Terror, tradition and good taste

By Irfan Hussain: OpEd Dawn News

THE suicide bomber who murdered Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the Afghan High Peace Council, concealed an explosive in his turban. This is not the first time the traditional head gear has been used to hide a bomb.

Similarly, terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan have carried weapons under burkas that they have used to slaughter innocent people. They were safe in the knowledge that they would not be stopped and searched by male security staff in deeply conservative societies. And, of course, it would be an insult to ask a Pakhtun to take off his turban.

These attitudes and traditions present formidable security challenges. We all remember how Maulana Abdul Aziz tried to escape arrest during the Lal Masjid episode by donning a burka. In India, robbers wore this all-concealing garb to hide their guns in a daring hold-up in a jewellery shop.

Security forces have been unable to come up with an answer to this troubling problem. There simply are not enough policewomen available to search every burka-clad woman in public places, and it would be anathema for male cops to demand that burkas be removed. So lives will continue to be lost at the altar of tradition.

In Europe, the burka and the niqab have become the focus of another kind of scrutiny. The French law barring these garments from public spaces has been hugely controversial. Widely supported by the majority, it has nevertheless divided opinion among feminists and liberals.

In a long recent article in the Guardian exploring the impact of the law, Angelique Chrisafis spoke to a number of women who continue to wear the full-face veil, despite the legal and social problems it poses. One of them, Hind Ahmas, said that on one occasion, she was attacked by a man and a woman on the street who told her “to go back to Afghanistan”. She was also punched in front of her three-year old daughter. The journalist quotes Ahmas about how the law has changed her life.

“In my head, I have to prepare for war every time

Arundhati Roy: 'The Press Decides Which Revolutions To Report'

The celebrated dissenter on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, mass uprisings in the Arab world, the Anna Hazare movement, her old comrades-in arm like Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, Maoism, writing and much else.

Arundhati Roy

Rajesh Joshi: The 10th anniversary of September the 11th attacks on the US is upon us. What do you think has changed in the world, or hasn’t changed, in these years?

Arundhati Roy: Plenty has changed. The numbers of wars that are being fought has been expanded and the rhetoric that allows those wars —that are essentially a battle for resources —is now disguised in the rhetoric of the war on terror, and has become more acceptable in some ways and yet more transparent in other ways.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing that has happened is that increasingly we are seeing that these wars can’t be won. They can be initiated. But they can’t be won. Like the war in Vietnam was not won. The war in Iraq has not been won. The war in Afghanistan has not been won. The war on Libya will not be won. There is this initial pattern where you claim victory and then these occupation forces get mired in a kind of slow war of attrition. That’s also partially responsible for the global economy slowly coming apart.

The other difficulty is that the more the weapons of conventional warfare become nuclear —and all this kind of air bombing and so on —the more it becomes clear to people who are fighting occupations that you can’t win a conventional war. So, ironically the accumulation of conventional weaponry is leading to different kinds of terrorism and suicide bombings and a sort of desperate resort to extremely violent resistances. Violent, ideologically as well, because you have to really motivate people to want to go and blow themselves up. So, [it's a ] very, very dangerous time.

You have been very critical of the war on terror, especially the US policy. Would you have preferred a Saddam Hussain or a Taliban regime in Afghanistan?

Well, it does look as if the Taliban regime is going to return in Afghanistan in some form or shape. And

On Terrorism: Articles by the legendary Eqbal Ahmed

A Presentation at the University of Colorado, Boulder

October 12, 1998 

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish underground in Palestine was described 

as "terrorist." Then new things happened. By 1942, the Holocaust was occurring, 

and a certain liberal sympathy with the Jewish people had built up in the 

Western world. 

At that point, the terrorists of Palestine, who were Zionists, suddenly started 

to be described, by 1944-45, as "freedom fighters." At least two Israeli Prime 

Ministers, including Menachem Begin, have actually, you can find in the books 

and posters with their pictures, saying "Terrorists, Reward This Much." The 

highest reward I have noted so far was 100,000 British pounds on the head of 

Menachem Begin, the terrorist. 

Then from 1969 to 1990 the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, occupied 

the center stage as the terrorist organization. Yasir Arafat has been described 

repeatedly by the great sage of American journalism, William Safire of the New 

York Times, as the "Chief of Terrorism." That's Yasir Arafat. Now, on September 

29, 1998, I was rather amused to notice a picture of Yasir Arafat to the right 

of President Bill Clinton. To his left is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin 

Netanyahu. Clinton is looking towards Arafat and Arafat is looking literally 

like a meek mouse. Just a few years earlier he used to appear with this very 

menacing look around him, with a gun appearing menacing from his belt. You 

remember those pictures, and you remember the next one.

China far west attacks expose violence’s homegrown roots

China said ringleaders of the separatist “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) who trained in Pakistan orchestrated the assault on Sunday that killed six in Kashgar city, Xinjiang region, where many Muslim Uighurs resent the presence of Han Chinese people.

Reuters

BEIJING: The biggest threat to China’s grip on its ethnically divided far western frontier comes from homegrown anger exploding in violence, not from Pakistan-based terrorists officials have blamed for the latest bloodshed.

China said ringleaders of the separatist “East Turkestan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) who trained in Pakistan orchestrated the assault on Sunday that killed six in Kashgar city, Xinjiang region, where many Muslim Uighurs resent the presence of Han Chinese people.

The Uighur (pronounced “Wee-gur”) are a Turkic-speaking people who form a minority in Xinjiang, and are culturally closer to ethnic groups across central Asia and Turkey than the Han Chinese who make the vast majority of China’s population.

Still, many observers doubt the attack was a blow from abroad by ETIM, which they said was struggling, in disarray, and even outright defunct.

Instead, the causes of – and possibly the cure for – ethnic conflict lie mainly within China, they said.

“All conversations I have had with people from China and Pakistan suggests a high degree of skepticism about the real viability of ETIM,” said Andrew Small, a researcher at the German Marshall Fund think tank in Brussels who studies China’s ties with

White House Adviser says U.S. Has 6 Months to ‘Knock Out’ Rattled Qaeda Leadership

New York Times: July 29, 2011
ASPEN, Colo. — President Obama’s top adviser on Pakistan said Friday that the United States had six months to deliver “a knockout blow” to Al Qaeda’s senior leadership in Pakistan while the group was still in turmoil after the killing of Osama bin Laden.


The adviser, Douglas E. Lute, a deputy national security adviser, said the United States needed to increase covert action in Pakistan to take advantage of the disarray within Al Qaeda’s senior ranks.


His comment was widely interpreted to refer to drone strikes, although he did not refer to the operations by name. The United States does not publicly acknowledge the drone strikes, which are classified. “This is a period of turbulence for our enemy,” Mr. Lute said in rare public remarks at a security forum here. “This is the time to double down on the opportunity to defeat Al Qaeda.”

Killing or capturing the group’s half-dozen or so top leaders in the next six months would “seriously degrade Al Qaeda’s ability to regenerate,” he said.

Semantics of Terrorism : By Khalid Aziz

WHEN we discuss issues that have to do with terrorism we often tend to avoid using the correct word or description. Therefore, the first casualty is the truth.

In order to remain in the safe world of non-controversial matters, we avoid discussing the real drivers of terrorism. Instead, we identify hunger, poverty and unemployment as the causes of terrorism. An analysis under this framework does not pay dividends; one must identify the real motivating force that drives terrorism if we are to create the right policies.

We fall into this trap because our minds are hardwired by culture, religion, history and our specific national narrative that forces us to view objects from a preconceived angle. For example, as soon as the recent tragic killings began in Norway, yellow journalism ran amok initially. The western media as well as Al Jazeera called it a jihadist attack; some even accused the
Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami organisation as the instigator.

Police finally charged Breivik, an ‘ethnic Norwegian’, with a history of far-right and anti-Islamic views as the accused. This underscores the point that the media is not neutral. All the current self-praise about being rational and enlightened is imaginary. The East and West have both created the ‘other’ as our Neanderthal forefathers did before us. Similarly, we write evasively when we discuss the causes of terrorism.

The war on terrorism is a phenomenon that prevents clear thinking. The Norwegian tragedy showed that when a society is threatened by any danger the impulsive reaction is to accuse the cultural ‘enemy’. In Western Europe, until the Second World War, the Jew was the accepted scapegoat. The new ‘enemy’ is now the Muslim in

Pakistan's patchy fight against Islamist violence sows confusion: by Myra MacDonald in Reuters

By Myra MacDonald

MINGORA, Pakistan | Fri Jul 8, 2011 6:50am EDT; Reuters
(Reuters) - At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan's Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. "It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong."

(A man takes a nap next to a poster of Osama bin Laden at the Chauburji monument in Lahore May 13, 2011. The message written on the posters read: "The prayer absentia for martyr of Islamic nation is a duty and a debt"/Mani Rana)

Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed - his "absolutely expressionless face" as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.

Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan.

But there the similarity stops.

One is now being "de-radicalized" in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation.

He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that

American report on Hizbut Tahrir, in 2004

Hizbut Tahrir: American report of Hizbut Tahrir in 2004. Important report revealing a lot about this organization http://bit.ly/miSrOX



http://www.islamawareness.net/Deviant/Hizb/confrephiztahrir.pdf