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ArgumentLiberal Professors’ Deadly Delusions about Curing Terrorists
Last Friday, Usman Khan, a 28-year-old British national who was released from prison on parole in December 2018 after serving eight years for terrorism offenses, killed two people a machete near London Bridge. Earlier in the day, at the same site, he had attended an alumni celebration event hosted by the organizers of Cambridge University’s Learning Together program, having been invited to share his experiences as a former prisoner.Simon Cottee writes that the question raised by Khan, who was killed by police as he fled the scene of his attack, is about redemption and whether it’s either right or prudent to give convicted terrorists a second chance. “I have some degree of sympathy for this view [that everyone should be given second chance], but it needs to be massively tempered with a keen sense of not just what is right but also what is prudent” he writes.
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TerrorismLessons on Terrorism and Rehabilitation from the London Bridge Attack
Can prison rehabilitation programs work, and is it sensible to try and rehabilitate seriously radicalized individuals convicted on terrorism charges? These are questions not just for the U.K., in the wake of the second London Bridge attack over the weekend, but for the entire world.
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Argument: TerroristsLondon Bridge Attack: I Told Ministers We Were Treating Terrorist Prisoners with Jaw-Dropping Naivety. Did They Listen?
Usman Khan, a 28-year old terrorist who on Friday killed two people on the London Bridge before being killed by the police, served time in jail for “terrorist offenses” and was monitored by the British police. Ian Acheson, who, in 2016, at the request of then-Justice Minister Michael Gove, led a team of investigators who wrote a detailed and highly critical report about the way radicalized Islamist terrorists are managed in jail and after their release, writes: “What we found was so shockingly bad that I had to agree to the language in the original report being toned down. With hindsight, I’m not sure that was the right decision.”
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ArgumentAre We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism?
The newly released U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence specifically highlighted the problem of increasing terrorist attacks perpetrated by individual who are not affiliated with any organization and who are motivated by white nationalist propaganda readily available online. “Policymakers and practitioners need to find new and creative ways to undermine far-right ideology, breaking down its conspiracy theories and severing its ability to recruit new followers, including amongst returning servicemembers,” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware write.
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ExtremismSurvey of 18 European Countries: Hardcore Anti-Semitic Attitudes Remain Pervasive
About one in four Europeans polled harbor pernicious and pervasive attitudes toward Jews, according to a new global survey on anti-Semitism commissioned by ADL (the Anti-Defamation League). While anti-Semitic attitudes held mostly steady in Western Europe, the poll found hateful notions about Jews are rising in Eastern and Central European countries polled.
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ExtremismAntisemitism Unbound
On Monday, 25 November, the U.K. Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, published an article in The Times in which he describes Jeremy Corbin, the leader of the Labour Party – parliamentary election will be held 12 December – as “unfit for office” because of his inability, or unwillingness, to tackle the growing problem of anti-Semitism in the Party’s ranks. Today, 27 November, The Times’s editorial commented on the urgent and unprecedented intervention by the Chief Rabbi. This intervention “is the result of the Labour leader’s inability to comprehend his culpability for an institutional problem,” The Times writes.
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PerspectiveWhen Does Terrorism Have a Strategic Effect?
Not all terrorism is created equal, Daniel Byman writes. “Some attacks are merely blips on the terrorism radar screen, grabbing headlines for a few days before life resumes as before. Other attacks, however, shake the world.” Over-reaction to an act of terrorism can have as many negative consequences as under-reaction, so leaders must avoid initiating dramatic policy shifts such as going to war or changing allies without thinking long and hard about the consequences of such shifts.
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African securityDeadly Mali Accident Highlights France’s Counterterrorism Mission in Africa
Thirteen French soldiers were killed Monday in a helicopter crash in Mali. The accident has drawn attention to France’s on-going involvement in counterterrorism operations in the Sahel region – a vast, arid, and largely unpopulated region south of the Sahara which covers an area the size of Europe and which has seen an alarming increase in Islamist terrorist activities.
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PerspectiveRadicalizing in The Name of Islam – Analysis
Analysis of all mass murderers’ motivations, ideologies, and radicalization is crucial, but it has been neglected for offenders claiming to act in the name of Islam. However, a data-rich study by sociology professor Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers a window into Islamist terrorist radicalization.
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Perspective: Islamic StateCaliph Abu Unknown: Succession and Legitimacy in the Islamic State
Three days after the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State released a short message, announcing the new “emir of the Muslims” as Caliph Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. Haroro J. Ingram and Craig Whiteside write that “The Islamic State’s leaders are confident the gambit will succeed because the replacement caliph was selected using a process first executed in 2006, and subsequently repeated in 2010 and again this year.”
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Perspective: ExtremismNazi Symbols and Racist Memes: Combating School Intolerance
The number of Americans between the ages of 15 and 21 who saw extremist content online jumped by about 20 percent, to 70.2 percent from 58.3 percent, between 2013 and 2016, according to a new study. As more such material spills from the web to young people and into classrooms nationwide, educators increasingly find themselves under pressure to combat this new front of hate. Many educators say they feel ill-equipped to recognize what students absorb from the web, much less to address it.
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PerspectiveWhat ISIS Will Become
Most Americans first noticed the Islamic State in 2014 – it was called ISIS then — but the group had been around in different forms for about a decade. Many of the group’s commanders and fighters were the same people who had fought U.S. troops under the name of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the past year, its leader has died and it has lost the last of its territory, which at its peak was roughly the size of Britain. So what’s next?
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TerrorismU.S. Warns That Turkey's Syria Offensive Giving IS “Time and Space”
U.S. defense intelligence officials are offering a sobering assessment of the impact Turkey’s incursion into northeastern Syria — and corresponding moves by the U.S. and other powers — will have on efforts to destroy the Islamic State terror group.
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ArgumentsWould Terrorists Set Off a Nuclear Weapon If They Had One? We Shouldn’t Assume So
For decades, the nightmare of nuclear terrorism has haunted the corridors of power in Washington and the imagination of Western popular culture. While this was true even before September 11, 2001, in the days since, a consensus has formed from which few dare deviate: Terrorist organizations are trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and if they are successful, they will use them in an attack as soon as possible. But how valid is this “acquisition-use assumption,” Christopher McIntosh and Ian Store ask.
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TerrorismDeaths from Terrorism declined, but the Number of Countries Affected by Terrorism Is Growing
Deaths from terrorism have decreased by 15.2 per cent in 2018 to 15,952 globally. This is the fourth consecutive year of improvement. Terrorism situation has improved in 98 countries in 2018, nut the situation in 40 deteriorated. Deaths from terrorism in Europe fell by 70 per cent, with Western Europe recording its lowest number of terror incidents since 2012. There has been an increase in far-right terrorism in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania for the third consecutive year, with the number of deaths increasing by 52 percent in 2018. This trend has continued into 2019, with 77 deaths to the end of September 2019. The global economic impact of terrorism was$33 billion in 2018, a decrease of 38 percent from the previous year.
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The long view
Perspective: Exaggerations Does Norway Have a Far-Right Problem?
A recent article in the Guardian by Sindre Bangstad, a Norwegian social anthropologist describes Norway as being in the grip of pervasive, far-right nationalism, with violence simmering just below the surface. “Norway is in denial about the threat of far-right violence,” reads the bombastic headline. Kathrine Jebsen Moore, a fellow Norwegian, writes that Bangstad misrepresents and misleads: she motes that the Norwegian Police Security Service still regards Islamist terror threats as the most serious threat to Norway, even if it has upgraded the threat of far-right extremism from “unlikely” to “possible” after an attempted mosque attack in August. But “to see in the upgrading of the terrorist threat posed by far-right groups a general mood of irrational hatred for immigrants and Muslims, and portray Norway as a hotbed for racism, is just wrong,” Moore writes, adding: “Norway, like other European countries, is faced with a new set of challenges as it changes from a homogenous nation to a country with a growing immigrant population” – and that “Norway is coping with this influx a lot better than Sweden. So, is Norway in denial about its far-right problem? Don’t believe it.”
Perspective: Exaggerations White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic
Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it. A similar dynamic can be observed in the case of white supremacy today. This is not “to suggest that the threat of white supremacy is not real or that we should be complacent about it,” Simon Cottee writes. “Of course it is real, and of course we need to indict and seriously punish those who have committed or are plotting to commit terrorist atrocities in the name of white supremacy.” But we should resist the urge to treat white supremacy as “a mythical monster against which to signal our moral virtue”: “White supremacy is not a monolith endangering our children and societies, but we might just make it into one by overinflating it into precisely this.”
Perspective: Nuclear terrorismA Meltdown in Nuclear Security
A commando raid on a nuclear power plant seems the stuff of Hollywood. So why are nuclear security experts so worried? It ranks among the worst-case scenarios for a nuclear power plant: an all-out assault or stealth infiltration by well-trained, heavily armed attackers bent on triggering a nuclear blast, sparking a nuclear meltdown or stealing radioactive material. Under pressure from a cash-strapped nuclear energy industry increasingly eager to slash costs, the commission in a little-noticed vote in October 2018 halved the number of force-on-force exercises conducted at each plant every cycle. Four months later, it announced it would overhaul how the exercises are evaluated to ensure that no plant would ever receive more than the mildest rebuke from regulators – even when the commandos set off a simulated nuclear disaster that, if real, would render vast swaths of the U.S. uninhabitable. Nuclear security experts, consultants, law enforcement veterans and former NRC commissioners are nothing short of alarmed. “You can’t afford to be wrong once,” says one expert.
Perspective: Lethal speechFree Speech Is Killing Us
There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet, for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. Andrew Marantz writes in the New York Times that in the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” “No one believes that anymore,” Marantz writes. Marantz says that after spending the past few years embedded as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, “I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.” He adds: “The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?”
Perspective: ExtremismRacists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.
Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn. Joanna Schroeder writes that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes. “Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.”
Perspective: ExtremismVictims of IRA Terror Tell Jeremy Corbyn to Apologize
Nearly 40 victims of IRA violence have called on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to apologize for his support for Irish republicanism, accusing him of “giving succor” to terrorists. In an open letter to mark the 35th anniversary of the Brighton bombing, the families of the dead demand that he condemn the terrorist campaign waged by the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s. A report from Mainstream, a new campaign group against extremism in politics, also reveals evidence of Corbyn’s closeness to London Labour Briefing, which ran an infamous editorial after the Brighton attack claiming that “the British only sit up and take notice when they are bombed into it.” The 1984 bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, during the Conservative Party conference, killed five people and injured thirty-one.
Perspective: ISIS resurgenceAverting an ISIS Resurgence in Iraq and Syria
The Islamic State (ISIS) has not made a comeback in Iraq or Syria – yet. A new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) says that “Conflict between Turkey and the SDF along the Syrian-Turkish border almost certainly will relieve pressure on ISIS, which lost its last territorial foothold in eastern Syria in May 2019 but persists as a deadly insurgency. Since May, the SDF has continued to pursue ISIS remnants across the north east and to hold thousands of ISIS detainees and ISIS-affiliated family members. Yet the SDF has warned that it will be forced to redirect its forces toward Syria’s northern border should Turkey attack. The consequences may be disastrous for areas farther south, where ISIS is most active, and for prisons and camps that hold ISIS militants and were already vulnerable to attack before the latest events.” The ICG notes that “Turkey’s intervention in north-eastern Syria, following President Trump’s 6 October decision, has put ISIS’s near defeat in Syria in question.”
Perspective: Syria withdrawalIndecision in Washington Compounded the Kurds' Dilemma
The American military presence in northeast Syria was always an anomaly, unlikely to be sustained indefinitely. The manner of its termination has nevertheless proven inept and unnecessarily costly. If the military advantages of partnering with the YPG were clear, it was equally clear that none of their neighbors would indefinitely tolerate an independent Kurdish state. Turkey was most agitated by this scenario given the Syrian Kurds’ links to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a designated terrorist group that has waged a low-grade insurgency against the state for decades. In the end it appears the Tump administration proved unable to choose among its competing interests in Syria, James Dobbins and Jeffrey Martini write. “Statesmanship requires the ability to choose between sometimes unpalatable alternatives. Statecraft requires a rigorous process of refining and a timely means of deliberating on those alternatives. These qualities have been notably lacking in charting the administration’s Syria end game thereby compounding the unavoidable costs of withdrawal with charges of betrayal and a retreat under fire.”
Perspective: ExtremismIf Germany Can’t Stop the Rise of White Nationalism, How Can Canada?
Between 2017 and 2018, anti-Semitic and xenophobic crimes both rose nearly 20 percent in Germany. In June, following the assassination by a neo-Nazi of Walter Lübcke, a conservative politician who supported Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, busted Nordkreuz, an extremist organization which compiled a kill list of 25,000 liberal politicians considered “pro-refugee” while also acquiring weapons, 200 body bags, and quicklime, which prevents the rotting that makes corpses smell. The BfV says that it is now tracking 24,100 known right-wing extremists in the country, of which 12,700 have been classified as violent. “That these developments are happening in Germany, a country known for an unflinching view of its own horrific past, might be considered surprising,” Sadiya Ansari writes. “And if Germany is struggling to contain this [extremists’] threat, what does that mean for countries that haven’t been as vigilant?”
Perspective: ISIS resurgenceAverting an ISIS Resurgence in Iraq and Syria
The Islamic State (ISIS) has not made a comeback in Iraq or Syria – yet. A new report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) says that “Conflict between Turkey and the SDF along the Syrian-Turkish border almost certainly will relieve pressure on ISIS, which lost its last territorial foothold in eastern Syria in May 2019 but persists as a deadly insurgency. Since May, the SDF has continued to pursue ISIS remnants across the north east and to hold thousands of ISIS detainees and ISIS-affiliated family members. Yet the SDF has warned that it will be forced to redirect its forces toward Syria’s northern border should Turkey attack. The consequences may be disastrous for areas farther south, where ISIS is most active, and for prisons and camps that hold ISIS militants and were already vulnerable to attack before the latest events.” The ICG notes that “Turkey’s intervention in north-eastern Syria, following President Trump’s 6 October decision, has put ISIS’s near defeat in Syria in question.”
Perspective: Syria withdrawalIndecision in Washington Compounded the Kurds' Dilemma
The American military presence in northeast Syria was always an anomaly, unlikely to be sustained indefinitely. The manner of its termination has nevertheless proven inept and unnecessarily costly. If the military advantages of partnering with the YPG were clear, it was equally clear that none of their neighbors would indefinitely tolerate an independent Kurdish state. Turkey was most agitated by this scenario given the Syrian Kurds’ links to the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a designated terrorist group that has waged a low-grade insurgency against the state for decades. In the end it appears the Tump administration proved unable to choose among its competing interests in Syria, James Dobbins and Jeffrey Martini write. “Statesmanship requires the ability to choose between sometimes unpalatable alternatives. Statecraft requires a rigorous process of refining and a timely means of deliberating on those alternatives. These qualities have been notably lacking in charting the administration’s Syria end game thereby compounding the unavoidable costs of withdrawal with charges of betrayal and a retreat under fire.”
Perspective: ExtremismIf Germany Can’t Stop the Rise of White Nationalism, How Can Canada?
Between 2017 and 2018, anti-Semitic and xenophobic crimes both rose nearly 20 percent in Germany. In June, following the assassination by a neo-Nazi of Walter Lübcke, a conservative politician who supported Chancellor Angela Merkel’s immigration policies, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, busted Nordkreuz, an extremist organization which compiled a kill list of 25,000 liberal politicians considered “pro-refugee” while also acquiring weapons, 200 body bags, and quicklime, which prevents the rotting that makes corpses smell. The BfV says that it is now tracking 24,100 known right-wing extremists in the country, of which 12,700 have been classified as violent. “That these developments are happening in Germany, a country known for an unflinching view of its own horrific past, might be considered surprising,” Sadiya Ansari writes. “And if Germany is struggling to contain this [extremists’] threat, what does that mean for countries that haven’t been as vigilant?”
Perspective: ExtremismNew UN Report on Online Hate Speech
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, recently gave a highly promoted speech about the importance of protecting freedom of expression online—which was immediately criticized as taking too binary a view of the issues and presenting a false choice between free expression and Chinese censorship. Evelyn Douek writes that by contrast, David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the freedom of opinion and expression, in a 9 October report, offered a very real reckoning with the trade-offs involved in protecting free speech while dealing with the real harm caused by some forms of expression, and is an attempt to find guiding, consistent standards. “There is still a lot of work to be done, not least by the companies themselves, to make this a reality,” Douek writes. “But this latest report will be a useful and influential guide in that process.”