C L O S E R

Liveleak.com: Welcome to Taliban-istan

Posted on November 21st, 2007 by .
Categories: Misc. News.

In the heart of Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, FRANCE 24’s Claire Billet meets “Abu Tayeb,” a Taliban special brigade commander.

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How to Look at Homegrown Terror – TIME

Posted on November 21st, 2007 by .
Categories: International Terrorism, ISIM/RU Research, Religious and Political Radicalization, Religious Movements.

How to Look at Homegrown Terror – TIME

How to Look at Homegrown Terror
By Amanda Ripley

The most sophisticated government analysis of the homegrown terrorism threat to be made public in the United States came out this week, and it didn’t come from Washington — not from the FBI, the Director of National Intelligence or the Department of Homeland Security. It came from the New York City Police Department, and with any luck, its release will spur the federal government ostensibly leading the war on terror to show more faith in the general public’s ability to digest serious intelligence.

The report, entitled “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat,” makes several important and underappreciated points.

— There is no useful profile to predict who will become radicalized. Most would-be terrorists are “unremarkable men” living “unremarkable lives.” They don’t have criminal histories, and they don’t always gather at mosques.

— They do, however, follow remarkably similar behavior patterns. Participants in 11 anti-Western terrorism plots analyzed in the report all went through four stages on the path from unremarkable to violent: Pre-radicalization, Self-identification, Indoctrination and Jihadization.

The report isn’t perfect. The phrase “Jihadization” is problematic, and has already alienated some of the Muslim-American leaders who should be included in this conversation. Nor is it all new. Some of these points have been made before by respected counterterrorism scholars. But the fact that it came from a government organization, not a think tank, and that it struggles mightily not to dumb down its content, makes it exceptional.

“It’s remarkable to me that one of the first public reports on radicalization to get it right came from a police department,” says Chris Heffelfinger, a counterterrorism expert with the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. “Our preconception is that it should come from the top, from the White House, [but] I don’t think the CIA or any other analytic agency has better stuff than this.”

The authors, Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt, of the NYPD’s intelligence division, spent months traveling the world and systematically analyzing the facts: who has participated in foiled and realized plots against the West? Where did they meet? What motivated them? And how did they go from being regular people, often citizens of Western nations, to radical violent extremists?

“This was a triumph of sensible men working very, very hard to get a good understanding of how this process works and determined, despite the risks, to get it out into the public,” says Brian Jenkins, a veteran counterterrorism expert at the RAND Corporation who was also a consultant on the report.

The NYPD has, since 9/11, built up one of the most impressive intelligence organizations in the world. The Department has officers based in the U.K., Israel and Europe, among other places. It also has hundreds of linguists who speak Farsi, Arabic and Urdu. Its intelligence division is led by David Cohen, who spent 35 years at the CIA.

In the past, the NYPD has been criticized for not sharing its intelligence widely, and it could have easily kept this report private and still reached its primary audience of law-enforcement officials. But it chose not to. “The NYPD knew it was going to draw some flak, as anything pertaining to domestic intelligence does and should. But we’d rather have the public debate, as noisy and rude as it may be, than have frightened acquiescence,” Jenkins says. “Too much of the message to the American people has been a message of fear, without explanation. In order to really get this, we have to educate, engage and enlist the citizens.”

Of course, doing that has its own dangers, and once the Department made its findings public — after a road show in Washington to the powers that be — it quickly became clear why this kind of thing doesn’t happen as often as it should. First, the broadcast media mischaracterized the report. Certain TV news shows defaulted to their usual “be afraid, be very afraid” script and claimed the report described two dozen active sleeper cells in the U.S. In fact, it did no such thing. If you read the 90-page report, you will see that it is a retrospective analysis of past plots, conducted with meticulous attention to detail. It is not the vague warnings of imminent doom we have heard from the federal government in the past. But the local CBS affiliate in New York City described it as “chilling,” perhaps out of habit.

At the press conference announcing the findings, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and his counterterrorism team started out visibly proud of their report. But questions from the media forced Kelly to keep stressing the basics. Reporters wanted to know how many cells Kelly was watching in the New York area, and how frightened we should be. “That’s not what this is about,” he said.

By afternoon, American-Muslim organizations had issued press releases criticizing the report. The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it cast suspicion on all U.S. Muslims, even though the report repeatedly stresses that there is no obvious way to profile would-be terrorists. The Muslim Public Affairs council says the report contradicts the findings of the federal National Intelligence Estimate declassified last month. But that’s an oversimplification. The National Intelligence Estimate did put more emphasis on the threat of al-Qaeda, but both reports stressed the danger of radical, self-generating cells. The federal Estimate is put together by people whose focus is overseas, says Frank Cilluffo at the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. The feds will never be as well-positioned as NYPD to understand the homegrown threat. “Ultimately, state and local authorities know their communities best.”

Perhaps one of the best things the report will do is create competitive pressure, Cilluffo suggests, spurring the feds and other police departments to greater feats of transparency and nuance. Historically, at the FBI and the Department of Justice in particular, intelligence is meant to be kept close, and the public is not to be trusted. Hopefully, the public and the NYPD will, eventually, prove them wrong.

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Protected: nu.nl/algemeen | Nationaal onderzoek naar salafisme

Posted on November 21st, 2007 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

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Protected: nu.nl/algemeen | Nationaal onderzoek naar salafisme

Posted on November 21st, 2007 by martijn.
Categories: Misc. News.

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Divisions in Muslim Brotherhood – World – theage.com.au

Posted on November 21st, 2007 by .
Categories: Religious Movements.

Divisions in Muslim Brotherhood – World – theage.com.au

Muslim Brotherhood members and internet bloggers Sondos Asem Shalabi, 21, and Abdulrahman Mansour, 21, in a cafe in Cairo.
David Wroe
November 17, 2007

THE lowly shoe is considered a degrading weapon in Egypt. To be beaten with a shoe adds insult to injury.

So when Mohamed Mahdi Akef, the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Islamist group whose members have frequent encounters with the police, threatened critics with his shoes last year, it was seen as a classic example of an intemperate leader’s inability to control his language.

Under Mr Akef’s leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood, considered the world’s largest, oldest and most influential Islamist organisation, is in crisis in its home country. Analysts in Egypt say it is struggling to define its political goals amid divisions at the top and a lack of fresh, charismatic leadership.

At the same time, a new generation of brothers and sisters are gaining prominence through Egypt’s ubiquitous political tool, internet blogging, and are starting, sometimes gently, to criticise their leaders.

Differences within the 79-year-old organisation emerged last month when it released a draft of its first political platform, which advocated banning women and Coptic Christians, who make up a 10th of Egypt’s population, from becoming president. The draft also raised the spectre of an Iran-style religious council.

Before the final version of the platform is released, Mr Akef, 79, indicated in two interviews with The Age that he would not bow on the question of women and Copts. “It is the Muslim Brotherhood’s opinion that a woman cannot be president,” he said.

“How can a Christian president protect the religion of Islam?”

Mr Akef also railed against globalisation, which he sees as naked US ambition, and slammed Western democracy as subservient to whims of the masses, without moral absolutes.

Banned since 1954, the brotherhood shocked the ruling National Democratic Party and Western observers in 2005 by winning a fifth of the seats in the Egyptian Parliament through independent proxies.

Pragmatist brothers are pushing to create a more mainstream political party. But Khalil al-Anani, an expert on political Islam, who has written a book on the brotherhood and is deputy editor of a government-funded political journal, said most brothers did not really understand democratic values such as pluralism and the protection of minorities.

“It’s very complicated for a religious organisation to transfer to a political party,” he said. “Most of them don’t believe in the value of equality.” He said the organisation was in crisis, with deep divisions in the wake of the poor public reaction to its draft platform.

One moderate on the brotherhood’s 15-member executive, Abdel Monem Abou el-Fotouh, told The Age: “I believe it is the right of any citizen to be president, whatever their sex … whatever their religion.”

Brotherhood members played down the divisions but Hesham Kassem, founder of the respected independent newspaper al-Masry al-Youm, said: “I don’t remember ever seeing so many schisms and differences between the dinosaurs and the innovators.”

As well as having influential branches around the world, the brotherhood is Egypt’s strongest opposition to President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled this country of 80 million people as an effective autocrat since 1981 and is a key ally of the US. The Government initiates periodic crackdowns, the most recent of which has seen 40 members facing military courts, sparking human rights protests. Most leaders have been jailed repeatedly, in Mr Akef’s case for a total of 23 years. Estimates of the brotherhood’s Egyptian membership range from 100,000 to 400,000.

Doubts linger over how it would behave in power. Young brothers become defensive when quizzed on the specifics of Islamic democracy.

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