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Terrorism Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on September 19, 2014 3 Comments
The New York Times earlier this month published an expose of how foreign money influenced think tanks. One of the subjects of the article was the Brookings Institution, its vice president Indyk and $14.8 million grant that the government of Qatar had given Brookings. A former scholar at Brookings cautioned that because of Qatar's influence any report coming out of the institution is likely not to be the "full story." The New York Times didn't seem much concerned with the implication of its reporting but some people did notice. In Tablet this week Lee Smith pounced on the Times for not looking into the implications of what it reported.
Or maybe the editors decided that it was all on the level, and the money influenced neither Indyk’s government work on the peace process nor Brookings’ analysis of the Middle East. Or maybe journalists just don’t think it’s worth making a big fuss out of obvious conflicts of interest that may affect American foreign policy. Maybe Qatar’s $14.8 million doesn’t affect Brookings’ research projects or what the think tank’s scholars tell the media, including the New York Times, about subjects like Qatar, Hamas, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other related areas in which Qatar has key interests at stake. Maybe the think tank’s vaunted objectivity, and Indyk’s personal integrity and his pride in his career as a public servant, trump the large piles of vulgar Qatari natural gas money that keep the lights on and furnish the offices of Brookings scholars and pay their cell-phone bills and foreign travel.
Smith also observed that the Qatar connection made Indyk poorly suited as an interlocutor for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 16, 2014 12 Comments
The United Nations announced yesterday that it was withdrawing all of its United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) peacekeepers out of Syria due to "[t]he situation in UNDOF on the Syrian side and the area of separation has deteriorated severely over the last several days."
Armed groups have made advances in the area of UNDOF positions, posing a direct threat to the safety and security of the UN Peacekeepers along the “Bravo” line and in Camp Faouar. All the UN personnel in these positions have thus been relocated to the “Alpha” side. UNDOF continues to use all available assets to carry out its mandated tasks in this exceptionally challenging environment.
The "Alpha side" is Israel. https://twitter.com/LTCPeterLerner/status/511583877295403008

Posted by Amy Miller on September 15, 2014 17 Comments
On June 25, 2014, 19 year-old Brendan Tevlin hopped into his car to return home after spending the evening at a friend's house. Minutes later, Ali Muhammad Brown approached the vehicle as it was stopped at a red light and fired ten rounds into the car, killing Brendan. Originally, the teen's murder was labeled an attempted robbery, allowing the media to remain silent. Now, court documents have revealed that Brown's motivation for killing Tevlin had less to do with thievery, and more to do with America's pushback against Jihadist terrorism in the Middle East. Via the New York Daily News:
According to court documents, Ali Muhammad Brown described his June murder of 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin as a "just kill" and said it was an act of "vengeance" meant to compensate for U.S. military killings in the Middle East.
Brown is a devout Muslim, and has been extremely vocal about his opposition to U.S. intervention in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.
"All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life," he told investigators, according to the documents. Brown further justified killing Tevlin by claiming the shooting was a "just kill," meaning he targeted an adult man and did not put any women, children or elderly people in danger. In police interviews, Brown described the U.S.'s military campaign in the Middle East as evil and said if a "man sees evil, then he must take action against that evil," the court papers show.

Posted by New Neo on September 14, 2014 25 Comments
The families of James Foley and Steven Sotloff have complained that the Obama administration threatened to prosecute them if they tried to ransom their loved ones. It is completely understandable why the families would be upset about this: how could any family fail to do anything possible to save their loved ones from such a horrific fate? And how could any family not be horrified that their own government might try to stop them? I don't think there's anyone who could fail to sympathize. But that doesn't mean the government isn't rightr. Therein lies the terrible ethical, emotional, and practical dilemma. By paying ransoms, the behavior of the terrorists is rewarded, more kidnappings of Americans occur, and our enemies grow richer. Plus, there is no guarantee that a group such as ISIS is actually serious about such negotiations. Every now and then the Obama administration gets it right, and this is one of those times. However, Obama's staff being who they are, they were probably especially cold and insensitive in communicating with the families. That being said, it's not clear that under the circumstances there would have been any acceptable way to say "no," or that any approach short of complete cooperation would not raise the families' ire and frustration.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 11, 2014 14 Comments
Last year on September 11 Mandy had a wonderful and moving post. Thanks to David for reminding me of it. Here is the post, excerpted, click on the link for the full original post:

Remembering September 11th and the importance of loved ones and endurance

Posted by   Wednesday, September 11, 2013 at 9:30am The morning of September 11th, 2001, I was sitting in my office at a prior job, admiring the beautiful blue sky outside my window, when my phone rang. “I can’t reach your brother anymore. His phone cut off. He was running and his phone just died,” my mother cried on the other end. For a moment, I had no idea why she was upset or what she was talking about.  But then another line rang and a friend’s voice, equally upset, screamed to me, “They’re flying planes into buildings where your brother is.” I sat stunned for a minute, paralyzed with fear and dread.  I opened my office door and there was an eerie feeling in the air.  It was noisy, yet quiet and somber at the same time....

Posted by David Gerstman on September 11, 2014 2 Comments
Long time Palestinian affairs reporter Avi Issacharoff yesterday reported that the plot that led to the kidnapping and killing of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel was done with the foreknowledge of Hamas's leadership. Issacharoff's report further buttresses Israel's long held claim that Hamas was responsible for the kidnappings and further undermines reports that Hamas's leadership was not connected. Palestinian security  officials told Issacharoff about another key member of the plot:
The officials said that although the Hamas leadership repeatedly denied involvement in the attack, the terror organization’s military and political wings knew about the plans in advance and had approved similar activities. Abed a-Rahman Ghaminat, one of the heads of a cell in Zurif (a village not far from Bethlehem) and a former resident of the village, was the Hamas military wing’s appointed leader over the Hebron area. Ghaminat was released from an Israeli prison in October 2011, and was deported to the Gaza Strip.
Based in Gaza, Ghaminat is part of Hamas' leadership and works with Saleh al-Arouri, who is based in Turkey, and is in charge of Hamas' operations in the West Bank. Ghanimat worked  with Mahmoud Kawasme in Gaza. Kawasme recruited his brother Hussam, who lives in the Hebron to mastermind the operation. Hussam Kawasme was indicted last week.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 11, 2014 11 Comments

Memory...

Posted by New Neo on September 02, 2014 19 Comments
Lee Harris's book Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History first came out in 2004. 2004 seems like a long time ago. And in a sense it is: ten years. But Harris's book has only grown more topical every day. That's unfortunate, because it's not a book that offers a lot of comfort. But his writing is insightful, so thoughtful and yet compressed that it's one of those books where the reader would do well to pause every paragraph or so in order to contemplate and digest what has just been said. Here's an excerpt. In the passage that follows, Harris has previously defined his use of the word "ruthlessness" as meaning "dreadfulness, frightfulness, horror, horribleness, terror, terribleness, atrociousness, atrocity":
...[T]he more the spirit of commerce triumphs, the closer mankind comes to dispensing with war, the nearer we approach the end of history, the greater are the rewards to those who decide to return to the path of war, and the easier it will be for them to conquer. There is nothing that can be done to change this fact; it is built into the structure of the world... People who have been trained in the practice of civility, and who find it second nature, will be reluctant to challenge the conduct of another on the ground that he is lacking civility The ruthless party therefore knows that he will be able to push very far before a break point is openly acknowledged Because once the break point is acknowledged, all bets are off and you no longer can be sure of the next step.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 01, 2014 7 Comments
Central to the charge that Israel's conduct warrants an investigation by an "independent" commission to investigate whether it committed war crimes is the premise that Israel, in defending itself against rockets launched by Hamas into its territory, caused a disproportionate number of civilian deaths. Since a commission appointed by the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council is looking to convict, a fair investigation into the violence is in order. Unfortunately, in an article from last week entitled "The U.N. says 7 in 10 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Israel disagrees," The Washington Post failed to provide the necessary context to allow a proper understanding of Operation Protective Edge.
The war in Gaza will now continue in a battle between databases to determine who was killed and why. The most contested number, the one that attracts the most stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal, is not the total fatalities on the Palestinian side, the more than 2,100 dead in the Gaza hostilities. The controversy centers instead on the ratio of civilians to combatants, or as the Israelis call them “terrorist operatives.”
In the second sentence the reporter, William Booth, mentions the "stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal," but doesn't acknowledge his own role in supporting the "stubborn insistence." Booth's articles on Operation Protective Edge have often contained similar language describing "mounting Palestinian civilian casualties." Furthermore, in other instances articles on which Booth was bylined listed casualty totals with no judgment as to their veracity. For example on July 19 a dispatch on which he had a byline reported:
The Palestinian death toll from the conflict rose Saturday to more than 330, including about 60 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. An additional 2,200 have been injured. The United Nations estimates that about 80 percent of the casualties are civilians, many of them children.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 31, 2014 16 Comments
A 39 year old man was arrested for beating up notorious anti-Israel MP George Galloway yesterday. The Guardian reports:
The Bradford West MP was released from hospital on Saturday morning having suffered a suspected broken jaw and rib as well as facial bruising. Neil Masterson, 39, has been accused of shouting about the Holocaust and attacking him. The attack, it is claimed, was related to comments Galloway recently made about the conflict in Gaza. The MP was posing for pictures in Notting Hill in west London when the attack took place. He was treated overnight at St Mary's hospital. Police said he was charged with the assault an Galloway and another man. A spokesman said Masterson was due to appear at Hammersmith magistrates court on Monday.
The suspect is not Jewish. A few weeks ago Galloway declared Bradford to be an "Israel-free zone."
Earlier this month the left-wing Respect MP said that goods, academics, and tourists from the “illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel” were not welcome in Bradford because of the country’s actions in Gaza. ”We don’t want any Israeli goods, we don’t want any Israeli services, we don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or the college,” he added. Galloway’s comments have already attracted attention from the police, and on Monday, in response to the MP’s statement, Israeli ambassador Daniel Taub made a special trip to the Yorkshire town.

Posted by New Neo on August 30, 2014 45 Comments
It's really just common sense: "Americans" who leave this country to fight for ISIS, or any other country or entity or group who is our enemy, should no longer be referred to as "Americans" by the press. I know; fat chance. Also, the laws governing the involuntary revocation of citizenship should be scrutinized to see whether they apply. If not, they could be expanded by the legislature to explicitly include fighting for designated foreign terrorist entities such as ISIS. And this isn't just true of Somali-Americans or whatever hyphenated-Americans might be guilty of this behavior. It's true of people like John Walker Lindh, one of the first "American" jihadis. Remember him? Four years ago, Joe Lieberman proposed an expansion of the current law in order to make sure it included those who fight as jihadis abroad. Back then Lieberman said, "I'm now putting together legislation [so that] any individual American citizen who is found to be involved in a foreign terrorist organization, as defined by the Department of State, would be deprived of their citizenship rights." The case has only grown stronger in the intervening years. Lieberman didn't succeed back then, but the relevant statute is here. These portions seem especially apropos:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 29, 2014 19 Comments
Britain, home to many of the Jihadists fighting for ISIS, including the likely beheader of James Foley, has just raised its terror threat level. The Telegraph reports, Terror attack on UK 'highly likely' as threat level raised:
The UK terror threat level has been raised to its second highest meaning an attack on the country is “highly likely”. It is the first time the threat level has been at “severe” since 2011 when it was reduced to “substantial”. Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said the decision was taken in light of the increasing dangers posed by British fanatics and other foreign fighters in Iraq and Syria.... Police and security services have long been concerned over the large numbers of British jihadists travelling to Syria and Iraq. It is feared more than 500 have gone and around half of those are now back in the UK, with some possibly planning attacks here. At least one plot is known to have already been foiled.
Is Britain finally will to address the Jihadis among it? Prime Minister David Cameron says Britain is, but that's far from clear, particularly in light of the disgusting disclosure recently that fear of being called "racist" led British authorities to ignore for over a decade Pakistani-community rape gangs targeting over 1400 white teenagers based on race and religion. Here is Cameron's address today:

Posted by New Neo on August 19, 2014 25 Comments
ISIS has released a video purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Wright Foley, who had been missing for almost two years. The video, which also threatens to do the same to a man identified as American journalist Steven Sotloff, will not be linked to on this blog. Foley had gone missing in northwest Syria in November of 2012, and Sotloff, a reporter for Time, had disappeared in mid-2013, perhaps in Libya. ISIS accompanied the video with a message that:
...U.S. President Barack Obama’s authorization of strikes against the group places the United States “upon a slippery slope towards a new war front against Muslims,” according to BNO. “Any attempt by you, Obama, to deny Muslims liberty & safety under the Islamic caliphate, will result in the bloodshed of your people,” the ISIS person added. Foley also speaks in the video, saying: “I call on my friends, family members and loved ones to rise up against my real killers, the U.S. government.”
There is a longer version of Foley's statement here.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 14, 2014 3 Comments
Yesterday the Washington Institute for Near East published Six Ways Hamas Hamas Could Limit Civilian Casualties in Gaza by Jeffrey White. All of White's suggestions involve separating the combatants from civilians, but as White acknowledges, "... there is little chance the group will implement any of these measures." And why would Hamas change? Human shields have been an effective strategy protecting its fighters. White concludes:
As long as the world sees Israel as the primary mechanism of civilian casualties, and as long as many Gaza civilians continue to be more concerned with "resistance" than their lives, Hamas has no reason to change its way of war.
Though White doesn't write it explicitly, the media has a responsibility to tell the whole story and not just the one that Hamas tells or allows them to. Oren Kessler says this explicitly in Reporters Have Finally Found Hamas. What Took So Long? that was published in The New Republic.
Let me be clear: I admire the bravery required of war correspondents, and I recognize the onerous conditions under which they work. I see no conspiracy behind the inability of many of them to adequately cover Hamas. Instead, I see a collective failure by much of the world’s press to give an accurate rendering of one party to the Gaza fighting, and to lay bare—whether explicitly or more subtly—the restrictions it enforces upon them in so doing.
Take for example, As war with Israel shatters lives, more Gazans question Hamas decisions that appeared in The Washington Post. While there is important information in the report - that Hamas has been alienating the civilian population of Gaza - the report always reminds readers that Gazans resent Israel more. For example:

Posted by David Gerstman on August 12, 2014 14 Comments
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has decided that Israel's self-defense needs to be investigated. (Note in the UN"s announcement the words "Hamas" and "rockets" are nowhere to be found.) After Operation Cast Lead the UNHRC picked a panel of four individuals, all of whom had prejudged Israel's guilt. The leader of that investigation, Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa later recanted his group's conclusions, but the damage was done. The UNHRC has decided that having a committee that is biased against Israel is necessary and selected an Irish professor of human rights law named William Schabas to head the new committee. Schabas has been involved in the travesty called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine along with crackpots such as Cynthia McKinney. At a hearing this "tribunal" in 2012, Schabas said "[m]y favorite would be Netanyahu within the dock of the International Criminal Court." UN Watch has compiled a list of statements and from Schabas showing his bias against Israel, including:
- A few years earlier, Schabas called for “going after” Israeli president Shimon Peres in the ICC, saying, “Why are we going after the president of Sudan for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza?” - In a 2009 blog post about the UN’s infamous Durban II conference on racism, Schabas urged the world not only to “ignore” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements, but to stop “exaggerating” them. According to Schabas, those who “deserve the blame” are “Israel and its friends, who have manipulated the truth about the nature of the work of the United Nations by gross exaggeration of the role and intervention of certain fanatics.” Schabas described Ahmadinejad as nothing more than a “provocative politician,” and not a torturer of dissidents, inciter of genocidal anti-Semitism, and arch-sponsor of terrorism.

Posted by New Neo on August 11, 2014 45 Comments
ISIS is the embodiment of evil. But:
“We don’t understand real evil, organized evil very well,” said America’s former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, in an interview with The New York Times. “This is evil incarnate.” “People like [Islamic State commander] Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi have been in a fight for a decade,” he added. “They are messianic in their vision, and they are not going to stop.”
My question is: does anyone ever "understand" evil? I don't think so. Evil's very nature is to be inscrutable. Evil is altogether mysterious and altogether different from the way most people operate or could even imagine operating. In all the biographies and histories that have dealt with Hitler, for example, who has ever really explained him? No one. Religious people posit a spiritual origin for evil. Non-religious people tend to doubt its existence, until they look into its eyes. If it were necessary to fully understand evil in order to fight it, World War II would have never been won by the Allies. What is necessary is to be able to recognize evil and see it for what it is quite early in the game. Those are the important first steps. The next steps are finding the will and the tools to fight it. Evil is very strong, because it doesn't know the same restraints and limits as morality or good. Regarding ISIS, Elizabeth Warren pipes up:

Posted by New Neo on August 08, 2014 23 Comments
Post-9/11, I read a quip that went something like this: "I just realized what the problem is with the 21st century. We got the numbers mixed up. It's not 2001, it's 1200." In the ensuing years, barbarism and religious wars have made a strong comeback---not that they'd ever really disappeared. But with the rise of ISIS, we now have a group giving itself over to their purest expression. Beheadings and crucifixions are part of their m.o., as well as forced conversions with the threat of death or exile looming, and now the imminent extermination of a minority religious group, the Yazidi, at ISIS's bloody hands. The Yazidi have one representative in Iraq's parliament. Her name is Vian Dakhil and her recent raw cri de coeur to save her people has made her famous. The world loves a show and a dramatic story, but it no longer loves actually taking on risky rescues, and has become accustomed to relying on the Americans to do so. Nature---and geopolitics---abhors a vacuum. The deposing of bad guy Saddam Hussein left a hole that other bad guys would inevitably try to rush to fill. Anyone who would cause the toppling of Saddam had to know it might be necessary for them to stick around at some level for at least a generation if they wanted a chance of ensuring that a new group of leaders of a different and better ilk would be substituting instead. But quite early on it became clear that, due to the efforts of the left in this country and changes in Americans' attitude towards war, occupation, and sacrifice, we lacked the requisite commitment.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 07, 2014 3 Comments
One of the enduring claims related to the Gaza war is that pushed by New York Magazine author Katie Zavadski in a viral article originally titled: "It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill 3 Israeli Teens After All (link goes to updated version, not original)(screenshot via Seth Frantzman): https://twitter.com/sfrantzman/status/494216021016723457/photo/1 That claim gave rise to the meme that Israel had concocted a Hamas connection to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in order to start the Gaza war.  At most, the story went, the kidnapping was carried out by a "lone cell" and thus could not be blamed on Hamas. The claim, however, is falling apart both because it wasn't backed up by facts and because Israel recently revealed that it had arrested the Hamas mastermind, and that there was a definite connection to Hamas.  For background, read these two posts: Today more information was released which further undermines the NY Magazine story, Hamas West Bank head arrested, indicted for planning wave of terror attacks:
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