While acts of terror have been defined, defining terrorism is not easy and no such definition could be articulated even by the UN bodies working on this. As far as India is concerned it has been witnessing regular killings in Kashmir by the insane acts of brain washed Muslim youth. India saw the 26/11 2008 attack in Mumbai in which nearly 200 people lost their lives. Very interestingly Hemant Karkare, the then Anti-Terrorist Squad chief of Maharashtra was killed during this attack.

Parallel to this we also witnessed the acts of terror beginning in Nanded (2006) and later four major places, Malegaon, Ajmer, Mecca Masjid (Hyderabad) and Samjhuata Express. For Malegaon related blast, NIA is demanding death penalty for Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, BJP MP, whose motor cycle was the instrument used in Malegaon. Along with her Lt Col Purohit is also being tried and other names which came into picture were those of Swami Aseemanand, Major (retd) Upadhyay and many those who had affiliation to Hindutva politics.

As India faces these acts of terror, it is imperative that we give a serious thought to the root of global terror and its impact on India. While the security measures undertaken at the moment are being questioned as earlier Pulwama and now Pahalgam terror attacks have shown chinks in our armour, there are some deeper issues which India needs to collaborate with global agencies in eradicating some of these.

At one level the terrorist groups which are affecting India, have bases in Pakistan. The plight of Pakistan is pathetic as it is not only an agency of acts of terror; it is also the victim of this dastardly phenomenon. The present terror acts are taking place in Kashmir. The major actors involved in this tragedy in Kashmir are offshoots of terror groups, which came up in the aftermath of the American project of countering the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

As the US was in no position to take on the Russian army’s presence in Afghanistan, it promoted Madrassas in Pakistan which gave training to Muslim youth; Taliban and its later clones was the result. Mahmood Mamdani in his well-researched book, ‘Good Muslim Bad Muslim’, tells us how the syllabus of these Madras’s was prepared in Washington. Communists were presented as Kafirs. Killing Kafirs was propagated as the goal and in the achievement of this goal, even if one loses life, Jannat was assured. America spent eight thousand million dollars in these madrassas and provided them with 7000 tons of armaments, which included the latest stinger missiles.

The same phenomenon of terror, promotion of which was the imperialist ambitions of America in controlling the oil wealth of West Asia, did assume dangerous proportions creating havoc in the region. Just to remind it was this era when Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis was ruling the roost. To the global good fortune, Kofi Annan the UN Secretary General appointed a high level committee to examine ‘Clash of Civilization’ in particular.

This committee came out with a report “Alliance of Civilizations” which concluded that the World has progressed due to the alliance of Civilizations. This report did not get projections from various quarters. The Islamophobia planted by the acts of terror and the negative role of American media was so intense that at places copies of the Koran were burnt.

The terror phenomenon turned into Frankenstein’s monster. While it played its negative role at multiple levels, it turned into destruction recklessly and Pakistan has also been a victim of this phenomenon. One recalls the Ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto was killed in one such attack by the terror groups. GTI (Global Terror Index) is a composite measure made up of four indicators: incidents, fatalities, injuries and hostages. To measure the impact of terrorism, a five-year weighted average is applied. In this Pakistan is 2^nd and India 14^th . Meaning the acts of terror have tormented Pakistan much more than India.

No wonder that the victims of terrorism are more in Pakistan, as it is the madrassas in Pakistan where the training was given. While India has to ensure that no acts of terror take place in India, there is also a need to understand that this cancer of terror sown by imperialist ambitions for control over oil can be eradicated by cooperation at global level.

“…Pakistan—a country repeatedly labelled as the “global exporter of terror”—has been appointed to chair the United Nations Security Council’s Taliban Sanctions Committee in 2025. Simultaneously, it will serve as vice-chair of the Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee.” Surely this tells a complex tale.

There are many factors controlling the policies of Pakistan, the emerging angle of China is yet another of these. While Pakistan needs to be held accountable, there is also a need to ensure that it is brought to the discussion table to get rid of this scourge. To prevent terror attacks in India all steps in promoting democracy in Kashmir are the need of the hour.

We are at present facing multiple dilemmas. The progress of Kashmir is static despite its vast potential. Pakistan needs to engage at multiple levels to ensure the eradication of the cancerous growth of terrorist violence. At a subtle level there is a propaganda associating Islam, Muslims with the phenomenon of terror. This understanding lacks a deeper understanding of the peculiar circumstances in which the American designs to control over West Asian oil resources has operated and led to the present impasse. Symptomatic countering of this dastardly phenomenon needs to be added on with the deeper analysis of the global scenario where dominant American policies have played a ruinous role in promoting this phenomenon and is now washing its hands off it.

The writer is a human rights activist, who taught at IIT Bombay. The views are personal.

The post Defeating Terror: A complex rigmarole appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Lost in the headlines, rapidly accelerating news cycles and the pervasive fear generated by terrorist threats is the fact that terrorist attacks worldwide have actually been declining – in some areas substantially.

The aftermath of a 2018 attack by the Taliban in Ghazni city, Afghanistan. Will terrorist attacks like this one be as common in 2019? Reuters/Mustafa Andaleb

Terrorism researchers like me have long noted that the number of terrorist attacks rises and falls in waves – generally lasting several decades.

I’m the founding director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, and one of the original creators of the Global Terrorism Database. My colleagues Laura Dugan, Erin Miller and I define terrorism as “the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by non-state actors to attain a political, economic, religious or social goal through fear, coercion or intimidation.” The database shows that the world has been gripped by a wave of terrorist attacks that began shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

My research using the START database shows the extent of this spike. From 2002 through 2014, worldwide terrorist attacks increased by 12 times and terrorist fatalities increased by more than eight times. Especially hard hit were Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East, India and Pakistan in South Asia, and Nigeria in sub-Saharan Africa.

The most active terrorist organizations driving this worldwide boom were the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, the Islamic State Group (also known as IS), the Communist Party of India–Maoist and Boko Haram.

But since 2014, the picture has changed dramatically – a development that has gone largely unreported in the media.

Let’s examine that change.

A downward trend

In 2015 total terrorist attacks decreased by 11.5 percent and total terrorism-related deaths by 12.7 percent.

In 2016, we saw a further 9.2 percent decrease in attacks and 10.2 percent decline in total terrorism-related deaths.

The downward trend continued in 2017, the most recent data available, with a 19.8 percent drop in attacks and a 24.2 percent decline in fatalities.

Taken together, these 36 months have witnessed the single largest three-year decline in attacks and fatalities since the Global Terrorism Database began in 1970 – nearly a half century ago.

The recent declines are geographically dispersed. In the peak year of 2014, five countries – Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Somalia – accounted for 57.2 percent of the world’s total terrorist attacks and more than half of the worldwide terrorism-related fatalities.
By the end of 2017, all five of these countries had experienced sizable declines in attacks.

Three of these countries also experienced a dramatic decline in fatalities: a 53.6 percent drop in Iraq, a 55.4 percent drop in Pakistan, and a 97.1 percent drop in Ukraine. The violence in Ukraine was concentrated in 2014 and 2015 and associated with the rapid rise of the Euromaidan revolution and culminated in the overthrow of the Russian-backed Ukrainian president.

During the same period, fatalities increased by 12.5 percent in Afghanistan and 203 percent in Somalia, but these increases weren’t big enough to offset the declines in Iraq, Pakistan and Ukraine.

Major groups less active

Attacks and fatalities claimed by the world’s most active and dangerous terrorist organizations have also declined during the last three years.

In 2014, the five most active terrorist organizations in the world were the Islamic State Group, or IS, the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and the Donetsk People’s Republic – a separatist organization operating in Ukraine and receiving military backing from Russia.

A member of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic forces, one of the world’s most active terrorist organizations, in the rebel-controlled village of Yelenovka outside Donetsk, Ukraine. Reuters/Alexander Ermochenko

By the end of 2017, attacks by the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, Boko Haram and the Donetsk People’s Republic had all declined. Total attacks by IS decreased by 2.2 percent from 2014 to 2015 but then increased by 7.7 percent from 2015 to 2017.

In Western Europe and the United States, total terrorist attacks are down sharply from the 1970s. In 2017, Western Europe accounted for only 2.7 percent of worldwide attacks and the United States for less than 1 percent of attacks.

That may seem surprising given the amount of media attention generated by a small number of high profile attacks. In 2015, attacks in Paris took the lives of 130 and injured another 400. In 2016, Western Europe experienced a series of mass casualty attacks carried out by IS and its affiliates in Nice, Brussels and Berlin.

While the total number of attacks in the United States remains extremely low, the public was shocked in 2015 by the 14 victims of the attack by Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernardino, California, and the nine people killed by Dylann Roof’s attack at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2016, Americans witnessed the 49 deaths linked to the assault carried out by Omar Mateen in Orlando, Florida. And in 2017, Americans learned of the eight deaths in New York City linked to Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov who claimed an affiliation with IS.
 

Some hotspots remain

Terrorist attacks and fatalities are not declining everywhere and every year.

The START database shows that in 2017, attacks and fatalities increased in India, the Philippines and Nepal. In 2016, attacks and fatalities increased in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan and Turkey. And in 2015 attacks and fatalities increased in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Egypt.

Also, while worldwide attacks have declined, a large number of countries are still being targeted. Thus, while terrorist attacks took place in a total of 100 countries in 2014, total countries experiencing attacks was 99 in 2015, 108 in 2016 and 100 in 2017. Countries only experiencing attacks in 2016 included Kazkhstan, Panama and Switzerland.

This effect was especially apparent with IS and its affiliates, which claimed fewer attacks and deaths in 2017 but at the same time carried out attacks in a larger number of different countries.

Not all reasons for declines in terrorist attacks are positive.

For example, an argument can be made that terrorist attacks have declined in Afghanistan in part because the Taliban in recent years has been so successful in taking back control of the country.

A similar outcome – but with the regime rather than the terrorist perpetrators gaining control of the situation – no doubt explains declining terrorist attacks and fatalities in Syria.

While we have observed major declines in terrorist attacks and fatalities from 2015 to 2017, both attacks and fatalities remain at historically high levels.

The number of attacks in 2017 is 27.9 percent higher than in 2012, and deaths 70.6 percent higher.

Even more strikingly, attacks were more than twice as common in 2017 as they were during 1992 – the peak year for an earlier wave.

An end to chaos?

One thing is certain: The number of terrorist attacks in a particular region of the world as a whole will eventually peak and then decline.
It seems logical to conclude that the chaos and disorder that follow in the wake of terrorist attacks provide strong incentives for societies to adopt strategies for countering them.

Few individuals or communities prefer living endlessly in chaos and violence. We can only hope that we have reached that tipping point in 2019. At the same time, we must humbly admit that prediction is the most precarious task of the social sciences.

Courtesy: The Conversation

The post Will terrorism continue to decline in 2019? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Muslim protesters in India marching against the Islamic State after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris. Divyakant Solanki/EPA

Restrictions on Muslim immigration have been openly discussed – most recently by Senator Fraser Anning in his maiden speech to parliament – and many believe another terrorist attack in the name of “Islam” is inevitable.

Confronted with this reality, the media are playing an essential role in informing us about Islam and influencing how we respond. But, perhaps due to a limited understanding of Islam or a fear of antagonising Muslims, a fundamental point has largely been absent from reporting: the threat of terrorism does not stem from Islam. Rather, it stems from Islamism, a political ideology.

The two terms may sound similar, but Islam and Islamism are not the same thing. Islam is a faith observed by over 1.6 billion people, whereas Islamism is the political ideology of relatively small groups that borrow concepts like shariah and jihad from Islam and reinterpret them to gain legitimacy for their political goals.
 

How the media legitimises the aims of terrorists

Islamist groups like al Qaida and the Islamic State use violence against non-Muslims with the aim of establishing a political institution (“caliphate”) based on shariah law – neither of which have a basis in the Quran or hadith (Islamic prophetic traditions).

Part of the appeal of the Islamic State comes from its insidious ability to selectively use Islamic teachings and repackage them as legitimate religious obligations.

In particular, Islamists have appropriated the concept of jihad to legitimise an offensive “holy war” against non-Muslims. This interpretation, however, has been rejected by studies that have examined the Quran’s principles concerning war and peace.

Islamic teachings, for instance, prohibit terrorism and the use of violence against civilians. Further, Muslim leaders and scholars around the world have repeatedly condemned terrorism, issuing fatwas (Islamic legal rulings).

By reporting on this misleading interpretation of jihad and under-reporting Muslim condemnations, the Western news media reinforce the perceived connection between Islam and terrorism.

In some cases, media pundits explicitly make this link, pointing to the fact terrorists specifically refer to “Islam” as the basis for their actions.

This uncritical acceptance of terrorists’ claims and misrepresenting of Islam legitimises and unwittingly promotes the Islamist agenda.

In other words, the media plays into the hands of terrorists by allowing them to become the representatives for Islam and Muslims in general.

Islamic State recruiting tool

Islamist terrorists have a strategic interest in propagating the belief that Islam and the West are engaged in a civilisational war.

As the Islamic State outlined in its online magazine in February 2015:
 

Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two choices.

The group explained that, as the threat of further terrorist attacks looms, Western Muslims will be treated with increased suspicion and distrust, forcing them to:
 

…either apostatize [convert] … or [migrate] to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens.

The Islamic State’s divide-and-conquer strategy is crucial to its ability to replenish its ranks with foreign recruits. The group targets disaffected and marginalised Western Muslims and invokes an Islamist narrative with promises of brotherhood, security and belonging.

In turn, the Western news media indirectly advance the group’s interests by repeatedly linking Muslim communities to terrorism and failing to meaningfully distinguish the Islamic faith from Islamist political ideology.

For example, as the first wave of Syrian refugees arrived in the UK in 2015, The Daily Mail warned of “the deadly threat of Britain’s enemy within” and associated refugees with the threat of “Muslim extremists”.

In the midst of the 2014 Sydney siege, The Daily Telegraph prematurely linked the Muslim hostage-taker with the Islamic State – a claim that was later dispelled by terrorism experts.

The impact of careless reporting

This kind of overly simplistic and sensationalist media coverage serves the Islamic State’s objective to pit Muslims and non-Muslims against one another.

As a study conducted at the University of Vienna in 2017 confirmed, media coverage that does not explicitly distinguish between Muslims and Islamist terrorists fuels hostile attitudes toward the general Muslim population.

With growing awareness of the impact of this kind of reporting, some media outlets like CNN have tried to distinguish between “moderate Islam” and “radical Islam”, “Islam” and “Islamic extremism”. But this, too, is misleading because it focuses on presumed religious motivations and overlooks the central role of Islamist political ideology.

A survey of almost 1,200 foreigner fighters by the Combating Terrorism Center revealed that over 85% had no formal religious education and were not lifelong, strict adherents to Islam. The report suggests the Islamic State may prefer such recruits because they are:
 

less capable of critically scrutinising the jihadi narrative and ideology.

Islamism masquerades as religion, but is much more a post-colonial expression of political grievances than a manifestation of the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. While the establishment of a caliphate or shariah-based order is the expressed agenda of Islamist terrorists, this is not a religious obligation for Muslims.

And it is not an assault on Islam for non-Muslims to say so.
 

Political correctness, or a more nuanced discussion?

In an effort to strip the Islamic State of its legitimacy, some governments have advised news outlets in the UK and France to use the derogatory acronym “Da’esh” to refer to the group, although this is not always practised.

Malcolm Turnbull also adopted the term “Islamist terrorism” in order to differentiate between those subscribing to the Islamist ideology and Muslim communities.

But many politicians such as Donald Trump continue to blur the distinction by using rhetoric like “radical Islamic terrorism” instead.

Some argue that our “political correctness” inhibits us from tackling the problem head on.

But those who say the problem stems from Islam are are mistaken. We should be able to have a constructive conversation about the central concepts of Islam, including whether establishing a “caliphate” and committing violence against non-Muslims are indeed religious obligations or have legitimacy in Islam.

Given the extent to which concerns about Islam have impacted on our society, there is an ethical obligation to differentiate between Islam and Islamism – or at least present a counter to the Islamist perspective.
 

Audrey Courty, PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University and Halim Rane, Associate professor, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why the media needs to be more responsible for how it links Islam and Islamist terrorism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A memorial on Las Ramblas following the attack. EPA/Quique Garcia

The fact that there was a 13-year gap between these incidents and the Madrid train bombings of March 11 2004 – should not be interpreted as a loss of interest on their part in such a strategic target.

Indeed only the diligence and efficiency (admittedly, coupled with strokes of fortune) of the country’s security and intelligence services have prevented further attacks.

According to government sources, some 180 jihadists were arrested in the four years leading up to July 2016. Meanwhile, interventions by law enforcement agencies, with investigative skills honed by decades of experience in fighting terrorism by Basque separatists, are believed to have directly prevented at least 15 major attacks since 2011.

Police gather in Cambrils, the scene of the second attack. EPA/Jaume Sellart

Not all the plots were typical. One that was thwarted in 2011 aimed to poison water supplies in tourist campsites and resorts with chemicals. This was apparently in response to the death of Osama bin Laden.

Searches of the homes of suspects arrested during operations uncovered encrypted videos with detailed maps of major Spanish cities, photos and plans of key buildings and guides to handling explosives.

According to the El Mundo newspaper, the jihadist ranks fighting in Syria currently include more than 100 fighters of Spanish nationality or former residents of Spain. These are among the most fanatical members of the terrorist groups and their active calls to strike in Spain serve as inspiration for followers still in the country.
 

A key target

Such vast potential is not lost on organisations such as Islamic State, which has claimed responsibility for the Barcelona attack. The group is known to be keen to extend its theatre of operations beyond Syria and Iraq to demonstrate that it is not a spent force. And, equally important, it wants to prompt a public opinion-driven rethink of support by Western governments for anti-IS campaigns.

Spain was mentioned 24 times in jihadist videos, newsletters and other forms of online propaganda over a period of just five months in 2016. That’s a reliable indicator that the Iberian country is firmly fixed in the terrorists’ sights.

There are geopolitical reasons for this keen and permanent interest. Spain has long been an active ally of the United States – particularly while conservative governments are in office as at present. For jihadists, the country is a key member of the international military coalition that “occupies” Muslim lands.

The picture of the Spanish premier of the day, José María Aznar, standing shoulder to shoulder with George Bush and Tony Blair in the Azores in March 2003 – effectively sealing the pact which led to the invasion of Iraq – served to establish Spain further as an enemy of Islam in terrorist’ minds.

Blair, Bush and Aznar in 2003. Harry Page/EPA

Less than a year later, Aznar was ousted from office due to the political fallout from the Madrid train bombings. His successor, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, immediately announced he was pulling Spanish troops out of Iraq. Al-Qaeda was swift to highlight this cause-and-effect sequence in subsequent propaganda.

The Spanish government has adopted a less active stance in the Middle East recently. It has refused to join airstrikes in countries such as Syria, for example. However, the government does not criticise its allies in their endeavours, so jihadists continue to see Spain as a legitimate target.

Hundreds of thousands of people protest in Madrid following the 2004 bombing. Andrew Parsons/PA Archive

Various historical issues aggravate the threat posed by such groups. It is important to recall that a priority of jihadist ideology is the reinstatement of the original borders of the Caliphate. Spain is considered the illegitimate occupant of Al Andalus (Islamic Iberia), the medieval territory under Muslim control and cultural influence between 711 and 1492. The reconquest of Granada – the last Islamic stronghold in Spain – by the Catholic Monarchs led to forced conversions and mass expulsions of Muslims.

A number of references in jihadist propaganda to Spain emphasise that the country is part of the umma (the supranational community of Islamic peoples), despite it having been seized by “infidels”. The territorial claims are wholly unrealistic today, but nonetheless strike a useful chord among radicalised jihadists desperate for a cause in which to believe.

The government is also often criticised for its permissiveness towards the formation of immigrant ghettos. Many fear that these socially excluded areas provide fertile ground for the seeds of the discontent that feeds radicalism and extremism, making young people easy prey for the ideology of jihadist terrorism.

Spain’s history, both in its recent and more distant past, makes it particularly vulnerable to jihadist terrorism, which is why these terrible events are unlikely to have come as a surprise. While none of this legitimises the ideology espoused by Islamic State, it goes some way to explaining how the organisation operates and how it convinces followers that cities like Barcelona should be targets of their violence.

Karl McLaughlin, Senior Lecturer in Spanish, Manchester Metropolitan University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Jihadist terrorists have long had Spain in their sights – here’s why appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The post How a dream to study abroad became a dream of jihad appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Mothers are revered in Southeast Asia. But, when it comes to extremism, might they also be part of the problem? Olivia Harris/Reuters

Terrorism research is now seeing a notable shift, with analysis examining the role women play as possible instigators of violence: mothers and mother-figures who are raising the next generation of soldiers.
 

Women as radicalisers

In Southeast Asia, for example, over the past year, there has been a rise in the number of stories of women involved in planning acts of terror and declaring support for extreme religious beliefs.

And ISIS is known to actively indoctrinate women in order to nurture young holy warriors.

Networks of women who pledge allegiance to the cause – whether ISIS’ or other extremist ideology – can exchange radical ideas among themselves and inculcate their children through a sustained domestic radicalisation strategy.

This suggests that terrorism prevention efforts should target not just extremist elements themselves, but also women, as possible vectors of radicalisation.

In Southeast Asia, home to 25% of the world’s Muslims, however, this proposition may sound particularly offensive. Here, women are often portrayed as symbols of virtue, selflessness and purity; entire sermons and treatises are dedicated to reverence for mothers.

A selection of hadiths, or Islamic teachings, about revering mothers are often cited as the reason for this inculcated respect, but even before the advent of Islam, Southeast Asian cultures treated mothers with great reverence.

Asian myths of various origins often feature a mother goddess who is deemed the personification of motherhood, fertility and creation.

Malay communities, for example, espouse a mother’s cherished status, and it is commonly believed that the pathway to heaven is in the footsteps of the mother.

The notion that it might lead instead to extremist thought and violent action is a dramatic departure from traditional thinking.

Nonetheless, across Muslim Southeast Asia, there are clear indications of increasing religiosity, from the controversial election, in April, of a conservative Muslim as Jakarta’s governor to purported support and empathy for ISIS in Malaysia.

Could mothers, those glorified beings, be part of the problem? Given dramatic economic and cultural changes underway in the region, the notion is not unfounded.
 

From distress to reprieve

As many parts of rural and coastal Southeast Asia undergo rapid development and urbanisation, many communities are quickly losing the natural habitats upon which their traditional livelihoods, like fishing and farming, depended.

Some families have been forced to migrate or commute to urban areas to seek employment in manufacturing, but volatile economic conditions and increasing automation have cast doubt on the longevity of even these jobs.

As a result, societies in which men have typically been the main breadwinner are now leaning on women to put food on the table.

To do so, mothers often rely on informal women’s networks . These provide information on bargain shopping or bartering for food. They might also resort to income-generating activities that men disdain as too difficult (such as the sale of homemade products) or too demeaning (such as collecting snails and greens in the forests).
 

Even as women in Southeast Asia increasingly serve as the family backbone, they receive little recognition or support for this role. Mental health services and financial assistance for women under pressure, such as those provided in some rural parts of India, are rarely, if ever, available here.

On the contrary, research has shown that that when men perceive that their public standing has been diminished by the inability to provide for the family, they may seek to exert more control in the personal sphere, translating into even more prohibitions on their wives and children.

Such economic and psychological burdens may leave poor, isolated women with religion as virtually their only reprieve.
 

Women as the family’s beacon of religion

A 2009 study of upper middle-class urban Malaysian women by Sylvia Frisk found that in spite of societal patriarchy, mothers and mother-figures are primarily responsible for disseminating and enforcing religious knowledge and rituals within their families.

And, in a decade of fieldwork in Malaysian coastal areas, we have seen that women who are most constrained by their husbands or families also most proactively take command of religious enforcement in their homes.

In other words, women who are under the most mental, physical or emotional pressures seem to find a sense of power that they are unable to exercise in other parts of their lives by compelling religious compliance in those closest to them.

Dictating religious practice becomes a way to exercise some form of control. The promise of a happier afterlife may also provide some sustenance.

The danger is that, unlike the upper middle-class women in Frisk’s study, poorer women have limited access to religious information. Their social circles are smaller, their movements more limited and they are less likely to read widely and critically question what they are taught.

If such women rely on a single source of Islamic learning, and that source is a radical one, they can be convincingly poisoned by extreme teachings. From here, it is not difficult to envision children being imbued with radical thought as well.
 

Empower the mothers

Women enforcing religious thought is innocuous on its own. But it becomes a concern when considered alongside the rise in female engagement with Islamic extremism.

In the Middle East, the existence of radical Muslim women’s networks has been documented. In several high-profile cases, mothers have encouraged their sons to fight the “holy war”.

At times, mothers appear to have even celebrated their children’s deaths as martyrs.

This is now happening in Southeast Asia too. As the recent case of Malaysian women selling their property to be with their ISIS lovers shows, radicalisation among women is on the rise.
 

We also found that it is increasingly socially unacceptable to speak out against or disagree with a religious entity – a religious school or a faith leader, for example – in Malaysian society today, which allows venues for extremist education to flourish unchecked.
Among Malay Muslim, the fear that not abiding by anything taught by a religious teacher can lead to a loss of pahala, the reward of heaven, encourages compliance with religious instruction – no matter its source or content.

All of these factors combined create the perfect setting for women to disseminate radical Islamic beliefs, both intentionally and unintentionally. Their offspring may then fulfil their filial duty to obey.

To reduce the likelihood that radical thought will be spread in Southeast Asia, empower the mothers. Providing socioeconomic support where it is most needed – among women – is the best insurance against future terrorism, ensuring that mothers and families remain vectors for positive action and tolerant beliefs, not hotbeds of distress and discontent.
 

Serina Abdul Rahman, Visiting Fellow (Malaysia Programme/ Regional Economic Studies), National University of Singapore and Christopher H Lim, Senior Fellow in Science, Technology & Economics at RSIS, Nanyang Technological University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post To Fight Radicalism, Empower Women: South East Asia appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Prayers in the street in Finsbury Park after the attack on June 19. Yui Mok/PA Wire

Neil Basu, deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police and senior national coordinator for counter terrorism, commended the response of the Muslim community, who stopped the man suspected to have carried out the attack before turning him over to police. One man who apprehended the man told the BBC that the individual had said he “wanted to kill Muslims”.

The Finsbury Park attack occurred just after the murder of a teenage Muslim girl in Virginia and an attempted vehicular attack on Iraqi migrants in Sweden. There is little doubt that this incident targeted the Muslim community, and while we cannot speculate as to what exactly motivated this violence, such an incident demands that we reflect on the harm that Islamophobia can cause.
 

Heightened tensions

The attack took place near Finsbury Park Mosque and the Muslim Welfare House on Seven Sisters Road, north London. Finsbury Park Mosque is infamous because the violent extremist, Abu Hamza, preached there before his arrest in 2004. Since then, under new leadership, the mosque and its leaders have made outstanding contributions to the local community, which has been recognised nationally. Regardless of this recognition, parts of the press continue to demonise the mosque.

On the night of the attack, Mail Online referenced Hamza – who was sentenced to life in prison in the US in 2015 – in their headline for a report on the attack.

As a researcher on Islamophobia, I have had the opportunity to speak with members of the mosque’s leadership a few times. I recall a conversation I had with Mohammed Kozbar, then chairman of the mosque, in 2012 about a pig’s head left on the gate to the mosque in 2010 and a hoax anthrax threat sent to the mosque in 2011. He told me then that the community was feeling vulnerable and fearful. He reminded me as well that the media rarely, if ever, reported on the positive contributions made by members of the mosque.

In 2015, in a report for Tell MAMA (the UK’s primary watchdog for anti-Muslim hate) and the Metropolitan Police, I identified a cluster of nine anti-Muslim hate crimes and incidents targeting the mosque. The misplaced association of the congregation with violent extremism continues to make the site a target for hate. In this sense, it should sadly come as no surprise that Finsbury Park has been targeted once again.

Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred have demonstrably increased year on year. This is evident in police data that I have reviewed from 2012 to 2014 and in reports by Tell MAMA that include data from victims, charities, and police forces across the country. Between May 2013 and September 2016, 100 mosques were targeted and attacked.
 

Spikes of hate tend to follow attacks perpetrated by Muslims in the UK and abroad. These dynamics are evident in research on the attacks in Paris in 2015. The three atrocities that claimed lives in Westminster, Manchester, and London Bridge have led to a major increase in anti-Muslim hate based both on police evidence and reports from Muslim communities.

These spikes are not localised and they affect Muslim communities across the country. In this sense, the way that Muslims are framed in reporting on terrorism directly harms communities by putting them in the cross-hairs of lone criminals, angry citizens, and extreme right-wing terrorists.
 

Anti-Muslim hate plays a role

This attack, as the Metropolitan Police were quick to note, has all the hallmarks of a terrorist incident, and it is being investigated as such. More details about the attacker’s motivation is likely to emerge as the investigation continues.

There is a blurry line between hate crime and terrorism. And it is difficult to impute any kind of causality between far-right extremists and such an attack.

What is clear, however, is that irresponsible sensationalism and the growth of Islamophobia inspires fear, anxiety, and hate towards Muslims. A report published in May from the Home Affairs Select Committee showed that social media is an important medium for sharing and distributing these sentiments. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide an environment in which cliques of users normalise and legitimate anti-Muslim ideologies.

It is important that the Finsbury Park investigation questions whether or not the attacker was influenced by extreme right-wing opinions disseminated online. However, it is also crucial to see if this individual was influenced by the press when he selected Muslims in the Finsbury Park area as his target.

Whether or not this incident is considered a terrorist attack should not distract us from the bigger problem: the failure of politicians and the media to effectively counter Islamophobia has caused Muslims to become targets of violence on their way home from prayer.
 

Bharath Ganesh, Researcher, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Finsbury Park attack shows the harm Islamophobia continues to inflict on Muslim communities appeared first on SabrangIndia.

General Election 2017. Danny Lawson/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The previous two columns in this series have explored the idea that a Conservative Party landslide, with at least a 150-seat majority, might not after all be the outcome of the United Kingdom's general election on 8 June. The earlier one expressed "a niggling sense that something may be developing below the surface that could break through even in the short time left” (see "The Corbyn crowd, and its message", 18 May 2017).

That notion was based partly on the way in which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was repeatedly attracting large and enthusiastic crowds at open-air events arranged at short notice, apparently responding to a felt need for a less regimented and more engaged kind of politics. Within a week, this sense of a trend had begun to evolve into something rather more definite, and Labour activists were beginning to think the Conservatives might be denied an overall majority (see "Corbyn, and an election surprise", 26 May 2017).

This latter column indicated a possibility of wishful thinking, but the trend of the last few days suggests that it is now distinctly possible. Part of this sudden and unprecedented shift reflects the Conservatives' campaign errors, especially over confusion on its policy over social care. But it is also clear that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is connecting with people in a remarkable way – his popularity is growing day by day and, far from being an obstacle to Labour’s electoral ambitions, he is becoming their star player.

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn is connecting with people in a remarkable way – his popularity is growing day by day and he is becoming their star player.

In light of these two columns, Oxford Research Group has just published a briefing that extends the discussion to look specifically at Jeremy Corbyn’s views on international security. These views were expressed in his Chatham House speech on 12 May and further developed in a thoughtful response to the devastating Manchester Arena attack late on 22 May.
 

A turning-point

In terms of conventional electioneering wisdom, defence and security are assumed to be Labour’s weakest policies, certain to be bitterly criticised as unpatriotic by the great majority of the national print media. Such criticism certainly followed the Chatham House speech and the subsequent Manchester intervention, but they had much less effect than intended. Indeed Corbyn’s view that the war on terror was failing and that there must be a fundamentally new approach to international security got much more support than expected, and certainly did nothing to dent the growing popularity of the party.

Jeremy Corbyn addressing crowds in 2003 against going to war in Iraq.

The ORG report concluded:
“[After] more than fifteen years of the war on terror, failed or failing states in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia, close to a million people killed and over eight million people displaced, the argument for some serious rethinking on Western approaches to security is hardly difficult to make.

This is where Jeremy Corbyn’s Chatham House speech is so significant since it breaks away from a near-universal Western state consensus and may be much more in tune with what many millions of people may be thinking. Whatever the outcome of the general election next week, space has been opened up for much wider debate. Independent organisations such as Oxford Research Group that take a critical but constructive approach to security will have a particular responsibility to aid the quality of that debate.”

The ORG report does, though, include one serious caveat. If in the coming weeks, ISIS loses both Raqqa and Mosul and then collapses, making it look like the war on terror is at last something of a success, then any chance of rethinking security, whichever party is in power, will be much diminished. At the time of writing the ORG report, such a collapse did not look too likely but what is relevant here is that further, wide-ranging evidence from just the last few days strongly confirms that view.
 

Three days, four theatres of war

That evidence comes from Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and the Philippines.

In Iraq, the army’s extended operation to retake Mosul was expected to be completed in barely ten weeks, but is now likely to take at least three times that. Der Spiegel reports that during the fighting, ISIS has deployed over 850 truck-bombs hundreds of young men ready to kill themselves. Even now, there are still around 1,200 ISIS paramilitaries defending a small core of the old city and the Iraqi army is only able to deploy a similar number of its elite task-forces one and two of its "golden division" (i.e. special forces).

So many of these troops have been killed or seriously wounded that the division is reported to be greatly depleted, with little capability of providing a professional core to the army when ISIS moves fully over to insurgency mode. Already that insurgency is evolving, the latest grim result being the bombing of a Baghdad ice-cream parlour in a Shi’a district of the city on 30 May, killing thirty-five people and injuring more than a hundred.

In Afghanistan, the Trump administration is overseeing a rapid expansion of its air-war against the Taliban and ISIS offshoots, with 460 weapons released in April 2017 compared with 203 in March, the April total being the highest since the peak of Obama’s “surge” in August 2012. The paramilitary response is wide-ranging, including one of the largest truck-bombs ever detonated, killing over eighty people and injuring more than a hundred, just outside Kabul’s “green zone”.  

In Egypt, the recent bombing of Coptic Christian churches was followed by attacks by ISIS gunmen on a small convoy of Copts going on a pilgrimage to a monastery 150 miles south of Cairo. The assault in Minya province killed at least twenty-eight people, the latest in a series that has taken the lives of more than 100 Copts since December.

In the Philippines, the army has been caught out by a sudden surge in paramilitary activity from a group linked to ISIS, in violence made worse by Philippine army casualties caused by “friendly-fire” incidents. The impact, and the sense of a government unable to cope, was enough to persuade President Duterte to cancel a visit to Japan. The continuing insurgency and counter-violence in the southern province of Mindanao, where martial law is now in force, is part of a growing climate of insecurity in which the state plays a major role.
 

A time to rethink

These and many other incidents – including, of course, Manchester – are reminders that ISIS and similar movements are simply not going away, and for Trump to promise more force will be the equivalent of piling yet more combustible material onto the blaze.

ISIS and similar movements are simply not going away.

The implications for Britain are that at some stage there has to be a fundamental rethinking of its defence posture and how it responds to al-Qaida, ISIS and the like. Even if Theresa May’s Conservative Party is re-elected, that process will eventually become impossible to avoid.

But if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party were to achieve the near-impossible and form a minority government in the coming weeks, its chances would be greatly boosted. Just one reason for anticipating a Labour success is that the much needed rethinking might happen sooner rather than later.

Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He is openDemocracy's international security adviser, and has been writing a weekly column on global security since 28 September 2001; he also writes a monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His latest book is Irregular War: ISIS and the New Threat from the Margins (IB Tauris, 2016), which follows Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers

Courtesy: Open Democracy

The post Britain and ISIS: a need to rethink appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Herald Sun devoted its first 11 pages to the bombing on Wednesday and another seven to it on Thursday. By Friday, Manchester had disappeared entirely from the front page of The Age, was reduced to a side column on the front page of The Australian and a small box at the bottom of the Herald Sun’s page one.

For as long as I can remember, media critics have cried foul that European and American deaths appear to be worth more in news terms than similar deaths in the Middle East. To which journalists mostly replied that “proximity” in a cultural (if not geographical) sense, or “rarity”, were the reasons.

So, is it now the case that European terror attacks have become normalised? Or is it just that news cycles have rightly moved on to other important news stories closer to home?

In Britain, the coverage is still around the clock. On Wednesday the stories and photographs on the front pages were mostly about the victims. There was a particular focus on the youngest girl, eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos, who featured on the front pages of all mainstream media.

This front page from The Sun, which compared the little girl to the bomber under the banner headline of “Pure Evil”, was particularly striking.
The Sun.Twitter

Across the week the media have reported on the threat level rise to “critical”, the hunt for other members of the terror group, soldiers on the streets, and public mourning.

By Sunday, the front pages were back in unison, with almost all mainstream newspapers’ front pages showing CCTV pictures of “the casual killer”  Salman Abedi – this time from the day of the bombing.

Opinion about the media’s coverage of these incidents is intense on social media and elsewhere. The New York Times’ photograph of the bombing aftermath was widely seen as irresponsible during an ongoing security operation, and it led to a diplomatic row between the UK and US over security leaks.

There is no shortage of advice offered to journalists on responsible reporting. In March, UNESCO published a 110-page booklet, Terrorism and the Media: A Handbook for Journalists. On page 44, it lists 21 “Key Points” to be aware of in the coverage of terrorism. These include:

• the dangers inherent in live broadcasting;
• caution about reporting leaks and unverified information;
• avoiding sensationalism;
• keeping a sense of proportion;
• not glamorising terrorists;
• respecting the dignity of victims; and
• being careful about the language used.

In February, in interviews conducted for a research project I am undertaking with Verica Rupar about terrorism coverage, I spoke to several French media editors about how they saw their editorial roles. Due to France having witnessed several major terrorism attacks in the past few years, all reported they had evolved their coverage from experience.

The editor of Le Monde, Jérôme Fenoglio, told me that after the siege at the HyperCacher supermarket in January 2015, he had published a front-page photograph of one of the terrorists, Amedy Coulibaly, sitting next to his sub-machine gun while justifying the murder he was about to commit.

He said that following the Nice attack in July 2016, in which 84 people were killed, he decided against showing terrorists’ “self-justifying videos and selfies”, as he believed it was the terrorists’ intention to make everybody talk about them through their deaths. He said:
 

And so their deaths give a supplementary dimension to these documents that they prepare in advance and circulate everywhere. I don’t want to republish these documents because it means to play, to be imprisoned, to be a victim of their own games.
 

Fenoglio stressed that he wasn’t advocating censorship, but rather “editorial choice”. He was not going to glorify the deeds of terrorists by showing pictures of them, unless they were alive and still being hunted by the authorities.

After the siege at the HyperCacher, the 24-hour BFM Television channel was censured by France’s Higher Council for Broadcasting (CSA) and sued by hostages over claims the channel put people in danger by reporting on live television that hostages were hiding in the basement. This outlet and others were also accused of “disrupting the arrival of security forces”.

At the public service broadcaster, France Télévisions, the director of news Alexandre Kara said they are constantly updating their handbook of coverage to learn from their latest experience.

His corporation also refuses to rebroadcast “Islamic State propaganda” and only uses “neutral” photographs of terrorists – for example, from their ID cards, rather than anything that might portray them in a sympathetic light. He said that this decision was made “after the Bataclan”:
 

There has been a big debate in France about whether or not one should show the photograph or give the name of a person guilty of a terrorist act. We decided to continue to give the name and show the photo. One of the reasons is because a terrorist is a criminal, and we show the photos of criminals, so there’s no reason to not show a terrorist. And secondly, I think that in not showing terrorists you add to the arguments of the conspiracy theorists who think that we hide the truth.
 

However, like Fenoglio, he believes there is a difference between transparency about who did what, and the danger of showing the terrorists’ actions to be in any way heroic, thereby doing their proselytising for them.

The co-editor of Libération, Laurent Joffrin, said there is now a “civic state of mind” in terms of co-operation between the media and police “because everybody knows they can be attacked themselves”. The main point is not to help the terrorists with untimely revelations, but to concentrate on the victims, and then the hunt for the terrorists.

After the Bataclan, the paper put a team onto writing biographies of all 130 victims killed at the venue and elsewhere in Paris. These portraits and photographs are still available to view “in memoriam,” in agreement with the families.

While the British threat level has now fallen back from critical to “severe”, nobody is under any illusion that these kinds of attacks will cease any time soon. The way in which journalists cover them will remain under scrutiny, as bitter experience continues to force changes in reporting behaviour.
 

Colleen Murrell, Undergraduate Coordinator for Journalism, Monash University
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Manchester and the media: what coverage of the terrorist attack tells us about ourselves appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Jeremy Corbyn's speech on terrorism. BBC, fair use.

Michael Fallon richly deserved to fall into the trap that Krishnan Guru-Murthy recently sprang on him, which saw him pouring scorn on words previously spoken by foreign secretary Boris Johnson. His spluttering insistence that we not seek to understand the motives of killers such as Salman Abedi represents politics at its most grating – as a brazen insult to the intelligence of the public.

But behind the attacks faced by Jeremy Corbyn from both right and centre regarding his comments about the failure of the war on terror lies a serious and genuine debate. Can we really say, more than a decade after the Iraq War, that our foreign engagements are a major cause of jihadist terrorism at home?

In a recent column in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland pours scorn on what he admits is Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘carefully caveated’ position. His argument is that jihadists are driven primarily by an inward-looking ideology which hates us for who we are, not for what we do. As he points out, within this frame of reference, even inaction by the West – as in Bosnia for example – can be used as material by entrepreneurs of grievance.
He’s not altogether wrong, but it’s more complicated than that.

Take, for example, a recent propaganda article by ISIS themselves, with the usefully straightforward title “Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You”.

The purpose of this article is exactly what it says it is: to clarify, once and for all, in the most straightforward terms, what the self-ascribed meaning of ISIS’s violence is.

And yet, this being so, the remarkable thing is that the article isn’t clear at all.

The piece opens by praising Florida nightclub killer Omar Mateen’s “attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub”, but goes on to express frustration at the idea that it might be considered a mere hate crime, or, worse, “senseless violence”. As ISIS insist, they have “repeatedly stated their goals, intentions and motivations” for violence, which are, it says, to be understood as “brutal retaliation” against “the crimes of the West against Islam and Muslims”, crimes which include “waging war against the Caliphate”, but also “insulting the Prophet” or “burning the Qur’an”.

“Although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary… the fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you” the piece insists. And yet, a few paragraphs earlier, it hints at the idea that a temporary cessation of violence might be possible: “even if you were to stop fighting us, your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you – if we deemed it necessary – in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats”.

Utterly uncompromising as this all sounds, there is still a tension in the words. ISIS wants to declare an unlimited war on unbelief as such; but it also wants to retain the notion that it can use violence as strategic leverage, which requires at least some limited concession to the idea that it could choose to stop (even though it couldn’t choose not to hate). It is worth pointing out that this ideology is no different in its essentials from that upheld by hardline, but officially tolerated scholars in Saudi Arabia too: that there is an obligation for true believers to ‘hate’ all others, even if actual hot conflict can, for reasons of expediency, be put on what might in practice be indefinite hold.

What conclusion can we draw from this? Certainly not that ISIS is worth cutting deals with. Rather, what it ought to reinforce is the point that ideology is not a sort of ineffable uncaused cause. However rigid and vicious, it doesn’t predict how a group or an individual will behave on its own. Even ISIS, for all its savagery and hatred, didn’t as such start its campaign of killing and direct incitement against Western targets and homelands prior to the first Western air strikes aimed at containing and rolling back its sudden advance into Iraq.

If we have learned anything from the ‘war on terror’, it is that murderous ideologies (which increasingly often seem to be almost interchangeable), are not just things that fall from the sky, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style, but rather things which, like nettles, flourish in disrupted ground. Where military interventions – even interventions which may have been well-meaning – have led to anarchy, they have created conditions conducive to socialising young people into the habits and attitudes of seemingly incomprehensible violence. Libya is an obvious example.

In the case of ISIS, a totalistic and expansive ideology may well provide ready justification for violence under almost any circumstance. But radical movements cannot flourish as fragmented archipelagos of true believers. In recent years, research into radicalisation has been increasingly interested in the role of wider milieus of people who have some emotional sympathy for the radicals, even if they don’t accept their specific beliefs. ISIS are well aware of this, and narratives of victimisation of Sunni Muslims are a key part of their attempts to reach a wider audience.

The morning after the Manchester bombing, I happened to give a lift to a Syrian friend, a former politics professor, whose family had been obliged to leave the country because, among other things, the encroachment of ISIS into their hometown. Naturally, he was full of dismay about the attack, and concern for the victims; but after a few minutes, he added quietly that hardly a week goes by without his hearing from some friend or other about more civilians killed by Western air strikes. He wasn’t, of course, trying to use one to justify the other, or suggesting that the killer had himself been thus motivated. But he was in little doubt that this fact helps at least to blunt the outrage that some might otherwise feel at attacks on Western civilians. According to the monitoring group Airwars, the minimum estimate for civilians killed in Syria and Iraq by Western coalition airstrikes since August 2014 now stands at 3,681.

But what if Corbyn is wrong in his assessment? What if there has been an evolution of the almost meteorological system of interaction between state failure, murderous militias, global media, identity crises in crumbling Western communities, and the ‘long tail’ effect whereby, if a group like ISIS solicits widely enough for killers, someone somewhere is bound to answer the call? What if the complex link between terrorism and foreign wars really has broken? Well then, the only real solution is to properly fund interventions at the level of our own communities, by building robust and trusted partnerships; to do that, and to deepen our cooperation with European and other partners. The need for better community policing is perhaps the single intervention most agreed upon by counter-terrorism experts. But police can’t do it if they aren’t resourced to do it, not to mention the many other public servants supposedly charged with a duty of care under the UK’s Prevent strategy. Theresa May can’t have it both ways.

Gilbert Ramsay is a lecturer in International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), University of St Andrews.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

The post No, the link between terrorism and our foreign policy isn’t simple. But Jeremy Corbyn is basically right. appeared first on SabrangIndia.