France wants to feel safe – whatever it takes. But what if it takes too much? Dominique Moisi

2016/07/29 Leave a comment

Another good piece on the limits of what can and should be done:

There is plenty that can and must be done to strengthen security in France and elsewhere. But the ultimatum that some French are now implicitly presenting – guarantee absolute security, or watch us cast aside the rule of law and basic principles of openness and equality – does more harm than good.

The French, like all people, deserve to feel safe whether they’re going to church, enjoying a concert or celebrating a holiday. The question is how to restore that sense of security at a time when the risk of a terrorist attack cannot be fully eliminated.

The answer lies with civil society. Citizens should become more alert to the signs of radicalization, and more educated on how to respond. People should be encouraged to report the possible radicalization of those close to them to relevant authorities, whether mental-health professionals or the police. The goal is not to have people making unsubstantiated accusations against neighbours and friends; it is to create channels through which people who recognize radical or violent leanings in someone they know can report their concerns.

This model has worked for Israel. Despite regular exposure to terrorist attacks, Israelis retain a sense of relative security, owing partly to the ability of civil society to contribute to their own safety. As a result, citizens are willing to respect what Max Weber called the state’s “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.”

France is not on the verge of collapsing into chaos, with vigilantes attempting to take on the terrorists. But the relentless fear-mongering of populists, together with genuinely terrifying, tragic, and infuriating experiences, is undermining people’s better judgment, causing them to fall prey to inflammatory rhetoric. With a presidential election next year, there is strong incentive for self-serving politicians to use the victims of Nice as instruments of campaign strategy.

This cannot be allowed to happen. If the French ultimately succumb to fear and elect populist bigots, the struggling Islamic State will have scored a victory. Make no mistake: the Islamic State is losing. Its territories in Syria and Iraq are dwindling, but it has a last-ditch strategy to prop itself up: rapid recruitment. And that would receive a major boost from intensification of anti-Muslim rhetoric or, worse, the election of those who would turn rhetoric into policy.

Islamic State recruiters are achieving success; from Orlando to Istanbul to Dhaka, it has found plenty of supporters who are eager to kill in its name. But as long as the West remains united and principled, IS cannot emerge victorious.

For France and others, the key is collective action, at home and abroad, which will require improved links between internal and external security agencies, together with greater risk awareness within civil society, along Israeli lines. Add that to continued strikes against IS sanctuaries, and its dream of an Islamic caliphate will soon be dead.

Regaining control over our lives and our destinies means being realistic. Instead of demanding a return to a time before terrorism, we must become more alert to the risks it poses – not only to our safety, but also to our values and commitment to the rule of law – and do our part to minimize them.

Source: France wants to feel safe – whatever it takes. But what if it takes too much? – The Globe and Mail

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Security agencies face ‘real challenge’ fighting terrorism: London police head

2016/07/29 Leave a comment

Worth noting:

Identifying and tracking people who could turn into terrorists remains a challenge. At least 800 people from Britain went to Syria in recent years, with many joining the Islamic State and others in the fight against the Syrian government. Roughly 400 have returned to Britain and the police now have to assess their potential threat. They are ranked on a scale of 1 to 4, with 1 being the most dangerous.

Many of those who returned from Syria were legitimate aid workers or IS fighters who became frightened of the conflict, he said. “You could, therefore, regard them as a lower-risk group. But we can’t absolutely guarantee that,” he added. “They remain a continuing concern.”

He had praise for controversial programs such as Prevent, which obliges teachers and others in Britain to report people engaging in radical behaviour. Critics have said Prevent stigmatizes those who have been reported and unfairly targets Muslims. Sir Bernard said that while it isn’t perfect, the program can offer help to vulnerable people and families.

Putting guns in the hands of police officers isn’t a solution, he added, because that only increases barriers between cops and communities. The Metropolitan force remains one of the few in the world where the vast majority of officers do not carry guns. Of the city’s more than 32,000 officers, only 2,100 are armed. However, that number is slated to increase by 600 because of the attacks in Paris last November that killed 130 people.

“Just arming all police is not always the answer,” he said. “And our way is to have well-trained specialist officers, well equipped, well led, who we’d be deploying in large numbers to deal with that type of attack.”

One of the most effective tools to combat terrorism, and most other crimes, is the city’s vast network of CCTV cameras. After rioting in 2011, which spread across several parts of London, police gathered 250,000 hours of camera footage to seek out the culprits. About 800 officers spent a year combing through the material, leading to 5,000 arrests. Of those charged with a crime, 90 per cent “pleaded guilty because [the video footage] was such powerful evidence,” he said.

Britons have become so accustomed to the proliferation of cameras in the subway, on buses, across public places and in some taxis that the country has not had a major debate about privacy issues.

Sir Bernard said that is because the cameras were introduced at the local level. “It wasn’t the government saying you’re all going to have CCTV cameras. This was local authorities saying we want it in a public space, in shopping centres, and buses wanted it,” he said, adding that for police work, the cameras are “incredibly powerful.”

Source: Security agencies face ‘real challenge’ fighting terrorism: London police head – The Globe and Mail

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ICYMI: Jihad and the French Exception: Farhad Khosrowkhovar – The New York Times

2016/07/23 Leave a comment

Good, thought-provoking explanation of some of the reasons for France’s “exceptionalism” and the arguable failure of its integration model:

France’s distinctiveness arises in part from the ideological strength of the idea the nation has had of itself since the French Revolution, including an assertive form of republicanism and an open distrust of all religions, beginning, historically, with Catholicism. This model has been knocked around over the years, first by decolonization, then by decades of economic hardship, the growing stigmatization of cultural differences, the fervent individualism of new generations and globalization, which has narrowed the state’s room for maneuver.

Above all, France hasn’t been able to solve the problem of economic and social exclusion. Its system, which is too protective of those people who have jobs and not open enough to those who don’t, breeds angst all around. Young people in the banlieues, marginalized and with few prospects, feel like victims. They become prime targets for jihadist propaganda, often after a stint in prison for petty crimes.

Neither Germany nor Britain faces the banlieues phenomenon, at least not on such a scale. The German town of Dinslaken, which is partly ghettoized, has become a hotbed of Islamist radicalization. The same goes for Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire, and the Molenbeek district of Brussels. But France seems to alienate many more of its citizens and residents, well beyond those who actually join the Islamic State.

One reason is that France’s vision of citizenship, which strongly insists on adherence to a few exalted political values, has seriously eroded over time. By the 1980s, the republican ideal was floundering: It had promised equal opportunity, and that now seemed to be in short supply. The French Communist Party, which had long brought dignity to disadvantaged groups by proposing to fight injustice through class struggle, also greatly weakened during that period, partly because of the demise of the Soviet Union.

Postwar Germany, on the other hand, chose a far more modest and prudent vision: economic progress. Today, Germany has a rather muted foreign policy toward the Muslim world, and it displays no desire to unite all its citizens around universal principles. Britain isn’t trying to create a monocultural society either. It has opted for multiculturalism, which can abide hyphenated identities and communal behavior.

France, however, remains resolutely universalist and claims it still has both the desire and the power to enforce inclusion. Yet its assimilationist ambitions are increasingly at odds with everyday reality, and this growing gap is a source of pervasive distress.

And so the strength — the weight — of France’s national identity has become a problem. It only heightens the discontent of young people with foreign origins, especially North Africans or their descendants, all the more so because the Maghreb’s decolonization occurred in pain and humiliation: When France withdrew from Algeria, it left behind hundreds of thousands dead and created scars in the collective unconscious that remain to this day. British decolonization seems almost painless in comparison.

Certainly, Britons and Germans also express fears about immigration and Islam. Such concerns help explain Brexit. Acts of sexual harassment in Cologne around the new year, apparently committed by immigrants, sparked a heated debate in Germany (and beyond). But both Britain and Germany give non-local minorities ample leeway to publicly express and practice their religious and communal preferences.

France insists — in the name of republicanism — that religion should remain a strictly private affair. An ideological nation par excellence, it focuses on symbolic issues like wearing headscarves or holding collective prayers in public places. But restricting such practices causes wounds that go much deeper than the prohibitions themselves: It allows Islamists to exaggerate the implications and accuse France of Islamophobia. In fact, France is no more Islamophobic than its neighbors; it’s just more frontal in the way it handles Islam in the public sphere.

French-style integration has had some successes. Most notable among them is a high rate of mixed marriages. The French public school system, by helping uplift the lower classes and, therefore, many children of North African parents, has also been a tool of integration (although lately it has seemed less effective). Sometimes precisely because they have faced prejudice in the job market, which has long been stifled by unemployment, children of immigrants have found refuge in state institutions like the army and the police, which recruit through anonymous competitive exams.

Although France has managed to integrate many immigrants and their descendants, those it has left on the sidelines are more embittered than their British or German peers, and many feel insulted in their Muslim or Arab identity. Laïcité, France’s staunch version of secularism, is so inflexible it can appear to rob them of dignity. An additional factor is France’s muscular foreign policy, which seems to target mostly Muslim countries, such as Libya, Syria and Mali.

Source: Jihad and the French Exception – The New York Times

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ICYMI – Andrew Coyne: A war that cannot necessarily be won, but must be fought all the same | National Post

2016/07/20 Leave a comment

Good realistic commentary by Coyne:

Alas it is not so. Whether or not we choose to be at war with ISIL they are at war with us. And there is very little we can do to change this.

We cannot simply defeat them in battle, as we might a conventional state: whatever progress we have made against ISIL in Iraq and Syria seems only to have diverted its energies into attacks overseas. Nor can we appease them, as we might a conventional terrorist group, even if we were of a mind to: for they have no demands, or none that we can possibly meet, such is the fantastic, end-times nature of their beliefs.

Nor can we just harden our defences, as if we could anticipate every possible avenue of attack. Protect the most prominent public buildings or infrastructure, and watch as restaurant diners and concert-goers are mown down. Guard against bombs and hijacked airplanes, and see AK-47s and trailer trucks used instead. Close the borders, and find yourself beset by homegrown jihadis. Focus on known terrorist profiles, and the enemy takes the form of “lone wolf” attackers, with no necessary connection to ISIL.

The threat — anonymous attackers, willing not only to kill in limitless numbers but to be killed themselves, and aided by all the latest technologies — is unlike any the world has ever faced. And among the challenges it presents is the psychological.

Because there is no satisfying narrative arc to this. We don’t get to go home when this is all over, because we are home and it may never be over. We have to accept this. We have to accept that some problems cannot be solved, but only endured; that some wars cannot necessarily be won, but must be fought all the same.

We are not helpless. We can make less likely the worst sorts of attacks, the kind that require greater planning, co-ordination and resources, and as such are more easily intercepted and disrupted. We can deprive ISIL of territory, starve it of funds, kill its leaders, and by these and other means deny it the mantle of prophecy on which it depends for new recruits.

And we can do much at home, notably to ward off the kind of deep-seated alienation within Muslim communities that so plagues Europe, on which terrorism thrives. It is crucial Muslims are not made to feel as if they are the enemy, collectively — every bit as crucial as recognizing the unique danger posed by ISIL, and the fundamentalist Islamic theology at its heart.

But there will be more attacks like those we have lately suffered, and probably they will be worse.

I don’t mean to say there is no chance of defeating ISIL, or that Islamist terrorism may not in time go the way of other threats to our way of life. I only mean that we cannot assume it will — not in the short term, and not even in the long. The roots of fanaticism have sunk too deep, over too much of the world, to be assured of that. When an idea, once unthinkable, has been first thought, and not only thought but acted upon, and spread to thousands if not millions of people, it will be a long time before it can be unthought.

So we must accustom ourselves to looking at this, as our adversaries do, as a struggle that may go on for decades, even generations, and understand that in the meantime there will be many more innocent deaths to mourn.

 Source: Andrew Coyne: A war that cannot necessarily be won, but must be fought all the same | National Post

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Let’s face it: The world has an Islamic problem – Marquardt

2016/07/19 2 Comments

Felix Marquardt’s, founder of the Al-Kawakibi Foundation for Islamic Reform and the think tank Youthonomics, take on Islam and terror and, in particular, an interesting argument for showing the horrific videos:

If Muslims want to be taken seriously when we argue that our religion is one of love and peace and social justice, then we must not cede to the natural inclination to say we have “nothing to do” with the authors of the ignominious crimes committed in the name of Islam.

We have one thing in common with them. We all call ourselves Muslims. Of course, their vision of Islam is perverse and completely, well, wrong. There is a common thread between despicable acts of violence committed around the world these days. And that common thread is that the people who commit them think of themselves as Muslims.

In other words, no, there is no intrinsic “problem” with Islam, but yes, hell yes, there is a contemporary degenerescence of our religion that is threatening its very existence and future. If we, as Muslims, cannot agree on this, then we must brace ourselves, for Islam will disintegrate completely before our eyes in the coming years. To address a problem, one must first admit that there is a problem.

This brings into focus another major issue that has popped up since Thursday’s attack in Nice: the dissemination of the footage of the slaughter and its aftermath.

The French authorities are asking that people refrain from sharing the gruesome pictures and videos, claiming that doing so may galvanize or trigger other would-be kamikazes. Others argue the same thing out of respect to the families of the victims.

I have news for you: In this day and age, Islamic State admirers and supporters who want to gain access to this footage will find a way to do so.

And, as far as I am concerned, is it precisely out of compassion for the victims that I want all the people in the world who share my faith to see what is being done in the name of our religion. Images of Nazi extermination camps and the picture of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm bombings shocked the world and brought change, precisely because they shocked the world.

We are encouraged to share footage of police abusing and killing black people all over the United States to make the world aware of what is going on there, but we should hide what IS is doing in southern France? Muslims all around the world must see what is being committed in the name of their religion so they can finally confront the reality of Islam in the 21st century: Medina, Cairo …we have a problem.

Source: Let’s face it: The world has an Islamic problem – The Globe and Mail

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Israel: Facebook experiment reveals how ‘terror-related’ posts are treated differently

2016/07/18 Leave a comment

Interesting and revealing:

Two Israelis — an Arab and a Jew — posted messages on Facebook saying they were going to kill someone on the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The two posters were real people with active Facebook pages, but the threat was part of an experiment conducted by an Israeli news station last week. The goal was to monitor the reactions of individuals and Israeli authorities who are tasked with keeping tabs on social-media posts that they say might inspire terrorist attacks.

Critics in both communities say social media has served as a conduit for unstoppable deadly violence. While the low-intensity Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been burning for decades, the platforms have given rise to individual extremists and lone-wolf attackers who are much more difficult to stop, officials say.

After posting that he had been inspired to kill Jews, Shadi Khalileh, the Arab citizen, received calls from concerned friends and family. Israeli Arab members of parliament, who heard about his post via word of mouth, even called to ask why he would post such a message, or whether his page had been hacked. Only 12 people “liked” his post.

The Jewish citizen, Daniel Levy, wrote that he had to seek revenge after a Palestinian killed a 13-year-old Jewish girl in her bed. His post drew some 600 “likes,” 25 shares and comments such as “I am proud of you” and “you are a king.” One comment urged him to “please take the post down before you are arrested.”

Israeli police questioned Khalileh about his post — it took some work to convince them that it had all been an experiment. But Levy’s post went undetected by the authorities, the news station said.

In neither case did Facebook flag the posts, which remained online until the station ended the experiment.

The failure of social-media platforms to take action against posts calling for the murder of Israelis or Palestinians, Jews or Arabs, has become a growing issue for those on both sides of this decades-old conflict.

Source: Facebook experiment reveals how ‘terror-related’ posts are treated differently | Toronto Star

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Denmark: How Flipping The Script Helped Keep Young Muslims From Joining ISIS

2016/07/16 Leave a comment

Good example of a counter radicalization strategy:

One day in 2012 a group of policemen in a Danish town was sitting around in the office when an unusual call came in. This town, called Aarhus, is a clean, orderly place with very little crime. So what the callers were saying really held the cops’ attention. They were parents, and they were “just hysterical,” recalled Thorleif Link, one of the officers. Their son was missing. They woke up one day and he was gone.

The officers put together whatever clues they had about the missing person: He was a teenager who went to a local high school, and he lived in a largely Muslim immigrant neighborhood just outside town. But before they got any further with their investigation, they got another call, from another set of parents. Their son was missing too.

“Why is this going on?” asked Allan Aarslev, a police superintendent.

After talking to the parents and snooping around the neighborhood the police figured it out: These young men and women had gone to Syria. They were among the exodus of thousands of European citizens who were drawn to the call put out by ISIS, the Islamist terrorist group, for Muslims worldwide to help build the new Islamic state.

 

Link and Aarslev are crime prevention officers. They usually deal with locals who are drawn to right-wing extremism, or gangs. The landscape of global terrorism was completely new to them. But they decided to take it on. And once they did, they wound up creating an unusual — and unusually successful — approach to combating radicalization.

The rest of Europe came down hard on citizens who had traveled to Syria. France shut down mosques it suspected of harboring radicals. The U.K. declared citizens who had gone to help ISIS enemies of the state. Several countries threatened to take away their passports — a move formerly reserved for convicted traitors.

But the Danish police officers took a different approach: They made it clear to citizens of Denmark who had traveled to Syria that they were welcome to come home, and when they did, they would receive help with going back to school, finding an apartment, meeting with a psychiatrist or a mentor, or whatever they needed to fully integrate back into society.

Their program came to be known as the “Aarhus model.” It’s been called the “hug a terrorist” model in the press, but this description never sits well with the cops. They see themselves as making an entirely practical decision designed to keep their city safe.

As they see it, coming down hard on young, radicalized Muslims will only make them angrier and more of a danger to society. Helping them is the only chance to keep an eye on them and also to keep the peace in their town.

Link and Aarslev were intuiting what scientists who study radicalization are coming to see.

“The original response was to fight [extremism] through military and policing efforts, and they didn’t fare too well,” says Arie Kruglanski, a social psychologist at the University of Maryland who studies violent extremism. “That kind of response that puts them as suspects and constrains them and promotes discrimination — that is only likely to exacerbate the problem. It’s only likely to inflame the sense there’s discrimination and motivate young people to act against society.”

Their approach has a basis in research on interpersonal relations as well.

Christopher Hopwood, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, studies something called noncomplementary behavior. Complementary behavior is the norm. It means when you act warmly, the person you are with is likely to act warm back. The same is true with hostility. But noncomplementary behavior means doing the unexpected. Someone acts with hostility and you respond warmly. It’s an unnatural reaction, and it’s a proven way to shake up the dynamic and produce a different outcome than the usual one.

The nonviolent resistance movements of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are the most well-known examples of this tactic. The Aarhus model is another. How did it unfold in real time? Consider the case study of a young man we call “Jamal.” Jamal is not his real name, and we don’t usually use pseudonyms, but he asked us to not use his name. He doesn’t want to be known as a person who almost became a terrorist. He wants a job and a life now. But that didn’t seem possible for a while.

Jamal was born in Somalia; his family moved to Denmark because Somalia was in the middle of a civil war. His was the only black family in the neighborhood and the only Muslim family, and his childhood wasn’t easy. Kids called him names, asked him if he had the same blood as they did, and teased him. For a long time he just would fight back, but he knew he was disappointing his father.

When he was a little older Jamal decided to take a different tack. He tried to be the good kid. He studied and made jokes in class, and his stress eased. The teachers liked him, his classmates liked him, and he began to make Danish friends and even to feel more Danish.

Then one day in high school his teacher organized a debate about Islam. Jamal had just been on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, with his family, and he was infused with a newfound religious identity. And during the debate one of the girls started saying to the class that Muslims “terrorize” the West, and kill people and stone women. Jamal argued with her and eventually lost his temper, saying, “People like you should never exist.”

After that moment, Jamal’s life went off the rails. The teacher told the principal, who told the police, who questioned Jamal about being a terrorist. Jamal had to stay home from school and miss his final exams. The police cleared him, but it was too late for him to redo his exams so he had to redo some of high school. He was furious about it. Soon after the investigation his mother died, and he blamed her death on the stress caused by the investigation. He began to feel rejected by the West.

During that year he ran into a group of fellow Muslims who had experienced some of the same discrimination. One of them had an apartment, and the group spent a lot of time there talking, praying and watching videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, a famous English-speaking imam. The friends talked a lot about jihad and making the trip to Syria. Two of the guys in the apartment began planning their trip.

While he was living in that apartment, Jamal got a call from Link, who had heard about his case. Jamal cursed him out and tried to hang up the phone, but then Link did something Jamal didn’t expect: He apologized, for the ordeal his fellow officers had put Jamal through. Hearing a policeman take responsibility for his life getting derailed really moved Jamal. He agreed to come into Link’s office.

When Jamal got there, Link introduced him to Erhan Kilic, one of the first official mentors hired by the program. Kilic was a fellow Muslim who had also faced discrimination in Denmark as a child. But he had taken a very different path. He had decided to embrace Denmark as his country. He now had a wife and two daughters and a successful practice as a lawyer. Kilic relayed to Jamal the main message of the Aarhus program: If he chose to, Jamal could also find his place in Denmark.

This is what sets the Aarhus program apart. It didn’t use force to stop people from going to Syria but instead fought the roots of radicalization, Kruglanski says. “There are strong correlations between humiliation and the search for an extremist ideology,” he says. Organizations like ISIS take advantage of people who, because of racism or religious or political discrimination, have been pushed to the margins of society.

Link and Aarslev’s program showed people like Jamal that there was a place for them.

“Aarhus is the first, to my knowledge, to grapple with [extremism] based on sound social psychology evidence and principles,” Kruglanski says. What Link and Aarslev were doing was so unexpected that it created an opening for people to think differently about their ideology. “They expect to be treated harshly,” Kruglanski says. Instead, they got the opposite. “That kind of shock opens people’s minds to maybe they were wrong about their society that they perceived as their enemy. It opens a possible window into rethinking and re-evaluating.”

Starting in 2012, 34 people went from Aarhus to Syria. As far as the police know, six were killed and 10 are still over there. Of the 18 who came back home, all showed up in Aarslev and Link’s office, as did hundreds of other potential radicals in Aarhus — about 330 in total.

But the program is admired for another accomplishment: Since the initial exodus of young people, very few have left from Aarhus for Syria, even when traffic from the rest of Europe was spiking. Last year, in 2015, it was just one person.

The program is still precarious, though. One terrorist attack in Aarhus could undo much of the work that has been done. But the officers are willing to keep trying. As Link put it, there are still “strong forces” out there tempting young Muslims to leave their lives in the West and join the battle.

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‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

2016/07/14 Leave a comment

Personally, I think it is a mix of the two elements – the individual and the structural:

What propels Islamist terrorism and attacks against France is more than an academic debate: The answer shapes policy toward blunting the threat.

So it is no inconsequential matter in a culture under attack, and one that so cherishes its intellectual debates, that France’s two leading scholars of radical Islam — former friends — have turned bitter rivals over their differing views.

“Madman,” “thug,” “illiterate,” “paranoid,” “ass,” “not a thinker” — these are just some of the choicer insults the two men have hurled at each other in a peculiarly personal quarrel with far larger stakes that has reverberated through the French news media and society for months.

The two distinguished academics, Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, have long lists of books to their name, and years of field work in the Middle East, Central Asia and the troubled French suburbs. They are both eagerly consulted by the French news media and government officials.

But with France on edge and the continued target of terrorist attacks, their clashing analyses of the origins, development and future of jihadism have broken out of academic circles to present an important question for France and for all of Europe: Which man holds the key to understanding the phenomenon?

Mr. Kepel, 61, a professor at Sciences Po, the prestigious political science institute, finds much of the answer inside France — in its suburbs and their dysfunctional sociology — and in the role of Islam, angering many on the left.

Mr. Roy, 66, who as a bearded young man roamed Afghanistan with the mujahedeen in the 1980s and now teaches at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, places greater emphasis on individual behavior and psychology in a jihadism he considers strictly marginal to Islam.

Mr. Kepel sees individuals as cogs in a system — part of a classically French, structuralist tradition that minimizes the role of individual human agency.

Mr. Roy, on the other hand, sees mostly troubled people in the jihadist ranks who act out their fantasies of violence and cruelty.

The terrorists who have carried out recent attacks were mostly marginalized young men and petty criminals, he says, adding that they have used Islam as a cover to pursue extreme violence.

“They haven’t had a militant past,” Mr. Roy said of many of these terrorists, in a telephone interview. The problem they represent, he says, is the “Islamicization of radicalism.”

It is a signature phrase that enrages Mr. Kepel, who leans toward its opposite: the radicalization of Islam.

“That ignoramus,” Mr. Kepel grumbled in an interview this month in his book-lined office, offering some choice gibes about his onetime friend’s lack of Arabic.

Mr. Kepel testified for an influential 2015 parliamentary report, wrote a best seller on terrorism after the attacks in Paris in November, and has been omnipresent in television and radio studios.

“At the ministry, they tell me, ‘I saw Kepel yesterday,’ ” said Mr. Roy, himself a favorite of the country’s dominant left-leaning news media. His arguments, for the moment at least, appear to be winning in government circles.

As the jockeying has intensified in official circles, so has the falling-out between the old friends.

Today they cannot stand each other, and, with the passion that typifies intellectual fights in a country where nothing short of war is more serious, they contemptuously dismiss each other’s views.

“The King Is Naked,” read the headline on Mr. Kepel’s attack on Mr. Roy this spring in the newspaper Libération, in a play on the French meaning of Mr. Roy’s name.

In turn, while acknowledging a long and now broken friendship, Mr. Roy today offers his own less-than-friendly critique of Mr. Kepel as a kind of cloistered intellectual.

 “We were friends for 20 years,” Mr. Roy said in the interview. “I traveled with him in Istanbul. But I was very struck by his incapacity to talk to anybody.”

“He’s sincere the way a madman is,” he added. “He’s not a thinker. He’s not a philosopher.”

The French debate has echoes of Republican criticism in the United States of President Obama for his reluctance to use the word Islam in connection with terrorism.

But as is so often the case in contemporary France, the heart of the dispute here is a disagreement about the country’s relationship with Islam.

Mr. Roy sees a Muslim population that is relatively well-integrated.

But for Mr. Kepel, the murderous jihadism that struck France in 2015 is the expression of a slow-burning Islamist radicalization that took shape over decades because of a failure of integration.

Source: ‘That Ignoramus’: 2 French Scholars of Radical Islam Turn Bitter Rivals – The New York Times

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I worked in the CIA under Bush. Obama is right to not say “radical Islam.” – Vox

2016/06/30 Leave a comment

Reprinted in its entirety:

The recent verbal attacks by the Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump and his supporters on President Barack Obama for avoiding the phrase “radical Islam” in his public pronouncements are simplistic, racially inflammatory — and flatly misinformed.

Settling upon accurate and strategically nuanced terms to describe the post-9/11 enemy is not the product of “political correctness” (contra Trump) or a failure to understand the enemy (contra a much-discussed Atlantic cover story). Nor are objections to using overly broad terms like “Islamic radicalism” limited to Democrats. The Bush administration understood the power of words, too. It concluded that distinctions that may seem small to Christian-American ears make a big difference to the mainstream Muslims we need on our side.

When I [Emile Nakhleh] directed the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the CIA in the early 2000s, I frequently interacted with senior Bush administration policymakers about how to engage Muslim communities and, when doing so, which words and phrases to use to best describe the radical ideology preached by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Always, the aim was to distinguish between radicals and extremists and the vast majority of mainstream Muslims, and to make sure the latter understood that we were not lumping them in with the former.

Like the Obama administration, the Bush administration correctly judged that the term “radical Islam” was divisive and adversarial, and would alienate the very people we wanted to communicate with.

Trump and those who echo his views must realize there is no such thing as one Islamic world or one Islamic ideology — or even one form of radicalism in the Muslim world. Many diverse ideological narratives characterize Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries and the 1.6 billion Muslims across the globe. To paint them all with the same broad brush of radicalism and extremism is absurd, dangerous, and politically self-serving.

Trump and those who share his views on this question may truly believe, as they insist when pressed, that “Islamic radicalism” describes only a subset of Muslims. But to Muslims, or for anyone familiar with the many strands of Islam, the phrase connotes a direct link between the mainstream of the Muslim faith and the violent acts of a few. What’s more, Trump appears to be recklessly pandering to the uninformed part of the American electorate that does believe in such a connection between the mainstream and the fringe.

Like the Obama administration, the Bush administration knew words matter

The project of choosing words carefully must begin with knowledge. Al-Qaeda, and more recently ISIS, have mostly drawn on the radical Sunni Wahhabi-Salafi ideology, which primarily emanates from Saudi Arabia. How to describe that narrow ideology to a broader audience was the focus of many conversations and briefings I attended after 9/11.

Many in the West, including some senior policymakers, have had only a scant knowledge of this type of ideology, which has wreaked deadly violence against Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I recall a conversation I had with a senior policymaker in which he asked me to explain “Wahhabism.” Since he had very limited time, I told him, “Wahhabists are akin to Southern Baptists.” That is: They read the holy text literally and are intolerant of other religious views. Wahhabists, like some Baptists, also abhor reasoning or “ijtihad” that would encourage them to question their religious brand. (Further complicating matters, Saudi Arabian officials, who generally embrace Wahhabi Salafism, describe those who use this ideology to justify their attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states as “deviants” from the faith.)

The roots of this radicalism go back to the Hanbali School of Jurisprudence, one of the four Schools in Sunni Islam, dating to the ninth century. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th century Saudi theologian, adopted the teachings of the Hanbali School as the authentic teachings of Islam. This Saudi strain of Islam has been further radicalized by Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Sunni terrorist groups. The other three, generally more liberal, schools are the Shafi’i, the Maliki, and the Hanafi — also named after their founders in the eighth and ninth centuries. Adherents of these more tolerant schools live across the wider Muslim world, from Morocco to Indonesia, from Turkey to South Asia.

Any terminology that the commander in chief of the United States settles on ought to reflect that we are speaking of Sunni-based radicalism — a strain that takes a particularly intolerant, exclusive, narrow-minded view of Islam and its relations with other Muslims and the non-Muslim world.

But there are at least two reasons why speaking of Wahhabism, while accurate, won’t fly in most public pronouncements: The word means little to the US domestic audience, and it could alienate Saudi Arabia, a complicated partner (to say the least) in anti-terror efforts. This is the one area in which the charge of “political correctness” carries some weight (although “political realism” may be a more reasonable way of describing the phenomenon).

Beyond ruling out “radical Islam” as overly broad, policymakers and advisors under both the Bush and Obama administrations have been careful not to accept the characterizations that violent extremists give to themselves, which inflate their role within their faith. That is why we don’t call them “jihadists” or, more obviously, “martyrs.”

The decision to avoid “radical Islam” is a strategic one

In short, both the Bush and Obama administration officials have refrained from using “Islamic radicalism” and its variants not because of “political correctness” but because of their nuanced knowledge of the diversity of Islamic ideologies. The term doesn’t enhance anyone’s knowledge of the perpetrators of terrorism or of the societies that spawn them, and it might hurt us in the global war of ideas. Policymakers refer to members of al-Qaeda and ISIS as “hijackers” of their faith in order to signal their support for mainstream Islamic leaders in an alliance against minor radical offshoots, not because they are unaware that some members of al-Qaeda and ISIS are theologically “sophisticated” (or “very Islamic,” as the Atlantic provocatively put it).

As our interest in Saudi Arabia’s oil wanes, some expect future administrations to take a tougher approach toward Saudi Arabia on the question of radical religious ideology. We may yet begin to hear talk of Wahhabi Salafism from a future White House.

But more likely, the next administration — I expect it will be the Clinton administration — will continue the policy the Bush administration began of referring to terrorists by the names of their organizations: Hezbollah, Ahl al-Bayt, the (Iranian) Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force, ISIS, and so on.

Using such terms avoids demonizing majorities of Sunni Muslims who just want to follow their faith, devoid of politics or activism. Simple terms like “terrorists,” “killers,” and “criminals” are also quite effective.

Source: I worked in the CIA under Bush. Obama is right to not say “radical Islam.” – Vox

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , ,

Quebec: Contre la radicalisation, le «vivre ensemble»

2016/06/29 Leave a comment

Quebec’s first series of projects to reduce radicalization:

Pour lutter contre la radicalisation menant à la violence, le gouvernement Couillard vient de donner le feu vert à cinq projets qui cherchent à développer l’esprit critique des étudiants du secondaire et du collégial.

Ces projets visent à canaliser les idées radicales des jeunes avant leur éventuelle conversion à la violence, a expliqué la ministre de l’Immigration, de la Diversité et de l’Inclusion, Kathleen Weil, lundi à Montréal. Ces initiatives se veulent complémentaires au resserrement de la surveillance policière et à d’autres mesures mises de l’avant depuis qu’une douzaine de jeunes Québécois ont fui ou tenté de fuir en Syrie pour combattre les « ennemis d’Allah », au cours des derniers mois.

« Ces mesures visent à bâtir une société inclusive, à développer l’esprit critique des jeunes. On n’est pas en train de vous dire que les jeunes qui vont participer à ces projets de dialogue sont à risque de se radicaliser », a expliqué le ministre Weil.

Le mot d’ordre commun aux cinq projets est la promotion du « vivre ensemble », une expression citée abondamment par le maire de Montréal, Denis Coderre. Ils visent aussi à développer l’estime de soi et l’appartenance au Québec des étudiants.

Le théâtre Parminou montera une pièce faite par et pour des élèves de troisième, quatrième et cinquième secondaire. Ces jeunes pourront exprimer dans leurs mots leurs aspirations et leurs craintes. Une quinzaine de représentations sont prévues sur une période de deux ans.

L’Institut du Nouveau Monde organisera des ateliers et des tables rondes sur la participation citoyenne dans les cégeps de 15 régions du Québec.

L’Institut Pacifique organisera des ateliers et un forum dans trois écoles secondaires des arrondissements de Montréal-Nord et de Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc Extension, qui sont parmi les plus multiethniques de Montréal.

L’organisme Ensemble pour le respect de la diversité aidera des jeunes du secondaire à s’engager dans des projets mobilisateurs qui auront un effet d’entraînement pour les autres élèves.

Équitas organisera des activités pour les jeunes de Saint-Laurent et d’Ahuntsic-Cartierville, avec l’aide de mentors issus des communautés culturelles.

Éducation à la démocratie

Ces projets sont pertinents dans le contexte de l’offensive plus vaste que mène le gouvernement contre la radicalisation, estime Frédéric Dejean, chercheur à l’Institut de recherche sur l’intégration professionnelle des immigrants, affilié au Collège de Maisonneuve. Il a dirigé un rapport sur la radicalisation d’une dizaine d’étudiants du Collège, rendu public le mois dernier. Le chercheur a justement recommandé une forme d’éducation à la vie civique pour les étudiants.

« Le problème, ce n’est pas d’avoir des idées radicales. On est toujours le radical de quelqu’un d’autre. Mais à cet âge, entre 14 et 19 ans, il faut aider les jeunes à construire leur propre pensée. Ce n’est pas inné d’apprendre à écouter les autres, apprendre à exprimer et changer son opinion, apprendre à accepter le désaccord », dit-il en entrevue.

Source: Contre la radicalisation, le «vivre ensemble» | Le Devoir

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with

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