Is there an Austrian link to New Zealand mosque attacks?

2019/04/01 Leave a comment

More on the possible Austrian link:

The Austrian authorities are investigating possible connections after it emerged that the main suspect in the Christchurch mosque attacks made a donation of €1,500 (£1,293) to the far-right Identitarian Movement in Austria (IBÖ).

The suspect visited Austria from 27 November to 4 December last year, according to Austria’s Interior Minister Herbert Kickl, who said that potential links to Austrian extremists were being looked into.

Police have searched the house of the charismatic, social media-savvy IBÖ leader, Martin Sellner, who has done much to raise the profile of the Identitarians throughout Europe.

The group is hostile to multiculturalism, and claims to defend Europe against migrants, especially Muslims.

Mr Sellner has firmly denied any involvement with the 15 March attacks, which killed 50 people, but admits he received the donation and wrote an email of thanks.

In a video posted online, he said: “I am not a member of a terrorist organisation. I have nothing to do with this man, other than that I passively received a donation from him.”

Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has said the group will be dissolved if it is deemed to be a terrorist organisation.

“There must be no tolerance for dangerous ideologies in our country – no matter if it’s radical Islam or right-wing fanaticism,” he said.

The main suspect in the Christchurch mosque attacks, Australian Brenton Tarrant, also seems to have had a preoccupation with Austrian history – something the interior minister said was being investigated.

Austrian landmark

The suspect’s clothes and weapons were covered with writing and symbols.

One of the words daubed in white on a gun magazine was “Vienna”.

There was also a string of names of historical figures, including that of Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, the military commander of Vienna during the Ottoman siege of 1683.

Starhemberg and his company of 20,000 men defended the city against the 120,000-strong Ottoman army, which was eventually defeated by the combined forces of Poles, Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire.

The Battle of Vienna in 1683 is often cited by historians as the point where the Ottoman advance on Western Europe was stopped; the turning of the tide in the Muslim/Christian struggle for the control of Europe.

As such, it is a date celebrated by the far right, including, it seems, the Christchurch suspect, who is a self-confessed anti-Muslim white supremacist.

‘The Great Replacement’

The Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DOEW), which researches extreme-right activity, says there are “many rhetorical and ideological overlaps” between groups like the Identitarians and the suspected Christchurch attacker.

“The title of the attacker’s manifesto, The Great Replacement (which sees immigrants as a threat to “white” Western culture) was a slogan popularised by the Identitarians,” DOEW said on its website.

“Regardless of the outcome of the investigation,” DOEW says, the Identitarians seem to be sticking to their narrative “for the time being”. It points to an IBÖ statement from last week, which speaks of the “Great Replacement” and calls for “De-Islamification”.

The whole affair is uncomfortable not just for the Identitarians, but for Austria’s government as well.

Mr Kurz’s own conservative Austrian People’s Party is in coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), making Austria the only country in Western Europe with a far-right presence in government.

FPÖ leader and Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said on Wednesday that his party had “nothing to do with the Identitarians”.

However, Austrian media published photos of FPÖ politicians with members of the group, and Bernhard Weidinger from DOEW told the BBC that there were many links between FPÖ politicians and members of the IBÖ, who often attended each other’s events.

In 2016, before he became interior minister, Herbert Kickl gave a speech to a far-right conference in Linz, called Defenders of Europe. The FPÖ politician addressed his audience, which included Identitarians, as “like-minded people”, according to Austrian media reports.

The FPÖ has also long celebrated the Battle of Vienna victory of 1683. In 2010 it even published a comic, set during the siege, featuring Mr Strache as a knight saving Vienna’s cathedral from an Ottoman minaret.

And when Mr Strache and Mr Kurz presented their government programme back in 2017, shortly before the coalition was sworn in, they broke with tradition, and held the event on Vienna’s Kahlenberg mountain, where the Battle of Vienna took place.

Asked if there was any historical significance to the choice of venue, Mr Kurz said no.

But in a video blog, Mr Sellner hailed it as “a good omen”.

Source: Is there an Austrian link to New Zealand mosque attacks?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , ,

What is gained by stripping ISIL returnees of citizenship?

2019/03/22 Leave a comment

While I agree citizenship revocation is counterproductive, I find this to be an overly sympathetic view of the women who supported ISIL, given the difficulties is establishing what they did and did not do during their time there, not to mention the difficulty in laying charges and securing convictions:

The first ISIL recruit I interviewed, in 2014 in Delft, the Netherlands, was a 22-year-old woman who had become an ISIL bride after being indoctrinated by a recruiter. It took the recruiter two months of continuous communication online to convince her to join what he called “the cause” and to be “part of the global struggle against the atrocities of the West.”

After months of clandestine planning, Zoleikha (not her real name) cautiously set out for the airport, ready to step aboard a flight to Iraq. She had followed every detail of the recruiter’s guidance except one: She left a short note to her family, telling them of her decision.

The family had suspected something was up. Zoleikha had been evasive for a while, and they had got in the routine of searching her room for clues when she was out of the house. When her father found the note, his heart skipped a beat and he could barely breathe. He knew what he had to do. Not more than an hour went by before the authorities stopped Zoleikha as she was about to board the plane.

I spoke with her father, a man of Moroccan descent, who owned the local dry-cleaning business. He was a hard-working family man. Of his four children, one was in high school and three had graduated from college, including Zoleikha. He had built a new life for his family and hoped his children would prosper.

He and his family followed some cultural traditions and occasionally attended mosque services. But it was important to him that his children assimilate into European culture. When he found the note, he remembered an Imam who had spoken about the challenges of radicalization and the need to be vigilant about recruiters within their community. The Imam had encouraged partnership with the local government and trust of the authorities.

Out of desperation, the father called the authorities. He told me he had done it for his daughter’s sake and for the sake of the country that had given him a new beginning. Zoleikha never reached Iraq. She was arrested, and then she was lucky enough to be released conditionally under court supervision.

There are many women who were not fortunate enough to have such an intervention. By most estimates, approximately 5,000 European citizens have been recruited to Iraq and Syria by ISIL since 2013. Many of the women left family, freedom and fortune to pursue an uncertain future. They arrived in Syria and Iraq, and what happened to them after that is a mystery. However, now, with the demise of the Islamic State, they are contemplating returning to the countries they left behind.

In Europe, conversations about the fate of returnees have intensified since the UK Home Office decided to strip British citizenship from Shamima Begum — who joined ISIL at 15 along with two other schoolgirls from the UK. The question for us as a society is: What do we do in these cases? Is appropriate to indiscriminately strip members of such a heterogeneous group of citizenship?

Debate has focused on legal questions that surround such a move, which would cause the troublesome dilemma of creating stateless individuals. However, human rights and counter-terrorism strategies deserve more consideration than they have gotten.

There are three main factors to consider in the complex matter of ISIL recruits who want to come home.

Why they left their home country

The first step is figuring out whether those who joined ISIL qualify as foreign terrorist fighters or whether they just went along for the ride. Some of the recruits have carried out unspeakable acts, but there are others who have supported ISIL through nonviolent means (as jihadi brides) or were forced to go along (wives and children).

It is vital to understand the spectrum of active participation to passive victimhood, as it has become clear that some of the women have suffered repeated traumas while having little willful participation in ISIL activities. Of course, few cases are likely to fall at the extremes of the spectrum. The majority of returnees likely will fall somewhere in the middle.

We need to approach the way we deal with these returnees across a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum we can imagine rare instances where an individual would be welcomed home without retribution and would re-enter society. There might also be exceptional instances where revoking citizenship and/or meting out the harshest punishments is appropriate. A case-by-case approach would help in the determination of what is a proportional response and appropriateness of criminal investigations.

How vulnerable to coercion were they?

The global terrorism database suggests that a leading factor in the ultimate decision to pursue a life of terrorism is a sense of societal alienation. This can be particularly heightened in young people whose sense of self is still developing and who suffer from self-estrangement. My field work shows that those who have sought to join ISIL from Western countries are not poor or uneducated, although poverty and lack of education are typically possible factors leading to vulnerability.

Alienation has been described as a leading driver, particularly among second-generation immigrants. Those who experience feelings of alienation seek empowerment, identity and a purpose often in misguided ways. Counselling can help with identity crisis, however, youths can fall into recruiters’ traps of before any such help arrives. This is not to release all blame and culpability for unforgivable actions. But many of the young women who were coaxed into joining the cause with a promise of identity and empowerment were subject to further alienation and subjugation. A person whose vulnerabilities have been exploited is quite different from one who knowingly and purposefully seeks out “the cause.”

The circumstances of their return

No country wants to threaten the security of its citizens by welcoming with open arms anyone who has been radicalized and continues to hold on to a jihadi mission. However, not all of those who wish to return are still aligned with “the cause.” Some returnees admit that they lived through nightmare experiences that were nothing like what they had been promised. And now they feel regret and remorse.

Policy-makers and academics can work with former recruits and terrorists and tell their stories in compelling ways so that others can learn why they started on a terrorist trajectory and see how it did not work out. They can shed light on the coercive tactics used by recruiters and ultimately help to devise counter-terrorism strategies that are not reactive but rather preventative.

In the world of securitization and advanced terrorism studies, the goal of counter-terrorism is to prevent attacks. Populist extrajudicial rulings against returnees, for example stripping them of their citizenship, could weaken and drastically derail these long-term prevention efforts by deepening society’s divisions. They could also create a perfect breeding ground for further radicalism. By allowing people who joined ISIL back into their home countries and putting them on trial, we can reduce such risks and furthermore create societal benefits.

As Fiona de Londras shows, upholding human rights and the rule of law does not hamper our ability to act. It enhances it, and is essential to the long-term success of counter-terrorism efforts.

Of course, until the police and courts determine whether and to what degree the returnees are culpable, returnees should be put in some sort of penitentiary facilities. If the courts find them guilty, they have to be sentenced for their crimes. If the courts and the police agree that they do not pose a substantial danger (be it through radicalization of others or inflicting violence), returnees should enter into a reintegration program that will help them re-establish familial and community ties. These returnees need help to find ways to participate in society and to address the alienation they might have experienced. Reintegration is important in the long term to reduce the risk of radicalization – both for the individual and for society. It fosters belonging, which is something the politics of fear cannot do.

These returnees might well serve as the best source of data. In counter-terrorism studies, field research is very limited. Because of security and access restrictions researchers often depend on incomplete secondary accounts and analysis. Working with returnees would allow us to better align counter-terrorism measures with the forces that activate terrorism, thereby achieving the goal of deterrence and perhaps prevention.

Disillusionment and disengagement in returnees can serve as cautionary tales for others by illustrating the false realities of joining such a mission. Stripping citizenship and other arbitrary punishments only support the extremist belief that the West does not care about the rest (i.e., Muslim citizens), leading to further escalation by pushing marginalized individuals and communities farther away from mainstream society. Such acts breed mistrust, making it less likely that marginalized groups will approach authorities when there is a problem of any kind.

“Why did you want to join ISIL?” I asked Zoleikha. She looked conflicted. “What could be greater than being part of building a new state?” she responded. She still seemed to be grappling with her identity.

Her father was relieved that he had been able to stop her before it was too late. And if she had been stripped of her citizenship? Perhaps it would make the next scenario where a father discovers his daughter about to join ISIL a different one. Perhaps that father would not do what Zoleikha’s father did: Report her to authorities, which prevented her from joining ISIL.

Source: What is gained by stripping ISIL returnees of citizenship?

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Our Brother, Our Executioner

2019/03/18 1 Comment

Good commentary by Aziz:

Whenever someone used to ask me if I was Muslim, I often gave an evasive answer, something like, “I was born Muslim” or “My parents are Muslim.”

It was a strange way to phrase it. I told myself that the purpose of this hairsplitting was intellectual clarity, despite the fact that I had attended a mosque my entire childhood, that I had read the Quran in both Arabic and English, and that I felt personally connected to the history of Islam. Perhaps this was the natural recourse for someone who came of age after 9/11 and was taught to retreat into invisibility because of the dangers of being Muslim. I knew, in my heart, that I was drawing the distinction only to appear safer to white people, to show that I was one of the good ones, worthy of belonging.

This was not just respectability politics: It was an act of self-erasure.

On Friday, nearly 50 of my fellow Muslims were massacred in cold blood in New Zealand. Not murdered but lynched, their deaths live-streamed to the sound of laughter. I long ago ceased to feel shocked at the violence directed against my community. But the heartbreak still comes.

The killer knew which day to pick. Friday is the Islamic Sabbath, when Muslims gather in the mosque to bow their heads in devotion to the divine. As they prayed, they might have been thinking about their children at school or what to make for dinner, unaware that soon their loved ones would be washing their bodies in accordance with Islamic tradition, preparing for the funeral prayer, the only one in Islam that has no Athan, or call to prayer, because the Athan was recited into their ears when they were born. When these Muslims saw the white stranger enter the mosque, they would have had the Islamic greeting on their tongues: “Assalamu alaikum.” Peace be upon you.

We know from the terrorist’s recording that one of his first victims welcomed him with the words “Hello, brother.” Muslims have long been depicted as an uncivilized, warlike people, but the opposite is true. We want to belong, to be good neighbors, to call the white man who enters our place of worship our brother. Instead he turned out to be our executioner.

The Muslims at the two New Zealand mosques were liquidated not just by a man filled with hatred, but by the ideas that he clung to, ideas about racial superiority and who his country belonged to. This was true in Quebec, when Muslims were gunned down in their mosque in 2017. It was true in Pittsburgh, when Jews who had been helping Muslim refugees were murdered in their synagogue in 2018. It was true in Norway, when 77 people were killed by a white bigot. It was true in Charleston, when black churchgoers were mowed down by another radicalized white man. A pathology of hatred has spread around the world, and it has put all our lives at risk.

Islamophobia is not a fringe problem: It is embedded in much of Western society. For over two decades now — the span of an entire generation — the whole Muslim community has been forced to accept collective guilt and punishment for every act of terror or violence committed by one of its members. Never would, or should, this standard be applied to white people, who seem to have kept the privilege of individual differentiation for themselves.

This is what those who are suspicious of Muslims cannot grasp: that the definition of racism is an inability to discriminate between the old man with the skullcap and beard before you and the suicide-bomber you saw on TV.

And yet people with millions of online followers have been incessantly preaching that Islamophobia is not the problem; Islam is. The Canadian intellectual Jordan Peterson has said that Islamophobia is a “word created by fascists.” The neuroscientist Sam Harris called it an “intellectual blood libel” that serves only to shield Islam from criticism. After I wrote a series of articles critical of Mr. Harris, a young white man from California emailed me to tell me he carried a gun — what kind did I carry? he asked.

If Islam is the problem, perhaps we should keep an eye on these Muslims. Send patrols into their neighborhoods. Make them prove that they are not terrorists. Ban them, as President Trump wanted. Ideas are not harmless: They are taken seriously by thousands of people. If only one person applies these deranged ideas about the other to the real world, we get a mass-murder like the one we just witnessed.

I greet a neighbor; he smiles and wishes me a good day. How do I know that once he turns on his computer, he isn’t pumping himself full of hatred of me and my people, raging in the dark cesspools of the web, venting his frustration that we even exist, and how dare we try and belong? Racism begins with ideas. It ends with violence.

When I saw the news from New Zealand, and thought of the number of times I have erased my Muslim identity, I shook with anger. When I thought of the number of times I have let casual racism toward Muslims slide, so not to come off as threatening, I shuddered in anguish. There was a time when I was ashamed of my religion, ashamed of my heritage. Now I am ashamed only of having once felt this way.

“If one is attacked as a Jew,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “one must defend oneself as a Jew.” When you are attacked as a Muslim, you must respond as a Muslim. And today, we are all Muslims — all of us who are committed to the light of our civilization, to peace, to saving our society from the primitive barbarism of such poisoned, inadequate minds.

Omer Aziz is the author of the forthcoming “Brown Boy: A Story of Race, Religion, and Inheritance.”

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with ,

Islamic State women defiant in face of lost caliphate

2019/03/15 Leave a comment

More relevant reporting:

As the battle against the Islamic State (IS) group in eastern Syria enters its final stages, the BBC’s Jewan Abdi says the mood amongst many of the jihadists’ supporters who have left the area, including many women, remains defiant.

The encampment in the village of Baghuz is barely more than a few holes in the dirt covered with blankets. It is squalid and filthy.

But above it flies the black Islamic State flag, fresh and clean. IS fighters had raised it only the day before, an act of defiance in the face of overwhelming odds.

“That’s a sign they will fight,” says a soldier belonging to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on the front lines battling the jihadists.

Just 24 hours later the battle resumed. It was the end of a ceasefire that had seen more than 12,000 leave in the preceding few days.

One day last week in the early morning, more than 20 trucks led by Humvees armed with machine guns went inside the tiny IS enclave to evacuate jihadist fighters and their families.

I followed these vehicles on their return journey to the desert where they were checked, separated, and sent on to camps run by the SDF forces. One military commander told me the total number of people evacuated was about 7,000.

The hunger and anger was evident on their faces. As I walked among them with my camera, trying to talk to them and film, several IS women suddenly attacked me and threw stones, dust and cans.

“Go film the brothers, don’t come here. Go. Leave. Go film them, we’re the woman of the Islamic State, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar (God is greatest),” they said.

A few weeks ago, the SDF estimated the number of IS families and fighters left remaining in Baghuz to be between 1,500 and 2,000 people. But in just two days last week, 9,000 people emerged.

The final territory under IS’s control may be on its last legs in Syria, but the ideology remains strong among those who have left.

Many of the IS women I encountered threatened of violent jihad and raising their children to become jihadist fighters.

Two captors for one woman

Among the thousands of people turning up out of Baghuz, I also found victims of IS’s notorious brutality, including one Yazidi woman called Adiba.

A mother of two, Adiba was enslaved for five years after IS attacked her small village in Sinjar, northern Iraq, in 2014.

Her husband was one of the hundreds of Yazidi men killed by the jihadist group, and she – like thousands of Yazidi women – was forced to convert to Islam and was used as a sex slave.

She says she was enslaved by a Moroccan man who beat her constantly and raped her. He was the father of her two-year-old child.

“I had to marry him. When we were alone he wasn’t good to me, he was always angry with me, but in front of people he treated me well,” Adiba tells me.

After Adiba’s first captor died, she was taken by another Moroccan man named Ahmed – orders she says came from her first captor in the event of his death.

Ahmed, who surrendered to the SDF last week, has denied enslaving Adiba.

Most of the people evacuated from Baghuz recently, including many foreigners who travelled to Syria and Iraq to live under IS rule, have been transported to the SDF-controlled camp al-Hol, in the north-east of the country.

The camp was designed to accommodate 20,000 people but the UN says conditions there are dire as the numbers have risen to more than 66,000.

The global dream of an Islamic State caliphate – a state governed in accordance with Islamic law – is on the brink of collapse, with most of its leadership gone and many captured by the SDF and coalition forces.

Hundreds of IS fighters have surrendered. Separated from their families, they sit in long queues in an area inaccessible to journalists, where US Special Forces and SDF soldiers interrogate them and send them on to detention centres and prisons under Kurdish control.

After losing their self-proclaimed caliphate, a sense of sadness, anger and indignation was clear among these fighters who are stuck in the middle of the desert, waiting to be moved into detention camps, away from their wives and children.

Source: Islamic State women defiant in face of lost caliphate

Filed under Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

‘Whiter Every Election Cycle’: How a Hate Group Joined GOP

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

A risk to conservatives in many countries, Canada included:

The white nationalist group Identity Evropa is so cozy with the Republican Party that members led their College Republican clubs and campaigned in support of GOP congressional candidates.

At least one Identity Evropa fan, who is not a member of the group, attended CPAC last weekend where he demanded an autograph from a leftist podcaster who, tripping on acid, signed the book “eat shit.”

Identity Evropa is a fascist organization. Its members have been involved in violent street brawls, including 2017’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. While other white supremacist organizations imploded after the rally, Identity Evropa attempted to cast aside the alt-right’s tarnished image and rebrand as a “clean-cut” organization. The makeover was an attempt to appeal to the mainstream Republican Party, according to chat logs released Wednesday by the media collective Unicorn Riot.

But despite its new face, the group stayed true to its fascist heart, the leaked conversations reveal.

The chat group’s name was an ironic nod at the image Identity Evropa tries to present to outsiders: “Nice Respectable People Group.” The image landed the white supremacist group a softball interview with the Today Show last year. Privately, Identity Evropa members celebrated the interview as a recruitment driver, the leaked chat logs reveal.

“Can we send a bouquet of flowers and a ‘thank you from Identity Evropa’ card to the ‘TODAY Show’?” one group member wrote in a message first flagged by Media Matters researcher Madeline Peltz. “I feel like we owe them something after so many applications today.”

The racist group wasn’t just pandering to the media. Members were also encouraged to get involved with their local Republican parties, Splinter first reported.

“Identity Evropa leadership strongly encourages our members to get involved in local politics. We’ve been pushing this for a while, but haven’t seen much of it happening,” leader Patrick Casey wrote in an Oct. 2017 message. “Today I decided to get involved in my county’s Republican party. Everyone can do this without fear of getting doxxed. The GOP is essentially the White man’s party at this point (it gets Whiter every election cycle), so it makes far more sense for us to subvert it than to create our own party.”

Months later, Identity Evropa member and Charlottesville marcher James Allsup quietly won an uncontested seat in his local Republican party, The Daily Beast first reported. After months of hedging by local Republican leaders who likened Allsup to a lynching victim, the local party ejected him in January.

But other Identity Evropa members have stayed close to the Republican Party. One member who described himself in October as having “an interview for a political job coming up. Anyone know any good inside sources for political news? I can’t say my main news source is [fascist podcast] Fash the Nation.” (Elsewhere in the chat, he posted racist and anti-Semitic attacks.)

The member used the screen name “Logan” and shared links to his now-defunct website, which he registered under the name, Logan Piercy. He described “door knocking” on behalf of Republican candidates in Montana during the 2018 congressional primaries. Piercy did not return The Daily Beast’s Thursday request for comment at the email address used to register his website.

Racists who didn’t campaign on the ground instead pushed for their favorite Republicans from afar. In September, when Rep. Steve King was under fire for being a white supremacist, Casey ordered the group to call then-House Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy to voice support for King, HuffPost first reported.

“Got through on the 202 number,” one member wrote. “Thanked lady for taking my call, identified myself as a member of a young conservationist Republican group that supports Congressman Steve King.”

Others bragged of donating money to King, and dreamed about getting him to interact with their Twitter account, as he has with other white supremacists.

Younger members described themselves as being members of College Republicans clubs.

“I’m an officer in my college republicans. I’m sure many other IE members are. It’s easy to infiltrate low level GOP stuff if you just show up,” one Identity Evropa member said in September, adding that he hoped to convert two members of his club. He also described modeling the club after Identity Evropa.

“[That feeling when] I’m making rules for my college republicans based on the IE guidelines and it makes me look like the responsible moderate,” he wrote.

“Join college republicans if you haven’t already,” another urged his fellow white supremacists.

“Dude I joined college republicans and a day later I had a 30 minute conversation with the most right wing populist candidate on the east coast,” another wrote.

A fourth Identity Evropa member mulled “starting a chapter” of College Republicans at his school.

Identity Evropa is far from the only far-right group making eyes at the GOP. Conservative youth darling Turning Point USA is reportedly rife with racism, as its former national field director allegedly texted another employee that “I hate all black people. Like fuck them all… I hate blacks. End of story.” The Proud Boys, an ultra-nationalist brawling group, have posed with Republican politicians and acted as a security service for Roger Stone.

Unicorn Riot’s Wednesday leaks also included chat logs from groups dedicated to a podcast by Allsup and his colleague Nick Fuentes, and logs for a chat group specifically for Fuentes fans.

Fuentes was at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where he posed with Brexit architect Nigel Farage. An apparent admirer of Identity Evropa who was active in Fuentes group chat was also in attendance. The young man, who posted under the screen name Simon Scola, lamented in Fuentes’ group chat that Identity Evropa’s Massachusetts “twitter page is dead and i doubt they have many people.” Elsewhere in the chat he posted an Identity Evropa sticker, which he bought at a racist conference.

Though Scola wrote about his fears of having his identity exposed, he revealed himself to the hosts of socialist podcast Chapo Trap House, who were attending CPAC with media passes.

In a Monday episode, Chapo host Will Menaker described a young man running up to them with a copy of pundit Ben Shapiro’s book while Chapoco-host Matt Christman was tripping on acid. “He was like, ‘sign my book! Sign my book for me!’” Menaker said. “And Matt actually did sign it, ‘eat shit.’”

Shortly after the encounter, Scola proudly tweeted a picture of the Shapiro book, with “eat shit” scribbled on the front page.

“The kid whose book I signed was a ratty little dude with bad facial hair,” Christman told The Daily Beast.

Source: ‘Whiter Every Election Cycle’: How a Hate Group Joined GOP

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Islamic State extremism on show at “miserable” Syria camp

2019/03/11 Leave a comment

Reminder of need for caution regarding wannabe returnees:

AL-HOL CAMP, Syria, March 8 (Reuters) – Foreign women with Islamic State have tried to assault others they deem “infidels” at a camp where they are being held in northeast Syria, attempting to impose their views even as the jihadists are facing territorial defeat, Reuters journalists visiting the site have found.

“They yell at us that we are infidels for showing our faces,” said a Syrian woman at al-Hol camp, where women and children were transferred from Islamic State’s final bastion in eastern Syria. “They tried to hit us.”

The Baghouz enclave is Islamic State’s last shred of populated territory after years of attacks have rolled back its ultra-radical “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq.

But its impending defeat is confronting the U.S.-allies Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the problem of what to do with growing numbers of people, many of them Islamic State followers, emerging from the enclave.

Most have been sent to al-Hol camp, already overcrowded with uprooted Syrians and Iraqis. Camp officials say they do not have enough tents, food, or medicine. Aid workers warn of spreading diseases, and dozens of children have died on the way there.

At least 62,000 people have now flooded the camp, the United Nations said on Friday, way above its capacity. More than 90 percent of the new arrivals are women and children.

The Syrian Kurdish authorities who control the camp have cordoned off the foreign women. On Friday, dressed head-to-toe in black and wearing full face veils, they gathered behind a fence with a locked gate.

“The foreigners throw stones. They swear at the Syrians or Iraqis and at the camp officials. Even the kids make threats,” said a security official at the camp.

‘WE NEED HELP’

Guards have fired in the air to break up a few fights and on one occasion used a taser to pacify a foreign female jihadist detainee, another Syrian woman at the camp said.

Some of the women coming out of Baghouz in recent weeks have displayed strongly pro-Islamic State sympathies.

Hundreds of jihadists have also surrendered. But the Kurdish-led SDF believes the most hardened are still inside, ready for a fight to the death.

Before the final assault on Baghouz, the SDF said it was holding some 800 foreign Islamic State militants and 2,000 of their wives and children. While it has not given updated figures, the numbers have ballooned, prompting fresh calls for support.

“The situation in the camp is very miserable. The displaced are growing very much and we are trying to cover people’s needs as much as we can. But we need help,” said Mazin Shekhi, an official at the camp.

When young children arrive alone, officials deliver them to aid agencies or try to find adults to care for them at the camp for now, he added.

“Even the big tents are full. People are sleeping out in the open.”

The International Rescue Committee said at least 100 people have died, mostly children, en route or soon after reaching the camp, and more than 100 children have arrived on their own. The aid agency warned the camp had reached breaking point.

Women from different countries begged for food or asked about their detained husbands, while young boys kicked a ball around in the dirt amid scores of tents swaying in the wind.

CAMP SKIRMISHES

Some of the tensions at al-Hol reflect friction that has simmered for years between jihadists who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State, “al-Muhajirin”, and locals who were members or lived under its rule.

“There were problems with some people,” said a 30-year-old woman from Turkestan who gave her name as Dilnor.

She said her entire family had moved to Syria to escape oppression at home and “just wanted to live under the caliphate”. Her mother, father and siblings all followed her to Syria.

“The natives … they were kind of rude. They always said the muhajirin are a problem and dirty and so on. It was always like that,” she said outside the wire fence of the pen where she was staying with scores of other women.

“Now (they) are alone, and the muhajirin alone. Now there are no problems.”

Shekhi, the camp official, said foreign women with ties to Islamic State had been kept apart so “they don’t mix” with others. “We put them in a section alone to avoid them making problems with the displaced,” he said.

The foreign women often fought among themselves, he added.

“There are some who are more extremist who don’t accept others. This is happening just among themselves, because they are separated from the Syrians and Iraqis,” he said. “The situation is under control.”

The staunch loyalties of Islamic State followers point to the risk the group will continue to pose after the capture of Baghouz. It is also widely accepted that the militants will still represent a threat, holding remote patches of territory and mounting guerrilla attacks.

Source: Islamic State extremism on show at “miserable” Syria camp

Filed under Radicalization, Refugees, Religion Tagged with , ,

Were the brides of Islamic State cloistered housewives or participants in atrocities?

2019/03/07 Leave a comment

More background on the women who joined or supported ISIS:

Thousands of foreign-born women left their homes and lives to join Islamic State and marry its fighters. But now that the militant group’s so-called caliphate is reduced to crumbled masonry and scorched rebar, many of them want to return home.

Shamima Begum was a teenage schoolgirl in east London when she left home to join Islamic State; Hoda Muthana, an Alabama-born college student; Kimberly Gwen Polman, a 46-year-old single mom in Canada studying to be a children’s advocate. Now they’re held in a Kurdish-controlled prison in the hinterlands of eastern Syria, asking to be let back into their home countries.

The women branded “ISIS brides,” using initials for the militant group, have become a focal point of fierce debate for governments worldwide: What are states’ responsibilities toward these women?

A central question in that debate is what exactly did the women do in the caliphate? Were they cloistered housewives largely ignorant of the group’s realities, or active participants in its genocidal acts?

Women initially did not join combat

When Islamic State declared the establishment of its caliphate in 2014, it called upon all able-bodied Muslims to emigrate and engage in jihad, or struggle, to further its cause.

Initially, for women, that didn’t include combat, said Charlie Winter, a senior research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London.

“The role of the Muslim woman ideally was to be a wife and bear children,” he said in a phone interview, “and as a wife and a mother they were participating directly in jihad because they’re creating the next generation of fighters.”

While its militants were waging what Islamic State called “offensive jihad” — blitz campaigns that saw the group put a third of Iraq and Syria each under its dominion — women were to be “bases of support” for husbands, fathers and sons, one wife explained.

Hayat Boumeddiene, the widow of Amedy Coulibaly, the Paris gunman who killed five people in two January 2015 attacks, offered advice for fighters’ wives during a interview in an Islamic State magazine.

“Be advisors to them. They should find comfort and peace with you,” she said in an article in the February 2015 issue of Dabiq. “Do not make things difficult for them. Facilitate all matters for them.”

As a wife and a mother they were participating directly in jihad because they’re creating the next generation of fighters.

Boumeddiene, who like her husband was born in France, is still at large and being sought by French authorities.

Women did claim more operational roles in suicide attacks outside Islamic State territories, said Devorah Margolin, a senior research analyst at the War Studies Department of Kings College London.

But most women who traveled to the caliphate intent on reaching the battlefield were unable to do so.

That changed to a degree as the group began to lose territory and many of its fighters were killed. It began to wage “defensive jihad.”

“By 2017 and 2018 they were proactively calling for women to engage in combat as well,” said Winter.

But there is little evidence women did so in large numbers.

Winter said there had been rumors of women given explosives and weapons training, but Islamic State never confirmed these reports.

There had been predictions women would increasingly take part in suicide bombings, since they generally have an easier time passing through checkpoints and whose faces could remain hidden under their garments.

There was also precedence for their deployment: Abu Musab Zarqawi, the spiritual godfather of Islamic State, dispatched Sajida Rishawi with a suicide vest to the Hotel Radisson in the Jordanian capital of Amman in 2005. She failed to detonate her bomb but was caught by authorities after her husband’s device killed 38 people.

Some carried guns in the religious police force

Islamic State’s religious police, known as the Hisbah, roamed its territory to ensure residents were complying with the caliphate’s harsh edicts. People found in violation faced imprisonment, whipping and amputation. An all-female police force known as the Khansaa Brigade was an integral part of the Hisbah.

“We saw women in the Hisbah. They were all armed,” said Saad Ubaidi, who owns a beauty salon with his wife in Mosul, Iraq.

“Iraqi women had guns, but the foreigners carried ghadaraat,” said Ubaidi, using the slang term for Uzi machine guns.

Women played a vital part in the propaganda war

Women may not have fought on the battlefield, but they helped Islamic State spread its message.

“They were very much part of the propaganda machine of this state-building process,” said Margolin, who is writing a report on women’s role in violent Islamist groups for George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Women were some of Islamic State’s most active recruiters online, she said.

Blogs and social media accounts ostensibly held by foreign-born female adherents advertised their lives as if they were in an Islamist utopia. They encouraged others to do hijrah, emigrate to the caliphate.

Some would provide a guide on how to avoid being identified as someone traveling to Syria to join Islamic State. Others would suggest what to pack for life in the caliphate (makeup and Islamic clothing, according to one blogger), or offer quotidian details on how the group assigned housing to fighters and women.

Others would cheer for the group’s barbarism and gruesome tactics.

Muthana, the Alabama-born student and daughter of a Yemeni diplomat who joined Islamic State in 2014, exhorted Americans to follow her lead.

“Soooo many Aussies and Brits here,” she tweeted from her now-suspended account. “But where are the Americans, wake up u cowards.”

She encouraged those who couldn’t travel to Islamic State territory to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.

“Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them,” she tweeted.

Women took part in the enslavement of Yazidis

In August 2014, the extremists surrounded Mt. Sinjar in northwestern Iraq. They began to hunt the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority long persecuted for their beliefs, which include elements of Christianity and Judaism. Islamic State viewed them as devil-worshipers.

Thousands of Yazidi men were slaughtered; women and girls were kidnapped and driven away to be sold in markets or given as gifts. In their enslavement, the women and girls would be servants to the household’s wife and raped by the husband.

One wife of an Islamic State member with a Yazidi enslaved in her household defended the practice in an issue of Dabiq. Her article was entitled “Slave-girls or Prostitutes?”

The woman, who called herself Umm Sumayyah al Muhajirah, cited religious texts and the works of scholars to construct an argument for taking Yazidi women as concubines. And she dismissed reports of abuse, attributing them to “devious and wicked slave girls” who “made up lies and wrote false stories.”

And whereas sex with a Yazidi slave is permissible, she adds, prostitutes in the West “openly commit sin.”

“Leave us alone with your burping,” she wrote of people judging the slave practice.

Pinning down what each person did will be difficult

Investigators looking for clues to the individual actions of each woman, away from social media, will have a difficult time gathering evidence admissible in a court of law.

“In the U.S., we’ve had 16 people who returned that we know of, 13 have been prosecuted in federal courts, so there’s a system to do it,” said Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.

But most of those were people who admitted their actions, he added. For those who don’t, investigators using Islamic State documents, for example, have to have a rock-solid chain of evidence, which is difficult to establish in the chaotic environment of a war zone.

Witnesses, often intelligence or security personnel, are often reluctant to testify in open court, and identifying women dressed in three-layer niqabs, the de rigueur face covering, will be unreliable.

Even the social media presence these women maintained is being lost. Blogging sites like Tumblr or WordPress, and messaging platforms such as Telegram, have aggressively shut down the accounts of Islamic State-affiliated users.

In any case, said Margolin, the women probably weren’t lying when they said they had been mostly concerned with family matters, but that didn’t absolve them of responsibility.

“Yes, they were wives and mothers, but what that means isn’t like what we mean when we think of a housewife,” said Margolin.

As the bearers of the group’s ideology for the next generation of fighters, she said, they were pursuing a higher objective.

“They represented,” said Margolin, “the future and permanence of Islamic State.”

Source: Were the brides of Islamic State cloistered housewives or participants in atrocities?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization, Religion Tagged with , , ,

The West Needs to Take the Politics of Women in ISIS Seriously

2019/03/06 Leave a comment

Well worth reading and reflecting upon that these were conscious choices by the women involved and that they should not be portrayed as victims:

In recent weeks, the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have closed in on the last remaining Islamic State holdout in eastern Syria. The remains of the so-called caliphate occupy less than half of a square mile of a small village called Baghuz, and all but a few hundred remaining insurgents have been driven out of the area by U.S. airstrikes and Kurdish ground operations. Over a thousand fighters and civilians, including many Islamic State militants’ wives and children, have fled. The SDF houses them in camps such as al-Hol, where humanitarian conditions are dire and the application of international law is ambiguous at best.

In the camps, the muhajirat, that is, Western women who joined the Islamic State, are easy to find. And tales of muhajirat like the American Hoda Muthana and the British Shamima Begum “begging to come home” have dominated headlines over the last two weeks. Their stories are part of a wave of recent coverage of Islamic State women, much of it pointing to a supposedly new and uniquely dangerous “Islamic State women problem.” Unfortunately, many of these accounts rest on flimsy scholarship and irresponsible reporting. The sensationalist, politicized, and often factually misleading nature of some reports masks complex political dynamics and peddles tired cliches about women in war, now cast with Iraqis and Syrians instead of Palestinian, Chechen, Timorese, Lebanese, Tamil, or Nigerian women.

The persistent appeal and shock value of the “beautiful but deadly” female fighter depends on an assumption that women have no politics and that their only natural role in times of conflict is to play the (usually sexualized) victim. Media coverage and rhetoric that reduces conflict-affected women to rape victims, sex slaves, or, most recently, “ISIS brides” lends itself to policy responses that have terrible consequences for innocent people. Women’s presumed victimhood has been deployed to justify military intervention, to excuse or obscure widespread human rightsabuses of civilians, and to privilege the judgment of external actors or local male elites over the perspectives of local women about what they need in the aftermath of war. Over-simplified victimization narratives are so entrenched that evidence of women’s political agency in wartime reads as either false consciousness (“ISIS lures women with kittens, Nutella”) or as a monstrous upending of femininity and the natural order.

Sensationalized accounts may garner far more clicks thansober social science, but the bland truth is that women in the Islamic State fall into well-established patterns.

For one, the idea that armed extremism has only recently become attractive to women is simply false. Since shortly after the Islamic State’s inception, women have taken on armed and unarmed roles in it; they have served as police in the group’s all-female Khansaa Brigade, as members of the all-female counterinsurgency brigade Umm al-Rayan, and as recruiters and propagandists. Both foreign and domestic recruits have participated in the brutal torture of Yazidi captives while also playing more domestic roles supporting male Islamic State fighters. Toggling back and forth between violent and nonviolent activities is not unique to the women who have participated in the Islamic State, however. In fact, this is the norm.

Further, although some reports have painted women’s voluntary participation in the Islamic State as unexpected given the group’s ideas about gender, it is not surprising in light of the histories of women in other Islamist and violent movements. Although less likely in groups that identify with Salafi doctrines, women’s participation, including in combat roles, still occurs. For example, women made significant support and frontline contributions to groups in Kashmir and fundamentalist organizations in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

More nuanced reporting on women who joined the Islamic State highlights a broad range of motivations for joining, including survival and coercion as well as status and deeply held commitments to the group’s doctrines. This, too, is consistent with extensive research on women’s participation in other conflicts, which finds that their motivations are deeply political and suggests that they generally have the same reasons for joining armed organizations as men do. Portraying Islamic State women’s behavior as unique to this organization is decontextualizing and counterproductive. It feeds into arguments about the singular brutality of the Islamic State that have been used to justify a heavily military-focused response likely to undermine post-conflict recovery.

Western governments would do well to confront the fact that many Islamic State women reported feeling more liberated after they had joined, not because they liked fighting but because they believed that men in the Islamic State respected their commitment as Muslims. Many of the muhajirat in particular reported fleeing isolation, disaffection, and discrimination as Muslim women in the West. Stripping them of citizenship and otherwise treating Muslims as second-class citizens has every chance of contributing to the dynamics that led women to join in the first place. The same goes for blanket suspicion of anyone wearing a niqab.

Portraying the women of the Islamic State exclusively as victims to be saved or monsters to be feared strips women of their humanity and denies them the complexity, nuance, and depth that media and policymakers readily afford to men. Post-conflict policy that fails to take women’s politics seriously will only feed cycles of violence and impede the pursuit of a sustainable peace.

Source: The West Needs to Take the Politics of Women in ISIS Seriously

Filed under Multiculturalism, Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

Punishment or Banishment?

2019/03/04 2 Comments

A rather curious article that lumps some of the Canadian worries regarding returning ISIS fighters (including wives)  with citizenship revocation.

The Liberal government reversed the Conservative government’s change to the Citizenship Act that allowed for revocation in cases of terror or treason

The statelessness provisions in most other countries require having a second nationality in order for citizenship to be revoked which makes the process more difficult to implement (as UK is finding out with respect to Begum not having Bangladeshi citizenship  and Australia with Prakash not having Fijian citizenship).

In the Canadian case, the issue is whether or not Canada should provide normal consular services (e.g., as we do to Canadians on death row in the USA) or make efforts to facilitate their return to Canada.

The former may be difficult given where they are being held and the latter, as many have noted, raises the possibility that there may not be enough evidence to prosecute successfully in Canada.

And while all have justified sympathy for their children, no sympathy for the mothers who made a conscious decision to support ISIS and its horrors and thus have to live with the consequences.

While the mothers have the right to return to Canada, no need for special government efforts to facilitate their return:

So-called jihadi brides are in the news, accused of supporting terrorism by having travelled to ISIS territory to marry ISIS fighters in support of the caliphate. Three Western states are implicated: the UK, the US, and Canada.

UK citizen Shemima Begum left the UK four years ago, when she was 15 years old, and surfaced last month at a Syrian refugee camp, heavily pregnant. US citizen Hoda Muthana, then a college student, left the US four years ago, using her tuition money to buy a ticket to Turkey, from which she was smuggled into ISIS territory. She is now detained in refugee camp in northeastern Syria. Kimberly Gwen Polman, born in Hamilton, Ontario, is a dual Canadian–US national who converted to Islam. She became persuaded by a Syrian fighter online that her incipient nursing skills would be of great value to the caliphate. She left the US in 2015 to join the caliphate, only to attempt to escape nearly a year later. But then she was jailed (and raped) and forced to sign a document acknowledging that if she were to attempt escape again, her punishment would be death. All three women have publicly announced their desire to return home this week.

The UK government reacted swiftly, announcing its intention to remove the citizenship of Begum, thereby denying her the right to return home. Recent official statements suggest UK authorities believe she is entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship, so revoking her British citizenship will not result in statelessness. US President Donald Trump announced over the weekend that all states should be ready to repatriate (i.e., bring home) and punish their “own” foreign fighters, but then tweeted that he had directed Mike Pompeo “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Canadian officials have been relatively quiet on their intentions. A spokesperson for Public Safety Canada statedonly that “The government is aware of some Canadian citizens currently detained in Syria. There is no legal obligation to facilitate their return.”

These cases are not identical. Begum was a child when she left the UK and is now a mother to a newborn baby boy. Muthana’s choices were exacerbated by her use of social media to celebrate and encourage violence. Polman is known to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. What they share is the right to return home to face trial and punishment in their countries of citizenship.

All states have justice systems in place so that suspected wrongdoers can be tried and punished. Democratic justice systems are those that respect due process rights: the rights to a fair trial, including adequate legal representation, which permits the relevant evidence to be adjudicated by trained judges and, where relevant, juries of their peers.

It is conventional to say that citizens must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and this convention holds even where there appears to be incontrovertible evidence of guilt. Its purpose is to allow the possibility that what looks like a slam-dunk case is murkier upon examination, to ensure that in collecting evidence all of the rights of the accused were respected, and furthermore to allow for the presentation of extenuating circumstances that can complicate what seems like a simple guilty verdict.

There is more to criminal justice in democracies, moreover, than how the accused are treated during the trial phase. The punishments must also meet democratic criteria. It is a principle of punishment in democratic states that any citizen, no matter how criminal, must be treated as someone who can re-enter the community of equals from which she was temporarily excluded by punishment. This principle is why the death penalty must be rejected. It is also why denationalization must also be rejected.

Denationalization of terrorists, the process of revoking citizenship from those suspected of terrorist activities, is gaining in popularity in democratic states, who are rushing to prove they are tough on terror. Denationalizing terrorists is good politics.

Nevertheless, denationalization is unjust and undemocratic. It permits states to abandon citizens who are entitled to their protection in dangerous locations, in principle free to commit additional crimes. The Trudeau government recognized as much when it overturned the parts of the Strengthening Citizenship Act that permitted the revocation of citizenship. Weaselly words stating that Canada is not under the obligation to facilitate the return of suspected wrongdoers reveal an unwillingness to stand by the commitment implied by Mr. Trudeau’s now famous statement, “A Canadian is a Canadian.” Canadians, even criminal Canadians, are entitled to have their rights protected by Canada.

By revoking citizenship, states punish citizens suspected of criminal activities by banishing them, in advance of conviction. They treat them as unworthy of having their rights protected, as beyond the pale, rather than as individuals who in time can learn the error of their ways. These women must be returned to their states of citizenship so that we, their fellow-citizens, can judge their actions and, if appropriate, witness their just punishments.

Source: Punish homegrown terrorists. Don’t revoke their citizenship

Filed under Citizenship, Radicalization, Revocation Tagged with , ,

A call to help the real victims of IS terrorism: the Yazidis

2019/02/23 Leave a comment

Valid points:

I’d like you to do me a favour. The next time you read a story like that of Shamima Begum, the UK Islamic State (IS) supporter who desperately wants to come home, although she does not regret her decision to join the terrorist group and thinks the Manchester bombing was justified, or see a report with IS ladies wailing about how they are suffering and cannot believe that their country is abandoning them, or read analysis on how we have a ‘moral obligation’ to rescue these poor souls, I want you to get access to a recent documentary called ‘On her shoulders‘. And I want you to watch it carefully (I just came back from a screening at the Canadian War Museum).

It is the story of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi young woman whom IS terrorists tore from her family in the village of Kocho back in 2014, who witnessed the killing of her kin and others, was brutally raped and sold into sexual slavery and eventually escaped. She is now a UN goodwill ambassador on human trafficking and is doing what she can to keep the plight of her people at the forefront of the world’s conscience.

To watch the film is hard. Not for its graphic content, which is mercifully absent, but for Ms. Murad’s story and the stories of thousands of other Yazidi women and girls, some as young as 10. She makes reference to what she witnessed done to those girls but there are no words to describe what grown men did in their sexual torture of so many innocent lives.

She tells of how many girls committed suicide rather than continue to suffer hellish abuse. She also gives voice to the genocide of her nation, for genocide it was. The perverted, toxic interpretation of Islam that IS practices saw the Yazidis as non-people that needed to be eliminated, except of course for the young women and girls that they used to satisfy their sexual urges.

Now go back to the IS women calling out to be ‘saved’. Look again at their stories of how they were ‘brainwashed’ or ‘coerced’ or ‘misguided’ or ‘just following orders’ (hmm, where have we heard that phrase before? In the aftermath of Nazi Germany: I wonder if their are parallels here?). Do that and try to convince me that we as a nation, as a government, as citizens should move heaven and earth to repatriate these women. Go ahead, try. I’ll wait.

The bottom line is that the surviving ‘women of IS’ are not victims: they are victimisers. Ms. Murad and the thousands of Yazidi men, women and children are the true victims. We must never forget that. Conflating the torturers and the tortured is beyond reproach. The women who joined IS were complicit by definition with the crimes against humanity that heinous terrorist group committed. They do not deserve our sympathy or our efforts to repatriate them. They deserve to be tried and incarcerated. They must pay for their actions. Sure, maybe one day they will repent and be able to rejoin society, but not until after they have answered for their crimes.

I will leave the last words to Ms. Murad. She wants those who did what they did to her and to her people to be held accountable. She wants justice. She wants the world to recognise the genocide visited upon her people by IS. So who are you to say any differently?

Those advocating for the ‘moral obligation’ to bring female IS terrorists home might want to check with Ms. Murad first.

Filed under Radicalization Tagged with , , ,

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