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The attacks not only shocked the world, but the  of planes crashing into the World Trade Center came to define a generation. In a speech on October 11, 2001, then-President George W. Bush spoke of “an attack on the heart and soul of the civilized world” and declared “war against all those who seek to export terror, and a war against those governments that support or shelter them.” This was the start of the global war on terror.

The Story of the 9/11 Attacks and Retaliation

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi leader of al-Qaeda, inspired the 9/11 attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a Pakistani Islamist terrorist and the nephew of the truck driver convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center , masterminded the operation. The described al-Qaeda as “sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal.” It held that the enemy rallied “broad support in the Arab and Muslim world.” The report concluded that al-Qaeda’s hostility to the US and its values was limitless.

The report went on to say that the enemy aimed “to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women,” and observed that it made no distinction between military and civilian targets. The goal going forward was “to attack terrorists and prevent their ranks from swelling while at the same time protecting [the US] against future attacks.”

To prosecute the war on terror, the US built a worldwide coalition: 136 countries offered military assistance, and 46 multilateral organizations declared support. Washington began by launching a financial war on terror, freezing assets and disrupting fundraising pipelines. In the first 100 days, the Bush administration set aside $20 billion for homeland security.

On October 7, 2001, the US inaugurated the war on terror with Operation Enduring Freedom. An international coalition that included Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the UK and other countries, with the help of the Northern Alliance comprising various mujahedeen militias, overthrew the Taliban, which was sheltering al-Qaeda fighters, and took over Afghanistan.

The war on terror that began in Afghanistan soon took on a global focus. In 2003, the Bush administration invaded Iraq despite the lack of a UN mandate. Washington made the argument that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, represented a threat to world peace, and harbored and succored al-Qaeda and other Islamic jihadists. None of this proved to be true. Hussein’s regime fell as speedily as Mullah Omar’s Taliban.

Victory, however, was short-lived. Soon, returned. In Afghanistan, suicide attacks quintupled from 27 in 2005 to 139 in 2006. Globally, the war on terror saw a “” rise in jihadist activity, with just over 32,000 fighters split among 13 Islamist groups in 2001 burgeoning to 100,000 across 44 outfits in 2015. Terrorist attacks went up from an estimated 1,880 in 2001 to 14,806 in 2015, claiming 38,422 lives that year alone — a 397% increase on 2001.

Boosted by the US invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda spawned affiliates across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, a decentralized structure that remained intact even after the US assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011 dealt al-Qaeda a severe blow. One of its Iraqi offshoots morphed into what became the Islamic State (IS) group following the withdrawal of most US from Iraq under President Barack Obama in 2011.

After declaring a caliphate in 2014, IS launched a global terrorist campaign that, within a year, over 140 attacks in 29 countries beyond Syria and Iraq, according to one estimate. Islamic State acolytes went on to claim nearly lives across the Middle East, Europe, the United States, Asia and Africa, controlling vast amounts of territory in Iraq and Syria, before suffering defeat by local forces in 2019.

In Afghanistan, despite the war’s estimated price tag, on August 15 the Taliban have taken control of the capital Kabul amid a chaotic US withdrawal, raising fears of al-Qaeda’s comeback. Last year, the Global Terrorism Index that deaths from terrorism were still double the number recorded in 2001, with Afghanistan claiming a disproportionately large share of over 40% in 2019.

Why Do 9/11 and the War on Terror Matter?

While the failures and successes of the war on terror will remain subject to heated debate for years to come, what remains uncontested is the fact that the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror have forged the world we live in today.

First, they have caused tremendous loss of blood and treasure. Brown University’s project places an $8-trillion price tag on the US war on terror. It estimates that about 900,000 people “were killed as a direct result of war, whether by bombs, bullets or fire,” a number that does not include indirect deaths “caused by way of disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”

Second, numerous countries, including liberal democracies such as the US and the UK, have eroded their own civil liberties and democratic institutions with the avowed goal of improving security. Boarding airplanes or entering public buildings now invariably involves elaborate security checks. Mass surveillance has become par for the course. The US continues to keep alleged terror suspects in indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo Bay.

Third, many analysts argue that the attacks and the response have coarsened the US. After World War II, Americans drew a line in the sand against torture. They put Germans and Japanese on trial for war crimes that included . In the post-9/11 world, torture became part of the . Airstrikes and drone strikes have caused high collateral , killing a disputed number of innocents and losing the battle for the hearts and minds of local populations.

These strikes raise significant issues of legality and the changing nature of warfare. There is a question as to the standing of “counterterrorism” operations in international and national law. However, such issues have garnered relatively little public attention. 

Fourth, the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing war on terror have coincided with the spectacular rise of China. On December 11, 2001, the Middle Kingdom joined the World Trade Organization, which enabled the Chinese economy to grow at a speed and scale unprecedented in history. Analysts believe that distraction with the war on terror hindered the US response to the revolution occurring in global international relations and power dynamics. 

Under Barack Obama, the US initiated an explicit that sought to shift focus from the war on terror and manage the rise of China. Under Donald Trump, Washington unleashed a trade war on Beijing and concluded a with the Taliban. Joe Biden has believed that, since the early days of the war on terror, US priorities have been too skewed toward terrorism and that Afghanistan is a secondary strategic issue, leading to a decision to withdraw troops to mark the 20^th anniversary of 9/11.

Biden has that the US has degraded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and eliminated bin Laden. Despite worrying echoes of George W. Bush declaring the “mission accomplished” in Iraq in 2003, from now on, Biden wants the US to remain “narrowly focused on counterterrorism — not counterinsurgency or nation building.”

While the terrorist threat still consumes US resources, Washington is now shifting its strategic attention and resources to China, Russia and Iran. The Biden administration has deemed these three authoritarian powers to be the biggest challenge for the postwar liberal and democratic order. The 20-year war on terror seems to be over — at least for now.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post How 9/11 and the War on Terror Shaped the World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Ben John’s crime consisted of downloading exactly that appeal to right-wing terrorists. Call it downloading with intent to read. According to the BBC, “He was arrested in January 2020 and later charged with offenses under the Terrorism Act, including possessing documents on combat, homemade weapons and explosives.” To be clear, he didn’t actually possess weapons and explosives, merely documents about them. According to John’s attorney, even the prosecution didn’t believe he was planning a terrorist attack. 

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Understanding the diminished nature of the threat, alongside the fact that he technically did violate a modern law that some complain encourages , the judge gave this account of John’s taste in downloading: “It is repellent, this content, to any right-thinking person. This material is largely relating to Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired ideology.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Right-thinking person:

Someone who understands the importance of limiting their thinking not only to approved topics but also to approved takes on those topics while accepting to make a concerted effort not to let their thinking wander into unsavory areas

Contextual Note

Britain is a nation and a culture that lives and breathes through its awareness of its centuries-old traditions. The idea of “right-thinking” cannot be defined by any law, but instead of being discarded, as it would be in the US, thanks to the British perception of the weight of its inherited culture, the concept can be credibly invoked in a courtroom and even figure in a verdict. Judge Spencer apparently believes the key to becoming a right-thinking citizen is to practice being a right-reading citizen. A clear-headed judge in the US applying the same logic would impose reading the law, not works of fiction.

Judge Spencer understands that knowing the law isn’t enough. Thinking like a good Englishman requires familiarity with great English writers of the past. And it must be the past. In his list there is no Martin Amis, Ali Smith, Ian MacEwan or even 20^th modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Joyce Cary or D.H. Lawrence. Right-thinking English society reached its pinnacle more than a century ago.

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It stopped evolving at the beginning of the 20^th century, by which time all British citizens were expected to understand at least that part of a dying empire’s heritage. This judgment reveals that the nostalgia for a society of the queen’s right-thinking subjects remains a powerful cultural force in British society.

John’s lawyer described his client’s character as “a young man who struggled with emotions; however, he is plainly an intelligent young man and now has a greater insight.” Perhaps the judge expects that John’s reading of great works from the past will inspire him to become a writer himself, making him not only right-thinking but even an active contributor to the perpetuation of the literary tradition that defines the nation’s greatness. John may even be inspired to take up writing his own dramatic story. Instead of engaging in the crime of downloading with intent, he may start uploading with creative ambition. 

This legal episode may leave the reader of the article with the impression that the judge regrets not having pursued a vocation in academia and is using the opportunity to hone his skills as a literature teacher. On that score, Judge Spencer may risk falling into the trap of the great British tradition of imitating a cast of despotic, if not sadistic headmasters and superintendents, on the model of Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind in “Hard Times.”

There is a hint of Dickensian severity in Spencer’s formulation of the young man’s sentence: “On 4 January you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.” But unlike Gradgrind — who condemned “fancy” (“You are never to fancy”) and promoted “fact, fact, fact” — by imposing fiction, Spencer may even be encouraging the development of John’s fancy, so long as it stays close to what right-thinking people fancy.

John’s barrister, Harry Bentley, reassured the judge: “He is by no means a lost cause and is capable of living a normal, pro-social life.” The term “pro-social” should be taken as a synonym of “right-thinking,” which means not “Nazi, fascist and Adolf Hitler-inspired.”

Historical Note

The judge mentioned some specific titles of works that John will be expected to read, all of them works that belong to the prestigious history of English literature. Judge Spencer gave this specific instruction: “Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.” Apart from Shakespeare, these are all 19^th-century writers. In their works, they describe the material, social and economic conflicts that concerned people living in a world that has little in common with today’s reality.

These novels reflect in different ways the impact of the momentous change as a formerly rural society was overturned by industrialization. Is it reasonable to think a young extremist of the 21^st century will be able to learn from such examples?

We are left wondering at what the chosen titles mean for the judge himself and what impact he expects them to have on the man accused of terrorist tendencies. Will the preoccupations of a destitute gentry in the early 19^th century in “Pride and Prejudice” provoke some epiphany for the young man? Will the absurdly melodramatic pseudo-political events Dickens situates during the French Revolution in “The Tale of Two Cities” clarify his ideas about radical politics?

Does the judge expect that the subtle confusion about a twin playing at reversing her gender role in Shakespeare’s sublime comedy will effectively educate John on the subtleties of sexual identity and help him to nuance his opinions on homosexuality?

Depending on how he conducts the discussion sessions around the convicted man’s readings, the magistrate may be creating a precedent that is worth imitating in other cases of individuals with terrorist inclinations. Calling great writers of the past as witnesses of what right-thinking people believe will at least rob such individuals of the time they would dedicate to reading downloaded extremist literature. It’s a question not of fighting fire with fire, but with comforting warmth. 

There is a problem, however. Understanding what Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens and others had to say requires delving into the history of their times and the modes of thought that accompanied those times. We might even wonder how right-thinking these authors were. Shakespeare in particular left hints that he wasn’t very fond of the oppressive order he was living under. His form of protest was not to download instructions provided by Guy Fawkes (who did attempt to blow up Parliament), but the texts of his tragedies that indirectly express his doubts about the existing political order.

For Shakespeare, something was rotten in England as well as Denmark, and the time was clearly out of joint. He carefully avoided appearing too subversive from fear of the temporal power that would inevitably accuse him under the Elizabethan version of the Terror Act.

Judge Spencer has nevertheless defined a noble course of action in this particular case. Let us hope that he is up to the task as a teacher. If he does succeed, we should recommend his example for handling future cases of intelligent individuals so disturbed by the reigning hypocrisy that they become ready to embrace ideas pointing in the direction of terrorism. Given the constant degradation of our political culture and of the trust people are willing to put in our political leaders and the justice system itself, such examples in the near future are likely to be legion. 

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Fortunately, the authorities were able to uncover this scheme and purge the Bundeswehr of these anti-democratic elements. In April this year, 12 men accused of planning a series of attacks on asylum seekers, Muslims, Jews and politicians in Stuttgart.

False Flag Tactics

Part of this plan was a false flag operation. A former Bundeswehr officer, identified only as “Franco A.” in the court proceedings, went on trial in Frankfurt in May for planning attacks on German politicians and various prominent individuals. Beginning in 2015, Franco A. sought to create a new identity for himself as a Syrian asylum-seeker. He succeeded in persuading the authorities of his false Muslim identity, at least for a while.

Among other individuals, Franco A. singled out Claudia Roth, a vice president of the German parliament; Heiko Maas, the foreign minister; and Anetta Kahane, a Jewish woman, frequently identified as an outspoken defender of asylum seekers, as . Fortunately, the authorities were able to uncover the scheme and arrest its principal perpetrator before it could be put into operation.

By impersonating a Muslim and carrying out attacks on prominent and individuals largely sympathetic to the cause of integration, Franco A. hoped to exacerbate the backlash against the Muslim community already underway throughout the country. In this way, he hoped to spark a conflict that would shake the foundations of German democracy.

The false flag tactic has a familiar ring to it. It was employed, for example, in the bombing campaign launched by right-wing provocateurs in the lead-up to the 1967 military coup d’état in Greece. But the one place where the tactic was employed most extensively was Italy. The “strategy of tension” was employed by Italian neo-fascists and elements within the state security agencies during the country’s Years of Lead — Anni di piombo — roughly 1968 to 1982.

Strategy of Tension

Northern Italy and Rome during the late 1960s were alive with revolutionary agitation and protest. Wildcat strikes broke out in the plants and factories of Milan, Turin and other cities during the “hot autumn” of 1968. University students throughout much of the country staged mass protests against the Vietnam War, in solidarity with their counterparts in Paris and Berkeley, and the outdated character of Italy’s system of higher education.

In this atmosphere, extra-parliamentary leftist groups formed. With such names as Worker Vanguard, Worker Power and the Continuous Struggle, these militant bands called for violent revolution against the corrupt Italian state and the Christian Democratic Party that dominated it. What would become the country’s most notorious terrorist group, the Red Brigades, emerged from this milieu.

At this point, we should call attention to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the biggest Marxist bloc in the Western world. By 1968-69, roughly one-third of Italian voters cast their ballots for the PCI, whose leaders, among other things, dominated the country’s largest trade union federation. Many journalists expected the PCI would shortly surpass the Christian Democrats as the number one party in Italy.

PCI’s leaders Enrico Berlinguer and Luigi Longo were at pains to point out that Italian communism was different — that it accepted the democratic rules of the game and aimed to enter a coalition government with the Christian Democrats to provide the country with a stable, democratic regime. Still, in the eyes of many Italians, the PCI was a communist party after all.

Counterrevolutionary Logic

Enter the strategy of tension. The counterrevolutionary logic of this was to launch a series of indiscriminate bombings in public places disguised in such a way that the Italian public would blame the far left for these atrocities and for the breakdown of public order in general. In this way, Italians seeking a restoration of law and order would support, or at least remain indifferent to a seizure of power by the country’s military and security services.

Accordingly, during the summer and fall of 1969, there were a series of bombings in Rome — one in front of an elementary school — and in the north of the country. The police reported these acts were the responsibility of anarchists. A number of individuals with backgrounds in neo-fascism (members of the New Order or the National Vanguard) changed their identities and resurfaced as “revolutionaries.”

Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party in parliament, appealed to a “silent majority” of Italians demanding a restoration of law and order, borrowing language from the Nixon administration in Washington. Then, on December 12, there was the bombing of the National Agricultural Bank at Piazza Fontana in Milan that killed 17 customers. The police quickly blamed revolutionary anarchists for the massacre and within days arrested two individuals with the appropriate backgrounds. One of them allegedly committed suicide by jumping out of the fourth floor of the police headquarters. Few believed the official account.

The story unraveled quickly, thanks to investigations carried out by suspicious journalists. It’s a complex tale. But it should suffice to report that it involved a collaboration between Italy’s state security agencies, the state police and key figures in the neo-fascist movement. Arrests followed, but the subsequent court proceedings dragged on for more than a decade.

The chances seem remote that the democratic order in Germany will be challenged as seriously as it was in Italy, now more than 50 years ago. Still, some of the same ingredients for false flag operations appear to have been present in the case of Franco A.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Strategy of Tension: Bringing Down German Democracy appeared first on 51�Թ�.

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Some of the groups on the congressperson’s list are familiar names to any observer of transnational radical-right extremism over the last several years: the Nordic Resistance Movement, Blood and Honour, National Action and what Slotkin, a former CIA employee focused on extremism in the Middle East and North Africa, describes collectively as the “Azov Battalion” in Ukraine. Not surprisingly, as someone who has written extensively about the threat of the radical right in Ukraine, the mention of Azov caught my attention. But it wasn’t for the right reasons, and it shows that, when the radical right is concerned, group designations and proscriptions aren’t always the best policy tool.

What’s in a Name?

For one, I’ve seen this play out before. In 2019, another member of US Congress, Max Rose, authored a similar letter demanding that the Azov Battalion be designated as an FTO. Rose’s letter was, ultimately, a complete failure. As I from Ukraine in November 2019, it contained inaccurate information, including the unproven claim that the Christchurch terrorist admitted to training with Azov, and ended up being a propaganda boon to the radical right.

Slotkin’s letter, fortunately, doesn’t make those kinds of sweeping, evidence-free claims. But it’s not without its major flaws. For one, the letter incorrectly refers to the Azov Battalion. The military unit once known as the Azov Battalion, formed in 2014 to combat Russian-backed insurgents in a still-hot war in eastern Ukraine, has been under the auspices of Ukraine’s National Guard and properly known as the Azov Regiment for years. While referring to it as the “Azov Battalion” could be excusable as something a commentator without experience in Ukraine might mention in passing, it’s not so excusable in an official letter demanding that said organization be designated as a terror group. In particular, how can a group be designated if it can’t even be named and identified correctly?

The accurate descriptor would, of course, be the “Azov Movement.” I’ve described the Azov Movement, which grew out of the original battalion and regiment, as a heterogenous radical-right social movement. At its core, the movement encompasses the regiment itself, the National Corps political party, the Centuria (formerly the National Militia) paramilitary organization as well as a number of affiliated subgroups and initiatives including a book club, youth camps, a “leadership school” and a (temporarily closed) three-story social center just off Kyiv’s central Independence Square.

It also encompasses organizations and networks that are clearly led by and are made up of members of the movement who appear to function with some degree of independence, often without any stated relationship to the movement and who are in their rhetoric. There are also smaller radical-right organizations that are nominally independent but still appear to have at least some relationship with the movement and who circle around its orbit.

Superficial Terms

Slotkin’s letter, on the other hand, describes Azov in superficial terms. The movement is referred to solely as “a well-known militia organization in Ukraine [that] uses the internet to recruit new members and then radicalizes them to use violence to pursue its white identity political agenda,” with one sole reference to a relatively recent January 2021 article. Sure, there’s not enough space in a letter like this to discuss the Azov Movement in considerable detail. But there’s no shortage of material in English on the movement’s activities over the past several years (certainly not just from this author), and, what’s more, it is easily accessible and digestible to anyone who chooses to take a few minutes to read beyond a simple Google search.

Having even a cursory understanding of what the Azov Movement actually is and how it functions would reveal just how difficult it would be in practice to designate it as an FTO, and, in fact, how difficult it is to proscribe these kinds of movements in practice. Even as the UK has moved to the violent neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division, reports from suggest that sympathizers are using still-existing networks to rebuild an offshoot of the group there.

The question then turns to who would be designated as an FTO. Would it be the regiment alone, which is itself a member of Ukraine’s National Guard and thus a member of the country’s armed forces? As counter-extremism expert Kacper Rekawek pointed out last week in a for the Counter Extremism Project, the US would surely never designate an official unit of an American ally’s military, whether one likes it or not.

Moreover, and to move further into the morass, would the broader movement be proscribed as an FTO, and if so, whom would that include? One could see it encompassing the National Corps and Centuria, but does that include every single affiliated organization, from sports clubs to youth camps? What would be the legal criteria for determining whether an entity is or isn’t part of the movement? And, moreover, which individuals can even be described as being part of the movement? Trying to parse these questions would be a veritable nightmare.

A Better Way

Even worse, I can easily imagine how affiliated organizations within the movement would worm their way out of being part of the designation, which exposes a serious flaw with going after the radical right through the means of . Daryl Johnson, an American domestic terrorism expert and former senior analyst with the US Department of Homeland Security, a journalist in Canada, my home country, that its government’s efforts to ban groups like the Proud Boys were “more of a symbolic gesture,” and that radical-right organizations facing these kinds of bans could simply just change their names and regroup under a new banner.

Given that, in the Ukrainian context, radical-right organizations and affiliates have a history of changing their names and branding while maintaining the core leadership, one should expect this to continue if an attempt to proscribe the entire movement were to actually happen. If US and Ukraine’s other Western allies are seriously concerned about the Azov Movement — as they should be — there are far more effective means at their disposal than the clumsy if attention-grabbing mechanism of a foreign terrorist organization designation.

They should consider, for one, designating specific individuals, with specific and justified reasons, instead of broader groups and movements. Visa and travel bans for specific prominent individuals, which would also encourage European allies to extend visa-free Schengen Area restrictions to those same individuals, would also be useful. There is also the option of placing pressure, both public and private, on Ukraine’s government and elements in the Ukrainian state to properly acknowledge and tackle the issue of the violent radical right in their country — pressure that could even include making some international funding and financial support contingent on tackling the problem.

These would be much more effective starting points for the US or any other Western country worried about the activities of Ukraine’s Azov Movement than any attempted FTO designation.

*[51�Թ� is a  partner of the .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why Designating the Azov Movement as an FTO Is Ineffective appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Many others were also put on trial, some of whom eventually received prison sentences for supporting the terrorists or for obstruction of justice. Among them were Licio Gelli, head of the infamous , and Pietro Musumeci, an officer in the Italian military secret service.

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Despite these convictions, the Strage di Bologna, or the Bologna massacre, as the attack is now known, continues to be a source of heated debate in Italy, and serious doubts remain as to whether the masterminds behind the attack have really been caught. Every now and then, for example, the Italian judiciary issues new sentences in connection with the attack. Moreover, as recently as January this year, nearly 40 years after the incident, Gilberto Cavalli was found guilty of aiding and abetting Mambro and Fioravanti.

The ongoing sentencing seems to confirm the widespread belief that we still do not know the whole story and that Italy has struggled to come to terms with this horrible act of terrorism. This state of seeming paralysis is symbolized by the fact that the main station’s clock has not been replaced and, as a reminder for future generations, still shows the exact time of the attack.

A New Lead? The Palestinian Theory

Former politicians, judges and magistrates, as well as investigative journalists and academics, have often added to the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the attack. Manifold theories about the true masterminds exist, alternately accusing left-wing terrorists, the Mafia or of having orchestrated the attack. In 2008, Francesco Cossiga, member of the former Christian Democratic Party (DC) who served as minister of interior between 1976-78 and held the title of prime minister between 1979-80 and president of Italy from 1985 to 1992, cast doubt on the culpability of the neo-fascists.

In an interview with an Israeli newspaper, he argued that the Bologna attack was an act of retaliation by Palestinian terrorists because the government in Rome had violated the so-called Lodo Moro — a decades-old secret agreement between Rome and the Palestinian Liberation Organizations (PLO), in which the Palestinians offered to spare Italy from PLO orchestrated terrorist attacks in return for Rome’s diplomatic support and for allowing the PLO to roam freely in Italy. In July 2016, Rosario Priore, who has investigated right-wing terrorism in Italy for years, propagated Cossiga’s thesis in his , “I segreti di Bologna: La verità sull’atto terroristico più grave della storia italiana” (“The Secrets of Bologna: The Truth About the Most Serious Attack in Italy’s History”).

According to Priore, everything started in November 1979 when the Carabinieri arrested three left-wing extremists — Daniele Pifano, Giuseppe Nieri and Giorgio Baumgartner — and a Palestinian man, Abu Anzeh Saleh, for arms smuggling. When the Italian government declined to release Saleh, the (PFLP) under George Habash contacted Libyan leaders Muammar Gaddafi, who in turn asked the Venezuelan militant Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — better known as — to retaliate against the Italians. The German Thomas Kram, a member of Carlos’ group, was duly dispatched to Bologna to carry out the bombing. However, Kram and Carlos denied any involvement, arguing that Kram was under constant surveillance by the Italian police as soon as he entered Italy and therefore could not have carried out the attack undetected.

Nevertheless, the question remains: Were the Palestinians really responsible, in one form or another, for the terrorist attack in Bologna? As time goes by and more and more archives declassify their documents and make them available for researchers, we may be able to get closer to the truth. In the meantime, however, as historians, we can try to sort myth from reality by contextualizing the events and critically examining the arguments presented. This approach reveals that the Palestinian theory is not as cut and dried as Priore and others claim.

We do not currently have any evidence that the PFLP and its main leaders, Habash and Bassam Abu Sharif, or any other Palestinian group actually demanded the release of Saleh. Furthermore, bombings were not typically the first weapon of choice for Palestinian terrorists, who preferred and taking hostages at the time. In addition, the Palestinians usually claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks they committed. Even Carlos, who worked for the PFLP until 1975, usually claimed responsibility for his actions.

Moreover, neither the Palestinians nor the Italian government would have gained anything from a stand-off caused by the arrest of one person and the confiscation of weapons. Given the vulnerability of the Italian economy and its dependence on Arab oil, Rome continued to negotiate with rather than confront the PLO. In June 1980, for example, the European Council under Italian leadership issued a statement in favor of the PLO. In addition, in 1980, the various factions within the PLO — including Habash’s PFLP — supported Yasser Arafat’s more cautious and diplomatic approach toward the European countries.

Why would the PFLP, whose leadership had been weakened when Habash suffered a stroke in 1980, go through all this trouble when there was really nothing to gain? Only when Arafat’s leadership role was challenged in 1982 did Palestinian attacks in Europe resume, with the of 1985 serving as a prime example.

Going back to Francesco Cossiga’s testimony, it seems that he used the 2008 interview primarily to present himself in a favorable light for the newspaper’s Israeli readership by rejecting any involvement in the pact between Rome and the PLO. He claimed that the secret service did not tell him any details about the agreement between Rome and the Palestinians, which, considering his positions at the highest level of government, is hardly convincing. In addition, by blaming foreign terrorists for the deadliest attack in Italy’s history, he avoided taking responsibility for neglecting and underestimating homegrown terrorism.

Moreover, we should not forget the tensions between the leadership of what was formerly known as the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian judiciary. Cossiga’s interview shows his distrust toward the judiciary and might have also been an attempt to undermine their authority, by implying that they were unable to find and prosecute the real perpetrators of the attack despite all these years that have passed since.

A Familiar Pattern: Right-Wing Terrorism

Considering these points, it seems unlikely that the Bologna attack was an act of retaliation against Italy orchestrated by the PFLP. The extent of Gaddafi’s involvement might tell a different story, but only further investigation and declassification of documents will clarify that case. As it stands, all the concrete evidence and indications we do have point to Italy’s extreme radical right.

The Bologna attack mirrored how right-wing terrorists have previously operated in Italy, particularly during the strategy of tension period between 1969 and 1974. Though skeptics may claim that the attack was designed to mimic the tactics of the extreme radical right and thus shift blame, it was not just the attack itself — the indiscriminate bombing without anyone claiming responsibility — but also the target that reminded many contemporaries of the chaos right-wing terrorists inflicted on Italy a decade earlier: placing bombs in or close to trains in the summertime, thus causing maximum civilian casualties.

On August 4, 1974, for instance, right-wing terrorists of the group carried out an attack on the Italicus express, killing 12 people and injuring 48. The Italian singer and songwriter Claudio Lolli commemorated the attack in his famous song “Agosto”— August — which experienced a revival after the Bologna attack.

One important aspect of the strategy of tension, however, was missing in 1980, thus implying that it was not just a copycat attack. In contrast to the early 1970s, the attempts to blame the Italian left for the attack were marginal and had not been picked up by Italy’s major newspapers. It shows that the perpetrators were able to adapt to a new socio-political situation. Blaming the Italian left, which had established itself as an integral part of the Italian political landscape in 1980, for the Bologna attack would have been a lost cause.

That does not mean, however, that the right-wing terrorists did not attempt to influence Italian politics. Bombings, bloodshed and chaos on the streets usually conservative groups who claim to be the protectors of law and order. Why right-wing terrorists thought 1980 would be a good year to launch another campaign to push Italy further to the right can only be fully understood when we contextualize Bologna within Italian and European history of the time.

Given the rising tensions between the West and the Eastern Bloc since 1979, anti-communism became a powerful recruitment tool for the radical right in Europe and again offered an opportunity to form alliances with the conservative milieu, including elements of the state secret services. Thus, it comes as no surprise that everywhere in Europe, extreme parts of the radical right started a new campaign of terror to influence the politics of their respective countries and push them further to the right. The campaign started in February 1980 and lasted, with pauses, at least until 1984-85, when the regime in Moscow began to noticeably decline.

France and Spain experienced a series of right-wing attacks, and after Bologna, a bomb exploded at the Oktoberfest in Munich on September 26, 1980, killing 13 people. Given the latter’s proximity to the Bologna attack, rumors quickly circulated that some kind of connection must have existed between the Italian terrorists and the German perpetrator, . In 2014, the German federal prosecutor general decided to reopen the case due to inconsistencies and omissions in the original investigations. Until July 2020, when the case was closed again, over 300,000 pages of evidence were examined and over 1,000 witnesses interviewed. In the end, however, the prosecutor could not find additional co-conspirators or backers as possible evidence was carelessly — some would argue deliberately — destroyed early on.

He did, however, establish that Köhler indeed committed a right-wing terrorist attack to shape West Germany’s politics and was more than just a disgruntled youth. Köhler wanted to influence the political landscape in his country in favor of conservative change — after all, parliamentary elections in West Germany occurred only a couple of days after the bombing, and Franz-Josef Strauß, the candidate of the conservative CDU, was known for his anti-communist stance.

Fluid Politics

In Italy, the political situation in 1980 was also fluid, even though no general election was on the horizon. Francesco Cossiga formed a fragile coalition government in April 1980 between his Christian Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the Socialist Party under Bettino Craxi. In the regional election in June 1980, the Christian Democrats gained new seats, and right-wing terrorists might have thought that by destabilizing public order this trend could be pushed even further, maybe resulting in an end to the Socialist’s government involvement.

Also, the city of Bologna as a target can be taken as a clear sign that it was the extreme radical-right milieu that sought to benefit from public turmoil: Bologna was a, if not the symbol in Italy for a successful, leftist local government: Since 1970, Renato Zangheri, a member of the communist party, has served as the mayor of the city.

Last but not least, we should also consider the Italian extreme right-wing terrorist scene at the time. Internal rivalry between different factions within a terrorist milieu is often an important factor to explain a process of radicalization. While the strategy of tension of the early 1970s was dominated by a form of reactionary right-wing terrorism, the second half of the decade saw the emergence of a heterogenous right-wing “armed spontaneity” that showed similarities to the American idea of leaderless resistance of the 1970s and 1980s.

During the second half of the 1970s, former heroes of the strategy of tension like were sidelined. When the security apparatus was able to arrest exponents of the armed spontaneity faction, and when the Cold War tensions once again increased, the old guard of Italian right-wing terrorism might have seen an opportunity to regain control over the country’s radical-right extremist milieu.

One last question remains, however: Why do the arrested right-wing terrorists deny all the charges? Should we believe them? Despite the fact that nearly everyone who was accused of having committed the terrorist bombing in Bologna has denied their involvement, the right-wing terrorists have another motif: Spreading terror and fear is a of every terrorist group. So, when they deny their involvement in the attack, which remained shrouded in mystery for decades, they increase a sense of unease, fear and terror — a feeling that something similar can happen anywhere and at any time because the true puppet masters are still out there, giving even those who have been accused of or arrested for a crime the opportunity to advance the group’s agenda.

On this 40^th anniversary of the Bologna attack, the citizens of Bologna will observe a minute of silence as they have done every year since 1980, commemorating the 85 victims whose names are enshrined on a plaque with the title “Victims of Fascist Terrorism.” Like each year before, the anniversary will be accompanied by newspaper articles and commentaries, continuing the controversial debates surrounding the attack. These discussions, however, should not distract from the fact that currently the judicial and the historical evidence point only to one group of perpetrators: right-wing terrorists.

However, as long as theories and rumors circulate and documents remain classified, the victims and their families still await closure. Even if the terrorists might have not succeeded in their ultimate goal, the fear and terror they unleashed on August 2, 1980, still haunts Italy’s public memory — and Bologna’s main station, with its stricken clock — to this day.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In many respects, Eugenicism is making a comeback of sorts. Increasingly, politicians across Western Europe are feeling comfortable with expressing sentiments that would ordinarily be defined as racist. These views promote the idea that there is an inherent difference between particular racial categories, with the white category at the top of this tree. Invariably, it places people of a darker skin complexion at the bottom of this hierarchy.

Foreign Fighters and the Global War for White Supremacy

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The historical attempts behind these efforts were to maintain the status quo concerning slavery and later colonialism, but it subsequently developed into the concept of scientific racism, the zenith of which is the Nazi Holocaust. Too many believe that Adolf Hitler introduced a policy of elimination targeting Jews, communists, leftists, homosexuals and all others who would reject the values of the Third Reich. The reality is that this was merely the peak of what was in play in North America and Europe for the greater part of a century.

Recently, the British government had to move quickly to dismiss Downing Street adviser Andrew Sabisky, who had been appointed in response to calls by Dominic Cummings for “weirdos and misfits” to join the heart of government to help it think outside of the box in developing radical policy interventions and solutions. It was quickly revealed that Sabisky messages online, with some of his writing confirming that he viewed particular minority groups as somehow inferior and undesirable, including where depopulation through sterilization would be seen as a viable policy.

This was no aberration, however. Numerous Conservative Party politicians have been accused of Islamophobia, which is akin to racism. The current British prime minister, Boris Johnson, has written about minorities and labeled them as “piccaninnies” bearing “watermelon smiles,” while also describing Muslim women wearing veils as “bank robbers” and “letterboxes.” It is also well-documented that US President Donald Trump favors the ideas of eugenics, even applying it to his marital relations, suggesting that in mating with Eastern European stock, he would be producing superior children. All of this suggests the normalization of racism and a particular logic of white supremacism.

The Attacks in Hanau

For what is currently known about the incident in Hanau, a 43-year-old German male — identified by media as — shot and killed nine people while injuring five others at two shisha bars. Most of the victims were Turkish and Kurdish men and women, with a Bosnian, Bulgarian and Romanian in the mix. He later returned to his home, first shooting his mother before committing suicide.

This suggests a combination of problems relating to ideas of the self and the other, and the internalization of a particular kind of racism that pertains to the view that white groups are superior, but that they are under threat due to growing minority populations, particularly in urban centers, with their respective high birth rates and in-marrying. The alleged motivations of Rathjen were to prevent the dilutions of whiteness, as he saw it. But it is also clear that the assailant had particular mental health issues, something that is a significant factor among Islamist extremist actors. Yet the emphasis on reporting in the media is on ideology and religion when it comes to Islamist extremists in their attacks against particular religious minority groups. With far-right aggressors, the focus is less on ideology and more on individual concerns regarding their mental health or other personal matters.

This is a fundamental failure of reporting, especially in the mainstream media. Although the reality is that with more and more examples — i.e., Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011 and Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand in 2019 — it is now impossible to ignore what is palpably clear and apparent. The Hanau attacker, Tobias Rathjen, published a manifesto citing fear of immigrants and disdain toward women.

In trying to understand how far-right extremists become motivated, activated and organized, there has been much emphasis in the recent past on the idea of lone-wolf terrorism. This relates to individuals who operate at the fringes of society, but effectively on their own. It is now clear that many of these attackers have an online presence, which allows them to develop their ideological perspectives and learn of methods and processes concerning attacks. But while this radicalization occurs online, real-world connectivity is nevertheless important to understand.

It is clear that we live in an era where racism toward minorities, Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment targeting a particular category of a minority — one that already faces a host of social, cultural and political pressures — have become the new normal. This racism fuels the ideologies of white supremacism, cultural superiority and notions of exclusivity, which is seemingly threatened by the realities of migration and the settlement of minorities.

Politicians in the “global north” are routinely demonizing such groups for political gain, but it is clear that those at the very fringes of society are mobilizing these sentiments into far more sinister outcomes. Invariably, it reflects on the individuals who face the consequences of rapid transformations to the local economy and society, and who are usually men who no longer receive the trappings of advantage associated with their gender. It also reflects on an ideology that receives broad acceptance elsewhere in social life.

Becoming Targets

There will be many in Europe who are becoming increasingly worried by these recent developments, where random Muslims are seemingly targeted where they are collected, whether it is smoking shisha pipes in a bar or praying in a mosque. These people are being pursued because it fulfills an existing agenda driven by hatred, intolerance and racism. While Muslims are naturally going to be fearful about these issues, the vast majority will carry on regardless.

In understanding what is happening concerning far-right attacks against Muslims, three factors remain important in appreciating the nature of the problem. First, these far-right attackers are finding fuel for their ideological predilections from the machinations of mainstream society and politics. Second, the counterterrorism and counter-extremism policy frameworks that currently receive considerable attention across the “global north” are ill-equipped to deal with the growing threat of far-right extremism because so much attention was historically placed on the idea that the most sinister forms of extremism are only of the Islamist kind. Finally, the reporting on these issues remains skewed, biased or is entirely invisible.

It is wholly incumbent upon observers to report on matters fairly and objectively. Only then will this topic get the wider recognition it deserves. For those working in this field, it important to understand that extremism and terrorism among different actors share common characteristics. As societies, if we concentrate on those social development concerns for all, then there is a real chance of eliminating the threat of terrorism because it is clear that there are patterns of reciprocal extremism in the current climate. To break this vicious cycle, a focus on local area community development concerns and issues of social inclusion remain paramount.

*[A version of this article was cross-posted on .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Normalization of White Supremacist Terrorism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Why Is the Radical Right Obsessed With Southern Africa?

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He was eventually shot while tending to an injured soldier, becoming the first American citizen to die in the Rhodesian Bush War. The timing of Coey’s decision is telling. At the time of his discharge, the United States was in the twilight days of its war in Vietnam, and the British Patriot’s obituary of Coey makes it clear that in resigning from military duty and traveling to Rhodesia, he chose race over nation, deciding that the fight for white supremacy in southern Africa was more pressing than the American war in Southeast Asia.

Not Alone

Coey was far from alone in his decision to travel to southern Africa to fight for white supremacy, and in fact joined a group of around 300 North American expatriates who dubbed themselves the “,” referring to their abandonment by the “broken” United States government, a trope often mobilized by far-right activists. The Crippled Eagles were just one of the many foreign groups fighting in the region, and it is estimated that over were represented in the combined forces that were propping up the regime in Salisbury.

While many of these fighters were simply mercenaries who would offer their services to the highest bidder, many were committed followers of far-right ideology lured by articles such as that printed in British Patriot. For the duration of the 1970s, the primary focus of both British Patriot and Bulldog — the magazine of the Young National Front — was squarely on southern Africa, with article after article encouraging young British men to join the fight for white supremacy in the region. Many of the articles were accompanied by reply slips calling for volunteers under the age of 45 who were willing to join either the Rhodesian armed forces or police service.

The presence of far-right foreign fighters in Rhodesia was far from unique in the context of the 20^th century. However, and so-called reached a new height in the 1980s with American “civilian” involvement in Central America. Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) gained particular notoriety as a paramilitary force in the region, and fighting for the anti-communist cause, growing from a group of six men from Alabama to over , many of whom were heavily armed and not afraid to use deadly force.

Part of the international Phoenix Battalion, the CMA actively recruited from far-right groups both in the US and the UK, and many members would use their training and access to weapons to once they returned.

In the following decade, this tradition continued, with far-right mercenaries traveling to the Balkans to support neo-Ustashist elements within the Croat cause. Members of the French nationalist-revolutionary group, New Resistance, traveled to Croatia to join the in 1991, where they were joined by Italian, Spanish, British and American recruits, the majority of whom were linked to extreme-right organizations within their own countries. The number of recruits grew to such an extent that a number of specific international paramilitary brigades were founded.

Tellingly, the French legion was named the Groupe Jacques Doriot, after the World War II-era fascist politician. Other groups, such as the First International Platoon, known as PIV (Prvi Internacionalni Vod) and explicitly neo-Nazi Werewolf Division, were amalgamated into the Croatian armed forces over the course of the war.

The PIV in particular came under intense scrutiny when one journalist-turned-member, , was brutally murdered in 1992. Würtenberg was reportedly investigating the group’s links to organized crime and drug trafficking, and his death highlighted the dangerously violent tendencies of the international mercenary movement. Members of the PIV, Doriot Division and Werewolf Division were to have also been involved in the anti-communist struggle in Angola and with the Karens in Myanmar, clearly demonstrating the global scope of both their agenda and activism.

A Very Real Problem

While the landscape of extreme-right activism has shifted in recent years, the foreign fighter problem remains very real. The most recent battleground has been in Crimea, where extreme-right activists from across Europe and North America have joined up with the now notorious , an ultranationalist Ukrainian paramilitary infamous for its political extremism and violence. The battalion has become a magnet, attracting over 2,500 “” volunteers from Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, many of whom see their as a “fight against the extinction of Europe.”

In Germany, former Azov members have been actively recruiting, and flyers with instructions on how to join were recently distributed at a . In Ukraine, these far-right activists are being trained and tested in warfare scenarios, bringing their newly found expertise, experience and extremism back to their home countries and organizations.

In the following decade, this tradition continued, with far-right mercenaries traveling to the Balkans to support neo-Ustashist elements within the Croat cause. Members of the French nationalist-revolutionary group, New Resistance, traveled to Croatia to join the in 1991, where they were joined by Italian, Spanish, British and American recruits, the majority of whom were linked to extreme-right organizations within their own countries. The number of recruits grew to such an extent that a number of specific international paramilitary brigades were founded.

Ukraine thus threatens to offer the same kind of environment that suggests both Vietnam and the First Gulf War offered in the 20^th century, in that it provides space for radicalization and training that will energize and educate white supremacist groups in the US and Europe. If Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant’s claim that he is to be believed, we may already be witnessing the result.

Despite the major threat that far-right foreign fighters have presented both to the security of their home nations and to international interests, very little has historically been done to combat the trend. In many cases, the US government has lent them , particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, when that there was a “pretty well-established tradition” of US citizens traveling abroad to fight for various causes and that he was “inclined to not want to interfere with them” as a result.

In Europe, the picture is slightly better, with one Swedish volunteer who fought in Croatia arrested on his return and charged with . However, many far-right groups still do not appear on lists of foreign terrorist organizations in Europe, and membership often goes widely unpunished. While foreign fighters traveling to Syria and Iraq in support of the Islamic State have been dealt with quickly and effectively by anti-terror legislation, the threat presented by far-right foreign fighters still looms large.

However, in late 2019, 40 members of the United States Congress Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to have the Azov Battalion a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Doing so would open the door for the prosecution of American citizens who travel in order to join the battalion and would limit the exchange of tactics and training between Azov and American white supremacist groups. As the signatories of the letter suggest, “terrorism is terrorism,” and the problem of far-right foreign fighters must be addressed on a global scale.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�. This piece was updated at 17:20 GMT.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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There are numerous cases of young people now in prisons for various offences related to spreading material associated with terrorist groups, whose aim of radicalizing others in the hope of generating further support for acts of violent extremism led to their conviction. These young men, once locked up for their offences, are generally released after serving half of their allocated time. However, these prisons can act as an incubator, where impressionable young men are surrounded by hardened ideologues with an even more checkered history.

In the case of Amman, and as reported in relation to others, deeper radicalization can occur, in the process further damaging the minds of these young men. Imprisoning someone for offences related to terrorism takes them away from particular forms of stimuli, but being incarcerated creates a real possibility of these prisons acting as a breeding place, where the radicalized can learn from others.

Talking Islamophobia With Tahir Abbas

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Elsewhere, problems of torture and abuse at the hands of captors played a significant role in radicalizing individuals who became influential leaders within their domains. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was an insignificant car mechanic before he was radicalized in prison and then became the number one al-Qaeda figure in Iraq from 2005 onward. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was an inconsequential teacher with a background in theology. He too was also radicalized in prison, ultimately becoming one of the founding actors within the Islamic State.

Already Too Late

In many ways, when a young British Muslim has been radicalized, it is already too late. The problem is the belief systems they now carry have warped their sense of themselves and their position in the world. It is true that this ideology is problematic, but it is not new to the study of violent jihadism. It has always been part of the eschatological framework of particular interpretations of script. The problem is why so many young people are seemingly drawn to it.

And this is the crux of the matter. If ideology is the pull in this equation, the push is individual, with structural factors that are somehow enabled at a particular moment. While the lure of ideology is potentially always there, attempts to fight it are limited because the push of structural and individual factors is too great. Halfway measures that intervene just before “the bomb goes off” only do so much.

The case of Amman, therefore, is not unsurprising in the context of the problems of knowing what to do with radicals in the European context — and often getting it wrong. Having witnessed, experienced and seen it first hand, too many working within the fields of deradicalization, counterextremism and counterterrorism start with the premise that an individual on the verge of carrying out an act of violence can be “reverse-engineered” if their psychological state of mind can be altered by education or emotional support. This approach has amiable ambitions.

However, upon the completion of this intervention, and as individuals are returned back to the communities, they face the same vulnerabilities of being exposed to all of the pressures that lead some to a narrow path of self-realization through self-annihilation. There are much wider structural issues that relate to investment in rebuilding communities that have faced decline over the last few decades, especially in parts of the country traditionally home to postwar ethnic minority communities, now in their fourth and fifth generations.

By being trapped in spaces that reduce opportunities rather than open them up, creating narrow cultural domains rather than present opportunities to learn and share with others from different backgrounds — with internal questions relating to intergenerational disconnect, and with communities having been effectively left out of the race for success, which is essentially racialized and gendered — the risks remain.

Reality of Extremism

The government, in its usually reactionary manner, to increase sentences or to ensure that those who have been imprisoned complete their sentences. This works well with presenting strength and receiving the support of parts of the country that equates toughness with results. At the same time, there will be those who decry counterterrorism policies that are quick to incarcerate individuals based on a presumption of intent rather than actual evidence of action or its potential — such is the law at present.

All of this will also embolden far-right groups and their counterjihadi rhetoric. But all of this is to forget the reality of extremism — that it is a function of social conflict in a more general sense, which is to state that these young men are products of society. They are made in Britain. And it is the fissures and the cleavages of society that permit young men to fall through the gaps.

As austerity deepens, and as insecurity in relation to the future of Britain and its populations continues to heighten, the vulnerabilities in relation to the potential for young people to be drawn into extremism will only grow. No deradicalization intervention can succeed without the appreciation of the wider social contexts in which radicals are made. And it is this lack of awareness and misdirection — in some cases fueling confusion and misalignment with respect to what should be done in such situations — that leads to attacks against academics, think-tankers and policymakers who seemingly get it wrong every time.

The fact of the matter is that while thinkers spend time and energy to work through an argument, it is in the hands of policymakers to introduce laws to make a difference. However, too many political actors play politics with people’s lives. They would rather engage in populist overtones in the pursuit of power. Combined with a certain media, in particular at the behest of the billionaire press barons, an intractable situation leads to more harm than good.

Terrorism, while a social construction, is also primarily a function of the lived experience facing groups and individuals with particular gripes and grievances that for various reasons cannot be met through the democratic process. This is why there will always be terrorism and extremism in societies that necessarily include groups whose interests conflict, in a hierarchical social structure, with those at the bottom of the social ladder — with those who have already fallen through the cracks of criminality most at risk.

They are so because of their vulnerabilities, not because of their inherent tendencies. Amman’s shooting in the middle of a London street by undercover police officers was in many ways distressing. The perpetrator was a hugely disturbed young man who had been thoroughly let down by a whole host of actors. Jailed for distributing terrorist propaganda, with a history of petty crime, Amman was thrown into the heady mix of Belmarsh prison, then released halfway through his sentence with little or no support. In fact, in many ways, due to the permanent mark on his record and his pariah status as a former inmate, his psychological and emotional well-being would have been in even more vulnerable state, but with no one to act in support.

Radicalization and deradicalization, extremism and counterextremism, terrorism and counterterrorism are all subjective and highly contested concepts. While we can argue about what they mean in reality and the implications they raise for a social context in which people find themselves, young men face all the vulnerabilities of life with little or no focus on their needs, wants and wishes in a fractured, atomized and hugely polarized world. Theirs is a malaise that grows insidiously but blindly for far too many — lest we revisit the sight of a young, Muslim man lying dead on the streets of Britain next time an event such as this latest London attack happens all over again.

*[This article was originally published on .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Made in Britain: Understanding the Realities of Radicalization appeared first on 51�Թ�.

At the turn of 1959, West Germany was startled by of a newly opened synagogue in Cologne. This crime was committed by two members of the radical-right Deutsche Reichspartei and followed by a series of all over the Federal Republic of Germany.

Other groups did not get beyond anti-Semitic statements and murder fantasies about the Jews. For example, in 1966, a group of three neo-Nazis plotted to murder a Jewish district attorney, Fritz Bauer, who was a leading figure in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials against Nazi criminals. Members of the radical-right terrorist group Nationalsozialistische Kampfgruppe Großdeutschland in the early 1970s were also militant anti-Semites who planned to throw bombs at Jewish-owned shops. Others turned their plans into action, such as a group around the neo-Nazi Hans Joachim Neumann, which destroyed and desecrated Jewish cemeteries in Lower Saxony in 1974.

Overcoming the Past

From the mid-1970s, radical-right terrorist groups planned and conducted attacks on prominent figures who, in their opinion, were responsible for the prosecution of Nazi crimes. The focus lied mainly on Jewish representatives of the ����-�ձ�������Բ���Գ�𾱳ٲ������ä���پ����ܲԲ� — a process of coming to terms with the Nazi past — particularly the writer and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal and the .

Wiesenthal was a well known as “Nazi hunter” who played a decisive role in finding and arresting the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1960. The radical-right terrorist scene detested him to the extreme. For example, Neumann’s followers planned to kidnap or kill Wiesenthal in 1974. Such plans did not emerge out of nowhere: The radical-right had been agitating against Wiesenthal for years, which is an indication that those ventures have often been flanked by radical-right political activities.

On June 11, 1982, a bomb hit Wiesenthal’s apartment in Vienna, where he was working as the head of the Jewish Documentation Center. The police arrested nine neo-Nazis, accusing them of a series of anti-Semitic attacks, including the one on Wiesenthal. In 1983, the suspects were brought to trial, with West German radical-right terrorist Ekkehard Weil as the main suspect. The court found the defendants guilty of various attacks, but the one on Wiesenthal’s home could not be definitively tied to the group.

Radical-right terrorists also targeted the Franco-German couple Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, who worked to track down Nazi criminals and bring them to justice. Their contribution to the criminal prosecution of Nazi perpetrators as well as the fact that Serge Klarsfeld was a Jewish Holocaust survivor got them in the sights of radical-right terrorists. For example, some West German groups included the “liquidation” of the couple in their plans. Similar to the Wiesenthal case, the Klarsfelds became victims of a bomb attack when, on July 9, 1979, an explosive device with considerable effect exploded in Serge Klarsfeld’s car in Paris. Only by luck nobody was hurt, but the attack was never fully solved. A , which called itself ODESSA, took responsibility for the bombing and went on to threaten the Klarsfelds’ life in the aftermath. This attack was part of a in France in the late 1970s and early 1980s, partly perpetrated by radical-right terrorist groups and partly by pro-Palestinian groups.

Latest in Line

Many cases remained unresolved over the years, with neither the motive nor the perpetrator identified. One of the most outstanding and shocking was an act of arson against a in Munich in February 1970 that killed seven elderly Jewish residents, two of them Holocaust survivors.

On December 19, 1980, Uwe Behrendt, a member of the radical-right Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann formed around Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, murdered the Jewish publisher Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frida Poeschke in their home in Erlangen. When the police managed to track down Behrendt a couple of months later, the perpetrator had already left the country, having fled to East Germany and afterward to Lebanon with Hoffmann’s help. There, the neo-Nazi presumably committed suicide in September 1981. Lewin had been under constant observation and harassment by neo-Nazis since he openly spoke out against the radical right. This crime was one of the most violent expressions of anti-Semitism before 1990.

Hatred and attacks against Jews had always been a crucial feature of radical-right terrorism in West Germany. While the dichotomy of “friend” and “enemy” constitutes a central feature in radical-right worldview, terrorist groups bring their violent practices in line with this dual principle. The support for the “friends of the cause” is contrasted with the fight against their “enemies.”

Death lists of Jews, political enemies or other opponents were and still are a common practice of radical-right terrorists. Anti-Semitism plays a crucial role in this, as anti-Semitic thought patterns are particularly suitable for constructing a common enemy stereotype. The shooting at Halle targeting worshippers marking Yom Kippur — Judaism’s holiest day — is only the latest in a long line to demonstrate its deadly effects.

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Anti-Semitism Continues to Be a Steady Feature Among Germany’s Radicals appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Understood from the idealist position in IR, transnational interest groups are, together with INGOs and NGOs, frequently identified as important (f)actors in the international community, as agents of positive change promoting peace, development and other political goods in opposition — or as a complement to the traditional state of Westphalian fashion and its presumed realist and self-centered agenda extending only to its territory and population.

However, as with the case of PEGIDA and other radical-right social movements on the national level, coined as a “,” it would be possible to claim that what we witness today is the rise of a new type of transnational interest group. Its agenda extends beyond the national and realist interests and normatively formulates quite different idealist positions than conventionally conceptualized: the dream of a future global order based on racial segregation and white supremacy restored. These positions can be traced within the recent terrorist manifestos of the , El Paso and other attacks, relating back to Anders Behring Breivik and further.

Existential Scenarios

To what extent is radicalization caused by domestic (endogenous) factors and to what extent by foreign (exogenous)? Contemporary scholarship operates mainly from the perspective of securitization or of socio-economic factors, which both mainly assume that it is best to intervene or prevent radicalization on the national, or even very local and individual level, for instance through closer collaboration between judicial, educational and social institutions. Although radicalization, extremism and terrorism are acknowledged to represent global threats, there is some, but little true international collaboration to combat them, possibly with the .

Moreover, the focus since 9/11 has predominantly been to avert Islamist terrorism, so little attention has been directed toward radical-right radicalization. However, arguably starting with Breivik’s rampage in Norway in 2011, but certainly clearly visible since the Christchurch terrorist attack in 2019, it appears as if the agenda of radical-right radicalization is focused only to a minor degree on domestic or national issues and rather locates itself on the level of global and increasingly existential scenarios.

The represents the legitimate self-interests of states and societies to preserve stability and to deliver security as one of the principal and non-negotiable political goods. It was formulated out of a concrete need of at home or against (individual or group) recruitment to “insurgent” troops or irregular combatants in war theaters abroad. Socio-cultural explanations of individual and group attraction to violence and conflict question the simple assertions of the securitization view and focus on more complex contextual, discursive or anthropological factors.

For example, in this view, the alienation of second or third generation immigrants in Western societies, frequently described as a push factor toward engagement in Islamist terrorism, is typically by larger issues such as structural exclusion from the labor market, reaction to one-sided media narratives or grievances, and peer pressure.

Global Political Settings

However, radicalization must also be understood in relation to international and global political settings. Radicalized individuals frequently act upon grievances that assume meaning in a global context, for instance the perceived discrimination against Muslims. The in most cases of radicalization is not the given society per se — nor even socio-economic grievances such as unemployment — but events transgressing the local, regional or national level. Radicalization in our own time is not confined to domestic settings, the delivery of political goods or ideal points of reference, but is embedded in the complex context of globalized politics and flows of information.

Alex Schmid, in a paper for the International Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Hague, that “the reference point of these ‘vulnerable youth’ is often external to the host society.” Whereas this important factor slowly arrives at scholarship and potentially a larger community of experts in relationship to Islamist terrorism, the implications for understanding the expanded references created by globalization in the transnationally shared universe of radical-right radicalization are still under-researched.

A reasonable chronology of trigger events in Islamist radicalization tends to start with Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, followed by a string of devastating Western involvement in multiple conflicts in the MENA-region, or the Danish Prophet Muhammad cartoon crisis of 2005. These events have placed severe pressures of identification on members of societal out-groups in the West, principally Muslim communities, leaving them in a state of double alienation and identity trade-offs. Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen that “radicalization occurs as individuals seek to reconstruct a lost identity in a perceived hostile and confusing world,” and that “individualization and value relativism prompt a search for identity, meaning and community.”

Conversely, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 and charged with the divisive rhetoric of Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” counter-jihadism has emerged as a political platform to organize members of societal in-groups in the West, inciting political violence such as the 2011 terrorist attacks in Norway. In these arenas of radicalization, identification processes charge political concepts like “Europe” or the “West” with new meaning, even lending their names to entire movements such as the Identitarians and practices such as identity politics, as in the German PEGIDA movement or its parliamentary arm, the Alternative for Germany party.

Shawn Matthew Powers speaks of the of strategic actors “to radicalize communities against the established organs and apparatuses of a given society.” Whereas he mainly has mutual interventions in separate national media environments in mind, we could likewise claim that the different types of radicalized out-groups and elements of in-groups “compete for influence in a more balanced, transnational, ideational playing field,” and that “the market for loyalties” has no national or domestic borders anymore since the formerly “closed ideational marketplace” is now open up to online-radicalization. The quick move to internet-based communication facilitates the trans-nationalization/globalization of information space, “emerging communication technologies reshape how societies negotiate power and legitimate authority.” Social media “play an important psychosocial role in establishing community, or put another way, shared knowledge, norms and interests.”

Allegiances are forged based upon other factors than the prevalence of a nationally shared knowledge-culture. “Moral outrage [about extra-domestic political issues] can trigger violent behaviour” or, as we currently can witness across Europe, mobilize massive electoral support for new right-wing populist parties promoting radical positions communicated in a growingly radicalized political rhetoric of the right.

What Fuels Outrage?

What fuels outrage in the transnational radical right? Which topics of presumed humiliation are constructed in its transnational discourses? I propose the following ingredients and various overlaps between them.

Nativism / supremacy / “replacement”: Starting with Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto and straight on to the ones penned by the perpetrators of the Christchurch and El Paso attacks, it would be possible to claim a complex of ideas gravitating around classical concepts of nativism and racial/national supremacy infused with the conspiratorial fear of replacement of the aboriginal white, European population on a global scale.

Shared conspiracy imagination: The “Eurabia” theory follows the narrative pattern of classical conspiracy theories since the French Revolution, in which an unholy alliance of domestic traitors and external enemies hatches a plot aiming at total destruction of Europe/the West. ‘ so-called “great replacement” theory is a more recent variation of this narrative that can be applied to other radical-right settings such as the US, where fear is stoked in relationship to Latinos, also harking back to a long history of pejorative stereotyping.

Migration flows: These first two points receive significant traction in relationship to ongoing migration flows either from war-torn macro-regions such as MENA or countries like Afghanistan, or are driven mainly by economic and climatic factors such as from Latin and Central America to the US. These migration flows are eschatologically charged as “deluges.”

A global racial war/antagonism: In light of the visions of supremacy paired with virulent conspiracy beliefs, a global racial war or existential racial antagonism is imagined that either will end in a future decisive and final battle or in the radical separation of humankind into racially divided “ethnopluralist” homelands. Apartheid will be practiced on a global level.

Crisis of masculinity / traditional gender roles: Across the radical-right spectrum, a particularly predominant feature is a perceived crisis of masculinity and “traditional” gender or family roles. Spearheaded by a global movement against “genderism” (and virulent support for the Canadian academic Jordan P. Peterson), radical and radiant visions of pure patriarchy restored — as a manifestation of unalterable divine or organic order — are promoted.

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Climate change denial / eco-fundamentalism: Among the radical right, there are two ambivalent positions toward . One position simply denies the reality of climate change and, for instance, engages in online abuse and humiliation of Swedish climate campaigner and activist Greta Thunberg. Another position is more eco-fundamentalist or eco-fascist (like the El Paso and Christchurch manifestos) and blames overpopulation for the ecological decline of the planet — and thus that extinction of significant parts of the human race can be excused against the backdrop of this decline. A pure and pristine nature is equated with racial and cultural superiority in a to its degenerated and filthy Other.

Victim-perpetrator reversal / reinterpretation of the human rights framework: The radical right likewise occupies and ambivalent relationship toward the international human rights framework, originally intended to safeguard individuals and minorities from external infringements. As much as for instance LGBTQI+ rights are questioned, ridiculed and attacked, or the recent push for “straight rights” represent an attempt to hijack the rights discourse for exclusionary purposes. In connection with the great replacement conspiracy theory, global victim-perpetrator relationships are reverted, and it is claimed that the “white race” is under threat of extinction and thus in need of protection through human rights.

We are currently witnessing the emergence of the radical right as a transnational interest group and thus should be as an actor in the “totality of interactions within the international system.” Along the discursive positions sketched above, a political agenda is shaped to fit into a multiplicity of different national settings and antagonisms. This move from national to international agenda setting is made visible by a string of interconnected and inter-referenced terrorist attacks across the continents, ranging from Oslo and Utøya, in Norway, to Christchurch in New Zealand and El Paso, Texas, in the United States, and turned into transnational media events through dissemination in both social and traditional media and their news cycle logic. These developments have to be understood through new and more holistic approaches in peace and security studies, and will impact foreign policymaking across the globe.

*[The author would like to thank the for valuable input during the workshop, Climate Change as Identity Politics, in September 2019.]

*[The  is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Radical-Right Radicalization, From the Domestic to the Global appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Moreover, there is no commonly accepted international definition of terrorism. For example, in the United States an act is deemed terrorism if its intent is to influence policy, citizens or the US government through coercion, whereas in France the intent must simply be to disrupt law and order deliberately and to a . Due to this ambiguity, many people do not understand the multifaceted and sometimes mercurial definition of the term “terrorism.”

Yet, while living with a vague definition of terrorism seems irrational and certainly has practical downsides, this ambiguity is currently the world’s best option for preventing the misuse of the term.

Societal Conceptions

The lack of an authoritative definition has led to a societal characterization of terrorism — even if only on a subconscious or emotional level — as being explicitly tied to Islam. For instance, when the prime minister of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, on churches by radical Islamists in April 2019 as terrorism, the rest of the world did not bat an eye. However, New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, for making the exact same announcement about a white nationalist’s live-streamed attack on two Christchurch mosques one month earlier.

A major problem with conceptualizing terrorism as being inherently linked to radical Islam is that it widens an ever-present — and ever-growing��— societal division. When an Islamist and a white nationalist commit similar attacks against the public with only the Islamist labeled a terrorist, a societal conception begins to form: If only Islamists can be terrorists, then Islam, and by extension all Muslims, should be feared.

This alienation of Muslims encourages discrimination and attacks against their community, which then becomes another��contributing factor in . Moreover, by not characterizing the white nationalist attacks as terrorism, our society focuses on condemning the individual rather than the . This allows white nationalist ideas to become increasingly mainstream.

Additionally, the ambiguous definition of terrorism, and the lack of an international definition, allows for government overreach. In 2018 alone, the , accusing many of them of supporting or being affiliated with terrorist groups. However, an examination of many of these cases has lead to the conclusion that the only crime committed by these journalists was criticizing the government or on the enemies of the state, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party and the Gulen movement. Led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, the Turkish government has interpreted its , which includes any acts done by members of an organization with the intent of “changing the characteristics of the Republic,” to suit its own means.

However, this interpretation has been heavily criticized by the international community, with Turkey being increasingly viewed as an authoritarian state by both foreign governments and civil society. Moreover, multiple countries, including and the , have refused to extradite individuals charged with terrorism offenses by Ankara. These examples prove that sometimes the ambiguous definition can be beneficial.

Potential Abuse

The complexity of terrorism necessitates a , as an incredibly specific interpretation would inevitably be too narrow to address the entire spectrum of the phenomena. However, a broad definition would allow for the potential over-designation of groups or individuals as terrorist. The difference between the potential abuse of power and what Turkey is already doing is that such a characterization, regardless of how prejudiced, would be justifiable. Governments could silence, or at the very least mitigate, criticism by pointing to the justification of the definition, thereby allowing governments more control in shaping public perception.

Additionally, an international definition of terrorism would have legal implications, making it potentially more difficult for countries to refuse extradition requests that fall under the purview of the definition.

The potential misuse of an international definition to justify government actions, harness public opinion and obligate the international community is particularly problematic because citizens around the world have ceded immense powers to their governments for the purpose of dealing with terrorist threats. The , , , the and all possess expansive counterterrorism legislation. These laws allow, among other things, , and even for the executive branch to use all “” against terrorist groups that meet a certain criteria.

This is an immense level of power with few constraints, one of which is the international community and civil society’s ability to offer government oversight through criticism and opposition to unfounded terrorism designations. Rather than enabling this oversight, however, an international definition of terrorism would encourage government overreach and facilitate possible abuse of power. A broad definition creates the potential for mischaracterization and manipulation while simultaneously allowing governments the privilege of justification. By any measurement, this is an ominous pairing.

While leaving terrorism undefined contributes to misunderstanding and hate, it also allows for dialogue and dissent. A more concrete understanding of terrorism is undoubtedly desirable.��Yet when the letter of the law will inevitably be manipulated, it is safer to trust in ambiguity.

*[Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is a of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post We May Be Better Off Without a Clear Definition of Terrorism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In Germany, there has been an ongoing public debate as to whether radical-right terrorists take responsibility for their crimes, particularly after the radical-right terrorist group (the National Socialist Underground, NSU) was uncovered. This group did not claim credit for its attacks before 2011, when its existence was revealed.

Security forces like the police and the domestic intelligence services often assumed from insights into the communication strategies of left-wing terrorism that a terrorist attack requires a communicative act claiming responsibility. Since this was not the case with the NSU attacks, authorities concluded before 2011 that there could be no political basis for the crimes committed against minorities, suspected minorities and a German policewoman between 2000 and 2007, in what became known as the . Other observers, particularly NGOs and critical journalists, argued that right-wing terrorists would (almost) never write .

This take is only partially true. Generally, it can be stated that most radical-right terrorist groups in Germany do not declare responsibility for their crimes, but there were exceptions. For example, the (German Action Groups), which committed several attacks in 1980, claimed credit for its crimes via phone calls and letters to the media, even though they were neither detailed nor well elaborated. Therefore, ever since the group carried out its first attack, the public was aware that there was a neo-Nazi group called Deutsche Aktionsgruppen that committed terrorist attacks.

Other actors, such as the (1982) and the NSU (1998-2011) serve as example for radical-right terrorist organizations that deliberately did not claim responsibility for their deeds. Besides these two, there are many other examples of groups or lone actors who did not admit their perpetration: the Otte Group and the Kühnen/Schulte/Wegener Group in the late 1970s; those responsible for the Oktoberfest bombing in 1980; the murderer of the Jewish publisher Shlomo Lewin and his partner Frieda Poeschke in 1980; as well as numerous attacks on immigrant homes in the early 1990s.

In the cases of the Hepp/Kexel Group and the NSU, both the police and the general public made false assumptions with regard to the background of the attacks. While the bombings carried out by the Hepp/Kexel Group against US Army personnel deployed in West Germany were thought to be left-wing terrorist attacks committed by the Red Army Faction (RAF), the NSU murders and bombings were misattributed to conflicts within differing factions inside the Turkish community.

Why, then, would right-wing terrorists decide not to claim responsibility for their crimes and miss the chance to transmit their messages to a wider audience? First, practical aspects should be considered. The leaders of the Hepp/Kexel Group took the view that letters or pamphlets always involved the risk of leading prosecutors on the right track. If the investigators initiated an active search for the actual perpetrators, the terrorists would probably soon be detected. This assumption may also apply to the NSU, since a significant bonus for terrorists in hiding was that the police never seriously investigated within the radical-right scene.

Assuming that terrorism is a communication strategy, following , a second aspect needs to be taken into account. One primary goal of terrorism — to produce a state of fear through the use of violence — is fulfilled when the victim group is intimidated. This was the case both with the attacks carried out by the Hepp/Kexel Group and the NSU, which managed to unsettle the target groups (US military personnel in the former case and the Turkish community in the latter). Furthermore, in the eyes of the terrorists, the attacks should speak for themselves. The NSU produced a DVD in which a text panel was shown, : “The National Socialist Underground is a network of comrades with the principle — deeds instead of words.” According to this logic, the attacks themselves, rather than letters, give a hint of the underlying motive.

A third aspect deserves attention. The terrorists may have intended to leave the police and general public ignorant of their true motives. It was a strategy by West German right-wing terrorists to blame the left for their attacks in the 1970s and 1980s. This was also the case in Italy, where numerous radical-right motivated attacks were committed in order to blame the communists, the idea being to win the population over to the far-right cause through a so-called “strategy of tension.”

For example, members of the Otte Group posted a letter after a bomb attack in Hannover in 1977, in which the RAF allegedly took responsibility for the bombing. The Hepp/Kexel Group did the same. When German authorities suspected left-wing terrorists of the attacks, Odfried Hepp, one of the leaders of the group, even considered encouraging this with a fake letter of confession. It was, in the eyes of the terrorists, not necessary to enlighten the public about the truth. This strategy might also have been pursued by the NSU. It is a matter of fact that the group was well informed about the police investigations into the Turkish community. For example, it collected newspaper clippings about the Česká murder series.

Therefore, it is fair to state that the terrorists not only tolerated the lack of knowledge about the background of their deeds, but may even have approved of it. The fact that the victims of the attacks were victimized for a second time through the police investigations must have been welcomed by this racist group.

The NSU might have been inspired by the racist American novels The Turner Diaries and The Hunter. These books point to a supposed necessity for a “race war” sparked by terrorist attacks. The white population is expected to join this war on the side of the racists and bring the conflict to an end. Political involvement is implied to be nonessential and sometimes even counterproductive. In the 1990s and 2000s, the violent German neo-Nazi scene not only translated and disseminated the novels, but also regarded them as a welcome . The NSU’s strategy of killing citizens and planting bombs without leaving any indication that this was a politically motivated crime strikingly resembles the discussed conceptions of starting a “race war,” albeit in a covert and indirect fashion.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Not All Terrorists Want to Claim Responsibility for Attacks appeared first on 51�Թ�.

“Communities Defeat Terrorism” was the tagline when I worked as the head of strategy and policy in the office of the UK’s National Coordinator for Prevent within the National Counter Terrorism Headquarters nearly three years ago. The whole basis of the policing approach to preventing individuals from being drawn into terrorism was that communities should play a leading role, not the police. This wasn’t about the police service pushing a “securitizing agenda” but rather acknowledging that the majority of the work required to build integrated and resilient communities should take place without the involvement, and certainly the leadership, of the police.

One of the guiding principles in the is that “Prevent depends on a successful integration strategy.” And yet, without the delivery of integration work at the local level, any effort to counter violent (or “non-violent” extremism) is effectively built on a rather shaky foundation with too much sand in the mix.

One of the primary conclusions I draw in my , The Prevent Strategy and Right Wing Extremism: A Case Study of the English Defence League, is that right-wing extremism is poorly understood and articulated at a national policy level. There is a lack of synergy on this issue between the integration, cohesion, hate crime, Prevent and counterextremism policy areas, the interpretation of which at a local level has led to inter-agency tensions that have been further negatively impacted by government-imposed austerity measures on public sector resourcing since 2010.

Let’s consider the focus on looking at “online harms” and the recently published . Yes, the online dimension to this is important, but it is also another distraction from what the government should be doing in the real world. Facebook, Google and Twitter have social responsibilities that they are slowly waking up to, and it is right that across the world hold them to account for what is taking place on their platforms, not least in relation to the support for violence as a means of furthering a world view.

But our government cannot abdicate its own duties in this regard. What is being done to build integrated, resilient communities? Communities will not do this by themselves, and this is where effective local government must play a much greater role. Local government officials have great convening powers. They are well positioned and able to work across and within communities to build consensus, and to create safe spaces for the challenging conversations that need to be had.

So why isn’t this happening? In essence, building integrated communities is difficult. It requires commitment, funding and patience, all of which are in short supply in the Brexit-obsessed Parliament. The desire of our current crop of politicians to chase headlines and signal their own virtuosity at any opportunity is akin to watching an under-10’s football game, with everyone chasing the ball and losing their positions. And yet, the continuance of communities essentially living apart is happening on their watch.

Instead of seeking to build “tolerant” communities, how about trying to build them on mutual respect? I tolerate someone playing music too loud on the London underground. Aiming for tolerance is indicative of a chronic lack of ambition in building integrated communities across the United Kingdom. Coupled with this is the huge under-investment in the very services required to deliver this work. Local authorities have been described as being “,” many of them having their budgets cut by 40% since 2010, with those in the bearing the brunt of austerity.

During the research for my book I interviewed practitioners in Newcastle, and it was common knowledge across statutory services and community organizations that the risk profile there was associated with right-wing extremism. Given the increasing emanating from right-wing extremism from northern areas, the government needs to take the continuum of risk escalation and, therefore, the interconnectivity between policies governing everything from integration through to terrorism much more seriously.

This is one of the reasons why police Prevent practitioners continue to be drawn into work that is fundamentally about community integration and is one of the great ironies of the 2011 Prevent review. The government stated that it wanted to more clearly delineate between community integration and counterterrorism. And yet the scale of the reduction of funding into the former has inevitably led to a continued role for Prevent practitioners (not just police) in the integration space.

A lot of criticism is often leveled at the Prevent strategy. And yet there has been very little work to understand the relationship between this strategy and the others that intersect in the areas of integration, hate crime and extremism. Recently, David Anderson, QC, the former independent reviewer of counterterrorism legislation, highlighted how the government’s attempts to define extremism have failed the so-called . The way in which the government adopts definitions and frames its policies matters, because this sets the parameters, both financially and operationally, as to how frontline practitioners implement them within a local context.

The way in which the terms “extremism,” “the far right” and “Nazi,” among others, are currently being thrown around should give us all pause. My concern for some time has been that the term “extremism” in particular is used far too expansively. From a risk management perspective, if our security apparatus is spread across everyone who is an “extremist,” this increases the likelihood that we will miss those who pose the greatest risks.

Communities defeat terrorism: not social media platforms, not working parties torturing over legal definitions —��communities. Yes, they have a role, but this should not be prioritized to the neglect of those communities that form the solid foundation upon which everything else should be built.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post To Defeat Terrorism, We Need to Invest in Communities appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This article has been difficult to write because I was hoping that, in 2019, I would not need to start talking about international terrorism and how it can impact the streets of Britain. Instead, we are focusing on the terrible events that happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, where a far-right extremist shot and killed 50 Muslims during Friday prayers at the mosques on March 15.

My worry was that these attacks would trigger further violence and a perception of a “them versus us” culture. What we know is that — following terrorist attacks in Paris and Tunisia, and in Woolwich in 2013 — we tend to see a sharp rise in anti-Muslim attacks. Indeed, Britain’s biggest force, the Metropolitan Police, 500 following the Woolwich attack, in which British Army Fusilier Lee Rigby was brutally murdered by two British nationals who recently converted to Islam.

These incidents include those where mosques have been targeted —��the latest incidents taking place just last week in — Muslim women have had their hijab (headscarf) or niqab (face veil) pulled off, Muslim men attacked and racist graffiti scrawled on Muslim graves and properties. Muslims, particularly those with a visible Muslim identity, are to anti-Muslim hostility, intimidation, abuse and threats of violence.

The prevalence and severity of such anti-Muslim hate crimes are influenced by trigger events of local, national and international significance. The danger is that hate crimes are often provoked by antecedent events that incite a desire for retribution in the targeted group — and toward the group that shares similar characteristics to the perpetrators — will form again. From this perspective, hate crimes increase following trigger events as they operate to galvanize tensions and sentiments against the suspected perpetrators and groups associated with them.

In my joint , looking at anti-Muslim hostility, we that after the Woolwich attack, the people we interviewed often cited terrorist antecedent trigger events that induced a significant increase in their anti-Muslim hate crime experiences. Sarah told us: “I know sisters who have been punched, being shouted at on the street, being pulled and pushed around by people, had their houses being burned down.” Ahmed stated: “I have figured out over the years that this happens when there is a terrorist attack in the news committed by Muslims so Islamophobia happens even more.”

We also spoke to people who had suffered anti-Muslim hate following high-profile terrorist attacks around the world such as the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and the shootings in Copenhagen and Tunisia the same year. Reflecting a spike in both online and offline anti-Muslim hate crime, Hamza stated: “I have received Islamophobic abuse in social media and on the street on various occasions. After the Sydney incident, I received Islamophobic remarks on four separate occasions in the space of two weeks.” According to Asma, “After the Paris attacks, I got a lot of nasty comments especially on social media.”

In a globally connected world, the actions by one terrorist group such as the so-called Islamic State (IS) can lead to counter-reactions and impacts on Muslims in the UK. Participants we spoke to pointed out that they were “bombarded with online abuse and offline threats” as IS rose to prominence, especially following the release of videos showing beheadings, or when there was a terror threat made against the UK linked to the group.

Sarah told us: “I was on my way to the shops and people shouted at me, ‘Why don’t we chop your head off?’” In another case, people on the street shouted, “Your head will be much better on the floor.” Along similar lines, Aisha said: “The cancer of ISIS and the atrocities that Boko Haram commit in Nigeria, when these incidents happen anti-Muslim hate crime does rise too.” She added that on her birthday, “a group of white men shouted at me and my sister, ‘You Muslim scums, supporters of ISIS, tell us how much you hate Britain!’’’

In addition to the significance of trigger events and the visibility of the Muslim identity, this that both race and religion are interlinked in anti-Muslim hate crime. Within this framework, the Muslim identity has been subject to a process of racialization whereby this identity is defined on the basis of the individual’s race rather than exclusively on the basis of their religion. Indeed, we found that anti-Muslim hate crime and racism were inextricably intertwined.

From this perspective, anti-Muslim hate crime is understood as a “new” form of racism, which can be attributed to Islamophobic, anti-Muslim attitudes as well as to racist sentiments. In this regard, it is crucial that we counter the negative viewpoint that all Muslims are “bad,” and that law-abiding Muslims in the UK should suffer anti-Muslim hostility because they believe in Islam. Instead, we need to show signs of solidarity and unity in the face of terrorism and work together to prevent further reprisal attacks against all communities. Because if we don’t, we only play into the hands of the extremists who want to divide and conquer.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Anti-Muslim Hate Crime Is a New Form of Racism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

On January 22, Britain’s security minister, Ben Wallace, announced there was to be an of the government’s Prevent strategy. The review was launched to further demonstrate the work done by the program in stopping people from becoming engaged in terrorism. Prevent is one of the four strands of the UK’s counterterrorism strategy, CONTEST. Created in 2003, CONTEST sought to revolutionize the way terrorism was addressed — through preventing, pursuing, protecting and preparing the country and its citizens against attack.

It was first published as a in 2006 before being put under the control of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, which was established in 2007, and updated to as part of the United Kingdom’s Strategy for Countering International Terrorism. The third version of CONTEST emerged in and explicitly placed Prevent at the forefront of its focus, resulting in the that sought to disrupt the processes of radicalization to stop people from becoming engaged in terrorism.

The (CTSA) cemented this governmental focus on Prevent through the creation of the so-called Prevent duty —��a statutory obligation, particularly on public sector workers, to stop people from engaging in terrorism or extremism through the referral mechanism of the Channel program and the upholding and promotion of British values. Throughout its development, Prevent has faced severe criticism but has remained protected by the armor of national security. Thus, academics and commentators have been left to gather data and personal insights in order to understand its impacts and effects, with no publically available and independent oversight conducted —��until now.

(Un)Intended Consequences

Post 9/11, Islamic extremism replaced years of IRA-related violence as the biggest terrorist threat the UK faced, and thus international terrorism —��largely in connection with al-Qaeda — became the focus of counterterrorism programs. This attitude became further entrenched after the 7/7 London bombings, which were carried out by terrorists inspired by groups affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, whereas previous international terrorism had been carried out by foreign individuals, 7/7 was a stark for counterterrorism forces demonstrating the transient nature of ideology and the capacity for British-born, “” individuals to become engaged in terrorism — to become .

Thus, disabling this “enemy within” became a key focus of British counterterrorism strategy. The Prevent program sought to identify those most likely to succumb to terrorist ideology, pre-empt their actions and obstruct them from engaging in acts of terrorism. In doing so, however, the government problematically made the focus on Islamist-inspired terrorism synonymous with a focus on Muslims, them as a group most likely to become engaged in terrorism activity. Numerous studies explore the ways in which Prevent’s conception of threat can be read as resting on Orientalist, imperialist, racist and gendered narratives that ultimately Muslims as the Other.

These studies include funding allocations for areas with over 5% (particularly around integration into programs), statistics, the utilization of as inroads for community reporting, the and the presentations of Muslims as a single . This has been by government officials who claim there is no deliberate attempt to target any one group, but academics have in many cases found evidence where indeed this has been the result of Prevent-affiliated programs, leading to subsequent calls for the of the strategy.

Moving forward to the 2015 and the CTSA, the Prevent duty shifted its focus to all forms of extremism and terrorism, broadening the scope for the strategy and moving away from its explicit focus on international terrorism. This remained the biggest threat, at least in writing. While studies are continuing to come to light around the effects and experiences of the Prevent duty, the picture remains complex and raises concerns for the (un)intended consequences of such a far-reaching and entrenched program of countering terrorism.

British Values

Reports and research undertaken by academics, media outlets and human rights organizations have shone a on a policy that puts teachers, doctors, social workers and housing agents, amongst many others, at the foot of a legal obligation to report signs of vulnerability to radicalization, or those who reject and challenge of democracy, rule of law, mutual tolerance and respect, and individual liberty. There have been claims of 4-year-olds being reported to anti-terror hotlines for misspelling “” (instead writing “terrorist house”), doctors caught between their as a health professional and a legal obligation to spot signs of radicalization, of undermined and Muslim at universities having their freedom of speech impinged upon.

For many researchers, their data and analysis are evidence of a highly problematic strategy that further entrenches division and suspicion, and must be scrapped. These that are claimed to have occurred as a result of the duty are, however, . For some, Prevent, particularly in relation to the duty clause, is not quite as destructive as has been made out, and for others it is a highly successful strategy that saves lives. Prevent officers have shared their positive experiences of the duty, noting its value and significance in both against the spread of terrorist ideology and safeguarding people from engaging in dangerous and potentially life-threatening spaces.

These critiques have been labeled “” by some who claim Prevent does not limit, but broadens the scope for . Further, the annual release of Prevent referral statistics has been welcomed as a response to some critics. They have signaled the government’s desire to be as transparent as possible around the implementation of the duty, it is . Challenges have also been made to the claims that Prevent disproportionately targets Muslims, with government saying this criticism is outdated and in relation to of the strategy.

Some practitioners are also actively engaging with far-right narratives in seeking to avoid discrimination and respond to the rise in visibility of radical right-wing organizations and ideologies. However, the capacity of the most recent Channel referral statistics in demonstrating this has been .

These debates outline one key element: Prevent is by no means perfect. The vast scope of views on the program, from the critiques to the success stories, demonstrate the contestable and complex nature of the scheme. Thus, given its statutory standing and normalization through the everyday enactment of Prevent duty across the public sector, it is high time an independent review is announced. across the opinion divides, the review now has to engage with a spectrum of voices and the vast amount of quantitative and qualitative data that reveal a multitude of experiences — and do so in a truly independent manner.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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You probably haven’t heard of Marshae Jones. Last December, she was arrested after a shooting at a convenience store in Pleasant Grove, a small town in Alabama. Jones, who was pregnant at the time, was shot in the stomach. She recovered, but the unborn child didn’t survive. The shooter, Ebony Jemison, was initially charged with murder, later adjusted to manslaughter. The fight was over the unborn baby’s father. Crucially, Jones started it.

Why crucially? “The mother’s involvement and culpability will be presented to a grand jury to determine if she also will be charged in the incident,” police officer Lieutenant Danny Reid, adding that “When a 5-month pregnant woman initiates a fight and attacks another person, I believe some responsibility lies with her as to any injury to her unborn child.” Reid concluded that was that there was only one victim in the affair: “That child is dependent on its mother to try to keep it from harm, and she shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

UK readers will most certainly have heard of . An East Londoner, she left Britain in 2014 to join the Islamic State (IS) as a jihadi bride, aged just 15. After losing two consecutive children because of the cruel and severe conditions in the former IS stronghold of Raqqa, she became pregnant with a third. Tracked down by at the al-Hawl refugee camp in Syria a week ago, Begum, then nine months pregnant, has appealed to the British government to allow her to return to her own birthplace to give birth and raise her child,��in the words of the “away from ISIS thinking.”

Begum has since , and the nation is divided over whether she should be allowed back into the UK after more than four years of life in an environment and culture that is hostile to the UK and among people who are openly opposed to Western ways of life.

Newborn Citizen

Begum’s family has that “As a British citizen, Shamima has every expectation to be returned to the UK and be dealt with under the British justice system.” At the moment it’s not clear how justice would be served. The new , which will grant greater powers to crackdown on hostile state activity, will not apply to Begum retrospectively.

The British government has the power to deprive a person of citizenship if it decides the action would be “.” However, it can’t render someone stateless. It’s not even clear if Begum has actually committed an offence at all. Britons who leave the UK for IS-controlled territory are usually not welcomed back, particularly if they are known to have engaged in fighting allied forces or terrorist-related activities, which will be punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the . The response to their family members is less clear-cut. It is thought that Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command has studied whether Shamima Begum was involved in activity that “a danger to British national security or would constitute an offence that she could be charged with in the UK.”

Some argue that she was manipulated at an impressionable age and has now matured enough to mend her ways. The trouble is that she shows no apparent remorse. Speaking to , Begum said: “In a way, yes, but I don’t regret it because it’s changed me as a person. It’s made me stronger, tougher. I married my husband. I wouldn’t have found someone like him back in the UK.” There is also a question over her complicity in the transition to Syria. Those who insist she was in some way “brainwashed” are criticized for not crediting her with intelligence and decision-making agency.

Personhood

But while much of the debate centers around Begum herself, considering the rights of her newborn invites us to venture along a different narrative. Since the mother is a British national, the child will technically be British and should, by extension, have a right to be brought up on British soil, have access to the NHS, go to school in Britain and participate fully in the welfare state.

Whether the mother committed acts of treason against the British government by voluntarily leaving for Syria and aligning herself with an enemy of many Western nations, including Britain, is, in a sense, irrelevant. A child, especially when still in its mother’s womb, is innocent and in danger of becoming a victim. Perhaps not a victim to the same extent as Marshae Jones’ unborn child, but a victim in the sense that its life chances will be overwhelmingly determined by the actions of its mother.

It’s too easy to argue that the British government’s responsibility should be to the child and its duty to protect that child regardless of the transgressions the mother. But this presumes the child would theoretically prefer to be born, live and mature in an environment its mother found repugnant — or at least did in 2014.

Obviously a child has no cognitive capacity to choose where to be born and grow. Those who point out that the child is innocent seem to presume life in East London would be preferable to Syria. It could also be argued, at least theoretically —��I know of no one who has advanced this view — that were the child born and allowed to develop among the Islamic State, he would see life very differently and repudiate the infidels his mother left behind. The unborn child will be shaped by whichever circumstances he is born into. All of which prompts us to wonder whether personhood is appropriately conferred on unborn children.

The concept of personhood is under constant revision. I’m going to define it straightforwardly as the quality or��condition��of being an individual human being. A society that accommodates a legal understanding of fetal personhood has to face some uncomfortable implications. If a woman chooses to smoke and drink during pregnancy, and the child is born prematurely and underweight, is the mother responsible for the child’s health? What if a mother exercises too vigorously or runs ultra-marathons or travels abroad to work for humanitarian causes? There was a fictional, but reality-like, case on recently, in which a pregnant woman with cancer refused to undergo radiotherapy in order to save her child. She endangered herself, of course. But she could have opted for the therapy and jeopardized the child’s chances of survival. Would she then be morally, if not legally, culpable?

If so, then we are bestowing rights on fetuses. This takes us very close to a zero-sum situation in which whatever is gained by one side is lost by the��other: Pregnant mothers lose autonomy as people in almost direct proportion to the rights we confer on unborn children.

Rebalancing of Power

There’s been a rebalancing of power when it comes to human reproduction. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the interests of mother and fetus are exactly the same. But every so often, a case like Shamima Begum’s challenges us to determine whose interest is best served by a decision. The British state is now struggling with this question: If it’s in the child’s best interests to grow up in Britain, should it prioritize those interests and admit Begum? If it decides to stick with a traditional conception of human individuality and refuse to confer this capacity on a newborn child, then it will assert that it has no legal or moral duty to allow Begum’s return.

At the moment, human beings in Britain acquire legal . In other jurisdictions, a being has rights even before birth. Begum’s case came to light only days before she gave birth to her son. Some insist that an embryo in the first trimester (from to about the 12th week of pregnancy) should be treated legally in exactly the same way as a fetus in the final stages of pregnancy. This seems a tenuous argument, though one that challenges us to determine at what cycle of pregnancy does a being deserve if not personhood, then at least some recognition of rights.

But consider: If the government determines the child has rights and freedoms comparable to, if not commensurate with, other humans, then it will segue into philosophical water. If a government can intercede to protect the best interests of a fetus, how might those opposed to abortion and the miscellany of women’s right associated with it turn this to their advantage?

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Popular culture is full of alternative histories. Mackinley Kantor wrote a famous article in��Look��magazine in 1960 about what would have happened if the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Philip Roth’s novel��The Plot Against America��imagines a world where Charles Lindbergh beats FDR in the 1940 elections and ushers fascism into the United States. And��The Man in the High Castle, an Amazon series based on the Philip K. Dick novel, depicts a terrifying scenario in which the Axis powers have won World War II.

These counter-histories tackle big historical events. The stakes are huge. As we read or watch these parallel universes, we shudder as we contemplate the precariousness of our current reality. A new Netflix series,��1983, inspires comparisons to these other counter-histories. But I fear that many people outside Poland might decide not to watch the series because the “what if” might seem parochial to them. It’s not just that the alternative history involves Poland rather than the United States or Russia or even Germany. It’s that even the “what if” here would be somewhat obscure for Poles themselves.

The show is called��1983, after all, not��1981. That’s the year when most people ask the big “what if” questions. What if the Soviet Union had invaded Poland that year to suppress the Solidarity trade union movement? What if Solidarity had improbably brought down the Communist government and replaced it with something more democratic nearly a decade before this actually happened in 1989?

Counter-History

But this new series focuses not on 1981 but on 1983, more than a year after the Polish government declared martial law, suppressed Solidarity and supposedly prevented the Soviet Union from intervening. In March 1983, according to the fictitious past of the new Netflix series, a number of explosions take place in major Polish cities. The Communist government blames the incidents on terrorists and uses them to justify a further consolidation of power. It does so also to keep the Russians at arm’s length, though in reality the risk of Soviet military intervention����even before the Polish government declared martial law in December 1981.

Thus we have a very strange counter-history. In reality, although the Polish government remained concerned about Solidarity’s activities underground and the overall sympathies of the Polish population, it would lift martial law in July 1983. Meanwhile, March 1983 was no special month, no critical turning point. Which means that the new Netflix series is set in a relatively small country and takes place in a not particularly pivotal year. The stakes, it would seem, are very low indeed.

But it turns out that 1983 is not so much about what happened differently but about what didn’t happen. Because of these explosions in Poland in the parallel universe of��1983, the country doesn’t go through the transformations of 1989. The explosions give the Communist Party an opportunity not just to push the opposition underground, but to effectively eliminate it and continue to hold power into the 2000s. Indeed, the present day of the series is 2003, 20 years after the incidents.

The party, with the help of the secret police, the army and the regular police, is still well-entrenched. It has constructed a widespread surveillance regime. It distributes propaganda to a population isolated from the outside world. It delivers sufficient economic success to garner popular support while relying more on nationalism than communism to maintain its legitimacy. The underground opposition that has survived is meager. A new resistance movement called the Light Brigade attracts a younger generation, but it too is small in numbers.

The show toggles back and forth between 1983 and 2003. In the first episode, a young man, Kajtan, passes his oral exams in the spring of 2003 on his way to becoming a lawyer. Kajtan seems to be the golden child of the Communist elite. He’s even dating the daughter of the economics minister. He is also an orphan. His parents died in the 1983 bombings. That’s when he became imprinted on the public imagination when he appeared on the front page of the party newspaper as the boy with a lily at the funeral of his parents.

In the flashbacks, we see his parents in the months before the bombings, the father participating in the underground movement, the mother working at the sports ministry. The two plotlines seem to run in parallel but they actually converge, the first leading up to the bombings themselves in 1983, and the second gradually exposing the real cause of the attacks.

The World Outside

The world outside of Poland is full of big events, like the deployment of US troops in the Middle East in preparation for what seems like another war in Iraq under orders from an administration headed by Al Gore. But these world-historical events are marginal. The series focuses claustrophobically on Poland as if we, the viewers, are as isolated as the characters in the show. And that’s what makes��1983 so interesting. The show is concerned not with abstract what-ifs. It is instead suffused with the specifics of Polish culture and history.

Take, for instance, the depiction of the opposition movement.��The show��depicts clandestine meetings and heated discussions over the use of violence, just like the conditions during martial law. But there is one scene in particular that stands out. One of Kajtan’s old friends brings him to a performance in an underground passage in Warsaw’s Old Town. It is a single actor reciting from the poet Adam Mickiewicz’s masterpiece��Dziady. Many Poles will instantly recognize the reference to the banned performance of��Dziady��that precipitated the protests of 1968 that began in Warsaw.

Then there’s the role of the Vietnamese community. When I lived in Warsaw in 1989, I remember the small community of Vietnamese who’d come over as students or guest workers. They’d set up a few restaurants where you could get reasonably authentic noodle soup. There was one community in particular in Praga, across the river, and I even remember articles in the paper about Vietnamese gangs. A new wave of Vietnamese came to Poland in the 1990s as small-scale entrepreneurs, and they are now Poland’s largest non-European immigrant population.

But��1983��imagines a much larger role for the Vietnamese. The party has brought in large numbers of Vietnamese guest workers to handle sensitive tasks. There are Vietnamese students and Vietnamese oppositionists. The community seems to have monopolized the fast-food industry and is involved in the underground economy of drugs, prostitution and gun-running. Polish cops even have to pick up some Vietnamese words to get by.

It’s the many details of 1983 that give it so much authenticity even though it’s fake history. The series showcases the Stalinist architecture that’s still scattered around Warsaw, including the famous wedding cake Palace of Culture and Science in the very center of the city. But there’s also the Old Town and some of the new glass and steel structures as well. At one point, Kajtan is sitting on a bench eating a��zapiekanka, the cheap French-bread pizza that was ubiquitous in 1989 but harder to find by the early 2000s when better options were available. In the alternative reality of��1983, the��zapiekanka��survives, just like the party.

Manipulation and Collaboration

But perhaps the most authentic part of 1983 is its preoccupation with those twin phenomena of modern Polish political life: manipulation and collaboration. It was a constant fear among those in the opposition that the authorities were constantly manipulating people and events. Perhaps they were provoking the opposition so that it would respond with violence. The other great fear was of collaborators. Poland’s secret police — Sluzba Biezpieczenstwo��(the security service known as the SB) — was not as powerful or as influential as the East German Stasi. But there were still over 20,000 operatives who were managing, at their height,��. Many leading intellectuals and dissidents have been accused at one point or another of being informants, including former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

There were no terrorist attacks in Poland in 1983. But a few months earlier in September 1982, a strange incident took place in Switzerland. A group that called itself the Polish Revolutionary Home Army seized control of the Polish Embassy in the city of Bern and took several diplomats hostage. The militants����for an end to martial law, more than a million dollars and safe passage out of Switzerland. After 72 hours, Swiss police stormed the embassy, freed the hostages and captured the gunmen.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The head of the hostage-takers was Florian Kruszyk, who turned out to be a convicted Polish spy. In 1968, Austrian authorities����after determining that he was a member of the Polish secret service. So was the whole incident cooked up by the Polish authorities to discredit the opposition and justify a crackdown on Solidarity underground? Possibly, and��1983��takes this scenario and runs with it.

Jennifer Wilson����the series in��The New Republic��for depicting an imaginary Polish dystopia instead of challenging Poland’s current dystopian reality. But that’s not fair. For many Poles and those who listen carefully, there’s a substantial connection between the imagined future of��1983��and the current reality of Poland under the Law and Justice Party (PiS). This party, of course, is right wing, not Communist. But it espouses the kind of nationalism that Communist Party officials spout in��1983. And PiS favors the same kind of semi-isolationist politics.

Agnieszka Holland, the famous Polish director who was involved in the making of��1983,��encourages such comparisons. “The Poland in the series is isolated – much more isolated than in the communist era,” she��. “Outside influences are very rare, so the country develops its own version of modernity. Prosperity is limited, but people don’t know how it is outside so they feel safe and happy. They are manipulated by this propaganda, but they feel it is good for them. Of course, this is very close to what PiS would love to have in Poland.”

It’s not just Poland, she goes on. The support for right-wing populists and authoritarians in Russia, the United States, Turkey, the Philippines, India and Brazil suggests that many people around the world have little interest in freedom. For this reason,��1983’s exploration of the freedom vs. security dilemma goes beyond the Polish context of the series. It’s a show that’s well suited to the times we live in. It’s also a genuinely riveting show, with sharp dialogue, great acting and mesmerizing atmospherics. I hope that it cultivates an audience hitherto ignorant of Poland and its history.

*[This article was originally published by .]��

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Two months of contentious ethno-politics between Chechnya and Ingushetia, which prompted extended public demonstrations in the Ingush capital Magas, culminated legally on December 6. The constitutional court of the Russian Federation of the legitimacy of a controversial territorial exchange agreement between the two North Caucasian republics. This ruling conforms to current Russian political arrangements, however, it prefigures Moscow’s attitude toward future changes to North Caucasian borders.

As long as a pro-Kremlin strongman like Chechnya’s President Ramzan Kadyrov can overpower and outwit neighbors without overt force, expansionism based on ethnic allegiances is acceptable. This plan of action can only go so far before it becomes too heated to handle by federal courts.

Background information is key to understanding how a territorial swap in Russia’s inner abroad reached the constitutional court in Saint Petersburg. Members of the Ingush opposition filed a case with the Ingush constitutional court to overturn the ratification and implementation of the new administrative boundaries. On October 30, the court the agreement between Kadyrov and Ingush President Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. They found the deal unlawful, given that a referendum is required to decide matters of territorial integrity in the republic.

Following the decision, Yevkurov reacted by taking the case to the Russian constitutional court, optimistic that it would strike down the ruling by his own constitutional court. On November 27, the highest court in Russia began its deliberation on the provocative agreement. In Ingushetia, in the largest city of Nazran. According to , the case heavily favored Chechen arguments as they presented more speakers and onlookers in the courtroom. Speaker of the Chechen parliament and close associate of Kadyrov, Magomed Daudov, made an appearance to argue in favor of upholding the new law.

Ingush interests were represented by , a human rights lawyer from Kazan who had received threats to his own health and his family’s safety prior to the proceedings. The head of the Ingush constitutional court, Ayub Gagiyev, refused to take part in the hearings, contending that matters of republic territorial integrity are to be decided by the republics and not federal authorities.

The December 6 ruling explicitly stated that the Ingush constitutional court had no authority to cancel the deal. Kadyrov quickly contentment at the ruling, as expected. While the court’s decision may be the end of the road for legal challenges within Russian law, it surely does not represent a conclusive settlement for Ingush discontent or North Caucasian territorial integrity in general.

Kremlin’s Backing

As noted, the ruling by the Russian high court was predictable. The Kremlin demonstrated quiet support from the start, as the deal was ratified in front of Vladimir Putin’s presidential envoy to the North Caucasian federal district, Alexander Matovnikov. On the other hand, the strength and duration of Ingush opposition protests may have surprised the Russian leadership. Resistance to the land swap was foreseeable, as opine that Russia’s smallest republic forfeited 26 times more territory than what it received from its Chechen neighbor. The latest judgment could easily ignite further tensions.

Further, Moscow pursued a wait-and-see approach that stifled any major protest incidents from taking a more severe tone. The Russian leadership recognized that it would be best to observe quietly rather than ignite any sort of situation that could upend its arrangements of political security. It is a strong postulation that Moscow knew from the outset that the new territorial boundaries would remain unchallenged and, thus, required little obvious involvement. This approach permitted Kremlin-backed Kadyrov yet another opportunity to expand his regional power over a smaller neighbor presided over by a weaker political leader.

While Yevkurov also has the Kremlin’s backing, his position is not as influential regionally. He was the highest-ranking public official going through the hoops to ensure the continued implementation of the newly established borders. Both him and his republic had the most to lose in comparison to the gains attained by Kadyrov. This is the most obvious way in which the Chechen president undermined his Ingush counterpart’s authority. Kadyrov will continue to govern in his strongman style while Yevkurov struggles to regain political legitimacy in the eyes of the Ingush people. A basic understanding of political will determines that there will perpetually be citizens upset with new laws, but events rarely escalate so quickly. Rallies that decried a lack of trust in the government and continued calls for Yevkurov’s resignation demonstrate that the situation is past the point of political will.

The culmination of the legal phase of this political impasse brings further attention to North Caucasian territorial claims and tensions. Moscow implements a policy of managed stability in the inner abroad, reliant on allegiance to Putin and hardline policies to suppress these claims, Islamic radicalism and possible unrest fueled by poverty. Alongside these issues, Chechen influence continues to expand across the southern republics as Kadyrov creates ethnic and religious links with important indigenous leaders. Subsequently, the sway of local leaders over certain factions reaches the grassroots level and shifts internal political opinions within nearby republics. This is a second form of undermining political autonomy and authority. Moscow begrudgingly permits this regional power play in exchange for North Caucasian security, but at what point will it clash with its internal security framework?

Chechen Expansionism

Kadyrov kept no secrets of his plans to expand Chechen territory into areas where ethnic and historical claims can be made. His proposals over Ingushetia percolated for years. A that depicts the recently acquired Sunzhensky district as part of Chechnya and a subsequent 2013 constitutional amendment addressing issue reveal a long-term plan. Neighboring Dagestan’s territory faces a similar treatment as a depicts border areas around Lake Kezenoy-Am, Ankh district and a part of Botlikhsky district as a part of Chechnya. The area around the village of Ansalta in the Botlikhsky district raised eyebrows as it illustrated the furthest claims made into the republic.

On December 7, the leader of Dagestan, Vladimir Vasilyev, that he and the Chechen president would discuss the contentious border issues between the two North Caucasian republics. It seems like a roadmap very similar to previous events in Ingushetia where cartographic interpretations reflect a future reality.

Russia’s constitutional court’s ruling set a precedent on how territorial disputes between Russian federal subjects should be managed. During the last two months of political developments, Kadyrov’s power was undoubtedly on display, meaning that mightier republics have the upper hand over their neighbors. An emboldened Kadyrov must sense that he can reorganize the North Caucasian federal district according to his larger vision. Forthcoming discussions with Vasilyev determine that the contemporary period offers the best prospects to establish new borders in Chechnya’s favor. Nevertheless, a sizeable amount of caution must be applied too. Opposition to the finalized Ingush deal remains strong, and the political path toward Dagestan only becomes trickier. The influence of other ethnicities, such as the with whom tensions have flared and then simmered after Chechen incursions, mean a settlement with Makhachkala is a tougher endeavor.

Going forward, Moscow must keep a keen eye on its political security arrangements in the North Caucasus. The area often presents complex circumstances to manage, while resolutions over historically contested borders are difficult to achieve. Authorities find themselves in a complicated situation where an important component of the security framework in the form of a firm hand in Chechnya has stirred regional border issues to suit his favor. Visions of Chechen expansionism disrupt the balance of power in the North Caucasus and, as a result, create a problem that could easily transform into something larger given recent history.

Opposition to further territorial swaps may not have the time to be presented in court before skirmishes break out. Geopolitical pundits often speak about the concept of a “Greater Russia,” but now Russia must contend with the smaller scale version of “Greater Chechnya” within its own borders.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is Chechnya Redrawing the Map of the North Caucasus? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The latest measurements in Europe show that after a sharp spike in xenophobia and radicalism in 2015 caused by the migration crisis, the situation has improved slightly, but in some respects it has become . In 2017, for example, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia recorded the highest level of in the last four years, and in Italy and France the same is true for anti-Semitism. A peak of anti-Islamic attitudes over the same period was recorded in Britain, Germany and France.

The situation surrounding hate crimes has further . In 2017, an increase in violence was recorded in Britain, France, Greece, Italy, Poland and many other countries. The Netherlands, Germany and Russia are an exception, but this summer Germany experienced right-wing riots in Chemnitz, and in September there were inter-ethnic clashes in the Russian region of Kabardino-Balkaria, which indicates that the situation is still very far from stable.

The level of hatred is still extremely high, and the trends are not encouraging. There are reasons to doubt that this is exclusively the result of the activities of the parties and movements we call extremist or radical. These trends are part of a more complex system that reproduces xenophobia and radical attitudes on a large scale. A variety of political forces are involved in this system — not only extremist ones. In a certain sense, the state plays a significant role here.

In fact, the state establishes the rules of the game, including the rules for the integration of minorities. At the same time, it makes mistakes, leading to radicalization. This happens insofar as it offers mainly that are rejected on average by 25-28% of those for whom these models are intended. Within assimilation, one part of a society (or an entire ethnos) loses its distinctive features, which are replaced by features borrowed from another part of society (another ethnos).

The discriminatory conditions for registration of Muslim religious communities in and , discrimination against Muslims in terms of language in the religious worship in , the temporary withdrawal of children from immigrant families to imbue them with Christian values in , or the ban on teaching in schools of national minorities in the languages ​​of national minorities in and , and even the ban on religious headgear are the elements of assimilation with expressed traits of violence. People rejecting assimilation are locked in the self-created ghetto, where they become victims of radicals of all colors.

This is the main problem: In 2017, 22% of Muslims in France and Germany, and 32% and 38% in Britain and Austria respectively, did not have or did not seek any contact with non-Muslims and with the nationals of .

Winners of the Game

Naturally, the state does not exist in a vacuum. It is influenced by various political forces seeking the dividends from the current situation. The conservative parties and those right of center are the main players here, and the parties in power are the main beneficiaries of this game. The migration crisis caught many of them unawares. Right-wing radical views became more and more popular among their voters, but these parties did not want to give the voices to the extreme right. Instead, they began to play on the right-wing field.

They lost only once, when they decided to play the Brexit card. In other cases, the elite always won. In France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Ukraine the ruling parties managed to outplay the right-wing radicals in their own field, effectively playing the anti-migration and nationalist cards, and taking tough security measures, on the verge of violating fundamental human rights. For example, in the Netherlands, strict was adopted, authorizing expatriation out of court. Foreigners who participated in armed hostilities, financed terrorism or were members of extremist groups were declared as undesirable. For a long time this postulation could not be disputed in court; an opportunity to do so appeared only in 2017.

In general, we can say that we are moving toward the creation of monocultural and monoethnic states. That absolutely contradicts the reality of the modern globalized world.��

In Hungary and Poland, the government actively used the migration crisis to stir up�� among ordinary voters, seizing the initiative from the radicals. As a result, in 2016, the Poles and Hungarians demonstrated the highest indicators of fear of migrants and hatred of Muslims in Europe. At the same time, the ruling parties, Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, have increased their ratings, and neo-Nazis from Hungary’s Jobbik party were forced to distance themselves from the topic of migrants. In , the ruling parties practically intercepted the nationalist Russophobic agenda, actively promoting the Ukrainian language and culture at the expense of minority ones.

What is the social danger of this phenomenon? It’s the fact that the ruling parties, playing on the right-wing field, are forced to drift to the right. Thus, instead of extinguishing xenophobia, the ruling elites play on the xenophobic sentiment and sometimes contribute to the growth of prejudice.

Carpe Diem

The second player and another group of beneficiaries are parliamentary right-wing radical and populist parties. Realizing the chance presented to them today, they are eager to use it to enter the political elite. Unlike establishment parties, they are moving toward the center, understanding the need to expand their electoral base, including representatives of the minorities, whom they just recently positioned as enemies of the nation. They abandon their most odious slogans and formally become presentable for��external audience.

So the French National Front was forced to radically change the ideology of its party, making it completely tolerant, for example, to the LGBTQ and Jewish communities. Today, one third of French gay couples for them. The same can be said about the Freedom Party in Holland. Its leader Geert Wilders abandoned anti-Semitism and sexism in his public speeches. In Hungary, Jobbik, which has acquired a neo-Nazi reputation, has changed its tone. Its leader, Gábor Vona, to the leadership of the Jewish community on the Hanukkah holiday in 2016 and demonstrates a serious liberalization of views, even being criticized by ordinary members of the party.

However, such maneuvers don’t mean these parties should be hastily transferred from the right-populist and right-wing radical spectrum to the center right. Their birthmarks are still there, although they are stubbornly trying to hide them. So, the leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) during the campaign in the Bundestag that Germany “should be proud of its soldiers who participated in both world wars, and people should stop reproaching the Germans with the Second World War.” His colleague, the leader of the party branch in the federal state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke, the monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Berlin “the disgrace of Germany.”

This is proved also by Marine Le Pen’s proposal to , as well as the participation of PiS activists in anti-Semitic actions in Poland. The latter was highlighted even by the extremely politically correct . The leader of the Russian LDPR party, which seemed to get rid of its nationalistic image, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, included frankly xenophobic, nationalistic and anti-migrant slogans in his program during this year’s presidential election and managed to get more than 5% of votes, .

Small right and left-radical parties, as well as Islamists, are the remaining players and beneficiaries of the third and fourth levels. They generate hatred at the domestic level and commit acts of terrorism and hate crimes. At the same time, right-wing radicals tend to occupy the extreme-right niche and conquer the ultra-right electorate, who traditionally voted for those parties, which today, in their opinion, betrayed their old ideals by rushing into power.

They are more radical than their predecessors. They openly profess the ideology of fascism and Nazism, question the outcome of the Second World War and so on. They are hungry, and therefore they strive to do everything possible to be recognized by the street — so far unsuccessfully. In the past six months, they have failed to attract more than a few hundred people to their events. Even in in August, right-wing radicals, despite great efforts, brought no more than 900 people to the streets, although a year ago tens of thousands participated in their actions.

The Islamists were also significantly weakened after the defeat of the so-called Islamic State in the Middle East. The flow of recruits from European countries decreased. The cash flow has also markedly dried up when ISIS lost control of the oil fields. They continue to work as before by ideologically engaging youth through their legal organizations, recruiting young people into terrorist organizations and even sending them to Syria and Iraq, but on a much smaller scale.

The Wheel of Xenophobia

What is the real danger? It is a process that can be called a wheel of xenophobia, when interact with each other, eroding the situation from within.

The state, acting as the main participant of the process, essentially defines the rules of the game, offering minorities an assimilative —��and, in fact, discriminatory��— form of integration and undertaking interventions in the Middle East. Unwillingly, it creates conditions for Islamists to work destructively within minorities. Right-wing radicals use this situation to stir up hatred,��this time among the indigenous population of Europe. The right-centrist parties of the political establishment and the parliamentary ultra-right parties, which drift toward each other, try to get maximum dividends from this situation. They are most effective today in the electoral field, attracting a frightened voter.

Thanks to this voter, they get into the parliament and form, sometimes together, a government, making even greater mistakes in the sphere of minority integration. The wheel of xenophobia spins faster and faster, washing away the boundaries between democracy and outright discrimination.

The second danger is the rapprochement of large right-wing radical populist parties and the political establishment, as it shifts the entire political spectrum of Western society to the right and threatens democratic values. Political establishment parties no longer see any problems in forming a government together with right-wing radicals and populists. They see even fewer problems in cooperating with right-wing radicals on certain issues without joining them in government. This is really dangerous for social unity.

For example, in 2018, the government of Denmark, which includes the right-wing radical Danish People’s Party, adopted a new set of rules to life in 25 low-income Muslim enclaves of the country (thereby recognizing the presence of the Muslim ghetto in Denmark). People living in the “ghetto” were referred to a special category of citizens who are actually deprived of the rights. For instance, they can be imprisoned if they force their children to make a long trip to their country of origin, in the law as a “retraining trip.” Now, for such an “offense,” parents can face up to four years in jail.

Double penalties are given for any crime within the indicated 25 Muslim enclaves. Even infants are subject to special measures. Now children older than one and born in ghettos will be forcibly removed from their families for at least 25 hours per week, for compulsory education in “Danish values,” including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, the Danish language, etc. Non-observance can lead to the termination of social payments from the state, even if the family doesn’t have other sources of income. These measures do not just contradict democratic values, but resemble a certain experience of the recent past. There is a difference — one can leave the ghetto. But if you don’t want to be assimilated, it is better to leave the country altogether.

In the Name of Integration

There is a second example: Ukraine, a country where right-wing radicals are not in power, but have a significant impact on government policy, especially in the areas of culture, education and ideology. Last year, a on education came into force that bans education in any language other than the Ukrainian. Starting from 2018, teaching in the languages ​​of the national minorities is only allowed at primary school level. Some 400,000 children will not be granted the right to education in their native language. Starting from the fifth grade, the teaching in the languages ​​of national minorities has been almost eliminated. From 2020, education across the country will only be conducted in Ukrainian.

This worsens the quality of educational training for children. According to the conclusions of international organizations and researchers, teaching a child in a non-native language lowers its potential achievements by 20-30%. According to the well-known Danish scientist , who studies the influence of the language of education on the future fate of communities not only in Europe but also , “teaching children in a non-native language contributes to their disintegration, marginalization and even suicide.”

From the point of view of human rights regulations, the law puts children from different language groups in an unequal position: It allows for one of the groups to acquire knowledge faster and better, and creates problems for others. As a result, a significant part of children from linguistic minority groups will not receive the necessary knowledge and will be in a worse position when entering universities or the labor market. If parents want to give their children a good education, they have no other choice but to leave the country with their children.

Approximately the same law was adopted in 2018 in . Here, even Russian private schools and universities were banned. Here the right-wing radical party, All for Latvia, initiated the law.

In all these cases, it is no longer just a question of voluntary assimilation, which is normative in European integration models, but rather the partial introduction of violent methods, since the subject is deprived of choice. Cooperation between right-centrist and right-wing radical parties almost always leads to changes in the legislation and implementation of laws in the sphere of national and religious policy toward the introduction of violent methods of assimilation.

Does this violate any international legal norms, like the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities of the Council of Europe? No, it doesn’t. Although Article 5.2. of the convention that “the parties refrain from any political or practical actions aimed at assimilation of persons belonging to national minorities against their will and protect these persons from any actions aimed at such assimilation,” but at the same time makes a very significant reservation that “without damage to the measures taken within the framework of its overall integration policy.” Thus, if assimilation measures are justified by the interests of integration, then everything is completely legitimate.

In general, we can say that we are moving toward the creation of monocultural and monoethnic states. That absolutely contradicts the reality of the modern globalized world. Moreover, violent methods start to appear in this movement. The process of merging political elites with right-wing radical groups, which was impossible 20 years ago, leads to a series of problems. They include the legitimization of discrimination against minorities; devaluation of democratic values ​​as a result of the conflict between values ​​and interests, such as the right to choose and freedom of religion conflicting with the need for assimilative integration of minorities aimed to create a homogeneous society; the transformation of the political establishment, which includes right-wing radical and populist parties, who may formally abandoned their populism and radicalism but kept it in their policies; and further radicalization of the voter under the influence of all these factors, as well as pro-government media.

Such a process has already occurred in the 1930s. All this ended up with the fascist and Nazi parties coming to power in a number of European countries. Everybody loses everything in such a scenario: a minority that becomes the subject of discrimination at state level, the majority that develops a problematic relationship with the minority, the authorities that get a splintered society and, finally, a democracy that is devalued as a result of a conflict between values ​​and interests, where the interests get the upper hand. Only political players win, earning political capital on the radical field.

*[The ��is a partner institution of��Fair Observer. Updated: January 28, 2019.]

��The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Astana process, which aimed at formalizing security arrangements and de-escalating tension between Turkey, Russia and Iran, seems to be at stake in the wake of a meeting held in Tehran��in September and the subsequent organized between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. The two sides have agreed on a deal to create a between the Syrian army and the opposition forces in Idlib. The positive side of the agreement is that it prevents further bloodshed in the country at least for some time. However, the deal does not guarantee a permanent solution when it comes to Idlib.

The decision taken at the summit can be read as the suspension of the hot topic, namely the Idlib operation. With the decision, Turkey once again showed its decisiveness to make a distinction between the moderate opposition and the “radical” entities such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Additionally, Turkey and Russia aim to force these entities to dismantle or at least to disarm. However, most of these fighters are unwilling to give up their weapons because of their ideological convictions, meaning there is a potential of escalation into a military confrontation.

Having said that, the decision neither offers a sustainable solution, nor can it be seen as a long-term remedy. Moreover, it did not preclude the possibility of a large-scale assault in the future. Nonetheless, the recent advancements between the Astana troika are likely to have repercussions for the Syrian scene in the upcoming period due to their different approaches, alongside divergent objectives, to the crisis. What is worse, if the situation in Idlib deteriorates, is that it is likely to have a severe impact on the Syrian opposition forces, the Astana peace process, Turkey as a whole and, by extension, Europe.

Last Stronghold

Firstly, Idlib province is known as the of the Syrian military opposition, including moderate forces alongside radical groups. It is known that the Assad regime and its allies captured three of the four specified in the Astana process under the guise of the war on terror. In fact, the Astana process has allowed the regime to restructure the war according to its timelines and priorities.

The primary backers of the Assad regime, Russia and Iran, facilitated this process. Russia supported Damascus through the use of its lethal air force, while Iran supplied manpower, with its militias arriving from different countries. Given the reality that Idlib represents the last stronghold of the opposition, a possible operation in the future would cause a humanitarian crisis in the province. Idlib hosts more than alongside many different armed groups, as well as tens of thousands of fighters.

Moreover, among the civilians, there are tens of thousands of internally displaced people who previously refused to settle in the regime-held areas. Additionally, foreign fighters in Idlib also complicate the crisis. Most of the foreign fighters within the ranks of the radical groups in Idlib can’t return home as their country of origin does not want them. If they return, they will most probably face a jail term. Additionally, they created discontent among the local population by not taking the internal dynamics into consideration.

The international community has also shown little appetite in sharing responsibility regarding these fighters. The latest deal in Sochi is also likely to escalate tension among the radical groups and Turkey-backed moderate organizations in Idlib, as has��. Notably, a radical wing of the HTS is against the Sochi deal, and this increases tension with the Turkey-backed “moderate” opposition. This situation would have a negative impact on the lives of the civilians in the province.

Paramount Importance������������������������������������������������������

Secondly, Idlib is of paramount importance to Turkey. A possible takeover of the province by the regime and its allies could jeopardize Turkey’s presence in Syria and undermine its relevance in the ongoing crisis. Given the rising role of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria and their intimate ties with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Turkey is unlikely to downsize its presence in Syria. It sees its presence as the only guarantee that will keep the further expansion of the PYD in checks, if not rolling back its gains.

Besides, because of Idlib’s geographical proximity to the Operation Euphrates Shield zone and Afrin, where Turkey launched operations against the so-called Islamic State and the YPG respectively, Turkey pays too much attention to it. Following a possible takeover of the province by the Syrian regime and its allies might put pressure on Turkey since Damascus is eager to take over all the areas under the control of the Turkish-backed opposition. Turkey gained the upper hand vis-à-vis PYD/YPG presence in the west of the Euphrates with Operation Euphrates Shield and , and a significant part of territory fell into the hands of Turkey-backed groups in the wake of fierce clashes. In addition to these, Turkey is the guarantor of the Syrian opposition in the Astana process, and a probable operation would decrease the credibility of Turkey in the eyes of the opposition as well.

Furthermore, since Idlib lies on the southern border of the country, Ankara is afraid of a new wave of refugees. Turkey is already the in the world. Currently, more than 3.5 million Syrians reside in the country. President Erdogan has expressly ��that Turkey cannot take more refugees.

On the top of this, Turkey has created in Idlib within the context of the Astana process in an attempt to observe the situation in the area. Even though the observation points cannot prevent a full-scale operation, they force the regime and its allies to be more careful in their assault. One can argue that a possible large-scale military operation on Idlib is likely to bring into question Russia and Iran’s commitment to the Astana process.

Given the provided by the US to the YPG and the shifting dynamics in Syria, Turkey has drawn closer to Russia and put a distance between itself and the United States. However, the Tehran summit showed Russia’s and Turkey’s��divergent approaches to the crisis. Turkey has played a cooperative role throughout the Astana process, yet it perceives a large assault as a grave threat to its national security and interests. Hence, the Sochi deal should be seen through this perspective.

Influx of Refugees

Thirdly, a refugee influx would not only harm Turkey, but it would also put pressure on the shoulders of the European capitals. Turkey cannot safely host any more refugees — a position expressed by top . Faced with of a possible refugee influx into Turkey, the gates would be opened for those fleeing from Syria . A refugee influx would also create security threats as there is high probability of infiltration by radical elements into the general population.

This would also have repercussions in Europe. The far-right politics combined with xenophobia have been on the rise in Europe over the past years. What is worse, this situation could create a new wave of radicalization for both Syrian and European youth in the upcoming period. The new refugee wave is likely to increase the level of nationalism in Europe which might also have a negative effect on the Syrian youth in the face of possible discrimination and marginalization by European societies.

Turkey, having been negatively affected by the Syrian conflict, has tried to live up to its commitment within the framework of the Astana process. The divergent politics of the Astana troika presented in Tehran and the bypassing of Iran in the subsequent Sochi meeting do not mean a complete split, but there is definitely a crack. Turkey can play a disruptive role if it can’t find common ground with Russia and Iran in the future.

This disruption could be carried out by supporting opposition forces in their resistance against the regime and its allies. Reportedly, Turkey already started the . President Erdogan’s statements affirm . Lately, he articulated that if the world turns a blind eye to the killing of tens of thousands of innocent people to further the regime’s interests, Turkey will not watch from the . Hence, it is safe to say that Turkey would likely resort to all the diplomatic channels to prevent a bloodbath in Idlib. Nonetheless, if the situation deteriorates, the Astana process might collapse.

At this stage, the situation in Idlib is increasingly tense. The international community must side with Turkey in the face of a probable full-scale assault on Idlib in an attempt to prevent a humanitarian and diplomatic crisis, and to secure European countries from another refugee crisis that could set off a wave of radicalization.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Arabic phrase Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim translates as “in the name of Allah the beneficent the merciful.” These words open all but one of the 114 chapters of the Quran. Muslims repeat these words before every act of worship, from making supplication to eating. This religion that I practice, adhere to, love and believe in is to me the most complete and all-encompassing rules for life I can imagine. My love for Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, exceeds that which I have even for my own mother, under whose feet, Islam teaches us, heaven lies.

Yet for all the blessings I feel Islam has brought me I found myself, in the months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, having to answer questions from a fellow undergraduate as to why my co-religionists felt it within their “Islamic duty” to kill nearly 3,000 innocent people. “Why did they do it?” I was asked. “Why are you asking me?” I retorted, and the response, which has since become commonplace, was, “Since you’re a Muslim.”

This is not the experience for members of the other great monotheistic faiths when outrages are undertaken in their name. Why is Islam singled out in this way? This shared guilt, and having to explain the actions of murderous psychopaths whose beliefs have been perverted by hate preachers have given rise not to abandonment or any crisis of faith within me, but to a newfound resolve, and indeed increased belief, in Islam’s religious tenets.

With this reinvigorated emaan (faith) I felt duty-bound to challenge other young men at risk of being radicalized. This was happening online, through the kinds of social media content coming out of Iraq and Daesh (the Islamic State), or from dangerous literature and speakers that the media were all-too-visible in the UK, such as Abu Hamza or Anjem Choudary.

Response to Tragedy

In keeping with my faith, I have tried to do what I could in my little corner of the world, even voluntarily, to prevent my deen��(way of life) from being associated with acts of heinous violence, on one hand, and from the slurs that the media and Islamophobes continue to spew daily, on the other. I have even approached the UK government to speak about my concerns around extremist content online, crafting counternarratives that I felt would help overcome these. I have also stressed that I was born, raised and remain a proud British citizen, ready to support the government’s work to both counterextremism and anti-Muslim hatred.

Perhaps it was my naivety, or perhaps it was the fact I said a few things some didn’t want to hear, but, despite my best efforts, my critique of the-then (2009) latest review of the failed to lead to the expected follow-up call after my meeting in the Home Office.

Some 10 years after the 9/11 attacks tragedy literally hit home for me through the death of my uncle, Mohammed Zabir. His passing came during Ramadan 2011 following an alleged hate crime. A passenger in his taxi on the night before an English Defense League (EDL) march in Middlesbrough severely injured my uncle. This was a totally unprovoked attack and I firmly believe — as the police did at the time — that the injuries he sustained directly led to his ultimate demise in hospital the next month. Once again an extremist narrative, this time shared in the pub by English hooligans, had, by way of sabotaging and misrepresenting my religion, lead to the death of an innocent person — my uncle.

My response to this tragedy started with love — that same love that motivates my faith, but also love for my country and my family. It has led me to a career as a social entrepreneur. Merging my faith and social concerns, makes films and content in order to counter the threat of extremism among British students through education and social unity programs. For example, we have now begun a pilot program with Kick It Out and the Premier League, delivering safeguarding and “Equality Inspires” sessions to football clubs.

As with our work with the Premier League, challenging extremism in all its forms means that we must come together as educators, neighbors, institutions and communities. The violent attacks against innocents at concerts in Manchester and on the bridges of London, but also the murder of the MP Jo Cox and the vehicle attack by far-right extremists near the Finsbury Park Mosque show that there are multiple threats and faces of intolerance, prejudice and hate, which, in the medium and long term, can be only defeated through education.

Mercy to All Mankind

For me, lesson number one is: Islam does not need saving from extremism. Islam is not at war with Britain, just as the latter is not at war with Muslims, even if extremists on both sides want that to be the case. Rather than feeding into this “us versus them” narrative, and rather than allocating mind-numbing terms such as “moderate Muslim” to those you agree with and “wahabbi” to those you don’t, it is vital that mainstream voices listen to what the majority of British Muslims say about Islam.

Prophet Muhammed was sent “as a mercy to all of mankind.” If there was a greater and more balanced education about him — not for the purposes of conversion, but community cohesion — I believe that much in the well of suspicion could be parched of the nourishment it currently receives. Put another way, no media agenda or the millions that fund extremist groups could ever negate the fact that your Muslim neighbor also enjoys a cup of tea and biscuits, and probably knows as much about football as you do.

So let’s start with what we share, rather than focussing upon and further entrenching divisions that make us all culturally poorer and politically tribal. If my work has demonstrated anything it is, first, that faith and understanding of the other can move mountains. But even for those of a different faith, and those without, I also know that solutions to serious issues within our communities can only come from the bottom up, lead with love by grassroots activists that are out there doing, helping, and caring, not posturing or inciting.

Islam alone does not need saving from extremism — all religions and communities do, and education is the key, not politics.

*[An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that the words��Bismillah, ar-Rahman, ar-Rahim open all of the chapters of the Quran.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In July, Norway remembered the victims of the Utøya and Oslo attacks of 2011. A temporary memorial was unveiled with the names of those killed. The attacks have had an enormous impact on a country with only 5 million inhabitants.

On July 22, 2011, 77 people lost their lives at the hands of a Norwegian right-wing extremist, Anders Behring Breivik. Most of the victims were young Labor Party (Arbeiderpartiet, AP) activists and youth politicians who were gathered at Utøya for their annual summer camp. The tragedy left a massive gap not only for their families, but also local communities and Norwegian politics.

We will never find out what would have happened if those killed at Utøya had lived and been able to pursue their careers and make their mark on Norway’s political scene. It is possible that they might have been able to steer the AP onto a different path, away from a right-wing, anti-immigrant neoliberalism that has marked the party’s��. As I have previously , the AP has done its best to keep up with the radical right, making it difficult for the electorate to see the difference between itself and established right-wing parties.

Eradicating Hatred

After the attacks, then-AP Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg promised to counter hatred with more tolerance, openness and love. A single terrorist was not going to be allowed to change Norway’s way of life — a liberal criminal justice system, tolerance and openness, with easy access to politicians and public buildings, was to be the response.

In the seven years since the massacre, much has moved in a negative direction. AP politicians, despite being the target of hatred, need to share responsibility with other political parties. Despite the promises made by the prime minister in 2011, there has never been a collective political strategy to come to terms with the fact that Norwegian society had produced the killer. The ideology he promoted was and is now , especially on social media, by radical-right activists, including .

Conservative (Høyre) Prime Minster Erna Solberg has highlighted the importance of eradicating hatred, yet her government has done little to address this. By ruling in coalition with ministers from the Progress Party (Fremskrittspartiet, FRP), she endorses hatred. Let us not forget that Breivik was a former member of FRP, which has, in fact, moved a long way toward the radical right in the years since the attacks. The mainstream has over the years legitimized FRP by working in local coalitions, including AP. FRP has now been in government since 2013 and is treated like any other party, despite its politicians in high office spreading racist and anti-immigrant propaganda. FRP has praised the neighboring , a party that grew out of the neo-Nazi movement in the 1980s.

It is difficult to imagine that this is the same party that, in 2011, accepted that its rhetoric had gone too far, saying in the aftermath of the massacre that it was going to reconsider how it conducted politics. In fact, then-leader of FRP Siv Jensen was the first party head to announce publicly that something had to change within the party (of which she was heavily criticized by the leader of its Danish sister party, Dansk Folkeparti). Yet on the anniversary of the massacre, a local branch of FRP posted a questionnaire on Facebook asking if refugee children should be allowed to attend breakfast and after-school clubs for free, receiving responses in forms of heart or angry face emojis.

At the commemoration ceremony, Prime Minster Solberg said that we live in times of false news and internet hatred. Indeed, every year, survivors and the victims’ families continue to receive death threats and hate mail from individuals and extremist groups, with the being that it was a pity that the killer had missed them or that they got what they deserved. Tarjei Jensen Bech, a survivor and the deputy mayor of Finnmark, is living with threats, such as “I think it would have been best for all of us if you had stayed at Utøya and not survived.”

One of Our Own

The mother of two survivors, Christin Kristoffersen, a politician and previous AP mayor of Svalbard, gets from people who call her a “traitor-mom and a whore,” and that it’s a pity her children didn’t get killed. She says that “we live in a society that is legitimizing aggression and hatred at a level never seen before.” Kristoffersen argues that Norwegian society has not worked through or come to terms with the fact that it nurtured and produced its “own” terrorist.

Norway needs to accept that it produced Anders Behring Breivik, but its politicians still haven’t managed to tackle the spread of hate and intolerance as promised in the aftermath of the tragedy. Norwegian politicians have not dealt with or intervened to undermine the racist ideology that made the terrorist attacks possible. The mainstream political parties are too concerned with winning elections and pandering to a section of the electorate that is influenced by racist propaganda and Islamophobia.

This may be no different from other European countries where the radical right is gaining power and influence, including Italy, Austria and the even more extreme Hungary and Poland. Hatred and fear are being online, despite the prime minister saying the government is now prioritizing action against hate speech on social media. Trying to curb hate speech on social media is futile when those in power are using it themselves.

*[The����is a partner institution of��.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The dissolution of the (Basque Country and Freedom), announced on May 2, was marked by celebration and expectation in Spain. But for a terror group that killed over 850 people in a nearly 50-year campaign of violence against the Spanish state, international celebration of the announcement was measured. This mellow reaction is perhaps less surprising when placed in the context of decreasing Basque separatist violence resulting from sustained action by Spanish law enforcement. Bucking trends that emphasize grievance and comprehensive reconciliation, the Spanish state succeeded by refusing to deal with ETA on its own terms, maintaining pressure even as the group demobilized, and preserving its commitment to liberal democratic ideals.

Few watching the security situation in northern Spain would find ETA’s demise very surprising. The group’s calls for armed action to preserve Basque identity were increasingly irrelevant after the end of Fransisco Franco’s dictatorship, which strived to establish a pan-Spanish identity that threatened the Basque regional identity. After Franco’s death in 1975, his efforts to Spanish as an artificial and universal language gave way to policies that recognized the patchwork of groups that made up the republic.

Spain’s post-Franco language policy was not intended to be a counterterrorism silver bullet, but it succeeded in diverting the wind from the sails of a group that prioritized cultural survival in the face of forced assimilation. While not a law enforcement tool per se, such accommodation could ameliorate the concerns of those susceptible to the message of existential ethnic conflict.

As Spain joined the democratic world order, potential political obstacles to collaboration were sidelined and arguments based on Basque marginalization — a key ETA claim — became harder to maintain. Embracing multiculturalism alone did not defeat the group, but it was effective at refuting at least part of the terrorist group’s foundational narrative and showing that Basque language and culture could live peacefully within the Spanish state. Spain succeeded without engaging directly with ETA’s grievance narrative, despite counterterrorism theory’s emphasis on development and inclusion as a panacea.

Even as ETA faded from view, between Basque Country and the rest of Spain have , primarily driven by taxation, economic pressures and political preferences. But rather than focusing on addressing every grievance with its Basque citizens, the Spanish government succeeded in disrupting ETA through a specific focus on arrests, raids and public pressure. While post-Franco Spain has shown greater tolerance for regionalism, the state remains unified and committed to democratic ideals.

Spain’s approach to countering ETA may seem counterintuitive at first. Armed movements cement their identities in narratives that highlight collective grievance as justification for action, violent or otherwise. But while it would be foolish to diminish the suffering of marginalized groups, engaging with armed groups on the level of their own rhetoric also can be counterproductive.

Terrorist groups — especially those seeking to establish a new state — often seek legitimacy by trying to portray their actions as equal to that of their opponent, namely the state. Sitting across a table from a terrorist leader in a formal setting can lend the appearance of legitimacy to a group’s claim to be the sole representative of a disenfranchised people. By agreeing to make concessions in return for a cessation of attacks, the state can actually incentivize future violence. At the same time, this might disincentivize members of the same disenfranchised group to resolve their grievances through civil society.

What’s more, the state’s well-meaning efforts can overlook the layers of bureaucracy, each with its own motivations, within terrorist groups. As with any other organization, armed groups have factions that would like to see their own interests advanced. Had the Spanish state engaged with ETA negotiators until a consensual solution was found, it might have found itself running in circles with a group increasingly irrelevant on the ground but desperate to maintain credibility in the eyes of its supporters and members.

Mid-level members who have carried out multiple crimes might see little benefit to peace deals that fail to guarantee their freedom as more prominent members move to post-terrorism careers. Such conditions invite violence, as spoilers with little to lose have everything to gain from a dramatic return to nationalist violence. This is a classic tactic of militant and terrorist groups that plays to the asymmetric advantage that armed groups cultivate: the threat of unpredictable violence in pursuit not only of a political goal but also of survival.

Lessons in Counterterrorism

ETA’s demise provides lessons that challenge some popularly accepted counterterrorism maxims. First, its dissolution was the result of a lengthy process, not a dramatic victory. Cheers erupted when Colombia finally concluded a (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) in November 2016, but such celebrations were premature. A group like the FARC — far larger than ETA, with ample access to weaponry and money — has the means to return to conflict if the political and military environment proves attractive. The treatment of in the 2018 elections should further worry those who see the group’s end through electoral participation, as FARC’s incentives to return to violence may remain despite the peace agreement.

In defeating ETA, Spanish authorities also challenged ideas that seek to paint terrorist groups in a more sympathetic light. While Spain has made commendable and necessary democratic advances since Franco’s death, it did not make the mistake of trying to “develop” its way out of the threat by promising investment and freedoms to legitimize the use of violence. And while Basque and other languages were legalized, Spain did not fall victim to ETA’s narrative and maintained its commitment to democracy and security hand in hand. ETA’s unilateral final declaration suggests that the group saw no end in site for its armed activities and no hope for winning further concessions. Former vow to continue pursuing the group also suggests continued efforts to arrest violent Basque separatists.

ETA’s dissolution is not just a cause for celebration. It cuts through some cherished myths of counterterrorism that circulate in the public domain and forces us to think critically about the situational success of certain hardnosed tactics. ETA’s demise will provide a useful case study in the relatively young field of counterterrorism studies for decades to come.

*[Young Professionals in Foreign Policy is a partner institution of 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On June 4, the UK government published the latest version of its ��(CONTEST.) The strategy has developed significantly since its early inception in 2003 and first public edition in 2006. The four pillars of the strategy — Prevent, Prepare, Protect and Pursue — have not been without controversy, particularly , which specifically aims to work within the education system to identify radicalization early on.

So, what does the most recent version tell us about the state of the government’s perceptions on the threat of terrorism today and, most importantly, about its priorities? Firstly, the very fact that the strategy needed reviewing and enhancing shows that Britain, despite proclamations from across the pond by , appears to be acting on the reality of global analysis that the so-called Islamic State (IS) is not only alive and well, but remains the number one terror threat to the UK and the West.

By no means defeated, the Islamic State is now in 18 countries, compared to just seven in 2014, more than at any point during the existence of the caliphate. Operations by the group’s affiliates, terrorist cells and lone actors, as we have observed in recent weeks in Europe and Asia, remain a relentless reality. On the same day as the new strategy was announced, “one of Britain’s youngest female terror plotters” was sentenced as part of the country’s first ��for planning an attack on the British Museum.

The revised framework identifies the , more of it and faster, from the security services and prison authorities, down to the charity commissions and local government. While all possible emphasis should be put on the sharing of intelligence, it seems difficult to understand why we have have not been sharing all possible information across government organizations already. Why are we sitting on intelligence?

It is estimated that Britain’s security services may hold records on as many as 20,000 individuals of interest, not all of whom constitute an immediate threat. There is a growing concern that as the number of people convicted of terrorism-related crimes grows, so too does the number of individuals due to be released back into society.

Further announcements see domestic emphasis on transactions of interest, such as the stockpiling of chemicals or potentially harmful goods, and the need to react to people acting suspiciously when hiring vehicles. The government review also allows for an increase in security services staff to deal with the growing concern of the public and the threat of terrorism, although it is unclear which of the three elements of the country’s intelligence services — MI5, MI6 and GCHQ — will benefit most.

But where does all this point toward? The answer, in some respects, is hidden on page 70 of the report, where “overseas priorities” are granted just eight pages. The academic world is certainly divided over the causes of radicalization and extremism, but that does not appear to translate into substantive policy. There are undoubtedly improvements and, at the very least, the recognition that counterterrorism work must be carried out overseas. However, the strategy is light on substance while openly recognizing the threat is now “dispersed” — a problem that could well have been averted if the military had been used more widely and deployed with a substantive operational remit other than to “train and advise.”

This is not to say troops such as the Special Forces aren’t working on the front line, and it is encouraging to see funding for them and other elements of UK front-line operations, such as the Foreign and Commonwealth Counter Terrorism and Extremism Network, see additional funding and manpower. But these measures alone, in what has become a much wider problem — particularly concerning is the spread of extremism across North Africa on Europe’s doorstep — are not tantamount to a wider joined-up military strategy. The intent on cooperation, both bilateral and multilateral, is all well and good, but even America is its number of Special Forces operatives in Africa with an eye on down scaling due to “other priorities.”

CONTEST remains staggeringly light on international obligation and cooperation, certainly in any form of detail or clarity for the military. The strategy affectively puts most its eggs in one basket of domestic prevention. There is no question of the vital role domestic counterterrorism measures play where education and local work in communities are paramount to cohesion. However, one of the greatest components of Islamic State’s strategy is technology and the online platforms through which the group can exploit individuals and whole families. Active cells and individual followers alike have continued their activity — and are likely to continue — despite the growing emphasis on the domestic counterterrorism capability.

Further, IS and its self-proclaimed caliphate is still not simply an ideology — it is very much a living, tangible organization that actively seeks to materialize the doctrine it subscribes to at all costs. It is far too simplistic to take Donald Trump’s approach to ISIS, which dismisses the group’s�� ability to carry out its political agenda with efficient military force. IS fighters may act like savages and kill indiscriminately, but there remains a a political goal where their beliefs can be lived out under working social and economic frameworks.

How is it then plausible, for the United Kingdom�� — or any sovereign country that has remained under constant threat of terrorism, where, by the security services’ own admission the authorities are continuously working to stop new attacks — to neglect to create a much more powerful, pragmatic strategy for moving the front line of domestic terrorism to its various international sources?

Ultimately, IS proves to still be the greatest threat to British citizens, despite the rise of the far right in the UK, and��it is unlikely to subside any time soon. In fact, this form of extremism is building, with al-Qaeda quietly regrouping across parts of Asia and the Middle East. We cannot analyze the threat posed by terrorist groups by the amount of territory they currently hold but rather by the spread and vitality of their malignant ideology. This means, in the case of the Islamic State, that we can expect no less than a prolonged war of attrition in the current climate and approach to counterterrorism.

The UK and other countries not only need to work internally and externally to improve intelligence sharing and develop a sophisticated domestic policy, but also get serious about the international obligation we have to our citizens at the real front line of today’s terrorism.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On April 12, Britain’s emergency “war cabinet” sat to deliberate airstrikes against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Syria as a response to yet another chemical attack against his own people. By late evening there was backing of Prime Minister Theresa May’s position to undertake as part of a US-led coalition, which was launched on April 14 with hitting suspected chemical weapons sites in Damascus and Homs.

The war in Syria has been raging for seven long years, having been allowed to spiral out of control by the international community. The current situation, however, shows an alarming continuation of a trend that has blighted the very fabric of Western policy in the region. Conflict and intervention have taken on a new dynamic since 9/11, underpinned by a staggering misunderstanding of the realities of war, the variables and the two-way dimension that military operations entail. Ultimately, policy and strategy have not found common understanding in recent campaigns, most notably Iraq and Afghanistan. The failure in both cases falls at the feet of the political class and leaders at given junctures.

President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair instigated the current status quo in intervention policy in the early 2000s and immediately undermined and systematically neglected the strategic implications of this new policy. The infamous “war on terror,” which subsequently morphed into the “long war,” failed to understand war and its nature, emphasizing, or rather suggesting, perpetual conflict. These new campaigns saw endless strategic changes on the ground as dynamics fundamentally changed. Because strategy could not serve the ends of policy, the appreciation and understanding of war was fundamentally missed.

In Afghanistan, the British mission continuously changed along strategic lines, as the original policy became convoluted and ultimately lost. There was no consistence from the starting position of reconstruction and development, through to overt operations to win land from the Taliban to advising and training the local military. Similarly, in the US-led Iraq campaign, policy and strategy were at loggerheads. During his first press conference as US forces commander in Iraq, commented on the strategic decision to significantly increase troop numbers as part of the surge campaign by suggesting that military action was necessary, but “not sufficient.” As Sami Ramadani wrote in 2007, Bush and Blair “allegedly launched the war at first to save the world from Saddam’s WMD, then to establish democracy, then to fight al-Qaeda’s terrorism and now to prevent civil war and Syrian or Iranian intervention.”

Oratory from President Donald Trump in recent days has been its usual drumbeat of aggression amidst a global symposium of watered-down anger directed at Assad. But throughout the last decade, rhetoric has failed to establish a cohesive policy, both on a state and multilateral levels. “,” declared Prime Minister May after the Islamic State-inspired attacks on London Bridge. Her predecessor, David Cameron, likewise suggested the UK faced an “” threat from the group. Despite this, resources were not aligned to the military to resolve these problems; in fact, defense spending was cut.

Since the end of the Cold War, among the international political class there has been a desire to engage in short wars — wars with a tangible end, winners as such. Iraq and Afghanistan have frightened us into inaction due to our incoherent policy over this period. Russia has been able to annex Crimea, the Islamic State still exists (despite Donald Trump’s to “bomb the shit outta them”) — the scourge of swathes of territory across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia — and the West still has no answer.

Policy toward Syria has been shaped by our post-9/11 conflicts as both the US and the UK were undoubtedly war-weary after a decade of conflict. The emphasis and time to intervene in Syria has long passed, in part due to the political elites not having the stomach to sell another military campaign. As the war in Afghanistan was winding down during 2013-2014, Syria instead deteriorated into the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, creating mass migration of refugees, the destruction of vast proportion of the country and a perfect vacuum for Islamic State to exploit.

But this latest argument for airstrikes suggests once more that no matter how strongly we may feel about chemical attacks against the civilian population, that it is yet another ad-hoc policy with absolutely no long-term strategic consideration. Airstrikes will undoubtedly cause casualties among Syrian government forces, slow and hinder Assad’s murderous military machine — but what then? Is it only crimes of this nature that deserve intervention? Once we mete out punishment for the Douma chemical attack, will we then step back and allow Assad to continue his brutal destruction of all who oppose him? The uncertainty amongst political leaders, and indeed amongst both the governing party and the opposition, about backing the airstrikes raises more policy questions than answers.

Bombs, no matter how precise their laser targeting is, will not end the conflict in Syria, where clear policy and understanding of military strategy remain wanting. The British government should work closer with planning and strategy advisors, revert to academics and scholars of modern warfare and terrorism to understand the new rules of war and the pitfalls of policy without substance. The military can be part of the solution, but not until the political class changes its ideological framework and understands that post-9/11 conflicts were flawed conceptually, creating ultimately unwinnable wars for the military.

War should never be treated as a political end, a knee-jerk reaction to an event; it should never be viewed through that prism. War is not, as Clausewitz suggested, the continuation of policy, but rather it is, as Syria has proved, the very failure of policy.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It seems that studying terrorism and terrorists through the prism of past criminal activities has become particularly fashionable. Western media outlets have been awash with articles that effortlessly make this connection. For instance, in the aftermath of the recent terrorist attack in Manhattan, CNN reported on how the had multiple interactions with law enforcement agencies in several states.

Drug smuggling also appears to offer a route into the world of Islamist terrorism. , was sentenced to two years imprisonment in 2012 for smuggling hashish between Morocco and Spain. Brahim and Salah Abdeslam, the responsible for the deadly November 2015 Paris attacks, were also known to police for drug smuggling. Salah was later arrested and is currently , which is scheduled for December.

Making these connections, in turn, reflects the emergence of fresh thinking concerning the crime-terror nexus. Traditionally, analysts have focused on as distinct organizations, and asked how they coexist and learn from each other. However, a more novel and innovative approach considers thugs and, in the process, a perfect example of gangster jihadists. Given their past, they are certainly less shy about using violence and can use existing criminal networks to finance and coordinate their activities, not to mention getting their hands on weapons with relative ease.

Adding substance to this debate are additional reports warning that a . Petty criminals are increasingly bypassing more classic forms of Islam (and indeed fundamentalism) and moving toward more nihilistic forms of religion and protest. As a result, the so-called Islamic State’s European legions have turned classic definitions of terrorism on their heads simply by recruiting and radicalizing young thugs.

The idea that petty criminals are “evolving” into a new breed of gangster jihadists and mass murderers seems compelling. But haven’t we seen this before? Take the case of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the infamous al-Qaeda terrorist who was once known as Mr. Marlboro, a reference to his previous career as a tobacco smuggler. And let’s not forget that the plotters behind the 2004 Madrid attacks also had criminal pasts and connections to organized crime.

Such apparent contradictions underpin the fact that nobody really knows for sure whether today’s terrorists are really yesterday’s criminals, thugs and gangsters. That’s what makes our into this conundrum so vital. There are certainly indications that this is a growing phenomenon in francophone countries. Among the hundreds of French and Belgian foreign fighters and jihadists, an estimated 50% have criminal records varying from petty crime to more serious offenses. The same might also be said of Germany, which has also experienced a recent upsurge in terrorist activity.

However, the scope and scale of the phenomenon inevitably varies from country to country. Italy is a case in point, where there is growing evidence of organizational cooperation between Islamist terrorists and the mafia. It was recently reported, for example, that control had, with mafia assistance, made its way through Italian refineries and into European energy markets. And then there’s Northern Ireland, where “old school terrorists” with a long track record of terror activities on both sides of the Loyalist-Republican divide have turned to crime for funding purposes.

There are, as always, exceptions: The now defunct Basque separatist group ETA had a strict policy of not recruiting criminals into it ranks; the Irish Republican Army (IRA), albeit funded through criminal enterprises like fuel or even pig smuggling, would periodically target “criminals” as exercises in public relations. Undoubtedly, however, that allow them forge documents, “improve” fundraising and more.

While fresh thinking on connections between criminal activities and terrorism is welcome, it is clearly still at a nascent stage. By focusing on over a thousand individuals arrested for terrorism offenses in 11 European countries, we seek to determine once and for all if we are really experiencing a new and dangerous phenomenon.

In this respect, the fact that we will only focus on those individuals who have been arrested for terrorist offenses and convicted (rather than people who have faced legal action as a result of traveling to Syria, for example), will give our research a more representative sample. Our two-year search for bona fide gangster jihadists is still in its inception phase, and we are hundreds of profiles away from drawing a cast-iron conclusion. For now, we might as well surmise that there is no gangster jihad, but there are some very successful gangster jihadists.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Germany got its very own electoral shock on September 24, when the . For the first time in more than half a century, the far right will be represented in the German parliament, with more than 90 seats. Although it’s now Germany’s third most popular party — behind the Christian Democrats (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SDP) — the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is still too toxic to become part of a ruling coalition.

But the AfD will have influence well beyond its numbers. “In a nutshell,”��, “things are about to get a lot nastier.”

The AfD’s electoral victory has destroyed the taboo in Germany that has kept the far right on the fringes. It will inevitably pull the ruling Christian Democrats further to the right, particularly on social issues like immigration. It may even have an impact on the ongoing discussions about the fate of the European Union.

Beyond Germany, the AfD’s success will give a shot in the arm to other far-right formations, particularly after the National Front’s losses in the last French elections. Looking a little further down the road, if it manages to return to parliament in the next election, the AfD will qualify for government money to create its own party foundation, which will enable Germany’s far right to spread its message all over the world.

Europe’s rebellion against liberalism — in both its economic and social versions — is continuing to shake up politics as usual. An equally unsettling question, though, is how much it will shake up geopolitics as usual.

What the AfD Wants

The far right in Germany has followed much the same script as the Tea Party and the Trump movement in the United States. It began in 2013 with several academics angry about the eurozone (and, by extension, the EU). But just like ��until he started talking about the so-called “threat” of immigrants in Virginia — and ended up taking House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s seat in 2014 — the AfD only became truly popular by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment.

As Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats welcomed refugees into Germany in 2015 — an influx, to date, of around 1.3 million people — the AfD began to peel away support from the center-right CDU. Even the purportedly moderate faces of the AfD, like Jorg Muethen,����that “in some German cities, I struggle to find Germans on the streets,” thus equating German citizenship with skin color or other external markers.

The party has advocated border controls — effectively abrogating the Schengen system of free movement within many EU member states — as well as new border patrols. Frauke Petry, a party leader who is also considered a moderate, has said that these new border police units��should if necessary as they try to make it into the country.

Central to the anti-immigrant message has been Islamophobia. The party plastered the streets of Germany with posters like the one that showed two young, bikini-clad women from behind that read, “Burkas? We like bikinis.” On Facebook, it distributed an ad showing bloody tire tracks with the caption: “The tracks left by the world chancellor in Europe,” linking Merkel’s refugee policy to terrorist attacks around the continent.

The party has other deeply disturbing positions, like its denial of climate change. But what has caused some division within the party is its attitude toward German history. One party leader, . Since current German policy is firmly in the camp of condemnation of Nazis, it’s quite sobering to imagine the kind of policy that Hocke prefers.

This German corollary to Trump’s appeal to white supremacists and neo-Nazis has divided the party. this week after announcing that she wouldn’t sit in parliament with the party faction. Reportedly, Petry has wanted to purge the party of its extremist elements — at least those who take an extremist position on the history question — just as Marine Le Pen attempted to clean up the National Front by kicking her anti-Semitic father out of the French far-right party.

According to��, 35 of 94 are “right-wing extremists.” So it’s not just about a purge of one or two bad apples. Expect the AfD to split along the same��realo��and��fundi��— realist vs. fundamentalist — fault line of the Greens.

A key connection between AfD and Donald Trump, the UK Independence Party and right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is��their . He’s responsible for the bikini and tire tracks ad campaigns. He’s adept at fusing anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and race-baiting messages. But with one of his suggestions for the AfD, Harris went too far. The party rejected his suggestion of “Germany for Germans” as a campaign slogan. Perhaps it will resurface in the next election, if the so-called moderates abandon the party.

Has the Right Already Won?

Finally, what would a modern election be without Russian interference?

In the lead-up to the election, several major newspapers��noted��that . Perhaps they spoke too soon. First to consider are the Russian speakers, those with German heritage who’ve relocated to Germany since the 1980s — the right kind of immigrants from AfD’s point of view. The ��comes from this constituency, and it has helped the party become the second most popular one in former East Germany.

Then there was the obligatory visit to Moscow, as Petry made her pilgrimage last February and��met with, among others, the truly beyond-the-pale . As the election entered its last phase, the usual trolls and Twitter bots came out to play, at least��some of them . Again, as with Trump, the Kremlin isn’t interested in promoting a particular party in the hopes that it will win or reorient the country’s foreign policy. It simply wants to shake up a status quo that it perceives as tilted against Russia.

Even though the radical right has lost some recent elections — notably in France and in the Netherlands — it has nevertheless transformed the debate in Europe. Consider the immigration situation. This month, the two-year program to relocate 160,000 migrants from Greece and Italy to other EU member states came to an end. It managed to��, and only with great effort. Some countries — notably Poland and Hungary — refused to locate a single migrant. More than 20 member states failed to meet their obligatory target by 50%.

Far-right populists poisoned the discourse on immigration, denouncing millions of people as well as linking this “scourge” to the EU, multiculturalism and liberal politics more generally. Throughout the continent, EU member states are tightening their immigration laws, increasing the number of deportations and sweeping away informal settlements����in the northern French town of Calais.

“The right-wing populists have already won the upcoming elections in Europe, no matter what the outcome is,”����in��Deutsche Welle. “The EU has done away with human rights and Western standards of civilization by cooperating with the Libyan coastguard, African dictators, and deporting people back to war zones.”

Then there’s the issue of helping countries like Greece exit their perpetual financial crisis.��Discussions this week��between seem to point the way toward fresh loans and the prospect of Greece becoming fiscally independent by next August. But if Merkel has to bring the Free Democrats into a coalition government, she’ll have to reckon with that party’s “red line” on reforming the eurozone to facilitate “fiscal transfers” to countries like Greece. The euroskeptic AfD will rejoice.

Elsewhere in Europe

The French turned back the tide of hatred in the last presidential and parliamentary elections. The National Front, once seemingly on an unstoppable roll, now has only eight seats in parliament, and its leader . In the wake of Le Pen’s losses, pundits wondered if Trump has had a bracing effect on Europe. Europeans see how Trump has transformed the United States into a three-ring circus, and they want none of it.

But that’s France. Elsewhere, the far right continues its march. In Norway, for instance, the right-wing Progress Party pulled in a respectable 15% in September elections, good enough for it to continue as a coalition partner with the Conservative Party. But perhaps that’s because the Progress Party, despite its anti-immigrant and pro-nationalist approach, isn’t��.

A more authentically radical right is poised to take over in Austria in elections next month. There, the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) is����than the AfD — in the low 20s. It would be doing even better if the center-right People’s Party (OVP) hadn’t started to take up its anti-immigration, Islamophobic message. The bullet dodged at the end of last year when independent t defeated Freedom Party leader Norbert Hofer seems to have taken a boomerang trajectory.

Worse, the center right in Austria, unlike its counterpart in Germany, has no problems with forming a government with the far right. Given that����— more than in Germany or France or Switzerland — it can count on considerable popular support for such a coalition.

In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, a����is likely to win next month’s presidential election. Andrej Babis, currently the finance minister, is a billionaire who’s skeptical of the European Union and wants to close the EU’s borders to keep out immigrants. His involvement in a corruption scandal involving one of his enterprises illegally receiving EU subsidies — oh, the hypocrisy! — doesn’t seem to have harmed his popular standing.

The AfD’s win may well encourage this political trajectory in Europe and beyond. It’s still hard to imagine the party successfully pushing through legislation or having much impact on governance. But if the party gets above 5% ��of the vote in the next parliamentary elections, it will win the right to form its own international foundation. Of course, the Bundestag might deploy various stalling tactics to prevent such an official funding stream — as it did when the left-wing Die Linke qualified — but there’s a strong bias in German political culture to observe the rules.

I’ve worked with German foundations all over the world: Friedrich Ebert (Social Democrats), Friedrich Naumann (Free Democrats), Heinrich Boll (the Green Party) and Rosa Luxemburg (Die Linke). Funded by German taxpayers, they’ve all provided valuable support for civil society and in promoting useful exchange of ideas. The prospect of German government money helping to spread far right-wing politics globally is a nightmare scenario. Germany just took one step closer to helping globalize the alt-right and recycle from history’s dustbin something that ought never again see the light of day: a Fascist International.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Born in Derby, her mother a local woman, her father a painter and decorator from Lahore, Pakistan, she has what seems to everyone who knows her an ordinary life. She goes to school, plays and mixes with other children, seeming to relish life in the community. At 17, she goes to university in Birmingham, gets caught up in the usual cataract of night clubs, bars and parties, graduates with an upper second-class degree, gets a job in hotel management, marries, has a child and settles for what we might call a manageable normal reality. Then, at 29, she vanishes.

Her family is mystified. The next we hear of her is that she, along with eight others, is killed in an apparent suicide bombing in the north Syrian town Kefraya.

This is a composite, made up of elements from several actual cases. But all the main features are germane: born and reared in an environment that appears at first welcoming, then, later, malevolent; progressing in what seems a conventional manner, then experiencing a disorienting narrative jag, something like an epiphany that hastens a reconsideration of practically everything, including the purpose and value of one’s own life. We can only guess at the reasons.

People appear to commit themselves to jihad for the same reason that people climb mountains: because they are there. Those who choose not to pursue jihad or climb mountains remain incredulous and perplexed, finding little rhyme and still less reason for activities that seem part religious, part purposeless, and wholly suicidal. Our inability to accept the scarcely credible doesn’t make it incredible; it means we don’t have the conceptual means or wherewithal to make sense of what appears senseless.

The Everlasting Bonfire

No one knows with any certainty exactly why young British Muslims have imperiled or surrendered their lives and, in many cases, wantonly killed innocent people, including other Muslims for what is, for many, a fathomless cause. What explanations have been offered seem chained to one culture without ever suggesting the distant possibilities of those beyond. According to the BBC, . This has no peer or comparison in British history: Some�� between 1936 and 1939, and their efforts were understandable. They were opposing the threat of fascism.

For young, disillusioned Muslims, the threat probably appears no less palpable or distinguishable: They see the West’s seemingly disconnected conflicts with Muslims as part of a concerted global attempt to destroy Islam.

For many, the default culprit is the internet, alive with ulema (Muslim scholars who are believed to have a specialist knowledge of Islamic sacred law) earnestly advocating death to infidels in the struggle against all enemies of Islam. The enemies are, they say, anyone who is not a Muslim. Their preaching is apparently reinforced locally by other men of god, comparably bellicose and equally opposed to the kuffar, or unbelievers. As 51�Թ�’s Atul Singh opines, “these disenfranchised young men are vulnerable to charismatic ‘clerics with a cause’ who often push them down the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.”

No doubt some imams do make proclamations on the internet and have their commands backed up at certain mosques. But the internet is almost a natural magnet for impassioned ranters angrily criticizing the world and everyone in it and encouraging others to join them in their inner world. Few take them seriously. And perhaps at another time in history, few would take the jihadist imam and his tirades too seriously.

The point is that now, many do take them seriously. This suggests a receptive audience, ready and willing to evaluate, accept and respond to new ideas that urge a comprehensive reform of existing worldviews —��what we now call radicalization.

Muslims in Britain, those of Pakistani descent in particular, often regard their religion as their primary source of identity and one that supersedes being British. Disaffected youth, aspirational achievers and conflicted brides are all parts of a polychromatic montage in which there are also surgeons and call-center workers as well as the corner shopkeeper, who is not so much a stereotype as a model of diligent enterprise in an sometimes hostile environment.

For some, vicarious experience shapes awareness, suggesting that the conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims elsewhere in the world shapes their own experience in everyday life. The mindset of young people physically removed from the actual conflict in, for example, Myanmar, is impacted by the devastation of Rohingya Muslims there.

They learn of and see images of homes being torched and neighbors turning on neighbors as the brutal military campaign against Muslims continues. This is imagined as a war on Islam in the eyes of some British Muslims: Global conflict provides a terrifying schema. Is it a coincidence or a reflection of the young Muslim’s experience that there is resonance in events in faraway places and in the not too distant past? Lebanon, 1982. Bulgaria, 1989. Srebrenica, 1995. Chechnya, 2009.

The 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, along with the Iraq War, seem like contemporary counterparts to the medieval expeditions to recover the Holy Land from Muslims.

Believing you are the victim of oppressive, prejudicial policing makes sense if you accept that you are part of an unjust exercise of force that forms a wider pattern – what some call “Othering.” They might be thankful they’re not actually in some conflict-torn times or places, but they can find reference points in their own dislocated lives.

Signals of Transcendence

Bizarre as many find it, some British Muslims believe they can enrich their religious sensibilities as well as furthering a political and social cause by finding what the sociologist Peter Berger once called “signals of transcendence” in common experiences.

There are signals every time a young Muslim feels she or he is unfairly detained under the Terrorism Act, or misinterpreted by the media or issued a rebuff by a prospective employer because she wears a hijab. Cumulatively they become a pattern that has associations with the wider struggle of Muslims, as they see it. Some ask: Why on earth do young people brought up in a culture that disapproves of sexism, supports diversity and promotes inclusivity, even countenance embracing a religion that espouses their opposites and adheres to a credo that seems atavistic?

The response might be that inequality, persecution and exploitation are not the exclusive preserve of Islam. The same media that circulates news of events in Myanmar disseminates stories of police harassment of ethnic minorities in Leeds, of innocent victims of a fire for which a local London council might be responsible, and of serious sexual assaults across the UK that increase year after year. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But the fatally flawed logic still has some purchase, it seems. Perhaps there’s a kind of cognitive triage in which certain evils are assigned degrees of urgency to decide the order they take. Subordinating women is not good; but oppressing all Muslims, male and female, is worse, according to this logic.

It’s probable that converts — to jihad, that is — scrutinize past lives, searching for fragments of memory and experience. This retrospective interpretation renders what they once considered normal, a façade masking a deeper, more sinister but more authentic reality. Their parents and peers were duped by a world that wishes to subdue and suppress Islam.

The ability to condemn what they regard as a monstrous evil suggests a belief in a moral ordering of the universe that may even be comfortable with the notion of hell. The insistence on hope in the face of approaching death implies a conviction that death may not be final: For some Muslims, their own death, which is��a within just a few years of them leaving the UK, is actually a blessing; it delivers them from hell to heaven. These are concepts alien to world in which faith has diminished.

One generation’s satisfaction propels the rage of the next. The first two generations of Asians to migrate to and settle in the UK accommodated insults, rejections and violence. The third, it seems, is more variegated in its orientation. While many persevere in education, business and the professions, others invalidate the legitimacy of the West’s dominion and challenge the world’s order. It is a perplexing contradiction.

Radicalization is enigmatic, in the proper sense of the word — a puzzle, a mystery, an unresolved conundrum. Think about the earlier case again: British-born, British-educated, British value-inculcated people who leave parents, family and friends to challenge the world they were brought up in and to lay down their lives in the process. The motivational mixture that propels conversion to jihadism escapes me. I suspect it escapes others too. But I’m sure that our present explanations of the radicalized, self-sacrificial defiance of many young Muslims are, at best, partial and, at worst, misleading.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On July 26, a German court sentenced Sven Lau, a known recruiter of foreign fighters, . One immediate concern following the continued loss of territory formerly controlled by Islamist terrorist organizations like the Islamic State (IS) and al-Nusra Front (now as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or Liberation of the Levant Organization) is that the surviving foreign fighters that poured into the region from Europe will now be returning home. Over 900 people from Germany alone are estimated to have left the country to fight with terrorist and extremist groups, , meaning that Lau’s case will likely be one of many.

Other European countries . Simply jailing extremists in the general prison population, rather than having the salutary effect of containing extremist ideology, has had the obverse outcome. The result of this has been the metastasis of Islamic extremist beliefs to non-extremists. As the European prison systems take in more individuals with a nexus to terrorism, the need to rethink current models of incarceration is paramount.

While the focus on recent Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe has largely been on the correlation between terrorism and immigration, the success of Islamist ideologues proselytizing within the prison systems of various European countries presents a more worrying source of radicalization. In the case of the January 2015 attacks on the magazine��Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher Kosher supermarket in Paris, for instance, two of the perpetrators, Chérif��Kouachi and Almedy Coulibaly, were products of the radical Islam pervading France’s notorious Fleury-Mérogis��prison: Within its chaotic confines, Chérif��and Almedy came under the sway of the . The father of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the IS ringleader most notorious for his role in planning the November 2015 Paris attacks, said his son, arrested on multiple occasions for robbery, was likely to .

Second and third generation descendants of Muslim migrants who came to Europe in decades past, unfettered by the less purist versions of Islam of their immigrant parents, yet not quite fitting into the Western milieu in which they have grown up, .

The sense of community provided by the Islamists mandates ideological purity and unmitigated devotion as the only prerequisites for acceptance amongst their ranks; the absence of theological grounding to rebut Islamist narratives makes those targeted for recruitment even more vulnerable. A convenient fusion of extreme beliefs and an already demonstrated history of violence allow radical preachers to redirect their new recruits toward extremist ends. Acts of violent jihad can serve a redemptive purpose for those criminals wanting to right the wrongs of their past in light of their newfound conversions.

So, what can be done to remedy this issue moving forward?

Propitiously coinciding with the arrest of extremist ideologue Anjem Chaudhry on charges of supporting IS, the United Kingdom has recently started implementing moves in the right direction by . The Netherlands already has such an approach for its inmates jailed for terrorist offences, of those within these special units makes drawing conclusions as to their effectiveness difficult. Yet this approach remains an attractive option given that it limits the contagion to those already holding extremist views and prevents the spread to those who do not.

Quarantining is a start in the right direction but it is not a perfect solution. One possible consequence is that the co-location of those with a propensity toward violence and extremism could bolster planning networks for attacks upon release from prison. As such, “extremist only” wings need to be monitored carefully specifically to avoid this possibility.

In an by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, some of the following recommendations would serve as valuable accompaniments for those in the general prison population: clamping down on anti-Muslim discrimination so as not to encourage the formation of identity-based gangs for protection, implementing mixed programs for prisoners that combine vocational training with religious re-education, and facilitating non-extremist networks outside prison to combat the tendency to return to extremist environs.

European prisons have served successfully as centers for the inculcation of extremist ideals for too long. With the repeated manufacturing of holy warriors out of simple street thugs, Europe needs new ideas. The influx of those returning from the battlefield after having served the jihadist cause will fill Europe’s prison systems with the most ideologically committed and violent acolytes. While incarceration is required to deal with these returnees and violent domestic extremists, history has shown that it is also a source of the problem. It need not be. With a continued dedication to reforming the system, the use of prisons as terrorism seminaries can be greatly diminished.

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The media and political responses to the Finsbury Park attack in London have been lame. Islamophobia is the driver of far-right extremism inasmuch as far-right extremism thrives on Islamist radicalization. Arguably,����would not have been radicalized if Muslims were not being demonized in the media on a daily basis. He had no other motivation than wanting to “kill all Muslims.” Osborne has now been rightly charged with the terrorism-related murder of and for injuring 11 others.

The murderous violent intent of terrorists derives from hate leading to violence and death. It is directed toward specific ethnic, religious or racial minority or majority groups. Otherwise, any “mentally ill,” “unemployed loner” or a “drifter” with a history of domestic violence or abuse toward others could seemingly carry out this act of violence.

Therefore, it becomes a problem for newspapers and other media outlets that do not emphasize randomness in these forms of violence and extremism. In underexposing the objective explanations behind the political or ideological motivations behind attacks, it intimates a far greater demographic capable of such acts.

However, Islamism, in the general sense, is presented as thriving among radicalized Muslims who use it to legitimize violence. It avoids all nuance. In the case of far-right extremists, not only is there limited recognition of the wide-ranging problem of far-right extremism and terrorism, but overemphasizing the “loner” angle is a useful distraction away from implicating the wider negative structural and cultural forces at play. Meanwhile, Islamophobia has normalized in society to such an extent that even to evoke it is to suggest that these challenging groups, in particular Muslims, are being disingenuous, at best, or downright treacherous, at worst.

Further, in reporting on responses to attacks, Islamist extremists��are presented as purely ideological, while English or other white ethnic individuals are said to have social and psychological problems. This suggests a general degree of acceptance on the part of society that their violence toward Muslims is somehow legitimate — i.e., because of something that Muslims espouse or adhere to, e.g. their faith, or because they are some responsible, as an entire faith community, for the actions of a limited few.

RADICALIZATION AND ISLAMOPHOBIA

Orientalism, scientific racism and now racialization��based on ethnicity, cultural and religious category suggest institutionalized Islamophobia: wholesale, widespread, menacing and omnipotent. If plans go ahead to introduce Islamophobia as a counterterrorism (CT) or countering violent extremism (CVE) issue and if this takes attention away from structural racism, it will further institutionalize Islamophobia. A deeper understanding of Muslim differences in society would reorient toward them the CT/CVE space, while Muslims outside of this realm are not only rendered homogenous but, crucially, invisible.

This homogeneity is not open-ended, diverse or layered with class, racial, sectarian and cultural characteristics, but rather a more sinister representation of Muslims as various threats to society. Engagement with Muslims is restricted to a focus on problems seemingly emanating from a Muslim cosmos — now potentially relegating anti-Muslim hatred to the realm of CT, further absolving the state’s responsibility in relation to Muslims everywhere else in society.

The events of the Grenfell Tower tragedy have reaffirmed the state’s neoliberal, majoritarian nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-European and anti-Muslim hegemonic narrative defined by years of neglect, allowing shoddy practices to linger, paying little or no attention to criticism of policy from all other sectors of society. The Conservative Party’s austerity policy since the 2008 crash has led to instability, populism and uncertainty. It is hyper-normalization in post-normal times, where the state has no clear idea of where to take the nation. British Muslims are relegated to a lowly position as the next few years will be all about Brexit — which erupted out of a completely unnecessary xenophobic, Islamophobic, anti-European, anti-human rights discourse reflecting an internal Tory party battle running for four decades.

Islamophobia today is the normalization of anti-Muslim hatred that has grown exponentially since the outset of the War on Terror culture that began after the events of 9/11. During this time, intolerance, bigotry and the development of alt-right, far right, radical left and other religious extremist groups have found succor in the vacuum of dominant discourses to stabilize societies that provide opportunities, as well as outcomes, for the many, not the few.

These cumulative extremisms at the margins of society incubate the discourses of intolerance and hate that allow these subgroups and their ideas to foment. Radicalization is intimately tied up with Islamophobia. This needs to be better understood. If not, little will change.

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Another attack, and once again I ask myself: When will we begin to educate our young people to recognize and protect themselves from the dangerous relationships that lead to such tragic consequences? The researchers at the excellent International Centre for the Study of Radicalization (ICSR) consistently state and in-person networks are key in the process of radicalization. This is what needs to be our focus, rather than simply targeting internet-based social media.

In addition, the government’s Prevent��strategy, while some of its components may be useful, is largely aimed at catching recruits once they are already in the radicalization pipeline. Unfortunately this is often too late, and as we keep hearing in the last few dreadful weeks, it is to track all those in that pipeline, even when they are known to the authorities. It is also extremely difficult to pull someone out of the process once it has begun.

There is a hugely important missing piece in the prevention puzzle. And that is to engage in prevention further upstream so as to prepare people before they are exposed to a recruitment attempt to any form of radicalization, whether from an Islamist organization, a neo-Nazi or racist organization, an extremist left group or any kind of cult. I believe this upstream work is the work that truly deserves being called prevention.

Education about the processes of radicalization, which I, along with other scholars, and many members of the public call brainwashing or coercive control, should be the basis of this education. We have 70 years of scholarship to draw on. After World War II, many scholars worked to understand how “good Germans” could have been drawn into colluding with and implementing the genocide of the Holocaust. This work on conformity, compliance and obedience by researchers such as became the foundation of contemporary social psychology. And we also have a largely untapped store of research about the brainwashing methods of Mao’s China and North Korea, along with more recent and important work in . But little of this work is now being taught.

In fact, there is much that is well understood about how recruitment and indoctrination work — a process that is almost identical to the grooming undertaken by sexual predators. It is a predictable process that involves isolating a person from their pre-existing personal networks, engulfing them within the new system or relationships, and maintaining high levels of fear and stress.

From the postwar scholars to current day thinkers, many agree that the best early prevention is to educate people to understand these processes. An awareness of being manipulated can help a person first identify and then resist a recruitment attempt.

It is not just abstract ideologies or technological means of communication that create violent extremists. These help, yes. But ICSR’s research, and , show that fundamentally it is about human relationships that entrap people within totalitarian organizations led by psychopaths with non-negotiable agendas.

People do not start out seeking to become suicide bombers. As terrorism researcher Martha Crenshaw said at a , they are usually recruited “by accident, on their way to other goals.” They then go through a predictable and known process of recruitment and then indoctrination to get them to the point where there is literally no way back. If we could take this seriously as a public health issue and spread the knowledge of what these coercive, dangerous and manipulative relationships look like to young people, their families and to all those who work with them, from teachers to the police to the medical and social services, then perhaps we can begin to build resilience to these methods in our population.

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In the wake of the June 3 terror attacks in London, Mayor Sadiq Khan assured Londoners of their safety. He said this as part of a statement about the readiness of the police. He also tried to put this into the context of such attacks now being an unavoidable part of life in the world’s biggest cities.

Indeed, the response of the London police — and medical services — was superb. From the first emergency phone call to the shooting dead of the three attackers by special police units, there was a gap of eight minutes. The entire area London Bridge and Borough Market was flooded with police and ambulances immediately. Everything was part of an immensely-prepared plan, which is also part of life in urban cities.

Yet Mayor Khan had to endure not one, but two tweets of criticism from US President Donald Trump. It was as if Trump thought that a Muslim mayor would be an easy target. The response of Londoners was very much on the side of Khan, and there were huge displays of solidarity across the religious spectrum — as there were after the May 22 attack in Manchester.

Three terror attacks in three months, all perpetrated by insurgents with fundamentalist Islamic motives, and yet Londoners and Mancunians refused to enter a response by hysterics. Much like the French refused after suffering their own attacks in 2015 and 2016.

THE IRISH REPUBLICAN ARMY

Part of this is a long history of being attacked. In France, there were many post-war attacks by insurgents on both sides of the Algerian question. Carlos the Jackal tried to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. In the United Kingdom, the long and very bloody and destructive campaign by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) not only hardened the citizens of London and Manchester, but arguably increased their open-mindedness about how to deal with terrorism.

Apart from a long list of atrocities in Northern Ireland, the attack of the IRA against the British mainland claimed a huge list of “successes” and near successes. Discounting the “minor” acts of violence, some of which took place within a block of where I lived or worked — at the level of bus bombs — the more spectacular attacks included the assassination of (1979); the assassination of , outside Parliament itself (1979); the attempted assassination of by bombing her hotel in Brighton (1984); the mortar attack on (1994); the audacious while Prime Minister John Major was conducting a Cabinet meeting (1991); the rocket attack against the headquarters of the (2000); the city attacks using truck bombs against (1996) and financial district (1996), both causing damage of several hundred million pounds; these followed earlier city (1992) and the in the financial district (1992); and these were in addition to the 1982 in London’s Hyde Park and Regent’s Park.

This was despite a ferocious, sometimes literally no-prisoners-taken campaign in Northern Ireland by the British Army and Northern Irish Garda (police force). But no one in Manchester or London called for the imprisoning or deportation of the Irish. No one shunned Irish pubs. No one recoiled from sharing a bus seat with someone called Paddy.

In the end, the Northern Irish “problem” was “settled” as much by long and patient negotiation as by the use of force. The process was helped by foreign negotiators who were regarded as “honest brokers” on both sides: people like US Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. What became the Good Friday Agreement was the culmination of a torturous process in which neither Mitchell nor Ahtisaari lost patience, nor resorted to name-calling or cheap shots in any media. US conflict settlement diplomacy in Western Europe probably achieved its highest post-war regard under Mitchell, and we long for his like again.

Of course, there is no single Islamic organization with which to negotiate. Those that are engaged in war and violence seem to have no agenda but destruction and death. There seem to be huge qualitative differences between the Irish and the Islamic questions.

AN IRON GLOVE

There are two points here. The first is key to creating a climate for possible, even if distant negotiation. No one in England thought it was helpful or desirable to deport or imprison anyone called Patrick Fitzgerald. The second is that there are Muslim communities, civic and religious leaders, role models, and even pop idols and actors who can be mobilized in a way that they enter dialogue and, yes, negotiation, with the radical elements that dwell — often hidden, though also often suspected — in European communities.

Here is where a US president addicted to tweeting starts being marginally useful. The one thing that political and community leaders can’t do, but must learn to do, is master modern communications in the way the Islamic State and other groups can. The drama and persuasiveness — dare I say it, the moral message — of the videos, podcasts, sermons, websites and the black net all speak to a mastery not only of instruments of communication, but a mastery of how to pitch a message of rebellion against all odds and against an enemy in all its manifestations, and against an enemy at its weakest points.

The narrative that competes against this will not come from blanket condemnation, and not come from calls to expel Muslims or imprison them or ostracize them. Interning US Japanese did not help the war effort against Japan. You cannot kill or imprison ideas, but you can make them grow stronger by trying to kill and imprison them.

Mancunians and Londoners at least have reached the point not of turning the cheek — ��there was deep approval of the ruthless police response on the evening of June 3 — but of extending one hand while cloaking the other in an iron glove. The two go together but, in the true difficulties of a vexed and complex world, not both at once and not the iron glove alone.

In international terms, it means completing the defeat of the Islamic State, but it also means, although it seems it will not be led by the current US president, some long and unpleasant negotiations — with an iron glove nearby — in Saudi Arabia. That may be the missing piece in the terrible jigsaw of today’s violent world.

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It was another night in London and another terrorist attack on Britain. On June 3, the capital witnessed a horrific act of brutality and violence. This time it was at the hands of three assailants, who started their by driving their van into innocent civilians. These attackers then moved to Borough Market where they hacked away at Londoners. Eight minutes later, all three attackers had been shot dead by the police. In these minutes of carnage and mayhem, the attackers stabbed and tried to slit the throats of random people, killing seven and injuring 48 others.

Three terrorist attacks in three months. Questions are going to be asked as to whether this wave of terrorism in the United Kingdom heralds a new dawn in extremist violence, with all the implications it raises for national security. It will also be questioned as to why the threat level was reduced from critical to severe and troops taken off the streets. Has there been an intelligence failure?

Since the Westminster attacks on March 22, it is said that . But two have been successful. Less than two weeks ago, 22 people were killed at a concert arena in Manchester. This was the first time an explosive device was used in a terrorist attack since the London bombings of 2005. The attacks on Saturday night used a van, similar to Nice, Berlin and the Westminster attacks, but the use of knives was at a different scale to that of the horrific murder of Lee Rigby in 2013. However previous events can be categorized, it is clear that in the current climate a far more sinister threat is at large.

These attackers are attempting to prevent the UK election from going ahead, frustrating the democratic process. These attacks are an attempt to instill terror, to stop ordinary people from going about their lives. Their aim is to disrupt our everyday existence, to cement hatred between groups and to pursue a warped agenda.

The usual outcry is to throw scorn at these attackers for their evil barbarity, condemning them to a fate worse than hell. While it is right and correct that condemnation is directed at those who deserve it the most, in a pernicious political and cultural climate where emotions speak more loudly than intellect, the worry is how people begin to compartmentalize others, making vast generalizations about an entire religion and a global faith community. Nor is it wholly satisfactory to throw scorn at foreign policy as the primary motivating factor.

The reality is somewhere in between the failures of integration as a domestic policy level and the consequences of a foreign policy in the Middle East, where regime change has been the dominant motif. Coupled with a general lack of agency among most Muslims, it is only aspirational and ambitious Muslims who are heard loudest.

AFTER LONDON: MUSLIMS IN THE UK

British Muslims should not allow their ethnic, sectarian and ideological differences to come in the way of a difficult situation. There is a strongly held set of assumptions on the part of government and media that British Muslim communities are not doing enough to weed out the problems of radicalization from within. That they are not speaking out enough at times like this. It is true that British Muslims face all sorts of challenges that reduce their confidence and sense of engagement, but the idea that terrorist sympathizers live at large among them is somewhat of an overstatement.

However, in the absence of any message from communities, media and political discourses will fill the void with messages that divide rather than bring people together.��The response to these attacks on the part of British Muslim communities needs to be the most robust it has ever been.

There will be people who will use these incidences to create further rifts or use it as an opportunity for political gain. US President Donald Trump wants to reintroduce a travel ban from Muslim countries. British Prime Minister Theresa May wants to ratchet up counterterrorism legislation, increasing sentences and getting private sector social media companies to work harder.

British Muslim communities must not feel that they have no agency in this regard. There needs to be much greater emphasis placed on speaking with a collective, activated and energized voice that clearly marks the separation between the terrorists and ordinary Muslims. These terrorist incidences have nothing to do with Islam or with the vast majority of Muslims in Britain, but in a number of instances, attackers do herald from within the geographies of Muslim communities. Ordinary Muslims bear no responsibility, but because these attackers have evoked the name of Islam, non-Muslims who have little or no understanding of the faith or its many tenants will uncritically absorb the dominant themes.

Ramadan is a month of giving and sharing. British Muslims have to take that extra step when so many forces are stacked against them. It is not the space to score any political points or shift the blame. The need now is to create a united front. This will help communities resolve internal issues as well as generate positive responses from the majority of society. In the absence of any centralized coordination, peripheral but loud voices will be heard, and these will only confuse and conflate. The time to act is now.

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What causes terrorism? The combination of the horrendous����in Manchester and a British general election inevitably meant that this question would dominate political and media discourses. And so it has. Particular attention has, once again, been drawn to the role of Western foreign policy, including that of the United Kingdom, as a driver of extremist violence.

In his first major����after the Manchester attack, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn chose to raise the issue of foreign policy. This prompted repeated Conservative attacks, echoed by some in the media, that he was blaming the UK for the terrorism in��.

Equally inevitably the debate has gathered an either/or quality to it. Either the Manchester attack����or British foreign policy had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of 22 people and the maiming of many more.

Certainly, a collection of British governments have repeatedly, vigorously and hardly surprisingly��. From Labour under Tony Blair to the coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats under David Cameron, to Theresa May’s current Conservative government, no one wants to discuss it.

THE IRAQ WAR, FOREIGN POLICY AND TERRORISM

But what about those charged with defending the UK from terrorism? The message they have conveyed over the years is one of nuance in which British foreign policy does play a significant role in motivating terrorism. They also speak of foreign policy as a driver of grievance, serving as a recruiter for extremists looking for followers.

In 2003, as����recently reminded us, the Joint Intelligence Committee, representing the main British intelligence agencies, explicitly warned the Blair government that invading Iraq would “increase significantly” the threat of terrorism. That included risks of attack within the UK from al-Qaeda and other “Islamist terrorist groups and individuals.”

Then, in 2004, the UK government published a report entitled��. It was widely circulated in the senior civil service before being leaked to the media in 2005. The report explicitly addressed the role of British and Western foreign policy as a source of anger among some British Muslims:

“It seems that a particularly strong cause of disillusionment amongst Muslims including young Muslims is a perceived ‘double standard’ in the foreign policy of Western governments (and often those of Muslim governments), in particular Britain and the US. This is particularly significant in terms of the concept of the ‘Ummah’, i.e. that Believers are one ‘nation’. This seems to have gained a significant prominence in how some Muslims view HMG’s policies towards Muslim countries.”

It added that “perceived Western bias in Israel’s favour over the Israel/Palestinian conflict” represented a “long-term grievance of the international Muslim community.” Since 9/11, it argued, these feelings had grown more acute. There was a spreading belief that the UK was becoming an oppressive force as part of its role in the War on Terror in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

One other aspect of the report related to foreign policy has continuing implications. It argued: “Disillusionment may contribute to a sense of helplessness with regard to the situation of Muslims in the world, with a lack of any tangible ‘pressure valves’, in order to vent frustrations, anger or dissent.”

This suggests that stifling debate about British foreign policy is not just counterproductive but potentially dangerous.

In 2005, a few weeks before the July 7 suicide bombings in London, in which 52 people died, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre issued another warning to the Blair government. The body, composed of representatives from UK intelligence organizations and the police,����events in Iraq “are continuing to act as motivation and a focus of a range of terrorist-related activity in the UK.”

Finally, and most publicly of all, there was former Director-General of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller’s 2011 BBC Reith Lectures. The first lecture, entitled��,��made explicit the connection between the invasion of Iraq and the 7/7 attack:

“[The invasion of Iraq] increased the terrorist threat by convincing more people that Osama Bin Laden’s claim that Islam was under attack was correct. It provided an arena for the jihad for which he had called, so that many of his supporters, including British citizens, travelled to Iraq to attack Western forces. It also showed very clearly that foreign and domestic policy are intertwined. Actions overseas have an impact at home. And our involvement in Iraq spurred some young British Muslims to turn to terror.”

Her talk, which I attended, was packed that night with many British politicians in the audience. Sitting front row and center was the then-home secretary, now-prime minister of the United Kingdom, Theresa May. She could not have missed Manningham-Buller’s message that “foreign and domestic policy are intertwined.”

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Even by recent standards, this week was bloody. An attack in����killed at least 28 Coptic Christians and wounded dozens. These innocent souls were headed to the Saint Samuel Monastery when masked attackers in three pickup trucks opened fire on them. This attack on Coptic Christians who comprise 10% of Egypt’s population forms part of a pattern. In April, at least 45 died and more than 100 were wounded in����during Palm Sunday ceremonies.

Coptic Christians in Egypt have become convenient whipping boys for Islamic extremists. First, terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State are highly sectarian. They do not accept other forms of worship, including liberal forms of Islam. Coptic Christians lie beyond the pale for them and are fair game. Second, every successful attack undermines President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s repressive regime. Elizabeth Perego argues that��. Egyptian military and����suspected Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers, including women and children. This radicalizes angry young men and begets violence, leading to a vicious cycle that shows no signs of ending.

Egypt is not the only place suffering from the cycle of violence. Even as US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Israel and Europe, Kenya, Southeast Asia and Britain experienced attacks. In Kenya,����through two roadside bombs. In the Philippines,��the ��of a city in Mindanao. The Indonesian capital��,��and Manchester, the third largest city in the United Kingdom, experienced��.

TRAGEDY IN MANCHESTER

On May 22,����outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. This suicide bombing killed 22 people and injured 64. UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd declared that Abedi’s attack was more sophisticated than in the past, and “it [seemed] likely — possible — that he wasn’t doing this on his own.” Consequently, the government��, the UK’s highest level. Rudd deployed 984 troops to guard sensitive locations around the country.

Over the last decade, terrorist attacks have become a regular feature of life in the UK. In 2006, the government first raised the terror threat level to����during a major operation to foil a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners with liquid bombs. In the following year, it had to do so again to hunt for men who tried to bomb a London nightclub and attacked Glasgow Airport. This is only the third time ever and the first time since 2017 that terror threat levels have been deemed to be critical.

The government is nervous for a good reason. Apparently, Abedi was a mule, a person who uses a device someone else builds. This means he was unlikely to be a lone wolf and likely to be part of a larger network that might have plans to strike multiple locations. This is election season in the UK, magnifying opportunities for terror attacks in the country.

Abedi was 22-year-old born in Manchester to parents of Libyan descent. The����that he had a “really bad relationship” with his family. Abedi struggled at school and university. His parents tried to take him back to Libya several times and he struggled to adapt to the European way of life. The young man hung around “the wrong crowd and was very, very gullible.” Before leaving school in 2011, he became “more and more religious” and cut ties with former classmates.

The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Abedi’s attack, saying “one of the caliphate’s soldiers placed bombs among the crowds.” It is too early for the murky details of the attack to see the light of day. However, it is an example of yet another homegrown Islamic terrorist in Europe, striking to claim innocent lives. Over the last three years, attacks have occurred in cities such as Paris, Berlin and London, leaving no place entirely safe.

Manchester is no stranger to terror. In June 1996, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) planted nearly 1,500 kilograms of homemade explosives in a lorry,����since World War II. Miraculously, no one died in the bombing that injured more than 200 people. After 21 years, the IRA is no longer bombing British cities. The terrorists have changed.

Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, has an idea why that may be the case. He takes the view that the UK’s foreign policy and intervention in wars abroad fuels the threat of “terrorism” at home. In Corbyn’s view, British interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan have not worked. In the middle of an election campaign, Corbyn : “We must be brave enough to admit the��‘war on terror’ is not working.”

Corbyn might have a point.����is a scholar on suicide terrorism who has found that 95% of suicide attacks from the 1980s to 2003 occurred “in response to a military occupation.” By military occupation, Pape means control of “the local government, the local economic system, and the local social system.” Pape makes the argument that suicide terrorism “is a response to loss of self-determination for their local community.”

Pape and Corbyn might be bang on the money when it comes to the reasons for suicide attacks in Kabul or Baghdad, but their argument does not entirely apply to����like Abedi. They end up attacking the very countries “where they grew up and went to school.”��Some even come from secular immigrant families who were brought up without religious zeal. What radicalizes these lost souls?

Part of the answer might lie in the examination of the past. The November 14, 2015, edition of��The World This Week��argued that terrorism arises from “deep disaffection and the disintegration of the political, economic and social fabric.” In the late 19th��and early 20th��centuries, terrorism emerged as a major political tool for those fighting for independence, democracy and justice. Russian Tsar Alexander II and Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand were perhaps the two most spectacular victims of this form of terrorism. Both were murdered by hotheads who found the status quo unacceptable and untenable.

Today’s terrorists share a similar disenchantment with the status quo. Muslim communities in Europe have long suffered much discrimination. Young men from these communities have found it hard to get jobs, rent homes or move up the social ladder. They have deep-seated grievances and a burning sense of injustice. Some who are deeply disaffected, highly isolated and socially maladjusted fall prey to charismatic clerics and radical ideologies. Some of these����have gone off to fight in Syria and Iraq. A few like Abedi have unleashed carnage at home.

DRACULA NEVER DIES

Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean statesman, worried incessantly about the disruptive and destructive forces of��. He was right to do so. For centuries, European nation states strove to create uniform identities. France had no place for the Huguenots. In the UK, there was no room for the native tongues of the Welsh, the Scots and the Irish who were all forced to adopt English. The German fixation with racial purity is only too well known.

Unlike India or Southeast Asia, Europe does not have a tradition of disparate communities living side by side for centuries. The influx of immigrants who look different, eat exotic foods and pray in strange ways is a rather new phenomenon. It is causing much strain in formerly imperial societies where prejudices run deep, privilege stands strong and self-righteousness is second nature.

To be fair, postwar Europe has made enormous strides in creating open, tolerant and liberal societies. Most immigrants can avail freedoms that would not be available to them back home. For years, Turkish immigrants in Germany had more freedom of religion than in the Kemalist Turkey they left behind. Similarly, Ahmadis from Pakistan in the UK could worship as they please without fear of banishment as apostates or bullets from Sunni hardliners.

In some ways, Europe’s record has been better than multiethnic societies like India or Southeast Asia. Arguably, tensions between communities have flared up less frequently and it has experienced fewer riots. Horrified by the Holocaust and World War II, Europe set out to tame primal forces of race, language and religion. There is more than an element of truth when Europeans argue that their societies have emerged as multicultural secular societies with Sadiq Khan and Zinedine Zidane as new patron saints.

Yet, like Dracula, primal forces may go to sleep but they never quite die. The July 3, 2016, edition of��The World This Week��observed how we are living in an age of fear, anger, hate and terror. That week, Istanbul, Dhaka and Baghdad experienced terrorist attacks. This author examined the rise of Islamic extremism in both Russia and Bangladesh. The particular reasons for the rise of radicalism in each country are different. In post-Soviet Russia, ethnicity is identity. Muslims from struggling regions move to Russia for jobs and are radicalized after facing relentless racism of a ruthless sort. In Bangladesh, unemployment, inequality and Saudi money form a toxic cocktail. Common to Muslims in both countries, as in many others, is a sense of injustice, a lack of hope and confusion as to collective identity.

In the days of the Cold War, people turned to socialism or capitalism. In the era of Pax Americana, capitalism has failed hundreds of millions and so have many Westphalian states. These states are often unable to provide their citizens social services, economic opportunities and justice. Some like Syria and Iraq have imploded. Others like Bangladesh and Nigeria are tottering. Even as states stumble, religion continues to be a powerful and subliminal force. The Russians have turned to the Orthodox Church and many Americans are frighteningly evangelical. With declining faith in existing institutions and ideas, people are seeking new collective identities and radical Islam offers a seductive alternative to desperate young men without hope.

Even hitherto tolerant Muslim societies are finding themselves under threat. On May 17, a sharia court in Indonesia’s Aceh province sentenced��. These two young men, aged 20 and 23, were found in bed together by vigilantes. Pertinently, gay sex is not illegal in the rest of Muslim-majority Indonesia and has been a part of the culture of the region. This is the first such conviction in Indonesia and Aceh is the only province where sharia is in force. Local officials in the world’s largest Muslim country claim that “people want to implement comprehensive Islamic teachings including the enacting of its criminal code.”

This reversion to rules based on religion and revealed authority instead of on reason and social deliberation is destructive and demented. The tectonic changes in a world of over 7 billion people are causing great fear among those who are being left behind. Hundreds of millions fear the future. They worry that they might not have jobs tomorrow, that they might be victims of some injustice or another in a deeply unequal world, and that they might not have a community to turn to in times of need. This fear often makes them turn to atavistic identities for solace. One of these is radical Islam.

In turn, the fear of Islam is making many revert to their national, ethnic or religious identities. They view Muslims with suspicion, questioning whether their proselytizing religion can allow diversity or liberty.��This polarization and fragmentation of societies on religious lines is a global risk. For instance, in the aftermath of the Manchester attack,��. Although Mancunians have demonstrated commendable solidarity, social bonds may weaken as primal identities reassert themselves. This, in turn, would make Islamic extremism more seductive for the likes of Abedi.

*[You can receive “The World This Week” directly in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list. Simply visit����and enter your email address in the space provided. Meanwhile, please find below five of our finest articles for the week.]

America’s Values Should Guide its Foreign Policy

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Without the��compass of values to guide foreign policy, we descend to profit and power and sacrifice principle and people.

Secretary of State��Rex Tillerson��addressed his State Department employees in Washington earlier this month. It was his first significant encounter with his charges since assuming his position shortly after President Trump’s inauguration. Tillerson touched on many issues in his remarks. Perhaps most noteworthy were his statements on the meaning of this administration’s America First policy and the role of values and interests in foreign policy making. As��I wrote previously, his remarks were emphatically discouraging and demoralizing for State Department personnel as well as for billions of people around the world. More critically for America’s interests, they ignore America’s extraordinarily unique role in the world. Keeping our values as an integral part of US foreign policy serves more than a comforting remnant of hope for millions living under oppression abroad. Ignored in Tillerson’s remarks was the vital… Read more

The Cambridge of Spies

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A Russian academic finds herself��caught up in an unlikely spy scandal.��

Between Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s push for the £100-million Royal Yacht Britannia, the current government’s “trading nation” narrative and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s plan to put the economy on a nationalized train back to the 1970s, nostalgia seems to be writing the script of British political life. Unfortunately, Britain’s trend of going back to the future does not stop at the gates of Westminster. As one unfortunate Cambridge historian has found out, the unsettling paranoia that Russians in the West are all spies among us has made an unsettling comeback. The historian in question is Svetlana Lokhova, whose story is a disturbing exemplar of how tensions between Russia and the West are impacting the lives of average Russians living and working in the United Kingdom, Europe or the United States. Because of brief interactions with former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn within the… Read more

Beer Can Be a Win-Win for Jobs and Water in Sub-Saharan Africa

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If early investments are made in industrial water efficiency, beer can be a win-win for jobs and water sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa.

The beer industry in sub-Saharan Africa has brought an influx of desperately needed jobs and capital to the region. This private investment and market growth can deliver the type of progress the international-development field has been working towards for decade and will be increasingly vital for meeting development goals. Continued growth in the beer industry should be strongly encouraged in tandem with support for improved efficiency in industrial water use to address the rapid exhaustion of water resources caused by brewing beer. If early investments are made in industrial water efficiency, beer can be a win-win for jobs and water sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa. Beer brands��are steadily��increasing��their brewing facilities in sub-Saharan Africa. They are also increasing their investments in the region. For example, as of 2012,��SABMiller��planned��to invest $2.5 billion in… Read more

The Greatest Problem Facing Latinos Under Trump

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US��mainstream media either ignores Latinos entirely or relegates them to symbols of immigration.

Despite recent attempts to bring national attention to the concerns of the Hispanic community, America’s Latinos remain largely invisible. As the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency drew to a close, Hispanics took stock of their perceived place under the new administration. Hector Sánchez Barba, chair of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda (NHLA), wrote of the “devastating impact” that Trump’s nativist rhetoric and immigration policies have had on the Latino community. Political analyst Victoria DeFrancesco Soto echoed Sánchez Barba in affirming that Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ principal accomplishment thus far has been��instilling fear within minority communities��through criminal measures that implicitly target blacks and Latinos. The National Council of La Raza asked Latinos to describe in a single word how Trump’s first 100 days in office have made them feel, and among the 1,400 respondents the most commonly used words… Read more

Solving the Kashmir Crisis

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Can the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor lead to a solution of the Kashmir crisis?

After entering office, a good part of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s energy during his whirlwind international tours was spent trying to convince world leaders that Pakistan was a terrorist state in order to isolate it. So, when China held the One Belt One Road (OBOR) summit on May 14, which had leading countries of the international community in attendance, it was India that isolated itself by not participating. Pakistan was the center of attention as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is an important initiative of the OBOR strategy, an effort to link the economies of Asia and Europe.

Before the summit, Modi paid a visit to Sri Lanka in an effort to keep the island nation on India’s side. The shared Buddhist heritage was highlighted as the meeting took place during a big Buddhist festival. Modi invoked Buddha’s message of peace as an answer to… Read more

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The post The World This Week: Primal Forces Drive Islamic Extremism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It’s becoming difficult to find words that haven’t been repeated a thousand times already on the subject of terrorism: the sadness and disbelief, the resolve, resilience, solidarity and unity of a people. But it’s not enough anymore; the children who never came home from a concert are testament to that.

Put as simplistically as possible, at the behest of offending and social scorn, Britain’s counterterrorism strategy, both domestic and foreign, must directly address monotheism. The dangers of Islamic extremism are based in Islam, nothing else, and thus we must fully embrace that it is time to scrutinize all aspects of counterterrorism strategy to align with the direct threat — a strategy that is currently hapless and disjointed.

Members of the Muslim community were quick to the latest attack, and distance themselves for the attacker and his extremism. They declared the act as cowardice and having no place in Islam; yet, sadly, it does. You can’t simply ignore where the threat festers: it is from Islam.

In the Name of Democracy

Western democracy is showing itself as fertile ground for extremism, littered with examples of frustrated security services and police forces constantly fighting against freedom of information and the legal grey areas that protect preachers of hate and the recruiters for evil.

, for example, was on the cusp of breaking the law for years, responsible for the radicalization of numerous young men. When finally convicted of hate crimes and supporting the Islamic State (IS), his only remorse came in the plea from his solicitor that he “regretted breaking the law” — not his support for IS.

And the Anjem Choudarys of the world can be found almost everywhere, from Oslo to Melbourne. These individuals have the freedom and the ability to preach, in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom and in the name of Islam.

I now openly question domestic counterterrorism policy. Even here in the UK, where we have a developed and broad strategy, it still fails to address the specific threat — it is still reactionary, and it still leaves religion out of the equation. Historically, that may be justifiable: Spain’s ETA, the IRA and other groups fought the state, with clear political ambition. You can perhaps argue that sectarianism played a role in Northern Ireland, but the clergy largely stayed out the conflict. The driver for these nationalist movements was perceived democracy, not hate and certainly not the annihilation of the other side.

Where it comes close to dealing with Islam, there is resentment; the PREVENT scheme, for example, is perceived to be used to spy on the Muslim community rather than its genuine imperative and true objective, which is stopping radicalization. When we in the West have these conversations following such attacks, exactly as we have done here today, about how multicultural we are as a nation, every creed and color united, it doesn’t mean we ignore the fundamentals — it is exactly the reason why we must address them. The Islamic State has systematically tried to exterminate the Yazidis in Iraq, execute every Shia in sight, every non-believer, every single apostate — everyone. And if they could, they would do the same here.

Lack of Strategy

Our strategy is lacking, domestically and internationally. There is no sign, after a decade of Islamic extremism hitting the West, over four years of the Islamic State punching beyond its borders, of any joined thinking or a multilateral strategy in sight. To contemplate that foreign counterterrorism policy doesn’t have a domestic impact is naive. It is hard to imagine, given current thinking and strategy, that Islamic extremism on the scale and violent nature that currently exists, will be gone in my lifetime. Unlike political terrorism we have seen many times before, religious terrorism is based on a much deeper, much wider fanatical foundation. And a lack of proper strategy that allowed IS to carve out, albeit briefly, its “state” in Raqqa will also allow it to dissipate into a global movement for decades to come.

It may now be time to think again and not be frightened of questioning our stance on an issue that simply hasn’t gone away. This doesn’t mean there is a need to become radical in our domestic approach, but be more pragmatic, identify the grey areas in society that allow so much vile hate to exist and prosper, and to trust our police and security agencies with intelligence and social media. And the Muslim community has a responsibility to embrace policy, to understand it fully and make sure the message is understood for the good it is aimed at doing.

Likewise, with our international policy against IS, whatever it currently is, it needs to be dynamic, ruthless and, above all, multilateral in design. The problem currently posed is almost as global as it could be, but we mustn’t doubt the group’s aim to extend further if it were remotely possible whilst increasing the number of attacks. The argument for staying out of the Middle East when it comes to IS has been well and truly lost. The Islamic State’s��fight has no borders and no humanity: This is a war that IS��declared and only it seems to be fighting.

If we are not prepared to have a grownup debate, if we are not now finally prepared to design a counterterrorism policy that directly address monotheism, then there will be more Manchesters, more victims, more blood and more vigils. There are soldiers on Britain’s streets today, but still the sound of “solidarity” seems to deafen the problem at large. The monotony is becoming unbearable, and it is now surely time to counter the very heart of the terror.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The post Manchester Attack: Time to Address the Unspeakable appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It is always disconcerting to wake up to news of terrorism, causalities, pictures of screaming children, ambulances, solemn looking police officers making official comments, and jumpy radio and television journalists speaking on the topic.

Scenes from the suggest utter carnage, fear and shock. These images will have reverberated around the world by now. Political leaders, community spokespersons and informed commentators will all be making various statements.

As the initial shocks subside, however, it will lead to serious questions about the nature of this incident and the people behind it. In a charged political and cultural climate, there will be the inevitable “Muslim question” about what has gone on. Was this the actions of a “lone actor terrorist”? Were they inspired or directed by extremist individuals or groups outside the community or in the country? If we can be sure that an extremist with a religious or ideological motive carried this out, is it likely that the perpetrator was of Muslim background? If this is the case, was the individual British-born or from outside the country?

With at least 22 dead and 59 injured by what looks like a nail bomb, other commentators and opinion formers are talking about another set of usual suspect topics. That the government’s is failing or that we need greater injections of Prevent thinking and practice. Alternatively, that British Muslims need to do more to fight the terrorism that comes from within their own ranks. Or that Islam is the problem and Muslims are perpetuating it. These utterances will come from the counter-jihad school of thought, fueled by alt-right and related revolutionary right-wing thinking.

There will also be those who argue that Prevent is an irrelevance at best. That these terrorist acts are a reflection of the frustration felt by the Muslim world as it comes to terms with the consequences of neoliberalism and xenophobia. And that the only way to deal with these issues is to focus on community development, investment in neighborhoods and cities, and a flattening out of social mobility, where integration is a two-way street. In reality, the most effective sets of solutions will cut through this rhetoric based on evidenced thinking with long-term objectives.

Scenes of young people, children, parents and families, screaming and shouting in fear, running in all directions, separating from each other, are still the defining images of the events from May 22, following a concert by American singer Ariana Grande. Stories of how ordinary citizens of Manchester opened up their doors in the middle of the night to allow people fleeing the scene to recharge their phones or to call others for assistance will be told and retold. That the taxi drivers in the city, of which a significant majority are South Asian Muslims, ensured that people fleeing the scene were able to get home and without charge will be hailed as a victory for community relations.

The UK General Election is three weeks away, but campaigning will temporarily stop today. However, what will replace it is the outcry, the soul-searching, the explanation, the reaction and the condemnation. From the mainstream to the marginal, from the center to the periphery, it is important that these voices do not divide. There is strength in unity and we are all responsible for ensuring it.

*[A version of this article was also featured on the author’s .]

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The post Murder Comes to Manchester appeared first on 51�Թ�.

First of all, as fellow human beings we are saddened and all torn up by the tragedy that occurred in the heart of London on March 22. The motive behind this mindless act��carried out by�� remains vague. His frenzy of aggression that took�� others is a��tragedy for the victims, their families, and all people in the city—either citizens or tourists—who are entitled to safety, comfort and peace.

Especially since Westminster Bridge is one of the most popular tourist��attractions, this awful violence came like bolt from the blue for many. No one had expected this kind of incident would take place in one of the ��in the world. Our message today is to show our deepest condolences and prayer for those who are affected by this assault in any way.

Our message is also for our Muslim brothers and sisters in Britain and abroad. We encourage you all to remain steadfast and confident in the face of criticism against our beliefs, keeping proudly to the religion we all know never teaches us to do such things. Do not let this attack dismantle our unity, create fear and dispute distrust among us.

In the wake of many that are claimed to be coordinated��by Islamic extremist organizations, many influential figures such as��the����have voiced their concerns to be of one mind with wider Muslim communities, conforming that violence and terrorism are not parts of Islam—or any other religion.

At the same time, there is a fundamental difference between showing sympathy for the victims and their families to expressing��apologies to the public because last week’s attack does��not in any way represent our religion. Even if the attack, which��still has��to be properly investigated by the authorities, was committed��in the name of Islam, we would not expect people who were born in the UK to apologize simply because the attacker was born there.

It is unfortunate��that the media has the meaning��of terrorism and misused the phrase in connotation��with Islam. It is becoming more apparent that this loaded term is exclusive to the one��religion only. Most of the time people rush to judge and scrutinize a��criminal or��violent act committed��by Muslims as terrorism. As a consequence, Islamophobia is becoming more widespread. That Islam is a religion that espouses��hatred of��the non-believers is a��false claim being misrepresented��to the public every single day.

If you are someone who��supports such attacks or even thinks that they are legitimate—you never know who could have been a victim. It could be innocent bystanders��or those you claim as your brothers and sisters.

You know that these kinds of actions lead to increased scrutiny of��the Muslim community and the establishment of policies that negatively affect��Muslims.

Moreover, any violent act carried out in the name of Islam is by all means not an effective way to tell any��government to stop waging or aiding��wars on��Muslim countries. Instead, these types��of appalling attacks will only further increase hatred and fear toward us that will be carried into other conflicts on��Muslim land. These attacks should be stopped, and ending them requires us to take part.

A serious and cohesive movement is needed for all Muslims to reach out to their families, colleagues and neighbors��to educate them not to engage in the misconceived perspective of Islam propagated by the extremists. Share the true values and teachings of Islam by showing our children, both through words and example, that Islam is a peace-loving, compassionate and tolerant religion.

When handling a situation where our beliefs are��being falsely presented as��indoctrinating hatred, cruelty and violence, do not let our emotion run ahead of our composure, vigorously blaming others and laying waste to our brotherhood and sisterhood we build up��over the years. Only with harmony are we stronger together. Only with humility will��our words be listened to. And only with kindness can we show the world what being a Muslim really means.

����������—p�𲹳���.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The post An Open Letter to Muslim Communities Following Westminster Attack appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The latest terror incident in London took place in the early afternoon of 22 March, exactly a year after the attacks in Brussels. It seems that anniversaries are now part of the terror repertoire. But almost immediately, even while Westminster—the site of UK Parliament—was in lockdown, a notice circulated widely, making its way from the internet to the House of Commons: “All terrorists are politely reminded THIS IS LONDON and whatever you do to us we will drink tea/And jolly well carry on/Thank you.”

The fact that the by the often-witty London Underground staff is almost meaningless behind the message embraced by the city��coming to terms with the most recent act of violence.

If the spirit of calm, stiff upper lip was expected, what did rankle Londoners was ’s earlier statement that terror attacks were “part and parcel” of living in a global city. The younger Trump, when even his father was offering solidarity, tweeted, “You have to be kidding me?!”—seemingly ignorant of the basic rule of diplomacy for public persons: When you have nothing useful to say, say nothing.

Trump Jr. would have done well to look at the history of London—and Paris for that matter—in the face of terror attacks that have stretched back for more than 50 years. Paris was attacked by both those for and against the independence of Algeria and later by Carlos the Jackal, long before the current round of attacks in the name of Islam.

There Was a Bomb

London was for years under attack by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). I remember driving past the financial district of Canary Wharf on February, 6, 1996, 15 minutes before the IRA detonated a truck bomb that ripped apart the facades of the new buildings in the district. An IRA bomb took out a bus one street away from my office. Another went off one block from my apartment.

The more recent attacks in the name of Islam came against a shocked but hardened population. When the 7/7 attacks took place in 2005, one of the blasts was clearly heard in the University of London precinct. I was dean at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the time. Professors who were veterans of war zones came rushing to my office. “That was a bomb.” “Yes, I know.” And, from the echo bouncing off the walls of the campus buildings, we worked out the poundage before the police did.

When the police lockdown was lifted but public transport was still frozen, people calmly walked home—some up to 22 miles. And, the next morning, walked back into work. And, yes, drank cups of tea.

Know Your Enemy

There is a pressing sense that our North Atlantic cousins lack decorum and, above all, lack knowledge while imagining they have it all. As said in September 2016, the West seems “to��know��us better than we supposedly know��ourselves.”

This raises problems not only in fighting terrorism, but fundamental problems about understanding it in the first place. A risk-shy President Obama didn’t even try. His one-step-removed policy of disengaged “engagement” epitomized by the use of drone strikes, which did not require boots on the ground, only exacerbated problems. Callow crew-cut youths, hunched over monitors displaying Afghan wedding processions and imagining they were columns of Taliban soldiers and sending in the missiles, not only took innocent lives and ended dreams for the future, they radicalized those who survived and those who were told the stories of those who survived.

The problem is that “collateral damage” comes back to haunt you—as new recruits to terror are easily persuaded that the Koranic sura (or verses) against the killing of non-combatants may be ignored in favor of “sword” sura that urge unrestrained war against all unbelievers. And, in any case, “they started it first.”

The London attack of March 2017 brought out heroic figures. One was the Minister for the Middle East and Africa Tobias Ellwood. The day before the attack, he and I were sitting beside each other at Sandhurst. We were both speaking at an away day for his staff from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). An ex-Green Jackets captain, he had himself graduated from Sandhurst.

When the attack on Parliament came, he rushed out and worked for long minutes trying to resuscitate the fallen police officer, Keith Palmer. Photos of Ellwood��covered with blood from trying to staunch the officer’s wounds became front page news. But he himself spends long hours working through the briefs of his staff, trying to understand the complex reasons for terrorism.

And, despite fiscal austerity, the FCO is not having its budget cut by 28% like the US State Department. Diplomatic reportage and analysis become vital tools in the understanding of terror and these tools are cut back at a nation’s peril.

If you don’t understand who your enemy is—what it believes, and why it fights—you won’t win. Today it is Europe. But if President Trump echoes his son’s response of “You have to be kidding me?!” to the possibilities of hard choices based on deep knowledge and simply sends in the missiles and troops, there may be a “victory” in his term. But the day after tomorrow it will again be the turn of the United States to reel in shock.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The post Terror in London: We Jolly Well Carry On appeared first on 51�Թ�.

I became aware of the situation unfolding on the busy streets outside Westminster today curtesy of a message I received on my phone as I left a briefing: It simply said, “Hope you are safe.”

I knew straight away something was unfolding in London, another event that was likely to be dominating the news feeds, putting fear into millions whilst testing the capabilities and competencies of those working in the emergency services.

Not wanting to gloss over the severity of the situation and thinking of the victims caught up in the attack—tourists enjoying a day in one of the world’s finest cities, visiting historic central London; people walking to or from meetings; or, indeed, Police Constable Keith Palmer, 45, who died while simply carrying out his duty—there was a different feeling compared to previous attacks in the UK. Something has fundamentally changed.

Islamic extremism is here, and likely to stay. We have waited for today’s events for a long time knowing full well it would come at some point, as the national lead for Counter Terrorism Policing, , said himself, “This is a day we had planned for—that we all hoped would never happen—but sadly it is now a reality.”

Part and Parcel

We are lucky here in the UK to have such outstanding men and women capable of acting with uncompromising professionalism under extreme pressure. You can tell watching them that they have been drilled repeatedly in procedures for worst-case scenarios such as the events on Westminster Bridge and by the gates of Parliament. We are safe in our knowledge that our reaction will be swift and measured with appropriate action for all those attacks to come.

The difference in today’s attack came in the public reaction, lethargic, dare I even suggest apathetic, as the news broke. I am not for one second suggesting that in a course of a day the British have lost their warm heart and caring side. We all knew that when—not if—an attack would happen here, there will be a tomorrow. These things now sort of just “happen” from time to time. It’s almost boring.

Ask most people in the West about attacks by Islamic extremists and they will give you the historical headlines: 9/11, 7/7, Bali bombings, Charlie Hebdo, Paris attacks and so forth. Ask them to name the perpetrators and most will struggle. For years we have been watching groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS) endlessly regurgitate a form of monotheism that is deplorable on all fronts, compounded by a working understanding in society that from time to time these things will happen—and, as one notable academic suggested, you must .

On days like today, it raises a serious question: Do people really care any longer or have they become immune to these attacks? And, if that is the case, what exactly has been achieved by an attack of this nature?

The Hand of the Meaningless

Let’s now call time on pandering: Extremism is laughable—a fallacy of epic proportion for any religion. Further, let’s call them out for who and what these individuals are: the lost, the ex-criminals, unable to construct an intelligent argument, needing something to pin their lives on because their life lacks meaning, craving inclusion like a child in a playground or the school bully who always shouts louder than the rest.

People like myself, spend our time trying to understand the psychology of terrorism, the political objectives and ultimately develop policy to counter these appalling acts of violence, both domestically and overseas. While there is a lot we can do and a lot that needs to be done to counter violent extremism, there will always be individuals that will remain apart from our society that we simply cannot help.

As an atheist, I struggle with any religious violence. Yes, there has been violence here in the UK drawn down sectarian lines in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. But it was based on political objectives, with the now late Martin McGuinness eventually giving up his gun for his seat at the table. Modern Islamic extremism has nothing political to hang its ideology on: There are no foundations of society, there is no negotiation, there is no conversation based in anything resembling humanity. It is simply inhuman.

What we witnessed today and in recent years with Islamic extremism, away from the now dwindling, final days of the caliphate, are attacks of pathetic proportion in the West, often orchestrated by men too scared to carry them out themselves who turn to those on the fringes of social reality. And what are the affects? Does society bend and fail? Do we all line up and join the make-believe prophet’s army?

No, we continue, and always will, because these attacks are now the new normal and have such a small, almost insignificant effect on us as a people. The , was right when he said that such attacks are “part and parcel of living in a big city.” You should expect these events: There is a history of such attacks, and so I do expect them.

I feel such rage and anger that people who were busy living have today lost their lives by the hand of the meaningless. Another layer of tragedy was added today, but another terrorist will be forgotten and in his wake. Nothing but momentary fear was left behind on Westminster Bridge. I don’t care who he is or what he stands for, because what he is and what he stands for is of no substance at all.

Maybe it is time to treat these attacks with the contempt they deserve—be professional, counter them as you can by force and humanity where you can, but do not publish his name, give him nothing he craves, let his name echo nowhere and be sung by none.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Well before Donald Trump was elected and Geert Wilders threatened to close all the mosques in the Netherlands, Muslims have been disproportionately affected by reactionary politicians’ lack of commitment to universal human rights. The annual ��draws particular attention to this issue: an introductory essay on terrorism discussed not the human rights abuses committed by violent extremists, but the human rights abuses committed in the name of the war on terror.

Like any war, this war risks disrupting the peaceful lives of innocent citizens. Unlike other wars, this war is becoming incorporated into mainstream politics.

The UN Security Council Resolution 2178 requires governments to take action to prevent or counter violent extremism (CVE). There are, however, no universal legal definitions for terrorism or violent extremism.��Resolution 2178 leaves such definitions open to governments. This��open-ended nature of the resolution means��that Muslims in general could easily end up suffering for the sins of Islamist extremist groups.

This vagueness is particularly worrisome since preventing radicalization through social and “other” activities��is an essential element of CVE. “Radical” behavior does not necessarily involve violence or intended violence. Peaceful expression and association, including religious devotion, may fall within the specter of what states consider��radicalization and in need of control.

This potential excess of the use of counterterrorism measures and CVE risks targeting innocent people, and Muslims in particular, whereas Muslims, just as much as non-Muslims, are the victims of violent extremism. Crucially, targeting innocent Muslims has an obvious counterproductive effect, making them more vulnerable to the outreach of extremist ideologies.

Marginalization and Suspicion

Marginalization and suspicion of Muslims in the West is relatively recent, starting with the September 11 attacks and the subsequent war on terror, but rapidly intensifying with the current divisive, sometimes overtly anti-Muslim politics spreading across Europe and the United States. In contrast, Muslims in India have faced marginalization and suspicion for decades, if not centuries. The situation in India can thus function as an example for the West, as the effects of the war on terror may replicate the transformations Indian Muslims go through elsewhere.

As the influential (CSIS)��remarks in a recent report on CVE strategy, various forms of structural conditions (including real and perceived marginalization, experiences of injustice and corruption) can make violent extremist organisations seem appealing. In India, these structural conditions are historically present. In Europe and the US, these conditions are growing due to a wide range of factors—possibly including the very CVE measures that states mobilize��to prevent the consequences.

I conducted��research in rural West Bengal, between 2011 and 2013, and for shorter periods in 2014 and 2016, in a village I call Joygram. I observed how innocent Muslims could be misidentified as potentially radicalizing. The story I tell here, about Muslims in India, is not directly about the counterproductive effects of CVE, as there were no such measures in place in this rural area when I was there. It is therefore more a cautionary tale on how not to mistake a pious Muslim for a terrorist. However, it is also an example of the potential effects that the marginalization and suspicion of innocent Muslims may have.

Secularizing or Radicalizing?

Muslims in India have been the subject of marginalization and discrimination at least since its postcolonial foundation. Despite the nation’s proud self-identification as secular and democratic, Muslims who defied partition and remained in India are tacitly considered second-class citizens. Their loyalty to the Indian nation is always questioned. Under current Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule, Muslims are openly deemed a “dangerous Other” and a threat to national unity.

This attitude toward Muslims materializes in human rights abuses and actual inequalities. Muslims have less access to governmental resources, including government jobs. They are not only less protected by the police but are also victims of police harassment and violence. They are ghettoized in the cities.

More recently, despite the particularities of Indian Muslim marginalization, the Indian narrative increasingly conflates with a globalized narrative. According to this narrative Muslims are the antithesis to liberal democracy, a disruption of a secular, liberal world order. Terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists groups increasingly legitimize the suspicion of Muslims everywhere.��Global terrorism intensifies the already negative attitude toward Muslims in India.

Moreover, the kind of leadership Prime Minister Narendra Modi enacts is gaining global currency. He is an exemplary autocratic leader, purporting to speak in the name of the majority while turning a blind eye toward, if not actively encouraging, human rights abuses against the minority. The election of President Trump and the surge of popularity for Geert Wilders in the Netherlands are��just the most recent examples of the populist trend.

As a result, whereas the secular, liberal West seems to increasingly think that Muslims are the greatest threat to peace, for these Muslims that very thought and the measures taken accordingly are a threat to their peace. Many Westerners feel they live under the threat of Islamic terrorism. Muslims everywhere live under the threat of being considered terrorists.

Many Westerners feel they live under the threat of Islamic terrorism. Muslims everywhere live under the threat of being considered terrorists.

This suspicion and concomitant marginalization create a deep sense of disquiet amongst the Muslims I work with. There is anger, and frustration, but foremost a sense of moral failure and responsibility. Paradoxically, perhaps, many of the Muslims in Joygram attempt to gain a sense of peace by converting from the local, non-denominational Islam to the more puritan, reformist Deobandi Islam.

This involves an emphasis on “proper” Sunni Islamic practice (closely following the five pillars of Islam; condemnation of shrine worship); a change in aesthetics (white Muslim dress, Islamic cap and uncut beard and shaven upper lip for men; a��salwar kameez��instead of sari for women, and in some cases a burka); and changes in everyday habits (as closely as possible following the hadith—the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad).

These visible changes make many non-Muslim Indians suspicious. It looks like reformist Muslims become “more Muslim,” and by implication “less Indian.” The more Muslim they become, the more they (allegedly) reject liberal values and instead (ostensibly) show allegiance to extremist Islamic ideologies.

This is a radical misunderstanding of the project of reformation as explained and practiced by Deobandi Muslims themselves. For them, this conversion to reformist Islam is a holistic ethical transformation: a response to the moral degradation of politics and society (including of Muslims themselves); an attempt to withstand the pervasive corruption implicating every Indian in an immoral economy; an almost desperate attempt to revive virtue in one’s personal, social, economic and political life—as a Muslim, but also as an Indian citizen.

Indeed, Islamic reformism��is, from their perspective, the basis for becoming a virtuous, secular Indian citizen, and for claims for equal inclusion��in the democratic nation. To them, virtuosity implies living in harmony with others, contributing to the Indian democracy and abiding by national law. So perhaps paradoxically to secular liberal ears, a new, reformed Islam becomes the basis of secularism.

The ethical framework of Muslims in Joygram is not rigidly stuck in time but has gradually incorporated secular liberal values. This ethical framework is called Islam only because India has a long history of reducing holistic moralities to narrow religious and communal modes of identification. Living morally should imply living peacefully, by following Islamic prescripts, locally specific rules of sociality, and the Indian constitution alike. Becoming a reformist Muslim is therefore a public statement showing: I do not engage in any immoral or unlawful activities.

Terrorist, No!

Alas, political and public discourse often positions Islam in contradistinction to secular liberalism. These��processes of ethical transformation can therefore be too easily mistaken for processes of radicalisation. This mistake would fit with the conveyer belt theory of radicalization. This theory would presume that reformist��Muslims are indeed covering the first steps toward becoming violent extremists. Prominent scholars have widely discredited this theory yet it is still prevalent in certain circles. Other circles, such as the CSIS, follow the evidence that there is no direct link between religious conservatism or reformism and violent extremism.

We cannot easily predict whether these Muslims are on the road to radicalization. Radicalization has more to do with external factors—marginalization, experiences of injustice—than with currently prevalent intentions or sentiments. Suspicion of reformist Muslims is particularly problematic since increased religious devotion may in fact reflect efforts to challenge Islamic��extremism. The CSIS, for instance, recognizes that religious fluency can be helpful in challenging extremist ideas and narratives. And, I would add, can help individuals to contribute to secular harmony.

Suspicion of radicalization is a major motivation to join the proselytizing movement the Tablighi Jamaat. The Tablighi Jamaat is an apolitical, non-violent Islamic organization. This was the case for Farid, who joined the Tablighi Jamaat to demonstrate that Muslims are peaceful. Farid fiercely condemns any terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam; those people are not worthy a Muslim title.

When I introduced Farid to a British friend, Farid immediately pre-empted any suspicion that his Islamic aesthetics may provoke. Imitating shooting an AK-47, and then waving his hand in rejection, he says to my friend, “Terrorist, no! No bombs! We Muslim,��shanti��(peaceful).” Farid learns and spreads an Islam of peace on the proselytizing tours with the Tablighi Jamaat. Becoming more fluent in this Islam helps him to challenge violence committed in the name of Islam.

Similarly, Deobandi imams preach that is the duty of Indian Muslims to contribute to��India’s national identity. An identity captured in the slogan��“Unity and Diversity.” Religious devotion��includes being��welcoming to strangers of whichever community. To pick up a rock on the road to avoid an accident unknowing of who the affected may be.��Donning the Islamic garb is a way of demonstrating one’s commitment to this ethical attitude of tolerance and solidarity.

In other words, the turn to reformist Islam is not a rejection of secular liberal values. Instead, it is a response to the failure of secular liberal governance. This failure is painfully visible in the rampantly unequal distribution of resources and rights. It is a response to purposively divisive and corrupt political practice: A politics that fails to secure universal human rights and substantive citizenship. It is a response to the kind of politics that we increasingly see in the US and in Europe.

Joygrami Muslims work��hard to become pious Muslims and devoted Indian citizens. Yet fellow Indian citizens suspect them for extremist sentiments. This creates ever more frustration. The ethical transformation that these Muslims engage in further alienates them from the Indian nation state. It makes them ever more suspect of anti-Indian and anti-global secular world order sentiments.

According to some CVE programs in the US and the UK, a perceived sense of being treated unjustly, expressions of hopelessness, futility and connection to group identity (including religion) are criteria suggesting that people are at risk of radicalization.

Most of the Muslims I worked with would easily meet all these three criteria. They feel treated unjustly, because the politicians and police marginalize Muslims on the basis of their religious identity. They feel hopeless because the very measures they take to demonstrate that they are peaceful are counterproductive. Their struggle for inclusion in the Indian nation state instead��raises suspicion. They increasingly connect to their religious identity—firstly, because Islam offers them the tools for living ethically and peacefully; secondly, because they feel��excluded from claims to the Indian group identity.

Yet their ethical transformation should not in any way be misunderstood as radicalization. It is the misunderstanding of their ethical journey that may incite a very different and otherwise unrelated journey—a journey toward radicalization. Hence a warning: Do not mistake a pious Muslim for a terrorist.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The old city is still beautiful in its elegant, well-designed, almost understated way. In fact, it’s hardly old. What we see, the streets in which we play the���ڱ�â�Ա�ܰ�, were designed and built by Georges Eugene Haussmann from 1853. His plans were still being used for city development as late as 1927. The iconic Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889. Essentially, the Paris of today is one and a half centuries old.

The difference between Paris and other cities that began at that time, such as Sydney, are the long wide boulevards and their trees; the plenitude of museums and cultural monuments; and the prohibition against tall buildings, the Tour Montparnasse being an exception. There is thus a skyline everywhere, a horizon. It is not blocked off by skyscrapers. Thus it is the city of light, amplified by those same wide boulevards.

Of course, it is also the city of art—and of exiled artists, writers, musicians and romantics. The Gene Kelly film, An American in Paris, set to Gershwin’s music, ensured that the legend of Paris was enshrined even in Hollywood. Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis all found their way there as celebrity exiles. Miles Davis said it was the only place he felt free from discrimination. Intellectuals from the emerging nations were also there: Leopold Senghor, the future president of Senegal; Frantz Fanon, who wrote a Bible of revolt; and Ali Shariati, the philosopher of the Iranian revolution. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was also exiled there.

There was a great intermixing of foreigners and local writers and artists. Miles Davis had a relationship with Juliet Greco. Fanon and Shariati were mentored by Jean-Paul Sartre. They all used to drink and argue philosophy and art at La Coupole in Montparnasse. The café is still there, much redeveloped, but still with art works by its original patrons like Jean Cocteau.

Outside the café these days, Syrian refugees beg for coins on the broad sidewalks. A family down the street, both parents and two young children, settle down for the night. The children are smiling as they are told their bedtime stories.

The Reign of Terror

Terrorism has long been a staple of postwar Parisian life. Targets were blown up during the Algerian War of Independence, both as the French tried to hang on to the colony, and as they tried to let it go. The pro-colonial group, Organisation de l’armee secrete, was responsible for a major attack on a train in 1961. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Paris endured sporadic attacks, including those by Carlos the Jackal. In the 1990s, the Algerian Civil War spilled over into France and the Armed Islamic Group attacked public transport.

However, all these attacks could be linked to clear political issues in the Middle East and to French foreign policy. There was a comparative lull in the frequency and intensity of attacks in the 2000s, until 2015. Then, in January, the Charlie Hebdo attack took place, and in November the carnage at the Bataclan.

What is new is the origin of the 2015 attacks is an ideology of faith rather than politics—certainly not the politics the French themselves pioneered with their own revolution, constitutions, and philosophical writings. Because the ideology is faith-bound, there is no discourse between French political philosophy and a militant Islamic theology. There is no Islamic equivalent of Frantz Fanon, with a foreword by Sartre, and using Lacan as an explicator of the psychology of revolt.

But one must surely be needed soon, as a city as worldly as Paris cannot continue to treat outrage simply as outrage; discuss superficially its sociology, but not its psychology and philosophy. Like all Western intelligence and security forces, the French concentrate on how the Islamic State (IS)��does what it does. It tries to defeat the “how.” It does not ask too deeply about the “why.”

But at least the French do a little better than the Belgians. The Paris attacks of late 2015 were planned in Brussels and included several Belgian Islamists. Those who survived fled back to Brussels. Then they attacked Brussels too. Belgium is a state with six rival police forces without intelligence-sharing protocols. They simply collapsed under the challenge of forecasting and preventing attacks on its neighbors and itself. Nevertheless, after the March 2016 attacks in Brussels, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was lit up every night in Belgian colours of red, gold and black. As they had been in red, white and blue after the Paris attacks.

From where I stay in Paris, and was staying throughout March 2016, across the road from Montparnasse Cemetery, one could see the tower. I stayed in the building next to where Simone de Beauvoir lived. She and Jean-Paul Sartre are buried together in the cemetery. For a city that impersonates space, light and elegance, it is strange to contemplate how famous lives were conducted, ended, and were buried in a small suburb—and where they were buried others of the great and the good were also buried. Foreigners like Samuel Beckett and Susan Sontag are there. French legends like Baudelaire are there. Durkheim, Ionesco, Man Ray, Proudhon, Rohmer, even Serge Gainsborough, are there.

At night, one looks across the sweep of their remains, slabs and monuments, to see the sweep of the Eiffel Tower’s searchlight as, underneath, it is lit in the colors of yet another country bloodied in the 21^st century’s reign of terror. The searchlight still sweeps, not yet for other countries, but it did for the sister French city of Nice in July 2016.

The Banlieu

The elegance, even of a cemetery, is hardly found in the outskirts of Paris. Actually, they’re not outskirts. They’re the reality of Paris—a reality of a seemingly segregated and schizophrenic city. Here there are high-rise apartment blocks. The horizon seems foreclosed. Elegance and philosophy seem far away. In suburbs like St. Denis, with their heavily mixed populations, the grimier feel seems both invigorating but also, looking over one’s shoulder, treacherous. The main street feels like a seedy part of Beirut but one imagines debates from Mosul, Damascus, Baghdad. One imagines.

The debates are probably no different in the restaurants and bars of the Edgware Road in London. And the cafes serve wine—and almost anything else that is alcoholic. The mixture is precisely an antidote to paranoia. Everything can be discussed over a glass of wine. And Paris is unpredictable. I’ve had my jacket slashed outside Sonia Rykiel on the Boulevard St. Germain in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Knowing it can happen anywhere, one doesn’t go to a city for safety. One goes to Paris for elegance and philosophy. The question is why are the French frightened to take philosophy to the banlieu?

In the 2005 crackdown on the purported violence and anti-social attitudes of the banlieu, former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s harsh tactics achieved nothing. With the strictures and the rigor of policing, there was no admixture of engagement and dialogue. The youth, precisely of St. Denis, felt restless and resentful over mass unemployment and police harassment. Despite being second-generation French, they felt exiled from France. Sarkozy’s heavy-handed response led to a spiral of attacks and counter-attacks until, finally, 20,000 police were deployed in the Paris suburbs. A state of emergency was declared. The rhetoric was about deportations and against foreigners. But the bulk of the unrest had featured local people.

Sarkozy’s effort having failed, his successors have fielded neither stricture nor engagement— although they have come down hard on atrocities, and President François Hollande has declared the country is at war. And no modern philosopher has spoken for the Islamic community, moderate or radical, although many thinkers, those on the covers of Le Point or Le Nouvel Observateur, or dashingly in the gossip pages of Paris Match, have written portentous tomes of what can only be called Islamophobia.

No one thinks for or with Islam. No one has tried to bring this part of France into France. But, for a city that hosted Shariati and Khomeini, that objected with great eloquence in the UN Security Council to the second Gulf War, this absence of thought and speech, whether in the banlieu or the great organs of state, or in the intellectual journalism that these days passes as philosophy, is a mystery.

On the Streets

Yet French radicalism is not dead. Students and workers still protest against the state’s proposed liberalization of labor laws. The railways go on strike. Cities taste tear gas now as ever before. Before his decision not to contest the 2017 Presidential elections, Hollande was challenged within his Socialist Party by Martine Aubry, a heavyweight of the left.

But her agenda seems a curious throwback to the left agenda of decades ago, with labor laws at its heart. The “worker” is still the heartbeat of the left, not the migrant, not the refugee. There will likely not be a candidate from the left in the 2017 elections but, for left and right, when it comes to terrorism, there is only rhetoric and intensified exercises in intelligence-gathering— all to do with the “how” of atrocity, and still not the “why.”

The November 2015 attacks saw��St. Denis as the��epicentre. It had been easy to stage the assault from there. The “how” to fight terrorism of even the French intelligence services had not penetrated the social networks and knowledge banks of the banlieu both on and away from the main streets, and their counterparts in Molenbeek, Belgium, from where the attackers, with their links to the Paris attacks, had set out to bomb the Brussels airport and the metro in March 2016.

On the streets of Paris, because they could not make it to the streets of London, entire families can be seen every night. The success of a British policy against refugees in large numbers has been to see those numbers making do elsewhere. Many are clearly Syrian. They have not yet been able to join in the practice of the local homeless who buy tents and pitch them on the sidewalks.

Beside the Montparnasse Cemetery there is a little encampment of tents, one with an armchair outside, a birdcage with a wooden hoopoe, a sun umbrella. The householder’s little precinct is patrolled by his dog, his leash tied to a tree allowing a circumference of total control. Passers-by walk around the circumference. It is as settled as street life can be.

The Syrian refugees one encounters are without tents and wooden birds in cages. They have not yet reached the appreciation of existential absurdity shown by their local counterparts. They are unfailingly polite. Both husband and wife smile their thanks for a donation. One wonders what the children will remember of their young years on the streets. They all seem aged about five, although one mother was breastfeeding a baby on the bridge beside Notre Dame.

But the poignant aspect about what is a spectacle of deprivation and uprooting is the nightly telling of bedtime stories to the children—and the children, knowing there is no choice but to make so, smiling. But they will remember, and the memory may be carried into the banlieu as social ladders are climbed from streets to petty criminality and gangs, and radicalization.

The sight of destitute families is no doubt repeated in all the great cities of Europe. It looks a disaster in the city of light. And culture, and learning and elegance. It answers the city of philosophy with its own questions about the meaning of life. And compassion. And the moral destitution of jadedness.

A Paris of Our Times

The great philosophers are dead. Many are buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Many of their successors are narrow-minded �ڱ�â�Ա�ܰ�s of the intellect. The successors too are dying—André Glucksmann on November 10, 2015, just three days before the atrocity at the Bataclan. In his late life, amidst the bewildering curves that French intellectual life now takes between left and right, he repudiated the notion that Islamic terrorism was the result of a “clash of civilizations.” But human rights and a sense of compassion have always been in his thought. A sense of nostalgia for solidarity too.

In the late 1970s, Glucksmann helped convene a conference of indignation against the lack of international governmental help for the boat people of his day—fleeing from Vietnam. To the conference came the elderly and frail Jean-Paul Sartre, and the historian Raymond Aron. They had quarrelled decades ago. No one remembered why. There is a wonderful photograph of the young Glucksmann bringing the two old sages together. And they reconciled. It was a nice sideshow that set off the real issue of the Vietnamese refugees. How they should be accepted and, in France, help with the merger of civilizations.

Today, Sartre and Aron are buried in the same cemetery—Glucksmann elsewhere, in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, where Jim Morrison also lies. In France, for the great and the good and the accepted foreigners, those with art and intellect like Morrison and Sontag, it has to be one of those two cemeteries.

In a sense, the cemetery became a symbol of my stay in Paris. All the great thought has gone. All the efforts to say that refugees are one with us has disappeared into an unquestioned puff of Islamophobia. Critical thinking about life and the destiny of history lies under marble slabs. People bring flowers. There seems always a long-stemmed rose on the grave of Sartre and de Beauvoir.

Others are less fortunate. They get the ceramic flowers in artificial planter boxes that can be bought from the six funeral accessory shops that surround the cemetery. Looking toward where she lies, the apartment block of de Beauvoir is being renovated and some parts gutted. One looks into the hollow space, the cave, and hopes a new elegance will grow in Paris.

Once I passed by, on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, down the road from La Coupole and a block away from the Montparnasse Cemetery, an ambulance crew attending someone who seemed to have had a heart attack or a stroke. The French are sanguine. No crowds formed. The victim looked like one of the Syrian refugees. It won’t be Montparnasse or Père Lachaise Cemetery. No philosopher will come to his brief funeral. But some few meters of elegant French ground will finally accept him.

*[Stephen Chan’s new book, , is published by Polity in February 2017.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Middle East has no shortage of dysfunctional states. The fallout of the has left civil war in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya. Beyond them, states such as Egypt and Jordan teeter on the edge of chaos, destabilized by their regimes’ own repressive tactics. Yet beyond the outright war zones, nowhere is more plagued by terrorist attacks than Turkey.

How has one of the region’s few Islamist governments—and a country that was, until the outbreak of war in Syria, viewed as a popular model for the Middle East—become the primary target of revolutionary ire?

One would assume that a fall from grace so spectacular, impacting people’s daily lives, their safety, the economy and international outreach in terms of soft power and commerce, would have led to a change of government at the very least.

Well, that did almost happen in July 2016. And it is funny how quickly events can send a smoke screen across the landscape of the past. Not so long ago, in June 2015, a general election saw a fall in support for the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) government that was close to trimming its power in the first coalition government of the century. That fall in support was the result of both a weakening economy and a stalling of the hoped-for peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Turkey’s Islamic nationalism

The steady march of instability on Turkey’s doorstep, coupled with the struggle to find the levels of growth enjoyed in the early boom years of the AKP government, led to an illiberal pivot. Hardship and instability inevitably herald illiberalism, yet the choices of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—a hugely popular leader—have been decisive ones. In choosing to abandon a more progressive line toward the country’s Kurdish minority and a more inclusive attitude to regional politics, he embraced Turkey’s nationalist right.

Erdogan may genuinely have felt that his grip on power depended on such a move. The climate of the Middle East region has become one of siege. Incumbent regimes are keen to bolster tried and tested defenses against the onslaught of new, iconoclastic movements. Yet Erdogan’s choice, while making his power safe for the time being within Turkish politics, has also placed him in an unwinnable long-term position. He has chosen to win a battle decisively, but in doing so has allied himself to a decaying set of structures that are on the wane.

Nationalism has been tried before in the Middle East. It didn’t last in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt—or even Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s day—when the conditions were far more favorable. Today, the identities that nationalism rests on are far more brittle. Turkey’s chaos is so potent today because it is once again fighting the two traditional foes of the state: Kurds and Islamists.

It is ironic that a government drawn from the Islamist movement, and long viewed suspiciously by the secular nationalist establishment, has now come to embody that same establishment so thoroughly that it is being attacked—like the establishment of old—by Kurds and Islamists once more. History is indeed a circular, rather than linear, affair in Turkey.

What must be done?

Erdogan’s government has proven that a lot can be gained from a siege mentality. He is not alone. Across the region—and the world—politicians are profiting from the sense of threat from outside. Whether it’s economic hardship, immigrants or a lack of ideological vision for the future, everywhere the lure of drawbridge nationalism is compelling. Nowhere more so than Turkey.

Yet the appeal does not alter the illusion. Things will not get better by that route. Repression of basic rights, introspection, protectionism and a closing down of channels of communication does not lead to prosperity anywhere. The figures are dire for Turkey. It is regularly cited as one of the most overexposed economies in terms of dollar debt repayments and the risk of capital flight. Its annual growth rate has plunged from less than 3% for 2016.

In the tourism sector, the most important area of the economy for large swathes of the country, the crisis is acute. Istanbul’s terrorism threat has killed off its visitor numbers whilst the important resorts of the Mediterranean coast, which have not experienced any terrorism yet, are empty through a combination of fear and Vladimir Putin’s recent blockade on Russian charter flights. Visitor numbers were at their . In an economic future like this, Erdogan is going to need to keep offering panaceas.

The truth is that there is no credible alternative to Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey today. The other half of the truth is that things are not going to get better in 2017. In early 2018, without any apparent alternative, Erdogan will succeed in transforming Ataturk’s state into a presidential system in time for its 100^th anniversary.

The new strongman is built very much in the old founder’s own image. Turkey goes round and round. The future is the past.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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This November, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) released the , the latest of its yearly reports laying out year-on-year statistical trends in worldwide terrorism. The report draws from a comprehensive database of terrorist incidents going back 16 years, from the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2015. The data covers 163 countries, accounting for 99.7% of the global population. Although the report is strewn with errors of detail regarding the identities and histories of terrorist groups, the broad statistical pictures it provides allow for interesting insights into how terrorist threats are developing in the 21st century.

Global terrorist activity has skyrocketed since the Arab Spring of 2011, after modestly receding during the US military’s “surge” in Iraq from 2007. In particular, 2014 saw a massive spike in deaths from terrorism, due in large part to an explosion of activity by Islamic State (IS). The following year, 2015, was the second worst year since 2000, although it did see an overall reduction in deaths by 10% compared with the previous year. This plateauing of terrorist killings was driven by a decline in a few of the world’s most affected regions, including Iraq, Nigeria and Pakistan, which each experienced at least a 30% drop.

Conflict Hubs

As the report points out, the number one factor influencing rates of terrorism worldwide is whether a country is affected by conflict. More than 90% of terrorist incidents since 1989 have occurred in countries either involved in conflicts or engaged in severe repression of the population. Consequently, changes in the dynamics of conflicts can lead to dramatic changes in the levels of terrorism taking place. The overall reduction in deaths caused by terrorism in 2015 from 2014 was a result of successful military campaigns against terrorist groups in key conflict zones.

In Iraq, for example, 2015 saw a 30% drop in deaths from terrorism due to an anti-IS campaign by an international coalition (though the country remains more affected by terrorism than any other). Nigeria, similarly, saw a 34% decline, due to fewer attacks by Boko Haram as the group was targeted by the combined military forces of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Pakistan, meanwhile, experienced a 38% drop in deaths, as the military’s Operation Zarb-e-Azb targeted terrorist safe-havens in North Waziristan, resulting in the killing of over 3,000 Tehrik-i-Taliban members, according to the Pakistani government.

Deficiencies in Governance

Effective counterterrorism campaigns in certain regions, however, do not lead to a halt in the activity of the terrorist organisations in those places. Rather, terrorism tends to get displaced into other nearby regions, particularly in parts of the world suffering from severe deficiencies in governance.

Syria, for instance, saw the largest absolute increase in terrorism deaths—2,761—of any country in 2015, as IS fighters hit by airstrikes in Iraq re-focused their activities on the Syrian side of the border.

Similarly, while terrorist killings by Boko Haram reduced within Nigeria, killings by the group increased in nearby Cameroon, Chad and Niger, by 163% overall. Deaths in Afghanistan also increased by 18% to 5,312—making 2015 the country’s most violent year for terrorism since 2000—offsetting the drop in neighboring Pakistan.

These shifts reflect a typical modus operandi among today’s terrorist groups, which is to transfer their base of operations into the most poorly-governed spaces. A comparable example in 2016 can be seen in Algeria, which has stepped up the militarization of its borders and rural regions, creating a stifling environment for al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and IS-linked cells. AQIM-linked terrorists with a long history of interest in Algeria, consequently, have now found a home in Mali and Libya, where a lack of basic governance has emboldened these group to expand their activities.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries also saw a sharp uptick in terrorist attacks in 2015, experiencing by far their worst year since IEP’s data began, with 577 deaths. Half of these attacks were carried out by IS, which has sought to distract from its military losses in the Middle East and continue to project an image of forward momentum by attacking soft Western targets. Denmark, Germany and Sweden, which had barely seen a terrorist incident between them since 2000, each experienced attacks, while France’s average of one death per year since 2000 shot up to 161 deaths from attacks in 2015. The worst affected in the OECD was Turkey, where deaths jumped from 20 in 2014 to 337 over the following year.

Maximizing Casualties

An interesting insight from the numbers presented in IEP’s report concerns development in the use of weaponry by international terrorist groups. Although attacks and deaths worldwide decreased in 2015, the use of improvized explosive devices (IEDs) as an attack method increased by 16%, with these attacks’ average lethality increasing by 20%.

One driver of this shift was Boko Haram, which, despite a sharp overall drop in terrorist activity in 2015, greatly increased its killings from the use of explosives. In 2013, the group had killed 107 people in 35 bombings; in 2015, meanwhile, this reached 638 people in 156 bombings, nearly two-thirds of which were suicide attacks.

These developments reflect the maturing of terrorist organizations over time, and the attention they pay to the efficiency of attack methods intended to maximize casualties.

The downside of IEP’s report is its numerous errors regarding specifics about terrorist organizations. This suggests a limited familiarity among IEP analysts with broader terrorism literature beyond the database they’re drawing from. In Egypt, for example, the report refers to Ansar Beit al-Maqdis and IS as distinct groups, with the Egyptian military being involved in “two conflicts” against them (the latter is in fact a rebranding of the former). However, this should not detract from the light shed by these statistics upon the broader directions of global terrorism trends and their causes.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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