The Data Behind Radicalization

2015/01/26 Leave a comment

Findings of a recent study of 1,500 individuals radicalized in the US since WW II:

Compared to violent domestic terrorists on the Far Left and Far Right, Islamists stand out. They’re more likely to be young (between 18 and 28 years old), unmarried and unassimilated into American society. They are also more likely to be actively recruited to an extremist group.

But in other important ways, Islamist extremists in the U.S. as a whole — violent and nonviolent — are not so different from other extremists. People in the three groups were equally likely to have become radicalized while serving time in prison — complicating the narrative that Muslim prisoners are unusually likely to commit to extremism from behind bars — and to be composed of individuals who have psychological issues, are loners, or have recently experienced “a loss of social standing.”

“Social networks are incredibly important to radicalization, but that’s not unique to Islamists at all,” [researcher Patrick] James said. “There’s almost always a facilitator — a personal relationship with a friend or family member who’s already made that leap.”

The Data Behind Radicalization « The Dish.

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‘Satire is the fastest way to destroy someone’: How Arabs use the Internet to mock dictators and terrorists

2015/01/26 Leave a comment

More on Arab comedy with some funny and biting examples on extremists:

The parody commercial for “Tak Firi” — the caliph’s favourite cheese — begins with two ISIS terrorists enjoying a picnic in a lush field.

It’s shot in the vein of ads for the French cheese spread La Vache Qui Rit, known in the middle east for corny commercials that often feature a parent encouraging their child to eat a cheese sandwich while waxing poetic about its health benefits.

One of the terrorists spreads the cheese onto a round of pita with his dagger and hands it to his giddy companion. “From the fields of Raqqa,” says the narrator, “we bring you this cheese. Take it with you to wherever you decide to blow yourself up.”

The “Tak Firi” ad — the name references the Arabic term for a Muslim who accuses a co-religionist of apostasy — aired in October on the Albasheer Show, an online Iraqi comedy news program hosted by Ahmed Albasheer, a 30-year-old native of Anbar province.

‘Satire is the fastest way to destroy someone’: How Arabs use the Internet to mock dictators and terrorists

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Débat sur la laïcité: Charles Taylor redoute de nouvelles divisions sociales

2015/01/24 Leave a comment

As always, sensible commentary by Charles Taylor:

«Puisqu’il y a des gens qui veulent surfer là-dessus pour faire avancer leur projet de laïcité, là, c’est dangereux parce que se sont deux questions complètement différentes. Si on commence le débat en pointant du doigt une partie de la population comme étant des terroristes en puissance, on ne pourra jamais régler ce problème, le problème de diversité», a déclaré M. Taylor.

Selon le professeur émérite, laïcité et lutte au terrorisme sont deux choses différentes et tracer un lien entre les deux thèmes risque de mener le Québec tout droit vers de nouveaux déchirements.

«Ce serait une erreur monumentale de mélanger les questions de terrorisme et les questions du vivre-ensemble dans la diversité dans une société comme la nôtre. Du moment où on fait un amalgame comme ça, on est tout droit sur le chemin de la division sociale. Si les gens croient que le moment est propice à cause des événements de Paris, ils ont grandement tort», a-t-il dit.

Sans détour, M. Taylor a exprimé sa méfiance envers le député péquiste et candidat à la direction du Parti québécois Bernard Drainville, revenu à la charge il y a une semaine avec une nouvelle mouture – moins restrictive – de son projet de charte des valeurs.

Le philosophe estime que le député de Marie-Victorin est «un mauvais porteur de ballon» dans ce dossier à cause de son passé marqué par la confusion entre la diversité religieuse et l’intégrisme.

Durant le débat sur la première version de la charte en 2013-2014, M. Drainville, alors ministre responsable, «a constamment fait l’amalgame», a soutenu M. Taylor.

«Il entretenait un contexte flou d’intégrisme religieux qui voulait dire à la fois se pencher sur la violence et interdire les signes ostentatoires. Quelqu’un qui croit que les gens qui portent des signes ostentatoires sont des terroristes en puissance ignore tout de la vie religieuse très diverse de notre pays, de notre société. Il agite des slogans très dangereux», a-t-il soulevé.

Le professeur est d’avis que les Français ont fait preuve de plus de sagesse à la suite de l’attentat perpétré contre l’hebdomadaire satirique en rejetant les amalgames et en prenant soin de ne pas montrer du doigt leurs concitoyens de confession musulmane.

Bien au contraire, «ils se sont tous dits: on est tous ensemble, toutes les religions, ne faisons pas d’amalgame, ne blâmons pas les musulmans pour ce qui s’est passé», a-t-il relaté.

Débat sur la laïcité: Charles Taylor redoute de nouvelles divisions sociales | Martin Ouellet | National.

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Radicalization a growing risk in Canadian prisons, experts warn

2015/01/24 Leave a comment

Not an easy issue to address. Comments by former prison chaplam Imam Dwyer worth noting:

Imam Yasin Dwyer worked as a chaplain in federal prisons for 11 years, but left his formal role after CSC moved to a privatized model for chaplaincy services. Dwyer says the chaplains had proven successful in building trust relationships with inmates, and the change severed critical ties to community.

“If the community is not speaking with authority about what religion is, in our case about what Islam is — especially in a correctional context — if the community doesn’t have that authority, then perhaps that authority may fall to voices that have not been granted that authority by the faith community,” he warned.

While most Muslims behind bars use faith to find meaning and guide them through incarceration, some are dealing with issues that make them vulnerable to radicalization.

Dwyer, who provided pastoral services to six of the Toronto 18 terror cell members, says he had success despite a lack of government support.

“It’s not even a matter of doing enough — it’s are we doing anything at all?” he says. “As the Muslim chaplain, I was looked upon to deal with these particular offenders, minus the resources to do it effectively.”

Dwyer says he does not want to contribute to fear-mongering, but wants to raise a red flag.

“Prisoners are in a very adversarial environment. It is a potentially violent environment where people are quite jaded and there is a real absence of consistent light. So in that situation, in that state of anger and isolation, you may have the potential of those falling into some sort of alternative dysfunctional narrative of what Islam is. That’s the flag that I would put out.”

Last month, CSC hosted an international roundtable and symposium on managing radical offenders that brought in experts from the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Israel, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

While there are publicly available statistics on aboriginal prisoners, have not seen statistics broken down by visible minority or religion.

Radicalization a growing risk in Canadian prisons, experts warn – Politics – CBC News.

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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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