via IPS News
The surviving Boston Marathon bomber reportedly told authorities the U.S. “war on Islam” drove him and his brother to commit their terrorist act. Their linking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a perceived global war on Islam is at the heart of the Jihadist [...]]]>
via IPS News
The surviving Boston Marathon bomber reportedly told authorities the U.S. “war on Islam” drove him and his brother to commit their terrorist act. Their linking the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a perceived global war on Islam is at the heart of the Jihadist message Bin Ladin and Al-Qaeda issued to the Muslim world almost two decades ago.
The message, which continues to lure some vulnerable Muslim youth across the globe, is powerful, simplistic, repetitive, deceptive and violent. It appeals to alienated and angry youth because they see in it a reaffirmation of their self-articulated religious narrative even though such a narrative has very little basis in objective religious teachings.
Of course, the tipping point of moving a young man from anger into killing innocent people varies from case to case. Once he accepts the universality of Bin Ladin’s message, he proceeds with plotting to terrorise regardless of place and cause.
When I was in government, I frequently briefed senior officials on the long-term danger of Bin Ladin’s message because it charted a path for individual radicalisers and radicalised alike without traceable connections to international terror organisations.
We also briefed them that more and more “lone wolf” potential terrorists who would be receptive to the Bin Ladin message live in Western societies and are usually “under the radar”. Part of my responsibility at CIA was to analyse all Bin Ladin’s messages for senior policymakers.
Bin Ladin’s simple articulation of Jihad, which continues to be propagated in the blogosphere by Al-Qaeda and its franchise groups, includes four key themes. First, the Islamic faith and territory are under attack, as exemplified by the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Western-led wars on individual Muslim countries, he told potential recruits, are part of a global “Christian-Zionist” war against Islam.
Second, Bin Ladin asserted that U.S., Western, and “Zionist” policies are anti-Islamic, as evidenced by what’s happening in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, the Philippines, Sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere.
Third, in response to these attacks, he argued all Muslims are duty bound to engage in Jihad against the “near” enemy (Muslim regimes) and the “far” enemy (the U.S., European states, and Israel). In addressing his followers through so-called fatwas and media messages, Bin Ladin claimed such “jihad” is an existential fight for the survival of the global Muslim community or umma. His successor, Ayman Zawahiri, has repeated the same message.
Fourth, the war between Islam and the “infidels” and the “apostates” will last until the “final days” when the “enemies of Islam” will be defeated. Islam will emerge victorious awaiting the coming of the “Mahdi”.
For Bin Ladin and Al-Qaeda, infidels and apostates included, in addition to non-Muslims, Islamic majorities who disagreed with this radical ideology and terrorist methods.
The four-pronged message is theology at its most simplistic level. Many grade school graduates, high school dropouts, and other youth with limited knowledge of their faith tend to accept it blindly as immutable truth. Many mainstream Muslims, including clerics and scholars, have had difficulty refuting Al-Qaeda’s calls for violence because radicalised youth have no interest in reasoned discussion or in learning about their faith.
Many Muslim youth, like their counterparts across the globe, have grown up with the new social media and a worldview grounded in the Internet, Facebook, short texting, and tweets. Longer treatises on religion or any other subject for that matter turn them off.
When Western governments began to implement so-called strategic communications strategies in an attempt to engage mainstream and “moderate” Muslims and refute extremism, radicalised youth were already inculcated with Bin Ladin’s violent rhetoric.
My analysts and I frequently briefed senior policymakers on the need to study Al-Qaeda’s radical rhetoric and fight it with more convincing messaging. Accomplishing such a goal should have been easy since vast majorities of Muslims worldwide rejected violence and extremism. But it wasn’t.
Radicalisation did not succeed because of religion or values. Terrorist groups have cynically used Muslims’ disagreements with specific Western policies to spread their message of terror. They also used the politics of nationalism – including in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Arabian Peninsula, Kashmir, Western China, and Sub-Saharan Africa – for their global Islamic agenda.
They stoked opposition to the United States and other Western countries by exploiting popular anger on the “Islamic street” against invading Muslim countries, Guantanamo, drone strikes, and other “dirty wars” tactics.
Some Muslim youth, immigrants or children of immigrants who live in Western societies find it difficult to adjust to life in their adopted countries. As alienated adolescents and even college-age kids, they become easy prey to radical recruiters, whether in person or on the Internet.
Where do we go from here? The news from Canada about the role of Canadian Muslims in foiling the recent terror plot to blow up a train is a useful guide on how to proceed.
Canada, the UK, some European countries, and Australia have done a commendable job making their Muslim communities feel a sense of belonging to the country where they live. Several U.S. cities, especially New York City and Las Vegas, Nevada, have implemented similar policies.
Real engagement of Muslim communities in Western societies usually begets a sense of belonging, especially if it is accompanied by official condemnation of hate crimes and rhetoric, such as “Islamophobia”. A well-grounded feeling of belonging empowers mosque imams and other community leaders to spot signs of radicalisation in their community and report them to the authorities.
As one Muslim resident of New York City once said, “This is my city and don’t want anything to happen to it.”
The good news is that vast majorities of Muslims oppose terrorism and focus on improving their lives. As the Afghan war winds down, and as Al-Qaeda Central weakens, a time should come when Guantanamo is closed and “dirty wars’’ become subject to public scrutiny. That is when Bin Ladin’s message becomes irrelevant, the threat of radicalisation wanes, and the “See Something, Say Something” slogan gains acceptance among Muslims.
Photo: The aftermath of the first blast of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing. Credit: Aaron “tango” Tang/Flickr
]]>by Wayne White
A major obstacle in the way of sorting through to an internationally acceptable definition of terrorism — largely intentional violence against civilians — was the incredibly broad definition that effectively evolved as acceptable, or necessary, among quite a few prominent governments involved in the course of the titanic [...]]]>
by Wayne White
A major obstacle in the way of sorting through to an internationally acceptable definition of terrorism — largely intentional violence against civilians — was the incredibly broad definition that effectively evolved as acceptable, or necessary, among quite a few prominent governments involved in the course of the titanic hostilities of WWII (which included war against broad civilian urban population centers).
Early on, the US tried to avoid involvement in what Germany, Japan and Great Britain especially had been doing: mass area bombings of enemy urban areas (later to be joined by widespread vengeful Soviet brutality administered more directly against civilians on the ground once the Red Army reached German territory). Given the failings of the American Norden bombsight in actual combat as well as powerful cross-winds encountered over Japan that disrupted bombing from high altitude, even such more focused bombing killed large numbers of civilian “collateral” casualties or proved ineffective against the intended militarily strategic targets. So, late in the war in Europe and over Japan, the US also resorted to mass area bombing, culminating in the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
One difference between many potential post-WWII parallels and so many of the ones with which we grapple today is that during 1939-1945 these acts of what might as well be called mass terror against civilians were carried out in the context of formally declared wars in an era in which the concept of “total war” had been recognized — and expanded — by combatants on both sides as needed to “break” both modern industrial and pre-modern societies. And then during the Cold War, worse still, the concept of Mutually Assured (Near Total) Destruction (MAD) that excepted no one from a theoretical nuclear exchange was accepted, albeit a bit reluctantly, by the US, USSR and many of their allies as a way of war (once again on the part of recognized governments).
Since 1945 there have been relatively few declarations of war, and some that are declared continue for long periods in a militarily somewhat surreal state (in which decades can pass without significant state-on-state hostilities). Instead, they often become mainly sort of glaring contests punctuated, in many cases, by either occasional brief outbreaks of limited hostilities or violence through non-state surrogates (typically countered by conventional military firepower).
One problem (among others) that has bedeviled perceptions of “who is a terrorist” in the course of many decades of non-State actors carrying out violence against civilians is the tendency on the part of many (which I believe is misplaced) to fall into the one-dimensional stereotype of considering mayhem committed against civilians actually or believed to be co-located with so-called non-state “terrorists” or “terrorist elements” (or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when the latter are targeted mistakenly) on the part of an uniformed military operating strike aircraft, artillery, drones, or whatever genre of professional weaponry, as not also being terrorism (often because those passing judgment sympathize with the nation state fielding that military and its particular definition of terrorism in specific cases). Many of them also involve resistance to occupation, oppression, or both in one context or another.
An example of the US government wrestling with a country-specific definition of terrorism vs. legitimate resistance was that of the military arm of the Algerian FIS waging guerrilla war against an authoritarian regime that had illegally canceled a final round of parliamentary elections specifically to prevent the FIS from legitimately winning a hefty plurality in the early 1990′s. For years until the emergence of and then dominance of what all considered terrorist groups (the GIA & GSPC), with the Intelligence Community and the State Department in the lead, the USG shunned the brutish Algerian Pouvoir (or junta), considering FIS attacks against military columns, installations & patrols as well as the national police as legitimate resistance to tyranny (a position at variance with that of France at the time).
Since then, of course, there have been many more of these agonizing quandaries since 9/11 especially (and most largely unresolved to anything like near universal satisfaction). And so it goes with no reasonably common definition of “terrorism” and vast numbers of civilians inevitably caught in the middle.
Photo: A B-29 over Osaka on 1 June 1945.
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