What About Terrorism?

11/15/2015 Warren Gibson Current Events China, international relations, Michael Shermer, Russia, terrorism

Thoughts on terrorism from “The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom” by Michael Shermer (Holt, 2015).

I may be doing more quoting here than is allowed under “fair use” but here goes. I will paraphrase his seven myths about terrorism.

Terrorists are pure evil. This was what Bush said after 9/11, but studies show they are typically motivated by outrage at U.S. foreign policy.
Terrorists are organized. There is no top-down, central organization directing terrorism.
Terrorists are diabolical geniuses. The shoe bomber and others following 9/11 were incompetent.
Terrorists are poor and uneducated. They are typically higher-income, better-educated individuals.
Terrorism is a deadly problem. Compare 13,700 homicides per year with 3,000 from 9/11 and an average of 70 terrorist deaths per year, or 7.8 per year excluding 9/11.
Terrorists will acquire and use a nuclear weapon or a dirty bomb. A real danger, but nuclear weapons require a lot of scarce material and sophisticated engineering.
Terrorism works. Terrorists usually wait until after their deed is done and then proclaim that whatever outcome happened was in fact their goal.

Please read the book yourself. The section I have paraphrased (pp. 80-86) is a response to objections to his thesis that the over-arching trend of recent decades is toward a safer, more peaceful world.

I’ll add some thoughts of my own:

Groups based on violence and hatred will eventually self-destruct as they splinter into factions and devour one another. But “eventually” leaves time for a lot of damage.
This seems like a great opportunity for Western governments to cooperate with Russia and perhaps China because Islamic terrorism is a threat to all those parties.

Leaders of all the Western nations have expressed outrage, as has Putin. Radio silence thusfar from leaders of Islamic nations which, one presumes, have a lot to gain by distancing themselves from terrorism.

From the Comments: Debunking Myths About Islam and Violence

07/27/2015 Brandon Christensen Current Events, Religion cultural chauvinism, immigration, Irfan Khawaja, Islam, Islamic culture, Islamism, Political Correctness, statistics, terrorism, Terry Amburgey

Jacques, a retired sociologist and university professor, has been repeating himself over and over again for the past fifteen years or so. His gripe? The imminent danger of Islam. Or Islamism. It depends on when you began reading him. Until recently, until the time that Delacroix decided to try and pick on me, Jacques’ venom was directed at Islam. Nowadays, it seems his poisonous arguments are directed at Islamism, the political movement. This is a step in the right direction. And yet, though his target his changed, his argument has not. The argument runs something like this:

Most, or much, of the violence in the world today is associated with Muslim groups of some kind or other.
Therefore, Islam, or Islamism, has an inherently violent penchant that needs to be removed using any method at the West’s disposal (including torture, a separate judicial system for Muslims suspected of being terrorists, and outright war).
In addition, Muslims who are not inherently violent (notice: Islam has an inherently violent penchant, except when it does not) are still responsible for terrorism because they do not snitch to government authorities when their fellow Muslims begin growing beards, and they do not speak out against Muslim extremists.

I have already gone the rounds with Delacroix on this narrative. He has been nothing but obstinately ignorant about his own argument, including the pseudo-facts that they rest upon. Maybe I shouldn’t be taken seriously. I’m just a lowly blog editor, after all, and a self-admitted libertarian to boot. The ‘comments’ of the two guys I’m about to highlight should be taken seriously, though. They are both college professors, and both do not self-identify as libertarians (though I think they are). Here is Dr Khawaja attempting to talk some sense into Jacques:

The first point is predictability versus explanation-in-retrospect, and I think you’re proving my point. I agree with your general account of the traits and biographical trajectory of terrorists. They’re often just as you say they are. The problem is, there are lots of non-violent losers with identical traits and trajectories, and no way to sort out the violent from the non-violent before the fact. The explanatory patterns typically emerge after the fact, which is when people tend to jump from explanation-after-the-fact to predictability-ex-ante. I guess I’m just flatly denying that the trajectory of the non-Islamist crazy is–in Western countries–all that different (ex ante) from the Muslim ones. The only “distinguishing” feature is that the latter are Muslim, and alienated from traditional Islam, and born again into something radical. But an enormous number of people have those traits, and simply waste their lives on being born-again Muslims of that sort without ever doing anything violent. My point is, when people–typically young men–start to move in that direction, it usually causes some concern. But “concern” is not the same as alarm at an imminent or even pending attack, and contrary to your suggestion, there is almost no way to predict those unless you’ve been taken into confidence by the would-be perpetrator. And of course, given what he wants to perpetrate, he’d have to be very incompetent to take a would-be snitch into his confidences.

Proviso: what I’m saying above refers to Muslims in Europe and North America. Things are different elsewhere. In the West Bank, if X’s brother, father, uncle, or cousin has been killed by the IDF, X is likely to commit a terrorist act, and if X becomes very religious, you can infer that he’s a member of Hamas. Similar moves are open to someone living in Pakistan. But those are different contexts than France of the US.

I’m not dogmatic enough to insist that the French cleric you quoted must absolutely be wrong. Maybe he has some way of detecting jihadists. But I really doubt it. The problem with French clerics of that sort is precisely their proximity to the government. They tend to speak with a view to pleasing this or that constituency, and what your cleric says is what the French government and people want to hear.

On immigration, granted that you didn’t literally come out and oppose all immigration by Muslims. But that isn’t quite what I accused you of, either. My point is: here we have a humanitarian crisis involving refugees who want asylum in this country. I’m the first to admit that if we admit a large number, some of this number will be terrorists and will perpetrate attacks on us that wouldn’t otherwise have happened (if we hadn’t let them in). My point is: now that we have this crisis, Americans have suddenly decided that a mass influx of refugees has to be constrained by border controls that would ensure that the mass influx remains a trickle. Imagine facing a potential influx of Syrian refugees and applying your stricture that none of them be Muslim literalists. By the time you operationalized that policy, and hired the border control staff to operate it, the year would be 2023, and the refugee crisis would be over. Or to take your other policy: can you really imagine teaching Syrian (or any other) refugees First Amendment law at their point of entry into the US? It can’t be done. It’s just not the way refugee operations work or can work. Imposing strictures like that on refugees is just a way of ensuring that the US never becomes a sanctuary during refugee crises.

I wouldn’t mind that attitude if only it were accompanied by a little bit of candor about history and politics. The US is committed never to become a large-scale sanctuary for, say, Syrian refugees. But now listen to the way politically conscious Americans talk about refugee crises elsewhere. The Arabs of Mandate Palestine were reluctant to open the borders of Palestine to European Jews? Well, that makes them anti-Semites. Common assertion: “The Palestinians remain in UNRWA camps to this day because the surrounding Arab countries, in their greed, refuse to take them in.” This comes from Americans who would never dream of taking them in. Israel, of course, has a very generous refugee policy (for Jews); that gets praise without any recognition that the refugees then function as demographic chips in the settlement game. West Bank settlements are full of Russian “Jews” who know less about the celebration of shabbos than I do.

Do I think the US has a Muslim problem? What makes the question difficult to answer is not any reluctance on my part to tackle the issue head-on, but an ambiguity in the phrase “a Muslim problem.” In one sense, it means “any significant problem stemming from Muslims.” In another sense, it means “a high priority issue facing the country as a whole and stemming from Muslims.” My view is that it has the first, not the second. There are several million Muslims in the country, and on the whole they don’t constitute a political problem. There are pockets of fanatics among them that do constitute a political (security) problem. France may well be different, but I think things are essentially in good shape in the US, despite this or that conspicuous Muslim atrocity.

To come at your question slightly differently: there is a sense in which Islam has a problem, the problem of reconciling itself to modernity. Given that, wherever you have Muslims who haven’t reconciled themselves to modernity, you’re going to get a problem (or problems). So yes, even if we had an isolationist foreign policy, that problem would remain. But that problem is least pronounced in the US, where Muslims basically run the same gamut as Reform to Conservative to Orthodox Jews. Literalist Muslims are no more (or less) a national problem than Orthodox Jews. I don’t mean to deny that they’re both a problem. But I wouldn’t say we have an Orthodox Jew Problem any more than I’d say we have a Muslim or Literalist Muslim Problem. Some places might, but we don’t.

Sorry, I said something confusing: “I don’t mean to deny that they’re both a problem.” I meant to say, “I don’t mean to deny that they’re both problematic,” i.e., give rise to problems. What I’m denying is that the problems are the equivalent of a high-level security threat.

Dr Khawaja blogs over at Policy of Truth and teaches philosophy at Felician College. Dr Amburgey tries to talk some sense into Jacques using a different angle:

“I said “probability.” It’s the concept we use, consciously or not, to approximate rational decisions in our daily lives: Select this birth clinic, rely on this baby food, travel by car, get vaccinated or not, go for this class rather than another. etc.”

I agree with Jacques. I’ll go further, I agree wholeheartedly with Jacques. I don’t subscribe to silly notions of human rationality like some of my colleagues but doing the best we can to make rational decisions is desirable both individually and in matters of public policy. As a consequence it’s useful to consider probabilities in our consideration of Jacques proposals.

Firstly, how does terrorism stack up against other risks in a probabilistic sense?

“Indeed – as we’ve previously documented – you’re more likely to die from brain-eating parasites, alcoholism, obesity, medical errors, risky sexual behavior or just about anything other than terrorism.”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/non-muslims-carried-out-more-than-90-of-all-terrorist-attacks-in-america/5333619

Even if we set aside the consequences of our choices [lifestyle or otherwise] terrorism is dwarfed by other things that kill us. Is it rational to spend more on the military than every other form of discretionary spending combined?
https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

Secondly, given that terrorism is a risk how do different forms stack up compared to one another.
According to Jacques…

“We have terrorists of all inspirations in America, I know. The white murderer of black church people in Charleston was a terrorist, pure and simple. He was home bred and home grown. However, we have many, many more terrorists of foreign extraction, almost all with ties to Islam.”

This is, to put it politely, a counterfactual statement. The various public datasets have different observation windows and methodologies. Right now I’m going to use the 1980-2005 FBI data simply because there is a handy pie chart that I can copy from. In decreasing order…

Latino-42%, Extreme left-wing groups-24%, Others-16%, Jewish extremists-7%, Islamic extremists-6%, Communists-5%

The USA certainly has problems. Does it have a ‘muslim problem’? I’d say the numbers speak for themselves.

Dr Amburgey teaches in the business school of the University of Toronto. He doesn’t blog.

Jacques has still not addressed my questions regarding the implications of his policy proposals, by the way, namely that they echo those implemented by the Third Reich. Political Correctness is a corrupting influence on the free and open society (I suspect, in my infinite kindness and generosity, that Political Correctness is Jacques’ real target when he writes about Islam), but so is cultural chauvinism. Two wrongs don’t make a right!

Liberty or “Security”: An Old Debate, A Familiar Straw Man

07/24/2015 Brandon Christensen Politics bad faith, free speech, Iran, Irfan Khawaja, Jacques Delacroix, Ludwig von Mises, Middle East, Plato, terrorism, Terry Amburgey

Ho hum. Jacques wants his government to do three things in the name of fighting Muslim terrorism (not to be confused with other, more numerous kinds of terrorism): 1) allow for an armed, perpetually-on-alert military to be active on US soil, 2) allow for a surveillance state that can do as it pleases in regards to Muslims only, and 3) initiate ideological quotas for Muslim immigrants.

The entire ‘comments’ thread is well worth reading, too. Dr Amburgey, who came from the same doctoral program as Jacques, brings the quantitative fire; Dr Khawaja, the qualitative. Jacques has responded to each of them.

The absurdity of Delacroix’ argument speaks for itself. I will come back to it shortly, but first I want to address a couple of his points that are simply made in bad faith. Observe:

(Yes, Mohammed did behead every man of a vanquished enemy tribe on the battlefield. Incidentally, they were Jews. The Prophet then “married ” their wives, he raped them, in others words. Bad example? Talk about this genuine part of Muslim tradition?)

Murdering and raping Jews is a “Muslim tradition”? I am sure this is news to Uighurs in China and the Javanese of Indonesia. I think there is a good case to be made for a present-day Arab cultural chauvinism that rests in part on what could be called “Muslim tradition,” but this is not a nuance that Jacques – the retired college professor – cares to address. I wonder why. If we’re going to go back to the 7th century to find cultural defects, can anybody think of something nasty that was going on in what is now France at the time? In what is now the US? What an odd historical anecdote to include in an argument.

Here, too, is another whopper:

One article of faith among literalist Muslims is that government must come from God. That’s why the Supreme Leader of the Shiite Islamic Republic is explicitly a cleric, couldn’t be an elected civilian or a general. This belief also explains the search for a Caliphate among Sunni jihadists, a polity where administrative and religious powers are one and the same.

What is a “literalist Muslim”? Nevermind. The government of Iran, its structure, is based on Plato’s Republic, not the Qur’an. The “Supreme Leader” Jacques identifies is based on the notion of a philosopher-king, not a Shiite cleric. This was done to protect the new dictatorship from its many enemies, including those loyal to the old dictatorship (the one supported by the United States; the one that Washington installed after helping to remove a democratically-elected Leftist government during the Cold War). The rhetoric of the Iranian dictatorship is explicitly religious, but in reality it’s just plain, old-fashioned despotism.

In a similar vein, “Sunni jihadists” (to use Jacques’ term) do not search for a Caliphate because of a belief that government should come from God, but instead look to a mythical Caliphate that they believe existed from the 7th to early 20th centuries as inspiration for creating a society that cannot be pushed around by murderous Western governments. Pretending that Arab Sunnis want to create a Caliphate in order to strengthen the link between government and God can only be described as “dishonest” when it comes from the mouth of a sociologist with a doctorate from Stanford.

At best, it could be argued that Jacques is simply making these types of points because they are pervasive throughout American society, and thus we – as libertarians of all stripes – have our work cut out for us. Now that I think about it, Jacques’ argument is so silly that it has to be an exercise in critical thinking. Nobody of his stature could say something so stupid, right?

Those are just two examples of, uh, the misrepresentation of reality by Jacques. There are many more, and I don’t think he got those myths from an academic journal. He got them from Fox News. That’s not good. That means libertarians are not taking advantage of their right to free speech, like conservatives and Leftists do. Why aren’t you blogging more often?

I’d like to turn back to his policy proposals. Here they are again:

an armed, perpetually-on-alert military on US soil,
a surveillance state that can do as it pleases in regards to Muslims only, and
ideological quotas for Muslim immigrants.

The first two proposals look like they were copied directly from the playbook of the Third Reich (I hope you’ll reprimand me in the ‘comments’ section if you think I am being overly dramatic, or strawmanning Jacques’ argument). Just replace “US” with “Germany” and “Muslims” with “Jews” and voila, you have an answer for your Muslim (“Jewish”) problem. (RE Policy #3: National socialists, of course, don’t like anybody immigrating to their territories, whereas Jacques, in his infinite kindness and wisdom, seeks only to allow those who think like him into his territory.)

Again, Jacques’ argument is silly. It is both vulgar and unintelligent. It is misinformed. And yet I have to ask: Who is winning the PR battle here, conservatives on the one side or left-liberals and libertarians on the other?

Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping toward destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interest of everyone hangs on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us.

That’s from Ludwig von Mises, the libertarian Austrian (and Jewish) economist who had to flee his homeland as the Third Reich took power. Speak your mind!

America’s Muslim Problem: What To Do.

07/22/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics civil liberty, Islam, Islamism, terrorism

There are many people in the US who possess normal common sense and who also have a liberal disposition, “liberal” in the old meaning of the word. I mean before the word came to designate a propensity to force others to do what they don’t want to do, accompanied by intellectual hypocrisy. The word used to mean something like: “well disposed toward others;” it used to refer to habits of tolerance, adding up to giving the other guy the benefit of doubt. I think I am one of those. I am lucid; I see what I see and I don’t pretend I don’t see it; I have no trouble finding something to like in others who are unlike myself. Nevertheless, I draw the line at institutionalized brutality (such as the genital mutilation of little girls) and at intentional cannibalism. The latter means that if you eat your dead to survive (as a Uruguayan rugby team plane-wrecked in the high Andes famously did about thirty years ago); it’s acceptable but if you go a-hunting humans explicitly for the table, I think it’s not cool.

Well, people like me have been struggling to hold their tongues since 9/11 in order to avoid stating the obvious about terrorism , and in order to not be forced to draw the policy consequences of what their eyes behold. We are caught between the rock and the proverbial hard place, largely, I speculate because we wish to avoid bad intellectual company. On the one side, we have paralyzing and contagious political correctness, on the other hand, there is the embarrassing torrent of abuse issuing from political allies who are both uninformed and ill-disposed, so ill-disposed that they are unable to see the obvious contributions of Islamic culture. I mean by this that you don’t have to be a Christian, or to love the Inquisition, or to believe that Christ resurrected to recognize that if Christianity had contributed nothing but Gothic cathedrals, that would still be a lot. Similarly, you don’t have to like Islam the religion to appreciate Arabic calligraphy and the Blue Mosque of Istanbul. Anyway, the pseudo-secret we have been unwilling to admit openly is this: We have a Muslim problem in this country.

We have terrorists of all inspirations in America, I know. The white murderer of black church people in Charleston was a terrorist, pure and simple. He was home bred and home grown. However, we have many, many more terrorists of foreign extraction, almost all with ties to Islam.

The man who murdered four Marines in cold blood in Chattanooga and wounded several several others was an immigrant. Somali refugees and their children have often been implicated in attempted terrorist acts in this country. The convicted and jailed underwear bomber is a Nigerian. We may not be able to do much about US-born terrorists such as Major Hassan (in prison) and preacher Al-Awlaki (pulverized by a drone in Yemen), but we can stem the flow of those with the greatest probability of slaughtering us at home. I said “probability.” It’s the concept we use, consciously or not, to approximate rational decisions in our daily lives: Select this birth clinic, rely on this baby food, travel by car, get vaccinated or not, go for this class rather than another. etc.

There is a young Muslim woman I know well and whom I love like a favorite niece. “Uncle,” she says,” Islamist terrorists are not more my problem than yours.” I disagree because I don’t believe that venomous seeds grow into poisonous plants on their own. They need water and they need good soil. No water, no plant; bad soil, no plant. The water for Islamist terrorism is provided by hundreds or thousands of preachers who preach irresponsibly, good Muslims all who don’t believe they have to be bothered about the effect of their equivocal words once they have left their mouth. (Yes, Mohammed did behead every man of a vanquished enemy tribe on the battlefield. Incidentally, they were Jews. The Prophet then “married ” their wives, he raped them, in others words. Bad example? Talk about this genuine part of Muslim tradition?)

The soil of Islamist terrorism is the passivity of otherwise blameless Muslim communities who cannot help but see fanatics grow before their eyes and decide to keep mum and to do nothing. Here is a simple example of what I mean. The killer of four Marines wore a beard, not any kind of beard, not a Hollywood-inspired beard, not a chic beard, not an old man’s beard like mine. His untrimmed, wide beard is worn only by imitators of the Prophet Mohammed. Few Muslims even wear such a beard. Muslims of all stripes know and recognize this. It take a few weeks to grow such a beard. If your son or your neighbor shows up with one, it should give you pause, if you are a Muslim. You should make a mental note that that young man bears watching. Why would anyone want to imitate the seventh century prophet in the 21st century. Who is wearing robes like Jesus? I am guessing (Guessing) that members of the particular terrorist’s community may have whispered some but just let the matter drop.

Some nation-wide reforms are obviously necessary toward domestic Islamist terrorism. Here are three.

Donald Trump is mostly a rich buffoon but once in a while, he forcefully states the obvious. As he proclaimed, it’s wrong that the people charged with our defense are not themselves allowed to be armed for their own defense. This silly policy should be reversed and all qualified military personnel (and I don’t see why a single one would be unqualified) should be allowed and encouraged to carry a personal weapon. If rural sheriffs’ deputies with three weeks training can carry a weapon, I expect members of our military to be qualified to do the same, strictly for self-defense and as a deterrent, of course. This change from current policy could be tried for a given period and its effects studied. If it were found out that members of the military fall into the habit of gunning one another, or civilians down then, the policy of a defenseless military could always be re-instated. Our society is taking worse risks every day. That was my first point.

Second, romantic libertarians (including many of my friends) have to come to terms with the need for widespread domestic electronic surveillance aimed at preventing domestic terrorism. As is usually the case, the assassin of the Marines in Chattanooga had given signals. He had spent months in Jordan and then made ominous noises on the social media. Of course, most of those who talk big on Twitter never take the next step to real mass killing. The minority who do should be discovered by monitoring the lot in a cheap, economical way because there are so many. To oppose this kind of step is like declaring that the protection of our civil liberties is worth a few massacres each year – which could easily turn into many massacres. Yes, there is a slippery slope there. And yes, such surveillance creates a precedent that might lead to the intimidation of legitimate dissent. Two responses. First, a climate of widespread insecurity also undermines our personal liberties. Witness the creation – with hardly a murmur against – of that very intrusive and yet grossly ineffective Homeland Security apparatus in the aftermath of 9/11. Second, attacks on civil liberties take many forms and are not dependent on the particular bugaboo of electronic surveillance. Witness the still unpunished persecution of conservative political organizations by the Internal Revenue Service.

Civil libertarians, including libertarians would do better and they would be more effective in the long run if they insisted on two things: real effective, strict judicial oversight of surveillance; more restrictive aiming than has prevailed in that area. This would require frank profiling. (More on profiling below.)

The third measure needed is to slow down the growth of Muslim immigration into this country. Islamist terrorists come exclusively or almost exclusively from Muslim communities. The larger the Muslim communities, roughly, the greater the number of potential Islamist terrorists on American soil. This is true both directly and demographically. Some Muslim immigrants become terrorists, others raise American children who become terrorists. Muslim communities everywhere turn a blind eye to the the transformation among some of their members in a radical direction that is the prelude to embracing terrorism. Now, we want to do this in a way that avoids stigmatizing a billion people worldwide, many of whom have a view of Islam that makes no room for social aggression, many of whom are lukewarm faithful, an unknown number of whom are frankly indifferent, no more Muslim that I am. I repeat, in passing, that Muslims globally supply most of the victims of Islamist terrorism but this is not my topic here, I am writing about improving Americans’ safety.

Yes, I know, nearly everyone knows by now that not all Muslims are terrorists (exceedingly few are) and not all terrorists are Muslims. Let’s put this behind us for good. My point is that for practical purposes almost all domestic terrorists are Muslims.

We have to develop a selective tool for keeping out of the country the narrower category of Muslims most likely to become terrorists. I am speaking here of profiling before the fact. Although “profiling” has a bad name, rational action requires it. Here is an example. Looking for car thieves in a particular area, the local police will ignore older church-going black ladies while focusing on white males in their twenties who dress in dirty t-shirts. Profiling! It turn out that one way to interpret Islam insists on its literal relevance in today’s society. The highest Muslim theological authorities including the Grand Mufti of Cairo and religious authorities from Al Azar University periodically remind the faithful that Muslim tradition must be interpreted in the context of our times. This modernizing perspective is equally rejected by ISIS, which practices slavery because it’s explicitly allowed in the Koran itself, and by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which pointedly keeps the stoning of adulterous women on its books for the same reason. (In addition, many Muslims are like their Christian counterparts: They don’t know much about their own religion and what they know is disorganized and often incoherent, what I call “religious bric-à-brac” in an article in Liberty Unbound with a title that includes this word. “Religious bric-a-brac and the Tolerance of Violent Jihad,”).

It turns out that Islamists are also all literalists, strict constructionists, when they are not simply hoodlums. If you prevent literalist Muslims from entering the country , you have gone a long way toward reducing the number of potential terrorists in the US. One article of faith among literalist Muslims is that government must come from God. That’s why the Supreme Leader of the Shiite Islamic Republic is explicitly a cleric, couldn’t be an elected civilian or a general. This belief also explains the search for a Caliphate among Sunni jihadists, a polity where administrative and religious powers are one and the same. But, of course, separation between Church and State, between religion and government is central to our constitutional arrangements. And, there is no compelling reason to accept immigrants, or even visitors, who think of a central tenet of our constitution as anathema. We have every moral right to sift them out. This can be done at low cost and with a fair degree of effectiveness.

Few countries accept everyone without condition; the US does not, never has. It would be a simple matter to make all immigrants, all refugees seeking asylum and, I think all visitors sign a document asserting that they support all features of the US Constitution, including specifically everything that has to do with the relationship between religion and government. These comprise the non-establishment of religion (including Christianity they may be reminded) and an absolute right to blasphemy. As I said, all entrants would be asked to sign a statement to this effect, and they would be told that the list of signatories could be published at any time, anywhere and in any language. Latin Americans would sign because their constitutions are copied largely from ours; Europeans would sign because thy are almost all religiously indifferent or lukewarm; the largest immigrant group, the Chinese wouldn’t care. The only group from which you would expect a significant reluctance to sign would be Muslims, not all Muslims, but Muslims with literalist, fundamentalist tendencies that is, precisely the category most worth excluding. Some would simply cheat, of course, and pretend to agree to what is to them anathema but the possibility of seeing their name publicized would act as a partial deterrent. In addition, such perjury would provide easy ground to prosecute those signing under false pretenses.

Some would protest that such exclusion would be “unfair.” I think that the issue of unfairness dos not arise. This immigrant believes that no one has a right to enter the US.

Arm our defenders; ferret out the wild beasts before they can bite; don’t allow the alligator swamp to become larger. It’s all obvious; it’s all doable. It’s much more than we are doing now.

Kling and Henderson on intervention and blowback

06/23/201506/23/2015 Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events Arnold Kling, blowback, David Henderson, international relations, libertarianism, separatism, terrorism

David Henderson, an economist at the Naval Postgraduate School’s GSBPP and also the Hoover Institution, alerted me to a remark made by another economist, Arnold Kling, about libertarian foreign policy. Both posts are worth reading, of course, but in the ‘comments’ thread of Henderson’s post, Dr Kling elicited a terse response from Dr Henderson for arguing the following:

David, the U.S. has intervened in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. We have not experienced terrorism except from the Middle East, and there the role of blowback is not clear–there are plenty of other causes, and Middle Eastern terrorists seem perfectly happy to operate in countries that have not invaded Iraq.

I think you have proved my point. Your preferred policy is non-intervention, and so blowback is your desired cause for terrorism. But you only look for evidence that confirms this. Go through the thought experiment of believing that terrorism is not caused by blowback, and then look for evidence from that perspective. That is what I ask for when someone has a “desired cause.”

You can read Dr Henderson’s response here, but I thought I’d go in a different direction with this. First, though, I’d like to thank Dr Kling for broaching this subject. Few libertarians do so (our own Drs Delacroix and van de Haar being two stubborn exceptions).

What I’d like to do is take Dr Kling’s second paragraph to heart and try to pin down some relevant facts I think are missing from his first paragraph, which I’ll break down, for the sake of dialogue, piece-by-piece.

the U.S. has intervened in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Kling left off Africa from his list of places the US government has intervened in. This is a huge omission because there has been plenty of terrorist attacks (successful or otherwise) aimed at US targets on the African continent, from Nigeria in the west to Kenya all the way in the east (a span, via each state’s respective most populous city, of 5,328 km; Los Angeles to New York City is about 4,500 km).

We have not experienced terrorism except from the Middle East, and there the role of blowback is not clear

Again, the US has been the target of terrorism in places other than the Middle East. Aside from Africa (the 1998 embassy bombings being perhaps the prominent examples, though there are more), the US has been the target of terrorism in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. I think much of Dr Kling’s confusion regarding blowback in due to his poor geographic knowledge. The Middle East (or Near East), for example, is also a part of Asia. Pakistan and Afghanistan, where many terrorist attacks against US targets have been undertaken, are not considered to be a part of the Middle East by specialists. Below is a partial list of terrorist attacks against US targets in the past:

In 1927, the US embassy (along with other foreign embassies) in Nanking, China came under sustained gunfire from both state and non-state actors, and at least one American died (“the Nanking Incident”);
In the 1920s and 1930s, many American institutions – public and private (or ostensibly private) – were bombed by left-anarchists upset over the unjust executions of two prominent Italian anarchists in Boston (“Sacco and Vanzetti”);
In 1964 the US embassy in Gabon was bombed twice in the same month;
In 1965 a car bomb exploded outside of the US embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, and Leftist factions claimed responsibility;
In 1984 a car bomb exploded outside of the US embassy in Bogota, Colombia, but no faction came forward to claim responsibility (it is largely attributed to one of the drug cartels in operation there);
In 1985 a Left-wing terrorist organization attacked the Soviet, Chinese, and American embassies in Peru;
In the mid-1980s a Leftist terrorist organization attacked US embassies in Indonesia and Italy.

Again, this is just a partial list. In the spirit of Kling’s argument, what I suggest we do here is divide up terrorist bombings into two segments: 1) the period of 1945-1991 (the Cold War), and 2) everything else. I think this is a fair move because during the Cold War the line between state and non-state actors became especially blurred.

Even if we decide to ignore my suggestion of dividing terrorist attacks into two segments, one picture that becomes much clearer is that all of the attacks are political, and terrorism against US targets does not come solely from the Middle East (or even states with large Muslim populations). I hope these two issues are conclusions that we can all agree upon. If this does not nudge the evidence in favor of the intervention-causes-blowback thesis, I don’t know what does. I think Kling’s next line of reasoning will help us elaborate on this a bit more:

there are plenty of other causes [of terrorism], and Middle Eastern terrorists seem perfectly happy to operate in countries that have not invaded Iraq.

I think this statement actually breaks the back of the hawks’ argument. First, though, when did we move from a discussion about intervention causing terrorism to a discussion about invading and occupying Iraq causing terrorism? Is Kling guilty of the bait-and-switch fallacy here? I am forced to conclude that he is, although in fairness his point was raised in a ‘comments’ thread rather than in a post of its own.

His bait-and-switch aside, Kling’s point about “plenty of other causes” of terrorism is one worth thinking through a bit more. There are four lines of thought that I’d like to explore here: 1) Now would be a good time to draw up a distinction between intervention and occupation. Up until now, we have been discussing foreign policy colloquially and ostensibly in terms of intervention, but the difference between the two concepts I just highlighted is huge and needs a bit of clarification. Some of the fuzziness surrounding the two concepts has to do with Kling’s charge of normative libertarian foreign policy. Dr Henderson, for example, cites the scholarly work of Robert Pape and Ivan Eland (as well as the observations of Paul Wolfowitz) to bolster his claim that intervention leads to blowback, but those guys are referring to the explicit occupation of territory, not intervention. This does not mean Dr Henderson or libertarians more broadly are wrong, of course, but only that dialogue on this topic suffers from a lack of detail. The Cold War-era bombings I listed above can be attributed to intervention. The terrorist attacks pre- and post-Cold War can be attributed to intervention as well, but also to occupation. Does this make sense?

2) While Kling is lazy in his assertion about “Middle Eastern terrorists” being “perfectly happy” with attacking states that did not invade Iraq, he has a really good point, albeit one made unintentionally: terrorism is an international phenomenon, and not something that can be attributed to a specific region (or religion). If we take a step back and look at terrorism more broadly (i.e. not just in a US context, which I think highlights well the consequences of intervention and occupation), what do we see? I don’t know about you, but I see terrorism in Russia, China, India, Pakistan, the US, Europe, all of Africa, Latin America, and, just for good measure, the rest of Asia, too. This leads me to train of thought Number 3: terrorism is political, as even death cults like Aum Shinrikyo in Japan or lone wolves like the Unabomber or the white nationalist shooter in Charleston are overtly political. I know I’ve harped on this already, but Dr Kling’s point helps make this much easier to understand.

Much of the terrorism, if not all of it (I hope readers will provide counter-examples), not directed at the US and its allies (which do intervene and do occupy) is done in the name of separatist movements within a state. While states claim sovereignty over their territories, and use IGOs such as the United Nations to bolster these claims, the separatist movements believe themselves to be occupied by a foreign power. Pape makes this crystal clear in his work on the (nominally Buddhist but militantly Left-wing) Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.

If terrorism is political, but it is not aimed at foreign intervention or occupation/separatism, what would terrorists hope to accomplish by murdering people? Given the calculated political nature of terrorism highlighted above, I fail to see how terrorism could be carried out randomly, except in works of fiction like Batman comics or old James Bond movies. The fictional nature of random acts of terrorism leads me in to my fourth and last train of thought, namely that I think Kling is introducing a red herring when he states that “there are plenty of other causes” of terrorism. This is simply not true. Since Dr Kling didn’t provide any examples, and since I don’t want to attempt to read his mind, I can only hope he reads this post and provides me with some examples that I can proceed to debunk.

While I think Dr Kling raises an excellent topic that needs to be discussed way more often, he, like Dr Delacroix, simply does not have his facts straight when it comes to foreign affairs. Ideology and dialogue are important components of the free and open society, but without a good grasp of the relevant facts of a matter those tools for improving our livelihoods become worthless, at best.

A Short Note on Islam and Violence: Russian Edition

02/16/2015 Brandon Christensen Culture, Religion Arab culture, Christianity, ideology, Islam, Islamism, Russia, Sunni Islam, terrorism

Many notable, and many more unnotable, commentators will swear by Islam’s “violent penchant.” They don’t care for nuance. They don’t care for facts. Instead, they adhere to the old principle of repeating something often enough until it becomes true.

I think there is an issue with Sunni Arabs and cultural chauvinism (the Qur’an is supposed to be memorized in the Arabic language only, for example) masquerading as religion. I think religion itself is mentally and emotionally abusive. Yet I am confident in stating matter-of-factly that there is no penchant for violence in Islam. Each instance of violence perpetrated by an Islamist can be explained by his or her political, or better yet institutional, situation. Islamism is, after all, a relatively new political paradigm that has arisen only with the advent of the nation-state in the Middle East.

Incidentally, these same detractors – the ones who repeat themselves over and over again – are also hawks when it comes to Russia. If I am not mistaken, Russia is a Christian nation (with a few exceptions along its peripheries) and unofficially a Christian state (did anyone catch the Patriarch’s recent speech to the Duma?). The Russian state is violent and aggressive. Russian society is violent and parochial. Moscow routinely violates individual rights. Because the vast majority of Russian citizens support the aggressiveness of both the Russian state and the Russian communities in post-Soviet space, this means that all Christians are violent and aggressive, right?

Guantanamo: A Conservative Moral Blind Spot

02/05/201505/11/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Politics Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, civil liberty, civil rights, CNN, ethics, globalization, Guantanamo Bay prison, legal theory, Mohamedou Slahi, terrorism, war and peace, War on Terror

A current Guantanamo detainee, Mohamedou Slahi, just published a book about his ordeal. The book is redacted of course but it still tells an arresting story.

M. Slahi was captured in 2000. He has been held in detention, mostly at Guantanamo prison since 2002 but in other places too . The motive was that he supposedly helped recruit three of the 9/11 hijackers and that he was involved in other terror plots in the US and Canada (unidentified plots.).

According to CNN:

Slahi admits to traveling to Afghanistan to fight in the early 1990s, when the US. was supporting the mujahedin in their fight against the Soviet Union. He pledged allegiance to al Qaeda in 1991 but claims he broke ties with the group shortly after.

He was in fact never convicted. He was not even formally charged with anything. Slahi has spent 13 years in custody, most of his young adulthood. If he is indeed a terrorist, I say, Bravo and let’s keep him there until the current conflict between violent jihadists and the US comes to an end. Terror jihadists can’t plant bombs in hotels while they are in Guantanamo. And, by the way, I am not squeamish about what those who protect us must do to people we suspect of having information important to our safety. I sometimes even deplore that we do to them is not imaginative enough. And, I think that the recent allegations to the effect that torture produces nothing of interest are absurd on their face.

But what if the guy is an innocent shepherd, or fisherman, or traveling salesman found in the wrong place? What if he is a victim of a vendetta by the corrupt police of his own country who delivered him over? What if he was simply sold to our intelligence services? What if, in short, he is has no more been involved in terrorism than I have? The question arises in Slahi’s case because the authorities had thirteen years to produce enough information, from him and from others, to charge him. They can’t even give good reasons why they think he is a terrorist in some way, shape or form. It shouldn’t be that hard. If he so much as lend his cellphone to a terrorist I am for giving him the longest sentence available. or simply to keep him until the end of hostilities (perhaps one century).

And if having fought in Afghanistan and having pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda at some point are his crimes, charge him, try him promptly even by a military commission, or declare formally, publicly that he is a prisoner not protected by the Geneva Conventions, because he was caught engaged in hostile action against the US while out of uniform and fighting for no constituted government. How difficult can this be?

I am concerned, because, as a libertarian conservative, I am quite certain that any government bureaucracy will usually cover its ass in preference to doing the morally right thing. (The American Revolution was largely fought against precisely this kind of abuse.) Is it possible that the Pentagon or some other government agency wants to keep this man imprisoned in order to hide their mistakes of thirteen years ago? I believe that to ask the question is to answer it.

This kind of issue is becoming more pressing instead of vanishing little by little because it looks like 9/11 what just the opening course. It looks like we are in this struggle against violent jihadism for the long run. Again, I am not proposing we go soft on terrorism. I worry that we are becoming used to government arbitrariness and mindless cruelty. I suspect that conservatives are often conflating their dislike of the president’s soft touch and indecision about terrorism with neglect of fairness and humanity. I fear we are becoming less American.

Let me ask again: What if this man, and some others in Guantanamo, have done absolutely nothing against us?

Of course, I hope the US will keep Guantanamo prison open as long as necessary. In fact, I expect fresh planeloads of real terrorist from Syria and Iraq to come in soon. I really hope that Congress will have the intestinal fortitude to call President Obama’s bluff on closing the prison. Congress has the means to stop it if it wants to.

La cultura y las identidades musulmanas ante los ataques terroristas en París

01/09/201505/13/2015 Guillermo Pineda Culture cultura, decentralization, estudios globales, globalizacion, immigration, Islamic culture, Paris, terrorism

Después de los ataques terroristas del 11 de septiembre de 2001 en Nueva York, los sentimientos de ‘shock, ira [y] miedo’ (Flint, 2002: 77) se generalizaron junto con el reconocimiento del impacto global y local de los eventos (Smith, 2001). Desde entonces, tal y como Fred Halliday (2002: 31) observó,

“La crisis desatada por los acontecimientos del 11 de septiembre es global e involucra a todos. Es global en el sentido de que une diferentes países en conflicto, más obviamente los EE.UU. y partes del mundo musulmán. Como en ninguna otra ocasión en, esta crisis internacional afectó a una multiplicidad de niveles de la vida, política, económica, cultural y psicológica.” (Halliday, 2002: 31)

Más recientemente también, los atentados en la ciudad de París hace algunos días; y el recuerdo de Bali el 12 de octubre de 2002, el tren de Madrid en los atentados del 11 de marzo de 2004 y los atentados en el metro de Londres en julio 7º 2005 han contribuido a estos discursos de peligro, el miedo y el riesgo (Bauman, 2006; Beck, 1992, 1999). Además, estos eventos también comparten una asociación con terroristas y atentados suicidas que están casi siempre identificados como de fuente islámica.

En los últimos años, los signos y significantes de identidades musulmanas tienen cada vez más el estigma de significar “el otro”; lo que causa que muchos musulmanes se conviertan en “las víctimas de discriminación, acoso racial; perfiles religiosos; asaltos verbales y físicos “(Peek, 2003: 271). La cultura de estos individuos es demonizada y su corporeidad y expresiones físico-vestimenta-corporales de identidad estigmatizadas a pesar de que el Islam no es en absoluto una categoría homogénea. Tal y como Halliday, (1999: 897) señala, el “Islam” nos dice sólo una parte de cómo estas personas viven y ven el mundo; y “El Islam puede variar mucho ”. Tariq Modood (2003: 100), por ejemplo, ha buscado aclarar la diversidad y heterogeneidad de la categoría de “musulmán”. Según explica Modood,

”Los musulmanes no son un grupo homogéneo. Algunos musulmanes son devotos pero apolíticos; algunos son políticos pero no ven su política como “islámica” (de hecho, incluso puede ser anti-islámica).”

Algunos se identifican más con una nacionalidad de origen, como la turca; otros con la nacionalidad de los asentamientos y tal vez la ciudadanía, como el francés. Algunos priorizan la recaudación de fondos para las mezquitas, otros las campañas contra la discriminación, el desempleo o el Sionismo. Para algunos, el ayatolá Jomeini es un héroe y Osama bin Laden una inspiración; para otros, lo mismo puede decirse de Kemal Ataturk o Margaret Thatcher, quien creó una franja de millonarios asiáticos en Gran Bretaña, reunió en la capital árabe y fue uno de los primeros en llamar a la acción de la OTAN para proteger a los musulmanes en Kosovo.

La categoría de “musulmán” es, entonces, igual de diversa internamente como lo es el “cristiano” o “belga” o “clase media”, o cualquier otra categoría útil para ordenar nuestra comprensión del mundo… (Modood, 2003: 100)

Frente a los eventos terroristas ocurridos esta semana en Francia es necesario y urgente que REFLEXIONEMOS sobre las las diversidades de las identidades musulmanas, su especificidad geográfica y la variación, y las formas en los que se resistieron, impugnados y manipulados en los estigmas de identidades culturales “musulmanas” a través del tiempo y el espacio.

Es urgente que “… si queremos entender la forma en que las identidades sociales y culturales se forman, reproducen y delimitan por unos y otros entendamos la compleja historia global que las constituyó”(Smith, 1999: 139). Unido con la importancia del lugar y la importancia de la localidad son otros diferenciadores de la diferencia social que es importante recalcar en este momento: “aparte de las disputas por los significados, la política de los espacios religiosos también está atada con el género, la raza y la clase política, y la política entre las naciones ‘(Kong, 2001: 217).

Pero esto no es todo. Junto (y a pesar de) la influencia del lugar y de la localidad en las identidades musulmanas, hay también otras y múltiples identidades que influyen en las personas, las trayectorias del curso de vida y las experiencias del día a día. Así, entender los eventos terroristas en París de manera aislada es un error que ningún académico debería cometer. Mucho menos, intentar aislar estos eventos de la interacción, producción y reproducción de las identidades y geografías musulmanes y sus increíbles similitudes y contestaciones con las identidades cristianas, occidentales, locales, nacionales, ateas, entre otros que existen y coexisten en este mundo globalizado.

Lo ocurrido en París no es culpa de ninguna cultura y mucho menos de un “choque cultural” (una contradicción de términos). Lo ocurrido en París es un terrible atentado terrorista producto de la falta de entendimiento cultural, histórico y político de un grupo de personas que decidió tomar en sus manos la venganza por causas irracionales, místicas y filosóficas que no comprendieron a cabalidad. El uso de la fuerza por los jóvenes terroristas es un ejemplo más de los peligrosos alcances que tiene la búsqueda irracional de la individualidad y superiodad de “mi” cultura y creencias en contraposición con la “otra” cultura y creencias que el sujeto no comparte. Este acto terrorista es un terrible recordatorio más del poder que nuestra mente tiene para crear una conciencia colectiva racional, consistente con la vida y con la solidaridad inter/intra-cultural que urge en nuestro siglo XXI. Como académicos tenemos la obligación moral de fomentar estas ideas. ¿Seremos capaces de hacerlo?

Referencias:

· Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid Fear, Polity, Cambridge.

· Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, Londres.

· Flint, C. (2002) Initial thoughts towards political geographies in the wake of September 11th 2001: an introduction, Arab World Geographer, 4 (2), 77-80.

· Halliday, F. (1999) ‘Islamophobia’ reconsidered, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22 (5), 892-902.

· Halliday, F. (2002) Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001: Causes and Consequences, Londres: Saqi Books.

· Kong, L. (2001) Mapping ‘new’ geographies of religion: politics and poetics in modernity, Progress in Human Geography, 25 (2), 211-233.

· Modood, T. (2003) Muslims and the politics of difference, Political Quarterly, 71 (1), 100-115.

· Peek, LA. (2003) Reactions and Response: Muslim Students’ Experiences on New York City Campuses Post 9/11, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 23 (3), 271-283.

· Smith, SJ. (1999) The cultural politics of difference, en D. Massey, J. Allen y P. Sarre, (editores) Human Geography Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 129-150.

We Can’t Bomb Our Way to Sanity

10/29/201410/29/2014 Mike Reid Current Events, Politics Canada, Ludwig von Mises, Martin Couture-Rouleau, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, terrorism

With Canada still reeling from last week’s unprecedented terror attacks, can we make ourselves safe from the threat of “radicalized” Muslims?

It is now pretty clear that both of Canada’s two terrorist attackers last week were mentally disturbed men. Their acts of violence were not caused by a religion the police can censor or a terrorist organization the military can bomb.

These two men weren’t “radicalized.” They were losing their minds.

Wednesday’s Parliament Hill attacker, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, was a drug addict who once robbed a McDonald’s in the hope that he could “get to jail to atone for his sins and get clean from a crack addiction.”

In other words, this man suffered mental torment. He decided that by attacking others, he could force them into a response that would cleanse his guilt and silence his troubled mind. When getting locked in a cage didn’t do the trick, Zehaf-Bibeau decided to up the ante and get himself killed.

Monday’s hit-and-run attacker, Martin Couture-Rouleau, apparently underwent a radical personality change two years ago. He lost his car wash business and became alienated from his friends, his father, and his wife. Only later did he convert to Islam, start talking to his horrified friends and family about the redemptive power of suicide terrorism, and then run over two soldiers with his car.

At the time of his car attack, his wife was seeking sole custody of their child because of the changes in her husband’s behavior.

This was not a functional Muslim man who decided to take up arms because he saw some beheading video on YouTube. He was a superficial convert dealing with, at the very least, some serious emotional changes and relationship problems.

The kind of personality transformation Couture-Rouleau apparently underwent seems to be consistent with the onset of schizophrenia, which usually happens in a man’s early 20s. Couture-Rouleau would have been 23 when the changes started.

These men were not good Muslims on the accepted path of proper conduct in their faith communities. Couture-Rouleau’s imam had been meeting with him in an attempt to talk him out of his interest in acts of violence. Zehaf-Bibeau had recently been kicked out of a mosque in British Columbia for his erratic, drug-induced behavior.

These were unstable men living with intense mental and emotional turmoil.

From the point of view of the mentally disturbed person seeking to end his psychological suffering, authentic religious devotion has a downside: you have to keep at it day after day. You pray, you work, and you still have to face your inner demons every morning and every night.

Suicidal violence has the advantage that you only have to do it once.

That these recent attacks have more to do with insanity than with Islam or ISIS may not be convenient for Western governments. It does not provide a shadowy supervillain against whom to defend ourselves. It provides no outlet for the Western public’s fear and anger, and it provides no justification for war. We cannot bomb our way to sanity.

This fact is also not advantageous for ISIS propagandists, who would prefer to congratulate Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau as holy warriors rather than express sympathy for them as mentally ill.

But there’s a plus side for those who prefer peace. The mental instability of last week’s two Canadian terrorists is a reminder of why suicide terrorists are really not that dangerous. The desperate people who usually carry out these attacks are likely not capable of the kind of delicate, slow-moving, secret operation required to set off a dirty bomb or a biological weapon in a Western city.

They have what Ludwig von Mises would call a high “time preference.” They want to end their own suffering and they want to end it now.

These terrorists (if we want to use that word for such tormented souls as Zehaf-Bibeau and Couture-Rouleau) were not actually trying to achieve mass casualties. They were trying to end their own pain and shame.

Suicidal violence with a hastily adopted patina of Islam was just the rope they chose to hang themselves with.

***

Originally published in Anything Peaceful.

Turn the Page; New Bombings in Russia

01/17/201401/16/2014 Brandon Christensen Current Events Al Qaeda, Bandar bin Sultan, international relations, Iran, Islamism, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sochi Olympics, terrorism, Vladimir Putin

[Editor’s note: the following is a short essay by Payam Ghorbanian. Payam was born in Tehran, Iran. He got his bachelor of science in Engineering from Zanjan University in Zanjan, Iran. He has been participating in liberal political activities and he was involved with some think tanks in Iran. He is doing research in the field of international relations and Iran’s foreign policy as an independent activist. He is now living in San Jose, California.

I cannot endorse this essay, but I am excited to post it because of its potential as a conduit for intercultural dialogue and exchange. I have left his essay largely intact, but did break up some of his longer paragraphs for clarity’s sake. Thanks to Payam for taking the time to write this.]

There is a narrow line between acting and having a reason and acting because of reason, reason is not merely the cause of the one’s acting. As Brain Fay said the having of this reason is the cause of agent’s acting and the reason does not explain the act, the act doesn’t occurred because of the one’s specified reason. After Boston bombing in the United States, Piers Morgan in his live show asked one of the Boston bomber’s friends to find out whether or not the bomber guy had any accent when he was speaking English. He probably wanted to give us a hint that the bomber might got involved in this disaster because of being teased by others around him. Morgan wanted to downgrade the threat of sinister ideology to personal reasons of bomber, which he was unsuccessful because of the friend responded: “no, not at all.”

Islamic fundamentalism has the holy goal to build or revive the Islamic nation the same as thousands years ago and to be able to run that nation with extremist religious rules in order to build the distinguished nation in order to beat the westernized nation in the judgment day. I have to mention that it is not actually only about Islam, all historical religions because of consequences of compacting with modernism and being frequently defeated have this potential ambition to draw the utopia for their followers, although now we are facing with Islamic fundamentalism which is the great threat for all modernized countries. Even though they are fighting with modernism, they constantly use the modern stuffs for getting to the final step like weapons, electronic connections, chemical bombs, internet, computer and etc. This battle would not end up if we just want to focus on a single aspect of it. On the other hand, if we are going to say that they are only a threat when they attack us or our allies, so we might be able to divide them into the good and bad and take an advantage of them for stopping the threat of wicked (but modernized) countries like Russia, China or even Bashar Al-Asad’s regime in Syria. It should be drawn by us as a red line.

Dokka Umarov is the person who is known for several attacks in Russia with the goal of reviving the Islamic State in Caucasus; being so closed to Al-Qaeda. Getting involved in Syrian war made him the one of the most dangerous rebel leaders for Russian nation. He also said he will prepare the maximum force to disturb the security of the Winter Olympics on February 7 in Sochi and now he has this ability to challenge president Putin. The last operation of terrorist group in Volgograd’s bombing killed 34 people on December 31, 2013. It is just the beginning of the wrong way, retaliation of rolling in Syria with the hands of terrorist group inside the Russia.

This upcoming Olympic is not just a regular event for Russia. It is a pose of pride, especially for Mr. Putin and maybe for all Russians to get their confidence back and show off the 40 billion dollar which has been spent for preparing of this event till now and it could be seen as a heritage of Putin’s presidency. After these recent attacks Mr. Putin said: we will tough and consistently continue to fight. He also has pointed his finger at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and call up for retaliation, which I think it is just more a threat, rather than a real action in order to prevent upcoming attacks.

When someone threatens you with an attack and at the same time someone else tries to blackmail you and offers you that if you want to prevent this attack you have to do something for me, it means that there is a connection between the person who threatens you and the person who wants to prevent the attack.

Prince Bandar Bin Sultan is the director general of Saudi Arabia intelligence agency from July 2012 until now and he was the KSA ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. He was known for helping Bin Laden’s family to leave US after September 11. He consistently tried to get involve his country in Syrian crises and after found out that United States is not interested in taking military action in Syria, he prominently criticized Obama’s policy regarding the Arabian countries. He said: KSA would shift away from United States over Syria. He has been using millions of dollars of his country in Syrian’s war without getting anywhere and now this war is getting more predominated by dragging inside the Iraq as we have seen during the last month.

Bin Sultan has also tried to convince Russia to give up Al-Asad’s regime by offering them to control and stop Chechen terrorist groups during the winter Olympics and also by purchasing weapons from Russia worth of billions of dollars, as the news said. However, he was ultimately unsuccessful. Mr. Putin knows this rule that if you take just one step back as a result of being frightened by terrorist groups, finally you will be totally turned away. I am into every activity which stops Mr. Putin and China’s government and their ambitions to build the new evil empire but I never ever think about using terrorist groups in order to push them back. They are modernized countries which means they can be backed off by modern means.

The Saudi Arabia with the eternal sick king and hundreds of princes with the lack of any discipline over them seems like an oligarchy. Increasing oil price and powerful armies which has been supplied by United States would really inflate their egos without any financial structure. They really think they can get involved in the games of power. They are in the same path where the last king of Iran was which is going directly to the land of darkness and being unaware of what their people really want and finally overthrowing by them but in this case of Saudi Arabia it takes a long time because of the unfortified middle class but it will ultimately happen. Just take a glance to the Mohammad Reza Shah’s interview in 1974 with BBC he said: “I think our country in the next 10 years will be what you are today. In next 25 years; according to other people, I am not saying that, will be among 5 most prosperous countries of the world.” Several years after this interview, all these bubbles just busted and he could not or would not realize what his people, especially the middle class, are looking for maybe just a little bit of freedom.

Unfortunately the Saudi Arabia and several countries in the Middle East can be called as the ‘necessary dictatorship’. I just made up this word to explain my thought. At this time these regimes surpass far their people, any effort to change the regime will invite the extremists to the party so we obviously prefer to face with dictators instead of terrorists but these sorts of countries should be pushed forward by international union to start reforms. I really like the way that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has followed by opening the gates of the country to the foreign investors with the useful rule of “51 percent of a business must be owned by a UAE national.” This means involving the local people in the business and helping them to lift up instead of putting them down by giving them money occasionally. A person who owns a business will be much more conservative about the definition of Jihad. Now in KSA by the sinister ideology, minds are polluted. Hostility and animosity just spread out so we can tell it will be prolonged but it should start right now otherwise allowing these countries to use the extremists as a political weapon or even helping them in Syrian War will just ignite the worst catastrophe. Remember Al-Qaeda was supposed to fight with Soviet Union but now it fights with the free world and all aspects of that.

Лицо терроризма в России

12/30/2013 Evgenii Grigorev Current Events Russia, terrorism, Volgograd

Я возвращаюсь с новой записью. К сожалению, она лишена праздничного настроения, так как за минувшие сутки в России произошли два ужасающих, бесчеловечных террористических акта, перечеркнувших так называемую “атмосферу Нового Года”.

Я даже не знаю, с чего начать… Думаю, многие из вас смотрят новости по вашим информационным каналам и в курсе террористических актов, которые произошли сегодня и вчера в одном из городов России. Я говорю про город Волгоград, крупнейший южный транспортный узел России, который за последние три месяца трижды подвергался атаке террористов. И вот, сегодня – два новых теракта, с интервалом в 17 часов. Террористы-смертники привели в действие взрывные устройства в здании городского вокзала и в троллейбусе, битком набитом людьми в час пик. По предварительным итогам, пострадало более 100 человек, погибло более 30. Среди тех, кому оказалось не суждено дожить до 2014 года – несколько детей, а также женщин.

Не буду углубляться в подробности. Слишком тяжело про это писать. При желании вы и сами можете поискать в интернете информацию.

За последние 20 лет лицо терроризма в России сильно изменилось. Если раньше мы имели дело с лидерами бандитов, управляющими достаточно крупными бандами, то сейчас имеем кучу разрозненных террористических шаек исламистского характера. Раньше с боевиками можно было хоть как-то договориться. У них была своя программа, требования, и исходя из этого их действия можно было хоть как-то предугадать и предупредить. Сейчас же мы сталкиваемся с фактами неприкрытого насилия против мирного населения. Не выдвигается никаких требований. идет откровенная война. Терроризм ради терроризма. Скажите мне, какие политические последствия может иметь взрыв в автобусе или метро? Да никаких. Жертвами выступает исключительно мирное население. От террористов, которые действуют ради самого процесса терроризма нет спасения. Их действия не предугадать, потому что в них нет логики и последовательности. А отсутствие хоть каких-то требований сводит на нет возможность конструктивного диалога.

Взять хотя бы для примера террористов, с которыми воюет Америка. Там все более-менее понятно. Какие-то требования, какие-то известные исламистские группировки. А у нас что? Никто не может понять. И судя по терактам, спецслужбы не могут их предотвратить или предупредить… Это ужасно, и у меня больше нет слов.

Я все сказал. Эта запись сделана “на эмоциях”. Надеюсь вы никогда не столкнетесь с тем, с чем сталкиваемся мы. Счастливого Нового Года. Я атеист, но тем не менее, сохранит вас Господь.

10 killed, 10 injured in trolleybus blast in Volgograd – Investigation Committee (voiceofrussia.com)
Islamist Suicide Bombing At Russian Train Station in Volgograd – 18 Killed, 40 Wounded – Female Terrorist Carried Bomb – Same Islamist Group That Was Behind Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Bombers) (theconservativetreehouse.com)

Why Would Somali Militants Attack A Kenyan Shopping Mall?

09/22/2013 Brandon Christensen Current Events Islamism, Kenya, occupation, Somalia, terrorism

I was going to write up a small essay on this topic, but economist Joe Salerno beat me to it. I’ll just reproduce it here:

The U.S. government and the establishment media are in a quandary. How are they to explain the heinous attack on a Kenyan shopping mall by Al Shabab a militant Somali group with links to al-Qaida which left 59 innocent civilians dead and another 175 injured, with the victims ranging in age from 2 to 79 years old? After all, since the horrific events of September 11, 1991, U.S politicians of all stripes have repeatedly hammered home the message that ”fundamentalist” Islamists hate us and want to kill us simply because we are free and prosperous. But Kenya is neither. According to the Index of Freedom in the World that attempts to measure economic, civil, and political liberties, Kenya ranks 91 out of the 123 countries included in the index. As for prosperity, based on the CIA World Factbook 2012, Kenya’s per capita GDP was estimated to be $1,700 per year which ranks 192 out of 225 countries.

Could it be that Al Shabab was telling the truth about the reason for its murderous assault yesterday when it tweeted: “For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now its time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land.” After all 4,000 Kenyans troops invaded and have been occupying part of Somalia since 2011. But then this raises the uncomfortable possibility that terrorist attacks by militant Muslim groups on the U.S and its interests throughout the world were not motivated by envy and hatred of our freedoms and high standard of living. Maybe, just maybe, Ron Paul was right and they were provoked by incessant U.S. meddling in the Middle East since World War 2 through numerous wars and economic embargoes including on food and medicine and the billions of dollars sent to payoff and prop up tyrannical and oppressive regimes that do U.S bidding, e.g., the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt.

Legitimizing Terrorism in Egypt

08/19/201310/27/2013 Jacques Delacroix Current Events coup in Egypt, Egypt, Egyptian military, Islamists, Morsi, terrorism

Mr Morsi is president of Egypt through valid and hotly contested elections. I don’t like his Islamic Brotherhood. I like even less his extremists Salafist allies. There is almost nothing to like about that crowd.

There is every reason to dislike Morsi and his coalitions. Reasons include: they would end up stopping the pretense of separation of religion from government in their large Arab country; eventually, they would implement a severe downgrading of the status of women; immediately, Morsi’s followers are venting their rage brutally persecuting Egypt’s remaining minority:the native Coptic Christians.

As I write, at least 500 of Mr Morsi’s followers have been killed in the streets by the Egyptian police and by the Egyptian army. That’s the same army that was displaced through a popular revolution only two and a half years ago. A couple of weeks ago, that army staged a coup to overthrow the properly elected government of Egypt. The Obama administration declined to call it a coup although everyone in the world knew that it was a coup. That was another way Mr Obama reconciled America with the World in general and with the Arab World in particular; through shameless lying, through a lie so gross there is zero chance anyone will believe it.

The army coup was triggered, encouraged, applauded by my natural buddies: The Egyptians – mostly urban, I guess – who are secular, and the many moderate Muslims who do not aspire to a religion-ridden government. My natural friends couldn’t resist the temptation: Take the easy way, ask the armed forces to do what they did in Egypt for forty years: Be the government, supplant the will of the people as expressed through proper elections.

The latest military coup achieves two things:

First, it will stand as a sort of proof that Arabs do not really want a democracy or that they are unable to sustain democracy. The reasoning will go like this: If democratic habits cannot take place in Egypt, a country with a long deeply rooted tradition of secularism, where will it?

Second, the current massacres in the streets of unarmed (or almost completely unarmed )civilians are planting the seeds of fifty years of future rage. Rank-and-file Islamists will have the right to say, “We tried their democracy; it was only a trap to defeat us, to make us cower in fear of our lives, of our children’s lives. We now know that only the fear of us will bring the kind of society we want.”

The current repression in Egypt sounds like a declaration of legitimacy for terrorism.

Now, I know that elections, even fair elections – such as the elections that brought Pres. Morsi to power do not, in and of themselves, constitute democracy. Other institutions matter, some matter more. It would be easy to convince me that the rule of law, for example, is more important than elections. Yet, if you love democracy, if you hate authoritarianism, close your eyes and ask yourself which side is acting heroically in Egypt today. Is it the narrow-minded, bigoted obscurantist religious party that was removed militarily, or is it those who have clamored for and obtained another twenty or thirty years of military dictatorship for their country?

From the Comments: How, Exactly, Does One Define Terrorism?

08/02/201305/12/2015 Brandon Christensen Comments, History Allies, Axis, ethics, Germany, imperialism, Japan, terrorism, war and peace, Western culture, World War II

From longtime reader –Rick, who starts off by quoting Dr Delacroix:

“Thanks to your influence, I have become more conscious of what I mean by terrorism. It includes intentionality and blindness toward the (civilian) victims. Thus, I have revised my concept of terrorism. I will be more precise in the future.”

One immediate problem I have with this is the use of force by the Allies in retaliation to the evil and unjustified use of force and murderous policies of the Axis powers in World War II. With “an intentional and blind lack of consideration of civilian casualties”, retaliatory force such as the bombing of Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan would not have occurred and as a result, our enemies may have, instead, developed and used such strategies and weapons on us. Without efforts to annihilate the enemy and obtain an unconditional surrender, WWI, WWII, or perhaps even the American Civil war may have ended up with a decades long cease fire form of a truce as we have between North and South Korea that commits America to spending billions to keep troops and support systems in Korea as we shrink our military forces on a global scale.

Your inclusion of intentionality and blindness makes the actions taken by the allied forces in response to similar or worse actions by the enemy nations of Japan and particularly Germany make the Allies no more than terrorists for their defensive actions taken to suppress hostile nations and restore some semblance of peace to the planet.

So, depending on your view of history and warfare necessities, you may need to revise your definition even further – or not.

Dr Amburgey also adds his thoughts on Dr Delacroix’s statistical reasoning. One thing I have noticed, reading through this dialogue again, is that Dr Delacroix and other imperialists are much more interested in wielding arbitrary rules, norms and even definitions to advance their aims. Once the imperialist is called out on his arbitrariness (amongst other things), however, he begins to accuse his debate partners of dogmatism (amongst other things).

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

05/03/201305/12/2015 Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty civil liberty, ethics, Guantanamo, terrorism, War on Terror, Western culture

I agree with President Obama. It’s unacceptable that we, the US, have kept people as prisoners for as long as ten years without trial or any other procedure that could conceivably result in their release or conviction.

Let me say first that it’s not an issue of toughness or not toughness. I, for one, think it’s ridiculous to invoke the Geneva Conventions to protect people who burn women and children alive and who assassinate while wearing civilian clothing. I am also in favor of making their lives difficult, of increasing the hardship of doing their disgusting job any way we can. That would include making a public announcement that specific individuals may be volatilized from the sky anytime, any place. That sure would create a circle of isolation around them. I would also be in favor of including an option to surrender and be investigated (by us.) I don’t understand why this option does not already exist.

There are three purposes for keeping people locked up. One is to secure them while they await trial. The lock-up time in this case should be as short as technically possible. The second reason is that they are serving a prison term, a punishment imposed after a conviction of guilt in a well-described, appropriate procedure.

The third reason to prevent people from leaving is to keep them out of any situation where they can hurt others. Thus, the classical treatment of prisoners of war is to secure them until there is peace. No punishment ought to be intended. In fact, there is international agreement that such prisoners should be treated the same as the soldiers of the nation detaining them. Again, to punish people, you have to try them formally and to find them guilty of something. That’s true even if the accused are prisoners of war, for example. A prisoner of war may also be guilty of crimes. The two issues are separate. A civilized society should not allow its collective judgment to drift from one situation to the other.

I often hear comments among my fellow conservatives that obscure the existence of a line separating the task of punishing terrorists from the mission to keep them out of our harm’s way. I also hear an absence, the absence of realization that the issue if not one of some Middle-Eastern strangers’ – many of whom openly hate us – rights. It’s about our rights. (It always is, in the final analysis.) Confinement to a small space open has not chosen is experienced as punishment regardless of intent. It’ s even the most severe punishment several other civilized societies have. I agree with President Obama that we should not punish severely individuals who may be completely innocent. They may be people who are no more guilty of violence against the United States and against Americans than I am. (Repeat this sentence. Make th”I” yourself.” )

I suspect many of my fellow conservatives believe in their hearts that those detained by American forces because they are suspected of terrorism must be at least a little guilty, or guilty of something. Of course, there is no such thing as being a little guilty in our legal tradition. The idea belongs in totalitarian societies.

If we need to control some people’s movements for the third reason, to prevent from from doing us harm, in a war that may never end, we owe it to ourselves as a nation to develop inventive solutions that don’t confuse our need to be safe with the imposition of undeserved punishment. I can think of two such solutions .

We could develop a place to keep them that does not resemble prison except that it should be guarded from intrusion by outside forces. High-tech surveillance methods on the periphery of such a place connected to missiles, for example come to mind. I am thinking of a sort of armed Club Fed. It could even be a Guantanamo Two, a decent resort where the detainees could lead a life more closely approximating normal life. Inside the resort, they would govern themselves as befit people who are not in jail or prison. There is no reason why they couldn’t have a normal family life with spouses and children. I can hear some already snickering about the cost of such a scheme. It’ s extremely unlikely that it would be more expensive to maintain than the highest security jail this country has ever had. It would also be less expensive than war, any kind of war.

There is another, a sort of libertarian solution to the problem of neutralizing those we suspect of wishing to do us harm. We could try to free them on bail. Let me explain: There are millions of individuals around the world and thousands of organizations who profess to be terminally disgusted by the very existence of Guantanamo prison. Among the latter are hundreds of Muslim non-government organizations (NGOs). Some of the latter have thousands and tens of thousands of members. The US government could negotiate the transfer of custody to private NGOs of inmates who have been held for several years and who are not slated to be tried. The US government could ask for a vertiginous bail amount, millions or even billions of dollars per inmate so transferred. The bail money would be refunded after a determined number of years (say, when the detainee reaches a certain age) if the detainee had not been killed or recaptured in the process of conducting or of supporting terrorist activities.

Either some would take up this offer of privatization of custody or not. If the offer were taken, we would at least have put some distance between us and the practical problems of dealing with people we think dangerous. (This includes, as I write, the horror of force-feeding.) Relapses of terrorists would become more publicized than they are now, less subject to the constant suspicion that the US is manipulating appearances. At the very least, if there was no no rush to adopt Guantanamo detainees, it would be nice to point out the hypocrisy of our critics.

Notes On Liberty

Spontaneous thoughts on a humble creed

terrorism

What About Terrorism?

From the Comments: Debunking Myths About Islam and Violence

Liberty or “Security”: An Old Debate, A Familiar Straw Man

America’s Muslim Problem: What To Do.

Kling and Henderson on intervention and blowback

A Short Note on Islam and Violence: Russian Edition

Guantanamo: A Conservative Moral Blind Spot

La cultura y las identidades musulmanas ante los ataques terroristas en París

We Can’t Bomb Our Way to Sanity

Turn the Page; New Bombings in Russia

Лицо терроризма в России

Why Would Somali Militants Attack A Kenyan Shopping Mall?

Legitimizing Terrorism in Egypt

From the Comments: How, Exactly, Does One Define Terrorism?

I Agree with Obama on Guantanamo but….

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