The Origins of Fox’s Favorite Muslim No-Go-Zone Myth – The Atlantic

2015/01/23 Leave a comment

Good take down of the ‘no-go-zone’ myth, with the following conclusion (and for those who know French, this parody on Le Petit Journal is both amusing and effective):

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=28b_1421201170:

Meanwhile, the meme can be seen extending to the United States. Truth Uncensored reports, incorrectly, that there are no-go zones stateside, including in places like Dearborn, Michigan, a Detroit suburb with a large Muslim population. Conservative Tribune even posts a map that allegedly shows no-go zones controlled by Islamists across the United States. I can’t tell where the map originally came from, but it cites data from Steven Emerson, the Fox expert who apologized for his no-go-zone comments. And the map is posted elsewhere on the Internet, labeled as everything from a map of terrorist camps (apparently al-Qaeda is big in Boca Raton—alert your grandparents!) to areas with concentrated Muslim populations.

Erroneous beliefs such as these concentrate along partisan axes, and once an idea has taken seed it’s difficult to root out.

Bottom line: You don’t need to worry about Muslim no-go zones if you live in the United States. And if you’re planning a tourist expedition to Europe, it’s a good idea to avoid high-crime areas, regardless of their demographics. But why, if there’s no evidence for no-go zones and some of the highest-profile propagators of the idea have repudiated it, do such myths survive and thrive?

It probably has a lot to do with the conservative media ecosystem. Erroneous beliefs such as these tend to concentrate along people’s partisan or ideological axes. (The same is true of liberal media, though not in this particular case.) And once an idea has taken seed, it’s extremely difficult to root out. As political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown, corrections can actually backfire, increasing holders’ faith in their incorrect beliefs.

Unfortunately, even reporting on these misconceptions can worsen the problem, so I am part of the problem. But it seems important to note that Jindal is plainly wrong. These sorts of distortions and exaggerations don’t help to fight the very real threat of Islamist terror. They don’t serve the cause of creating an informed, reasoned democratic society. And they don’t help the political prospects of guys like Jindal, who has previously demanded that his GOP stop being “the stupid party.” Maybe this meme is the real no-go zone.

The Origins of Fox’s Favorite Muslim No-Go-Zone Myth – The Atlantic.

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Why Orwell Still Matters – De-radicalization Example

2015/01/22 2 Comments

On the enduring importance of Orwell:

Maajid Nawaz, however, claims a different Orwell novel – Animal Farm – led him away from radical Islam:

It was while in prison, surrounded by several prominent jihadist leaders, that Nawaz realized he wanted to take a different path. He was reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and came to a new understanding of “what happens when somebody tries to create a utopia.”

“I began to join the dots and think, ‘My god, if these guys that I’m here with ever came to power, they would be the Islamist equivalent of Animal Farm,” Nawaz says. He says he began to see that it’s “impossible to create a utopia.”

“I’m living up close and seeing [the radicals’] everyday habits and lifestyle, I thought, ‘My god, I wouldn’t trust these guys in power,’ because when I called it, back then, and said, ‘If this caliphate, this theocratic caliphate, was ever established, it would be a nightmare on earth,’” Nawaz says.

Why Orwell Still Matters « The Dish.

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Couillard est insensible en matière de laïcité, dit Legault

2015/01/22 Leave a comment

The Quebec debates start again:

Le premier ministre Philippe Couillard ne doit pas utiliser les récents attentats terroristes de Paris pour repousser le débat sur la neutralité religieuse de l’État, a déclaré mardi le chef de la Coalition avenir Québec, François Legault.

Selon M. Legault, il est plus que temps de régler la question de la laïcité dans les institutions publiques en imposant des balises.

«Philippe Couillard n’a pas raison d’attendre, c’est inacceptable qu’on attende, on a déjà trop attendu dans le dossier de la laïcité au Québec, a-t-il dit. On doit agir, on doit mettre en place des balises dans une charte, dans une loi, on doit mettre ce dossier derrière nous.»

M. Legault reconnaît que la lutte à l’intégrisme est une question distincte de la laïcité, mais il juge que M. Couillard fait fausse route en repoussant le débat parce qu’il veut éviter d’amalgamer les deux sujets.

«J’ai beaucoup de difficulté à suivre Philippe Couillard, a-t-il dit. Philippe Couillard est vraiment insensible à tous les dossiers qui touchent l’identité québécoise. C’est une insensibilité qu’il montre depuis qu’il est élu.»

Couillard est insensible en matière de laïcité, dit Legault | Alexandre Robillard | Politique québécoise.

From the Government side, a focus on identifying best practices to counter radicalization:

On cherchera surtout à détecter ceux qui flirtent avec les organisations fondamentalistes.

Le but poursuivi sera de «nous protéger collectivement, protéger les familles qui sont à risque avec un enfant qui se radicalise, et protéger le public», a fait valoir Mme Weil.

Pour mener à bien sa tâche, Mme Weil est entourée des ministres de l’Éducation, Yves Bolduc, de la Protection de la jeunesse, Lucie Charlebois, de la Sécurité publique, Lise Thériault, de la Famille, Francine Charbonneau, et de l’Emploi, François Blais.

Les organismes communautaires et religieux, notamment musulmans, sans compter bien sûr les corps policiers (municipaux, Sûreté du Québec et Gendarmerie royale du Canada), seront mis à contribution pour soutenir l’action gouvernementale.

Québec dit vouloir s’inspirer des meilleures pratiques mondiales en ce domaine et présenter des mesures concrètes «pour détecter, contrer la radicalisation» de certains jeunes.

Le bouquet de mesures sera réuni dans un plan d’action interministériel et intersectoriel.

Le travail de déblayage du dossier a déjà été fait par les fonctionnaires. Vendredi, une première réunion ministérielle devrait permettre de préciser le cadre de travail et l’échéancier.

Le plan d’action devrait être rendu public «dans l’année» en cours, a promis la ministre Weil, en s’engageant à ce que le processus ne s’étire pas pendant «trois ans, disons, pas deux ans».

«On ressent tous qu’il ne faut pas fermer les yeux, qu’il faut y travailler. Il ne faut pas rester passif par rapport à ce phénomène-là», a-t-elle dit, un phénomène «pas très bien compris».

Intégrisme religieux: Québec s’engage à intervenir

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We Have Lost | Turkish Reaction to Paris Attacks and Implications

2015/01/20 Leave a comment

Thoughtful commentary on Turkey’s lack of full condemnation for the Charle Hebdo attacks, and lack of support – and understanding – of free expression.

And if this is the tenor of Turkish debate and understanding, as the conclusion notes, not the cheeriest but perhaps most realistic way to start the new year:

I could go on, but hopefully by now you get the point. A NATO-member country, with massive commercial and defense links to the U.S. and Europe, whose leaders speak English and many of whom have been educated in the U.S. and Europe, should know better. It should know that terrorism against civilians must be condemned full-stop, that drawing offensive cartoons does not mean that you deserve to be killed, that the Mossad did not just engage in a deadly false flag operation, and that no government is killing its own people in order to gin up anti-Muslim sentiment and create a pretext for persecuting its own Muslim population. When it doesn’t seem to know these things, it means we have lost the battle of ideas, and the extremists are winning. Not insignificant numbers of educated and sophisticated people in the Middle East genuinely believe that what happened in Paris is part of a larger conspiracy to frame Muslims for violent acts, that the U.S. created ISIS as an excuse to launch new military operations in Iraq and Syria, that 9/11 was a false flag operation designed to further a clash between the West and Islam, and on and on. The debate over whether the appropriate approach to combating jihadi terrorism is a military one or a law enforcement one is the wrong debate, because it misses the point. Neither approach is going to do the job, because this is a war of ideas, and so killing or prosecuting terrorists will only get you so far. People need to be convinced that extremism is both futile and the wrong way of seeing the world, and I don’t know how best to wage that battle, but I am pretty confident it is the one that needs to be waged.

One of the widespread techniques used when teaching international relations to undergraduates is to look at the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War and apply different schools of international relations theory toward explaining this earth-shattering event. If you are a realist, you point to the fact that U.S. military spending and economic superiority were too much for the Soviets to overcome, and they were brought down by overwhelming American hard power that can be measured. If you are a constructivist, you look at the battle of ideas and trace the way in which Communism became so discredited in the face of Western liberal democracy and capitalism that the entire Communist edifice collapsed as it lost its legitimacy. I have always been more drawn to the latter explanation for a number of reasons, but most of all because it wasn’t just the Soviet Union that disappeared overnight, but Communism itself. Yes, small pockets of it remain (and no, China is not Communist today in any meaningful way), but for a political and economic system that controlled nearly half the world to just disappear is remarkable, and it wouldn’t have happened had the only blow been the fall of its largest state patron.

The same thing needs to happen when it comes to the philosophy of extremism motivating the type of jihadi terror as we saw in Paris last week. There is no way to prevent these types of attacks from a logistical perspective; Paris was not an intelligence failure, and while the French police can deploy thousands of soldiers and police to protect nearly every potential Jewish target in France, there is not enough manpower to sustain that permanently. Even if there was, it wouldn’t be a failsafe solution. Until attitudes change in a major way, until jihadi extremism is discredited, until more extremists believe that there is a better way, and until the ideas animating jihadi extremist terror are demonstrated to have failed abjectly and completely, we will continue to lose. Pretty depressing way to start the new year, huh?

We Have Lost | Ottomans and Zionists.

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Chérif and Saïd Kouachi’s Path to Paris Attack at Charlie Hebdo – NYTimes.com

2015/01/19 Leave a comment

A good in-depth piece on the radicalization journey of the Paris killers and the challenge for police forces, suggesting that it may be more a matter of resources than expanded powers:

The 10-year evolution from easily spooked amateur to hardened killer is a story of steadily deepening radicalism that occurred virtually under the noses of French authorities, who twice had Chérif in their grasp. After the arrest of Chérif in 2005, when he was no more than a fledgling jihadist, he spent 20 months in prison. There, he met and became an acolyte of Al Qaeda’s top operative in France, Djamel Beghal, who had been dispatched to Paris to set up a cell aimed at attacking United States interests here, French counterterrorism officials said.

He also befriended a convicted robber, Amedy Coulibaly, who would later synchronize his own terrorist attack with the Kouachi brothers, killing a police officer and staging a siege inside a kosher supermarket in the days after the Charlie Hebdo carnage, bringing the death toll to 17.

Much remains unclear about their lives. But thousands of pages of legal documents obtained by The New York Times, including minutes of interrogations, summaries of phone taps, intercepted jailhouse letters and a catalog of images and religious texts found on the laptops of Chérif Kouachi and Mr. Coulibaly, reveal an arc of radicalization that saw them become steadily more professional and more discreet.

They shaved regularly, eschewing the conspicuous beards worn by many Islamists. They dressed in jeans and basketball sneakers, offering no outward hint of their plans or jihadist beliefs.

After at least one of the Kouachis traveled to Yemen in 2011, the United States alerted French authorities. But three years of tailing the brothers yielded nothing, and an oversight commission ruled that the surveillance was no longer productive, said Louis Caprioli, the deputy head of France’s domestic antiterrorism unit from 1998 to 2004.

The brothers appeared so nonthreatening that surveillance was dropped in the middle of last year, he said, as hundreds of young Muslims cycled back and forth to Syria for jihad and French authorities shifted priorities.

“The system is overwhelmed,” said Jean-Charles Brisard, a terrorism expert who is a former counsel to France’s chief antiterrorism prosecutor.

Chérif and Saïd Kouachi’s Path to Paris Attack at Charlie Hebdo – NYTimes.com.

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It’s time to confront ‘the cancer of extremism’ – Khan and Dueck

2015/01/19 Leave a comment

Good conversation between Sheema Khan and Lorna Dueck on extremism. Quote below from Sheema Khan:

In conclusion, we should start to look to ways of breaking the vicious cycle anytime a terrorist incident occurs. There is shock, anger, followed by condemnation of these acts, and then the backlash against Muslim communities, thus further creating divisions, which in turn alienate Muslim youth who become susceptible to the message of extremists (i.e. the West is at war with Islam, they reject you because you are Muslim, etc).

For Muslim communities, we really have to start looking in the mirror, and ask in view of atrocities occurring in the name of Islam at a higher frequency, “what is happening to the moral core”? During the days of terror in France, almost 2,000 women, children and the elderly were massacred by Boko Haram, which has also resorted to child suicide bombers. Almost 40 Muslims were killed in Yemen by a Muslim extremist. And the killing of Muslims, by Muslim extremists continues in Syria and Iraq. All of this on the heels of the horrific murders of schoolchildren and teachers in Peshawar by the Taliban. We need to take a deep look and acknowledge that the cancer of extremism is growing, and come up with strategies on how to deal with it.

It’s time to confront ‘the cancer of extremism’ – The Globe and Mail.

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ICYMI: Turning up the war rhetoric isn’t the same as confronting the threats – The Globe and Mail

2015/01/17 Leave a comment

Sensible commentary by Campbell Clark in the Globe:

But the big issue is clearly trying to prevent young Canadians, many of them apparently ordinary-joe young suburbanite men, from becoming radicals. And because that’s hard, governments talk less about it.

Talk of war on a massive scale won’t dissuade radicalization. Quite the opposite. One of the motivators for violent radicalization, according to experts, is that it makes marginalized, alienated young men feel important, even feared. ISIS even uses videos with themes from video games like Call of Duty to recruit foreign fighters. A potential recruit would probably be drawn, not deterred, by the idea that this is war on a massive scale. It might be better to employ ridicule.

It is true, as Mr. Harper said last week, that there are threats. But the unpleasant fact is that turning up the war rhetoric isn’t the same as confronting them.

Turning up the war rhetoric isn’t the same as confronting the threats – The Globe and Mail.

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Radicalization of prisoners discussed at Canadian roundtable

2015/01/15 Leave a comment

Interesting to see whether the CSC will revisit the earlier decision to cancel the chaplain program in 2013 (Is Canada doing enough to ‘de-radicalize’ convicted terrorists?):

Don Head, commissioner of the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), got approval from Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney to fly in participants from other parts of Canada and from the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Israel, France, Spain and the Netherlands at a cost of about $63,000, according to a briefing note obtained by CBC News through Access to Information.

“Violent extremist or radicalized offender populations may pose a threat to the safety and security of institutions and communities, necessitating an examination of evidence-based assessments, interventions and management practices for this group of offenders,” the document reads.

CSC confirmed the three-day event took place Dec. 2-4, bringing together international experts who discussed ways to manage extremist offenders.

Amedy Coulibaly, seen in an undated video posted online Sunday by militants, shot a policewoman and four hostages at a kosher grocery in Paris before he was killed by police on Friday. Coulibaly is said to have been radicalized in prison, where he met one of the Kouachi brothers responsible for last week’s Charlie Hebdo killings. (Associated Press)

The issue of radicalization behind bars is on the global radar after revelations that two gunmen involved in last week’s attacks in France are believed to have been radicalized in prison.

French authorities are struggling to contain the threat from what is now considered fertile ground for extremism.

….Rioux said CSC’s initiatives to prevent radicalization include comprehensive intake and screening procedures and training for front-line staff on security threat group identification.

Radicalization of prisoners discussed at Canadian roundtable – Politics – CBC News.

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More state power, not free speech, the likeliest we-are-Charlie result – Neil MacDonald

2015/01/14 1 Comment

Extensive commentary by Neil MacDonald of the CBC who unfortunately nails it in his somewhat lengthy piece on the aftermath of the Paris killings:

Western governments are, however, quite interested in enforcement and security, and that, not more speech, is the order of the day once again.

With unintended irony, and a very short memory, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared over the weekend that France is now locked in a “war on terror.”

That’s exactly the term George W. Bush used after 9/11. It presaged an unprecedented expansion of the surveillance state and the powers of America’s security apparatus.

Civil liberties were tossed aside. Other countries’ laws, even those of U.S. allies, became irrelevant.

And the frightened American population cheered.

The French, among others, mocked the slogan relentlessly, especially once it became apparent that the U.S. invasion of Iraq, carried out as part of this war on terror, was based on a false pretext.

Eventually, Bush’s own Pentagon quietly dropped the slogan. And when the Democrats took the White House, they repudiated it.

But it’s clearly back on. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder agreed with the French prime minister. America, he said, is at war, too.

Next month, Washington is convening an international summit to discuss new measures.

Canada is preparing new legislation to expand the powers of its security agencies.

The French, and the Americans, and no doubt the Canadians, are considering how better to monitor and obliterate incitement on the internet.

Or, more precisely, what security officials consider incitement. It’s a term that can be interpreted rather broadly, and no doubt will be.

Clearly, the ultimate answer to the Charlie Hebdo massacre will not be freer speech. It will be a mostly secret intensification of police power, with attendant shrinkage of individual freedoms.

And we will all be told not to worry: If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

At least one French demonstrator seemed to recognize some of this over the weekend. The sign he hoisted read: “Je marche, mais je suis conscient de la confusion et de l’hypocrisie de la situation.”

I march, but I am aware of the confusion and hypocrisy of the situation.

More state power, not free speech, the likeliest we-are-Charlie result – World – CBC News.

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No “Clash of Civilizations” – Commentary Magazine

2015/01/14 Leave a comment

From a surprising source, Commentary Magazine:

Surveys indicate that the broad majority of Muslims around the world are not in the violent, jihadist camp. A Pew poll in 2013, for example, found that across 11 Muslim countries, 67 percent of those surveyed said they are somewhat or very concerned about Islamic extremism and 57 percent said they had an unfavorable view of al-Qaeda while 51 percent had an unfavorable view of the Taliban. Moreover, “about three-quarters or more in Pakistan (89%), Indonesia (81%), Nigeria (78%) and Tunisia (77%), say suicide bombings or other acts of violence that target civilians are never justified.” Indeed the only place where a majority of Muslims justified suicide bombings was in the Palestinian territories.

It seems safe, then, to say that most Muslims around the world are moderate. But there is a substantial minority of extremists which, in absolute numbers, pose a serious threat, given the fact that there are an estimated 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. While those extremists pose a substantial threat to the West, they present an even bigger threat to fellow Muslims. The vast majority of victims of Islamist terrorist organization such as the Taliban, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Hezbollah have been fellow Muslims. Such organizations, after all, are principally bent on dominating their own societies, thus by definition oppressing and killing fellow Muslims; they generally attack the West only as an auxiliary line of operations. One of the truly disturbing aspects of modern-day Islamist movements is the ease with which they declare their Muslim enemies to be “takfir” (i.e. apostates) and therefore liable to be killed.

What is going on, then, is not a war between civilizations but a war within Islamic civilization pitting an armed, militant minority against a peaceful but easily cowed majority. Any talk of waging “war on Islam” is thus deeply misguided and harmful. What we in the West need to do is to help moderate Muslims wage war on the radicals. Sound impossible? Far from it. Just look at how successfully (if brutally) Muslim states such as Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria have fought to repress Islamist movements–or how courageously so many Iraqi and Afghan security officers have fought against Islamist extremists. (They would fight even more effectively if their own organizations were less corrupt and more effective.)

The “us-vs.-them” narrative only distracts from what needs to be done while playing into the terrorists’ hands–that is after all, precisely the narrative they seek to promulgate to rally Muslims to their side.

No “Clash of Civilizations” – Commentary Magazine Commentary Magazine.

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