prevent Americans' radicalization. Studies suggest that a quest for identity and the bonding process among small groups often drive militants more than personal hardship does.
"The profile in Europe is in general quite different [from U.S. extremists]: more working-class or even underclass," said a European intelligence official who requested anonymity for security reasons. "But it's a bit simplistic to make assumptions. We have seen everything in Europe -- educated people, doctors involved in terrorism. The underclass argument is not enough."
The Obama administration began the year with gestures to the Muslim world. President Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and made a historic speech in Cairo.
The Homeland Security Department leads the administration's counter-radicalization effort. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which works with Muslim leaders, held summit meetings with Somali communities this year in Minnesota and Ohio, said David Heyman, assistant Homeland Security secretary for policy.
But that office still lacks a director, critics point out, and the department has yet to fill other key posts as well.
"We don't do enough about fostering a counter-narrative," said Matthew Levitt, a former anti-terrorism official for the Treasury Department now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Competing for space with the radicalizers and challenging their radical ideologies is the key."
In contrast to the heightened extremist activity in the United States, Europe has remained relatively calm this year. But the West needs to keep up its guard on both sides of the Atlantic, said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian French scholar who interviewed jailed extremists for his book "Inside Jihadism."
"You can be middle-class and have bright prospects but become a jihadist," he said. "We have to broaden the analysis. This idea of American exceptionalism, the comparison with Europe, should not blind us to the fact that we are going toward a broader participation in jihad."
*** The lack of a counter-narrative initiative is the single most identifiable barrier towards reducing the threat in our country and in other countries. When will the decision makers realize this? How many more citizens shall we wait to see on an Al Qaida video somewhere, just before we read about him/her as the latest suicide bomber? Let's get on the ball, shall we? MS ***
Reporting from Washington - The Obama administration, grappling with a spate of recent Islamic terrorism cases on U.S. soil, has concluded that the country confronts a rising threat from homegrown extremism.
Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims, driven by a wave of English-language online propaganda and reflected in aspiring fighters' trips to hot spots such as Pakistan and Somalia.
Europe had been the front line, the target of successive attacks and major plots, while the U.S. remained relatively calm. But the number, variety and scale of recent U.S. cases suggest 2009 has been the most dangerous year domestically since 2001, anti-terrorism experts said:
* There were major arrests of Americans accused of plotting with Al Qaeda and its allies, including an Afghan American charged in a New York bomb plot described as the most serious threat in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.
* Authorities tracked other extremism suspects joining foreign networks, including Somali Americans going to the battlegrounds of their ancestral homeland and an Albanian American from Brooklyn who was arrested in Kosovo.
* The FBI rounded up homegrown terrorism suspects in Dallas, Detroit and Raleigh, N.C., saying that it had broken up plots targeting a synagogue, government buildings and military facilities.
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued her strongest public comments yet on the homegrown threat.
"We've seen an increased number of arrests here in the U.S. of individuals suspected of plotting terrorist attacks, or supporting terror groups abroad such as Al Qaeda," Napolitano said in a speech in New York. "Home-based terrorism is here. And, like violent extremism abroad, it will be part of the threat picture that we must now confront."
Officials acknowledged that her tone had changed, though they said terrorism has been her focus since becoming Homeland Security chief.
In some of the 2009 cases, extremist leanings are suspected but motives are not known.
Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- accused of killing 13 people in a Ft. Hood, Texas, shooting rampage last month -- has apparently suffered emotional problems. But in interviews, officials and experts have also raised his Muslim beliefs as an alleged motive.
A previous attack on the U.S. military, a shooting in June by an American convert who killed a soldier and wounded another at an Arkansas recruiting center, was apparently a case of a lone wolf radicalized in Yemen, according to Homeland Security officials.
"You are seeing the full spectrum of the threats you face in terrorism," former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.
"Radicalization is clearly happening in the U.S.," said Mitchell Silber, director of analysis for the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department. "In years past, you couldn't say that about the U.S. You could say it about Europe."
Europe has suffered a militant onslaught: transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, an assassination in the Netherlands in 2004, and close calls such as the fiery failed attack on the Glasgow airport in 2007.
Hard borders have helped the U.S. ward off the threat. But experts also said that Islamic radicalization is more widespread in Europe. Crime, alienation and extremism roil Muslim immigrant communities in places like tiny Denmark and the vast slums of France.
In contrast, American Muslims are wealthier, better educated and better integrated because the United States does a good job of absorbing immigrants and fostering tolerance, experts said. During the last decade, Americans have been a rare presence in the Al Qaeda-connected camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have trained hundreds of Westerners and thousands of recruits from Muslim-majority nations.
Nonetheless, recent investigations have run across Americans suspected of being operatives of Al Qaeda and its allies who were trained overseas and, in several cases, allegedly conspired with top terrorism bosses. They include a convert from Long Island, N.Y, who was captured in Pakistan late last year; a Chicago businessman accused of scouting foreign targets for a Pakistani network; and at least 15 Somali American youths from Minneapolis who returned to fight in their ancestral homeland.
"A larger trend has emerged that is not surprising, but is disturbing," Chertoff said. "You are beginning to see the fruits of the pipeline that Al Qaeda built to train Westerners and send them back to their homelands. . . . This underscores the central significance of disrupting the pipeline at its source."
A campaign of U.S. airstrikes launched last year has pounded Al Qaeda hide-outs in Pakistan. But the flow of trainees gathered momentum in 2007 when Pakistani security forces ceded turf to militant groups, officials said. The suspect in the New York plot, Najibullah Zazi, and the Long Island convert, Bryant Neal Vinas, allegedly met in Pakistan in 2008 and discussed attacks on U.S. targets with Al Qaeda chiefs.
Vinas and Zazi are the first Americans to be accused of joining Al Qaeda in several years.
Meanwhile, Silber said in recent congressional testimony: "There have been a half-dozen cases of individuals who, instead of traveling abroad to carry out violence, have elected to attempt to do it here. This is substantially greater than what we have seen in the past, and may reflect an emerging pattern."
Some feel radicalization in the United States has been worse than authorities thought for some time.
"People focused on the idea that we're different, we're better at integrating Muslims than Europe is," said Zeyno Baran, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. "But there's radicalization -- especially among converts [and] newcomers, such as the Somali case shows. I think young U.S. Muslims today are as prone to radicalization as Muslims in Europe."
In proportion to population, extremism still appears less intense in the United States. But the Internet functions as the global engine of extremism. Websites expose Americans to a wave of slick, English-language propaganda from ideologues such as Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni American described as a spiritual guide for the accused Ft. Hood shooter and other Westerners.
And socioeconomic success will not necessarily prevent Americans' radicalization. Studies suggest that a quest for identity and the bonding process among small groups often drive militants more than personal hardship does.
"The profile in Europe is in general quite different [from U.S. extremists]: more working-class or even underclass," said a European intelligence official who requested anonymity for security reasons. "But it's a bit simplistic to make assumptions. We have seen everything in Europe -- educated people, doctors involved in terrorism. The underclass argument is not enough."
The Obama administration began the year with gestures to the Muslim world. President Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and made a historic speech in Cairo.
The Homeland Security Department leads the administration's counter-radicalization effort. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which works with Muslim leaders, held summit meetings with Somali communities this year in Minnesota and Ohio, said David Heyman, assistant Homeland Security secretary for policy.
But that office still lacks a director, critics point out, and the department has yet to fill other key posts as well.
"We don't do enough about fostering a counter-narrative," said Matthew Levitt, a former anti-terrorism official for the Treasury Department now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Competing for space with the radicalizers and challenging their radical ideologies is the key."
In contrast to the heightened extremist activity in the United States, Europe has remained relatively calm this year. But the West needs to keep up its guard on both sides of the Atlantic, said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian French scholar who interviewed jailed extremists for his book "Inside Jihadism."
"You can be middle-class and have bright prospects but become a jihadist," he said. "We have to broaden the analysis. This idea of American exceptionalism, the comparison with Europe, should not blind us to the fact that we are going toward a broader participation in jihad."
*** The lack of a counter-narrative initiative is the single most identifiable barrier towards reducing the threat in our country and in other countries. When will the decision makers realize this? How many more citizens shall we wait to see on an Al Qaida video somewhere, just before we read about him/her as the latest suicide bomber? Let's get on the ball, shall we? MS ***
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