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Javier E

Lynching as Racial Terrorism - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ching-as-racial-terrorism.html

lynching racism history

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Mr. Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, took a step in that direction on Tuesday when it released a report that chronicles nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The report focuses on what it describes as “racial terror lynchings,” which were used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Victims in these cases were often murdered without being accused of actual crimes but for minor social transgressions that included talking back to whites or insisting on fairness and basic rights.
  • The report is the result of five years of hard work. Researchers reviewed local newspapers, historical archives and court records; interviewed local historians, survivors and victims’ descendants; and scrutinized contemporaneously published articles in African-American newspapers, which took a closer interest in these matters than the white press. In the end, researchers found at least 700 more lynchings in the 12 states than were previously reported, suggesting that “racial terror lynching” was far more common than was generally believed.
  • The report argues compellingly that the threat of death by lynching was far more influential in shaping present-day racial reality than contemporary Americans typically understand. It argues that The Great Migration from the South, in which millions of African-Americans moved North and West, was partly a forced migration in which black people fled the threat of murder at the hands of white mobs.
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  • It sees lynching as the precursor of modern-day racial bias in the criminal justice system. The researchers argue, for example, that lynching declined as a mechanism of social control as the Southern states shifted to a capital punishment strategy, in which blacks began more frequently to be executed after expedited trials. The legacy of lynching was apparent in that public executions were still being used to mollify mobs in the 1930s even after such executions were legally banned.
  • Despite playing a powerful role in the shaping of Southern society, the lynching era has practically disappeared from public discourse. As the report notes: “Most Southern terror lynching victims were killed on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. The Southern landscape is cluttered with plaques, statues and monuments that record, celebrate and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against black citizens during the era of racial terror.”
  • Mr. Stevenson’s group makes the persuasive argument that this history needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.
katyshannon

Paris Terror Attacks: Officials Searching for Man Involved in Deadly Massacre - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...ogether-assailants-ids-n463716

paris terror attacks officials searching massacre nbc news crisis history isis suicide bombers france belgium

shared by katyshannon on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • French authorities were racing Sunday to hunt down any potential accomplices to the wave of terror attacks unleashed in Paris as the investigation widened beyond this nation's borders.
  • A French man believed to be directly involved in Friday's massacre in Paris is on the run and the subject of an international manhunt, French security officials said Sunday evening.
  • Investigators said the man rented a Belgian-registered black Volkswagen Polo, which was allegedly used and abandoned by the hostage-takers who killed at least 89 people inside a Paris concert hall. advertisement He was identified by officials as Salah Abdeslam, 26, from Brussels.
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  • Abdeslam is allegedly the brother of another suspect currently in custody and being questioned — and of one of the deceased attackers, officials said.
  • French officials were working with authorities in Belgium, Spain and Serbia in an attempt to shed more light on the attack, which ISIS claimed responsibility for and which French President Francois Hollande described as an "act of war."
  • Less than two days after the attacks Sunday, French warplanes conducted raids in Syria, targeting ISIS' stronghold in Raqqa, the defense ministry said. Reuters reported that the operation was France's biggest strike against ISIS in Syria to date.
  • "The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the ministry said in a statement.
  • The airstrikes, which were carried out in coordination with the U.S., hit a command post, a jihadist recruitment center, a munitions depot and a militant training camp, the statement said.
  • Paris Prosecutor Francois Molins said seven terrorists died in the attack on Friday. Officials initially said there were eight attackers — as did ISIS. It seems now Abdeslam is believed to be the eighth attacker.
  • A French prosecutor also said officials have identified two more assailants, whose names were not released to NBC News — a 20-year-old who was part of the attack on the Stade de France and a 31-year-old who was part of the attack on one of the restaurants in the 10th arrondissement. Both were French nationals living in Belgium.
  • "We consider this means they have a network," Francoise Shepmans, mayor of the town of Molenbeek where the individuals were detained, told Belgium's TV RTBF.
lenaurick

Geneva terrorism arrests: - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

geneva terrorism crisis

shared by lenaurick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Swiss police have arrested two people and found traces of explosives in a car as security remains high around Geneva amid a terrorism alert
  • They were arrested on suspicion of the manufacture, concealment and transport of explosives or toxic gases, as well as on suspicion of violating the prohibition of groups such as al Qaida, ISIS and similar organizations.
  • The Swiss alert came after a tip from U.S. intelligence officials, who told their Swiss counterparts that they had intercepted communications among extremists discussing the idea of attacking Geneva, as well as Chicago and Toronto,
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  • "the possibility of the presence of an Islamic State [ISIS] terror cell in Geneva."
Javier E

Making Sense of the Violence in Charlottesville - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...538659

racism white supremacy history culture politics violence lynching usa memory racial

shared by Javier E on 04 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • many Americans of good will honestly, if erroneously, believe that what happened in Charlottesville is “not us.” How can this be?
  • Answering this question demands a look back at some of the most significant patterns of white-on-black violence in American history to identify the precise ways in which that violence was justified, forgotten, or defined as something other than the racist terror that it was.
  • American chattel slavery—in which blacks were bought, sold, worked, and bred for profit—was created and maintained through violence that was at once brutal and routine
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  • In justifying this violence, supporters of slavery recast it as a kind of self-defense, and violence committed in self-defense—unlike violence committed out of anger or hatred—says nothing about the character of the perpetrators.
  • The demise of slavery did not lead to a decline in white-on-black violence—it merely changed forms.
  • Most notoriously, whites lynched blacks; looking just at white-on-black lynchings for the purpose of racial control, the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877, when Reconstruction ended, and 1950
  • Lynchings were even more savage and sadistic than most people imagine.
  • Patrick Phillips recounts one such expulsion in his 2016 book Blood at the Root. In 1912, the white residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out all black residents of the county, who abandoned their land and their belongings as they fled bands of “night riders”
  • again, because defenders of lynching portrayed their violence as justified, even as we recognize today that lynching is a thing white people did, we can believe that it implies nothing about what it meant to be white.
  • The motifs of black men’s savage, uncontrollable lust and of white women’s chastity and virtue combined in a perfect storm of white fear to justify the practice of lynching generally, even when a particular lynching was not alleged to be in response to rape.
  • Even opponents of lynching seemed to agree that the supposed epidemic of black-on-white rape demanded a violent solution.
  • Attempts to justify racial terror have  been accompanied by a national commitment to erasing it from our memory.
  • Consider the little-known history of racial cleansing in America. Across the South and Midwest, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has identified hundreds of counties that experienced sharp and abrupt drop-offs of their black populations. Though the historical record, as with lynching, is intentionally spotty, in many cases there is clear evidence that whites systematically and violently drove out entire black populations, dispossessing black families of their property and rendering them refugees.
  • Such depravity required justification. This time, accusations of black criminality would do the trick. In most lynchings, the victim was accused of rape, murder, or both.
  • This state of affairs is not inevitable; America’s relationship with its history is a collective choice. Other countries have made other choices in the wake of systematic racist violence.
  • since black refugees could not safely return to retrieve their personal property or to sell their land, the new white “owners” could assert adverse possession after the statutory period of seven years, registering deeds at the county courthouse even though the Georgia statute technically required adverse possession to be “peaceable.”
  • This literal erasure enabled the ensuing rhetorical erasure of Forsyth’s history. In 1987, civil rights activists staged a protest in Forsyth County, which remained all-white 75 years after its racial cleansing. The white residents of the county seemed genuinely puzzled as to why activists were harassing them.
  • White terrorists cleansed their communities of blacks in Forsyth County in 1912, and in Marshall County, Kentucky in 1908, and in Vermillion County, Indiana in 1923, and in Sharp County, Arkansas on Christmas Eve, 1906, to name just a few. If we recognized these crimes for what they were, it would be difficult to ignore that a pattern of racial terrorism had occurred across decades, and that later incidents of racial violence were part of that pattern.
  • But a crime no one remembers cannot lead us to associate its perpetrators with criminality, so our concept of whiteness remains untouched by any association with violence.   
  • We have erased the history of lynching in much the same way. The overwhelming majority of lynching sites remain unmarked and un-memorialized. The failure to mark these sites allows Americans (especially whites) to forget the atrocities.
  • This erasure of history from public spaces contributes to a kind of gaslighting dynamic in discussions of race in America: whites are able to minimize blacks’ claims of historical and ongoing oppression because they have successfully forgotten much of the history that blacks still remember.  
  • Justifying and erasing hundreds of years of white-on-black violence has left many Americans ill-equipped to make sense of the racist violence that we live with today. As a result, whites often lack the vocabulary to contextualize even the most obviously racist events.
  • media outlets tended to use vague language like “evil” or “monster” to describe Roof. That kind of equivocal terminology implied that Roof had an inherent, inevitable propensity for violence, a propensity that sprang up organically rather than being nurtured by extremist influences
  • But Roof’s motive could not have been clearer. He wrote a manifesto about the threat black criminality poses to Western civilization. He confessed to police that he planned and carried out the shooting with the intention of starting a “race war.” Roof was desperate to make sure everyone understood that he had acted to promote white supremacy, but many Americans stubbornly refused to take him at his own word, insisting that it would be premature to interpret the shooting as racial terrorism.
  • By failing to connect Roof’s racism with his obvious criminality, many allowed themselves to think of the Charleston tragedy as an isolated and senseless act, instead of seeing it as a seamless continuation of the racial terrorism that is America’s heritage.
  • In every generation, Americans have consistently spoken about racist violence committed by white people as justified, erased it from memory, or simply called it something else
  • So when self-identified white nationalists seeking to turn America into a whites-only homeland held a torchlight protest, many observers failed to make the clear connection to bands of night riders, armed and carrying torches, driving blacks out of their homes to cleanse the region of anyone not white.
  • less than a decade later, Phillips writes, the white leaders of Forsyth County were boasting—with a straight face—that “while other north Georgia communities [with mixed populations] continued to suffer episodes of ‘race trouble,’ there were no such embarrassments in Forsyth.” This was possible in part because they had erased evidence of just how Forsyth came to be an all-white county
  • the effort is underway to face up to the full horror of racist terror, not justify it; to name racially motivated violence as such, not hide it; to mark down in disgrace the names of the perpetrators, not celebrate them; and to memorialize the victims, not erase their suffering.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning.
  • America, tragically, is over a century behind on its obligation to undertake the same reckoning. The horrific events of August provide an opportunity to get started.
sarahbalick

France foiling terror plots 'daily' - Prime Minister Manuel Valls - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-37334836

france terror prime minister

shared by sarahbalick on 12 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • France foiling terror plots 'daily' - Prime Minister Manuel Valls
  • The French prime minister has said the country's security services are foiling terror plots and dismantling militant networks "every day".
  • Previously the authorities said about 10,000 were identified as high-risk.
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  • France has been under a state of emergency since IS attacks on Paris in November killed 130 people in what President Francois Hollande called an "act of war".
  • It questioned the deployment of between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers to protect schools, synagogues, department stores and other sensitive sites.
  • Security is a central issue in the run-up to next year's presidential election but Mr Valls said proposals by the former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to set up special courts and detention centres were not the answer.
  • "Every Frenchman suspected of being linked to terrorism, because he regularly consults a jihadist website, or his behaviour shows signs of radicalisation or because is in close contact with radicalised people, must by preventively placed in a detention centre,"
  • Meanwhile, prosecutors charged one of the women arrested over a foiled attack near Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
  • Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said on Friday that Ornella G's fingerprints had been found inside the car. She was known to intelligence agents as someone who was considering going to Syria.
Megan Flanagan

After Bombings, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Clash Over Terrorism - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ald-trump-hillary-clinton.html

donald trump clinton terrorism US

shared by Megan Flanagan on 21 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump were already racing to seize the political upper hand
  • called Mr. Trump a “recruiting sergeant for the terrorists”
  • blaming Mrs. Clinton and President Obama’s handling of immigration and the Iraq war for bringing terrorism to American shores
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  • called for vigorous police profiling of people from the Muslim world and drew a direct equation between immigration controls and national defense.
  • attacks could reframe the presidential race around stark questions of national security
  • the bombings in New York and New Jersey over the weekend are a critical inflection point.
  • “They are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists,”
  • she has enjoyed an edge over her Republican opponent on issues of national security and foreign policy.
  • Mrs. Clinton held a news conference to call for “courage and vigilance” in the face of terrorism,
  • calling him a “recruiting sergeant” for terrorists, she accused him of giving “aid and comfort” to the Islamic State with his campaign oratory.
  • “We’re going after the bad guys, and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going after an entire religion,”
  • the candidates’ responses to an apparent terrorist plot on American soil could sharply alter voters’ views
  • criticizing Mrs. Clinton for favoring more lenient immigration policies and calling her attack on Mr. Trump tantamount to an accusation of treason.
  • to stop the rise of the Islamic State,
  • “Her weakness, her ineffectiveness, caused the problem, and now she wants to be president,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
  • directly equated American vulnerability to terrorism with what he called laxness in the immigration system
  • “These attacks, and many others, were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system,
  • “Immigration security,” he added, “is national security.”
  • he still faces broad reservations among voters about his readiness to serve as commander in chief.
Grace Gannon

Sydney siege victims should get terrorism compensation, says minister - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ism-compensation-says-minister

Sydney Australia terror attacks terrorism

shared by Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Grace Gannon on 13 Jan 15
     
    The federal compensation scheme for Australian victims of overseas terrorism should be extended to include domestic attacks such as the Sydney siege, the New South Wales government has said. The NSW attorney general, Brad Hazzard, issued the call for broader coverage in a letter to his federal counterpart, George Brandis.
qkirkpatrick

Millions gather against terrorism - CNN Video - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...charlie-hebdo

terrorism france protest hebdo culture religion

shared by qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • World leaders joined more than 2 million people at a "unity rally" in defiance of a terrorism rampage that claimed 17 lives in France.
  • qkirkpatrick on 15 Jan 15
     
    Millions gather at "unity rally" in defiance of terrorism
johnsonma23

GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism | MSNBC - 0 views

www.msnbc.com/...sson-how-not-respond-terrorism

gop terrorism politics US

shared by johnsonma23 on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • GOP offers a lesson on how not to respond to terrorism
  • About 10 months ago, after terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, killing 11 people, congressional Republicans quickly began looking for ways to blame American leadership
  • Republican field is dominated by candidates with no meaningful experience in or understanding of foreign affairs, and nearly all of whom continue to think the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was a great idea.
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  • A dark portrait of a vulnerable homeland – impotent against Islamic State militants, susceptible against undocumented refugees and isolated in a world of fraying alliances –
  • Ted Cru
  • military strikes against ISIS targets should be less concerned about “civilian casualties.”
  • the disastrous war McCain celebrated, should be blamed on President Obama’s foreign policy.
  • The one reaction nearly every Republican candidate agreed on is a refusal to accept Syrian refugees – as if the real lesson of the Paris attacks is feeling less sympathy for ISIS’s victims
  • the Republican’s rush toward “stop letting in refugees” is reminiscent of “the ‘travel ban now or we all die of Ebola’ fad of last year.”
  • But there’s also the unnerving track record of many Republican officials – including would-be presidents – who seem to fall to pieces every time there’s a crisis
  • The GOP’s responses to Friday night’s bloodshed was a discouraging reminder of a party that still doesn’t know what to do or say when mature leadership is required
silveiragu

5 Ways To Look At The Paris Attacks : Parallels : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...s-to-look-at-the-paris-attacks

paris_attacks

shared by silveiragu on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • self-proclaimed caliphate
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 16 Nov 15
       
      The definition of "caliphate"-or at least the connotations associated with the word-have changed since the time of the Seljuk Turks. Careful reading of history demonstrates other "successor states" to the original caliphate that are NOT ISIS/ISIL.
  • By comparison, al-Qaida often favored major symbols such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the Sept. 11 attacks, and U.S. embassies in Africa in a pair of 1998 bombings.
    • silveiragu
      silveiragu on 16 Nov 15
       
      Which raises the question: is the comparison valid? 
  • 3. Europe's Vulnerability: The Paris attacks point to weaknesses France and other European countries face in combating terrorism.
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  • 2. Multiple Soft Targets: The unifying thread in Paris was that all were soft targets and did not appear to hold special significance for the terrorists.
  • France is among many countries with large, disgruntled Muslim populations
  • 4. U.S. Has Mostly Been Spared:
  • There's no indication that the migrant influx has led to terror attacks. But the huge flow has shown that there's no real obstacle to moving across borders.
  • Muslims in the U.S., both those born in America and those who have immigrated, tend to be more successful, better integrated, and have turned to radicalism less often than Muslims in Europe and elsewhere.
  • 5. Racking Up Powerful Enemies: The Islamic State has rapidly accumulated sworn enemies far beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria, and the combined forces lining up against ISIS will put increasing pressure on the group.
  • France and Russia are now bombing in Syria.
  • The Islamic State has not suffered any major setbacks since its dramatic rise, and its many opponents have not acted in a coordinated manner.
  • As French authorities worked to piece together the details Saturday, here are five ways to think about the terror attacks that claimed more than 120 lives in Paris.
  • Beyond The Middle East: Until very recently, ISIS fought and carried out attacks almost exclusively in Syria and Iraq. But the group has now claimed responsibility or been blamed for major terror attacks in four additional countries in the past month.
  • suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people at an Oct. 10 rally in Ankara, the worst terror attack in the country's modern history
katyshannon

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...ML_SAUDI_ARABIA

news associated press saudi arabia iran syria sunni shiite execution protest reform politics crisis culture

shared by katyshannon on 04 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia announced Sunday it was severing diplomatic relations with Shiite powerhouse Iran amid escalating tensions over the Sunni kingdom's execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.
  • The move came hours after protesters stormed and set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran and followed harsh criticism by Iran's top leader of the Saudis' execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.
  • Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Iranian diplomatic personnel had 48 hours to leave his country and all Saudi diplomatic personnel in Iran had been called home.
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  • Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned Saudi Arabia on Sunday of "divine revenge" over al-Nimr's death, while Riyadh accused Tehran of supporting "terrorism" in a war of words that threatened to escalate even as the U.S. and the European Union sought to calm the region.
  • It also illustrated the kingdom's new aggressiveness under King Salman. During his reign, Saudi Arabia has led a coalition fighting Shiite rebels in Yemen and staunchly opposed regional Shiite power Iran, even as Tehran struck a nuclear deal with world powers.
  • The mass execution of al-Nimr and 46 others - the largest carried out by Saudi Arabia in three and a half decades - laid bare the sectarian divisions gripping the region as demonstrators took to the streets from Bahrain to Pakistan in protest.
  • On Saturday, Saudi Arabia put al-Nimr and three other Shiite dissidents to death, along with a number of al-Qaida militants. Al-Nimr's execution drew protests from Shiites around the world, who backed his call for reform and wider political freedom for their sect.
  • Al-Nimr was a central figure in Arab Spring-inspired protests by Saudi Arabia's Shiite minority until his arrest in 2012. He was convicted of terrorism charges but denied advocating violence.
  • While the split between Sunnis and Shiites dates back to the early days of Islam and disagreements over the successor to Prophet Muhammad, those divisions have only grown as they intertwine with regional politics, with both Iran and Saudi Arabia vying to be the Mideast's top power.
  • Iran accuses Saudi Arabia of supporting terrorism in part because it backs Syrian rebel groups fighting to oust its embattled ally, President Bashar Assad. Riyadh points to Iran's backing of the Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shiite militant groups in the region as a sign of its support for terrorism. Iran also has backed Shiite rebels in Yemen known as Houthis.
  • Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard said Saudi Arabia's "medieval act of savagery" would lead to the "downfall" of the country's monarchy. Saudi Arabia's Foreign Ministry said that by condemning the execution, Iran had "revealed its true face represented in support for terrorism."
  • In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the Obama administration was aware of the Saudis' severing of ties with Tehran. "We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences and we will continue to urge leaders across the region to take affirmative steps to calm tensions," Kirby said.
  • Earlier, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini spoke to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by phone and urged Tehran to "defuse the tensions and protect the Saudi diplomats," according to a statement.
  • The disruption in relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran may have implications for peace efforts in Syria. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and others spent significant time trying to bring the countries to the negotiating table and they both sat together at talks aimed at finding a diplomatic solution to the civil war. Last month, Saudi Arabia convened a meeting of Syrian opposition figures that was designed to create a delegation to attend peace talks with the Syrian government that are supposed to begin in mid-January.
lenaurick

Paris attacks: Interview details ringleader's plan - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

paris attacks politics policy

shared by lenaurick on 05 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • he ringleader of the Paris terror attacks boasted that he'd slipped into France without identification papers -- and that 90 people from different countries did the same, according to a widely cited radio interview.
  • Abaaoud was planning to carry out attacks against a police station and a child care center in the Paris business district of La Defense on November 19,
  • The ringleader proudly claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks, which killed 130 people in the French capital. But he purportedly disputed her accusation that he'd killed innocent people. "No, they are not innocent. You have to look at what is happening to us in Syria," Abaaoud said, according to the woman.
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  • The ringleader's purported comments that 90 people had slipped into France without identification papers and fanned out across the region come as authorities estimate that about 1,900 people have returned to Europe after fighting in Iraq and Syria.
  • Abaaoud, a Belgian-Moroccan ISIS operative, was killed in a raid on an apartment in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis six days after the attacks that killed 130 people.
  • France and Belgium are considered to be at the highest risk of a terror attack, a U.S. intelligence official said, while Germany and Britain also face a heightened terror threat.
rachelramirez

A Swedish Girl, ISIS and a Cautionary Tale of Global Terrorism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-tale-of-global-terrorism.html

new york times terrorism ISIS crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • A Swedish Girl, ISIS and a Cautionary Tale of Global Terrorism
  • Europe has been troubled for several years by the number of its young people who have run off to join the Islamic State, and is increasingly concerned about the potential for them to come home to carry out terrorist acts in their native countries
  • Senior Kurdish officials say she was rescued on Feb. 17 by Kurdish special forces without a shot being fired. The officials said they were able to locate her using information derived from her occasional use of the Internet, but they offered no details.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Sweden now has more would-be jihadists per capita going to fight for extremist groups than any European country other than Belgium, according to a 2015 study by the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence.
  • Recruiters for the Islamic State and for Al Qaeda affiliates active in Syria and other groups, including the Shabab, target the second generation of immigrants, terrorism experts said.
johnsonma23

ISIS trail of Terror | Is ISIS a Threat to the U.S.? - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...terror-isis-threat-us-25053190

ISIS US crisis

shared by johnsonma23 on 19 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • AQI was weakened in Iraq in 2007 as a result of what is known as the Sunni Awakening, when a large alliance of Iraqi Sunni tribes, supported by the U.S., fought against the jihadist group. AQI saw an opportunity to regain its power and expand its ranks in the Syrian conflict
  • Although originally an al Qaeda affiliate, ISIS and al-Baghdadi had a public falling out in 2013 with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s replacement and leader of al Qaeda “core,” over the role of another al Qaeda group, the al-Nursa Front, in Syria
  • ISIS saw a series of successes as it has cut its way from Syria into Iraq and towards Baghdad using a combination of military expertise and unimaginable brutality.
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  • The Iraqi government and much of its military officer corps are mostly made up of Shi’a Muslims, whereas much of the areas ISIS has retained in Iraq are predominantly Sunni
  • the Iraqi military forces are often operating in areas where the local population may be more willing to tolerate, or even support ISIS
  • The U.S.-led coalition against ISIS expanded its aggressive bombing campaign against the group into Syria in September 2014 and has bombarded the terror group virtually daily since.
  • ISIS primarily focused its attention on its regional ambitions prior to the U.S.-led bombing campaig
  • One of the gunmen in a dual terror attack in Paris in January 2015 claimed that he was part of ISIS, though the other shooters in that attack were linked to an al Qaeda affiliate.
  • authorities in the U.S. announced they had arrested an Ohio man and ISIS supporter who planned to bomb the U.S. Capitol.
  • , Western intelligence agencies are concerned about those who travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with ISIS before coming back home.
redavistinnell

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ism-sinai-air-crash-egypt-says

evidence terrorism sinai plane crash egypt

shared by redavistinnell on 14 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says
  • Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997
  • The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.
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  • Last month, the federal security service’s director, Alexander Bortnikov, said an improvised bomb with the force of up to 1kg of TNT blew up onboard the plane, and traces of explosives had been found in the plane debris.
  • The country’s tourism industry has been badly hit over the years by the fallout from terror attacks. Holiday flights from Russia and Britain to its top winter sun resort will not resume until 2016, leaving it virtually empty for what should be peak season, and overall tourist revenues are expected to fall by at least 10% this year.
Javier E

Obama's Terrorism Speech: Does the President Take the ISIS Threat Seriously? - The Atla... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...419055

obama terrorism ISIS threat policy GOP

shared by Javier E on 07 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Unlike Rubio, he considers violent jihadism a small, toxic strain within Islamic civilization, not a civilization itself.
  • And unlike Bush, he doesn’t consider it a serious ideological competitor.
  • While Republicans think ISIS is strong and growing stronger, Obama thinks it’s weak and growing weaker.
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  • In Obama’s view, I suspect, democratic capitalism’s real ideological adversary is not the “radical Islam” of ISIS. It’s the authoritarian, state-managed capitalism of China.
  • While Obama doesn’t say it outright, he appears to be subtly referencing Robert Pape’s influential argument that the great driver of suicide terrorism is not jihadist ideology but occupation
  • Obama also argued that the Islamic State is losing in the Middle East, where the “strategy that we are using now—air strikes, special forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country” will produce a “sustainable victory.”
  • The leading GOP presidential candidates reject that. They believe defeating the Islamic State requires some dramatic, if vaguely defined, new military and ideological exertion. Obama, by contrast, thinks America simply needs to not screw up. That means not being “drawn once more” into an effort to “occupy foreign lands,” thus allowing the Islamic State to use “our presence to draw new recruits.
  • “Terrorists,” he declared on Sunday, now “turn to less complicated acts of violence like the mass shootings that are all too common in our society.” In other words, the Islamic State probably can’t do anything to America that we Americans aren’t doing to ourselves all the time, and now largely take for granted.
  • Because Obama, unlike Bush and Rubio, believes the Islamic State is ideologically weak, he thinks America’s current strategy will eventually defeat it unless America commits a large occupying force, which would give the jihadists a massive shot in the arm.
  • The other unforced error America must avoid, according to Obama, is “letting this fight be defined as a war between America and Islam. That, too, is what groups like ISIL want.
  • Because the GOP candidates see violent jihadism as a powerful, seductive ideology, they think that many American Muslims are at risk of becoming terrorists, and thus that the United States must monitor them more aggressively.
  • Because Obama sees violent jihadism as ideologically weak and unattractive, he thinks that few American Muslims will embrace it unless the United States makes them feel like enemies in their own country—which is exactly what Donald Trump risks doing.
  • Like Francis Fukuyama, the author of the famed 1989 essay “The End of History,” he believes that powerful, structural forces will lead liberal democracies to triumph over their foes—so long as these democracies don’t do stupid things like persecuting Muslims at home or invading Muslim lands abroad.
  • His Republican opponents, by contrast, believe that powerful and sinister enemies are overwhelming America, either overseas (the Rubio version) or domestically (the Trump version).
Javier E

The Charlottesville Shuffle - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...the-charlottesville-shuffle

terrorism language white supremacy trump right-wing

shared by Javier E on 16 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • we fetishize the word “terrorism” far too much. It’s really just a sub rosa dialogue about Islamist political violence. We use this word as code for political violence carried out by Muslims.
  • It’s a word we use to make Islamist violence uniquely threatening and evil and make right-wing (and other forms of terrorism and political violence) inherently individual and thus politically meaningless, invisible.
  • The deeper issue is the learned and willfully blindness toward right-wing terrorism in the US and Europe.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • the key point will remain that, just as with Charlottesville, he does everything within his power to avoid discussing right-wing violence or terrorism as part of a broader movement or context. This is unsurprising since he is a major part of the context
  • After all, while dismissing him as clownish personally, the New Zealand mass shooter praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” This is no accident
  • Trump’s former advisor Whalid Phares made the point clearly enough this morning. You can disagree with the methods but appreciate the legitimacy of the terrorists’ goals. That is to say, you can if you harbor racist, eliminationist political beliefs and values.
Javier E

Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group | World ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...americas-neo-nazi-terror-group

leader white supremacy group terror

shared by Javier E on 24 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Using encrypted apps, members of the highly organized group planned terror campaigns; vandalized synagogues; established armed training camps and recruited new members.
  • The US attorney for Maryland, Robert K Hur, speaking after the recent arrest of three members of the Base, said that they “did more than talk – they took steps to act and act violently on their racist views”.
  • Rinaldo Nazzaro has maintained a decidedly low profile: he has no visible presence on any major social media platforms, no published writings under his own name, and no profile in local or national media.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Guardian was able to unravel Nazzaro’s identity due to his 2018 activities in a remote corner of the Pacific north-west.
  • Last August, an Oregon-based antifascist group, Eugene Antifa, warned that the Base was planning a “hate camp” in the neighboring state of Washington, and claimed Nazzaro (operating under the alias of “Spear”) had purchased land in Stevens county for training purposes. This warning came after a leak of the Base’s internal chats.
  • Property record searches revealed that three 10-acre blocks of undeveloped land were purchased in December 2018 for $33,000 in the name of a Delaware LLC called “Base Global”. In a telephone conversation in late November, Manke confirmed that this was the block of land he had been referring to.
  • The location of the land is consistent with “Norman Spear’s” advocacy of a white supremacist strategy called the Northwest Territorial Imperative (NTI), which was promoted by the deceased white supremacist Harold Covington.
  • The strategy argues for the creation of a separatist ethnostate in the Pacific north-west and encourages white supremacists to move to the region.
  • The plan, he said, would trigger the relocation to the Pacific north-west of the white population in the United States.
  • Under the motto “there is no political solution”, the Base embraces an “accelerationist” ideology, which holds that acts of violence and terror are required in order to push liberal democracy towards collapse, preparing the way for white supremacists to seize power and institute an ethnostate.
  • Materials inspected and sources consulted by the Guardian indicate that Nazzaro, as “Spear”, has faced persistent suspicions from current and former members of the group that he is a “fed”, or the agent of a foreign government, or that the Base is a “honeypot” intended to lure neo-Nazis out into the open for the benefit of law enforcement agencies.
  • The Guardian has discovered that all of the business addresses associated with Nazzaro’s OSI LLCs are “virtual offices”. This describes a situation where a second company provides a business address, and sometimes meeting rooms and greeting services, for businesses who do not wish to maintain their own premises.
Javier E

Why Students Should Care About the Wars America Fights - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545351

war history education wars military

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The more I asked my students about their thoughts on the Middle East, the more I realized that it was not simply a matter of disinterest (although that is certainly a factor among some), but rather that the subject only existed to them in an abstract manner.
  • My high-school experience was shaped by 9/11, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after the towers fell. It wasn’t until after I returned from deployment to Iraq and entering college that I began to think more about what this war meant and how it has fundamentally changed American society. But for my students, this was a war that had existed for almost their entire lives: In fact, from the moment many of them were born, the U.S. has been engaged in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the indelible mark that terrorism has left on Europe in recent years, or the very visible specter of ISIS operating within the Middle East and Africa today. How could there be no questions?
  • I wanted students to actively seek understanding of the region and the war that shaped a new generation of vets, including myself. I wanted to know that this history would not be lost, that a war costly in blood and treasure would not be forgotten; student detachment now would mean their detachment as they entered college and, ultimately, the “real world.” The consequences of a disinterested society are severe when considering the inevitability of future American military mobilization.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • I began to wonder if the disconnect is generational, whether today’s children are uniquely disconnected from the war that has shaped their lives
  • Consider the Vietnam War: The number of U.S. households owning a television increased by 75 percent between 1950 and 1960. By the time the Tet Offensive took place in 1968—a major turning point in the war—nearly 95 percent of households owned a TV. Images of the war were directly broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans via the big three networks
  • the fact that it was America’s first truly televised war speaks to its magnitude as a media event. Personal connections also rendered teenagers hyper-exposed to the war. Even though a minority of those who served in Vietnam were conscripted, the draft was still a salient aspect of the war, one of which families were all too aware
  • By contrast, in 2010, when the war in Iraq reached its seven-year mark, just 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the conflict. And currently, the proportion of Americans having served in the U.S.’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at less than 1 percent
  • Fewer families maintain connections to the military today than in previous eras, and this fact is especially pronounced among younger Americans; the younger you are, the less likely you are to know anyone who served in the armed forces.
  • With no relatives or family friends having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and with such little media exposure to the conflicts, many young people do not have any reference point for understanding the impact of war.
  • Experts argue history education—let alone nuanced history education that encourages critical thinking—is a low priority for America’s public schools, and if that’s the case this flaw only exacerbates the problem. As does the reality, according to some critics, that many modern-day textbooks teach a highly biased account of the “War on Terror.”
  • What does this mean? America’s youth aren’t apathetic—rather, they’ve grown up during a war obscured by modern American culture. If one doesn’t care to look at the war, then he doesn’t have to
  • . It’s not indifference per se, but instead lack of context.
  • If education is truly an investment in the future, then that education must involve addressing consequences of prolonged war.
  • It is today’s students who will foot the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan when they become taxpayers. It is today’s students who are now—and will continue to be—exposed to an entirely new set of policies and institutions have been developed in the name of the “War on Terror.” Today’s students, for instance, will continue to grow up in an era of both ever-increasing electronic surveillance and reduction of privacy.
  • Students’ silence speaks to the need for American schools to address a growing divide between the military and the American public—to include as a core part of the curriculum lessons on this ill-defined war that has left societies in ruin and changed American politics. At some point, students must learn that it is their civic responsibility to understand and assess violence being waged in their name.
malonema1

Anger over Donald Trump's UK crime tweet - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...uk-politics-41695667

trump US UK

shared by malonema1 on 21 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump has been accused of fuelling hate crime with a tweet erroneously linking a rise in the UK crime rate to "radical Islamic terror".He said crime in the UK had risen by 13% amid the "spread" of Islamist terror - despite the figure referring to all crimes, not just terrorism.
  • US media outlets have speculated whether Mr Trump's tweet followed a TV report on One America News Network, a conservative TV channel, which aired the statistics on Friday morning.
  • Donald Trump is half right. Crime has gone up by 13% - but not in the UK. The increase announced yesterday covered England and Wales whereas Scotland and Northern Ireland publish their data separately.But overlooking that mistake, what about the phrase that appears to connect the increase to the "spread of radical Islamic terror"?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • He had earlier lashed out at Sadiq Khan, tweeting that the London mayor had offered a "pathetic excuse" to Londoners after the London Bridge terror attack by telling people not to be alarmed.The Office for National Statistics said it would not comment on Mr Trump's tweet, but added that the survey relates to all crimes in England and Wales between 2016 and 2017.
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