London’s Hour of Reckoning

Err.......

Professor Pape seems to go against all the accepted theories regarding terrorism...

One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Professor Pape has created the first comprehensive database of every suicide terrorist attack in the world from 1980 until today. With striking clarity and precision, Professor Pape uses this unprecedented research to debunk widely held misconceptions about the nature of suicide terrorism and provide a new lens that makes sense of the threat we face.

FACT: Suicide terrorism is not primarily a product of Islamic fundamentalism.

FACT: The world’s leading practitioners of suicide terrorism are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka–a secular, Marxist-Leninist group drawn from Hindu families.

FACT: Ninety-five percent of suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of coherent campaigns organized by large militant organizations with significant public support.

FACT: Every suicide terrorist campaign has had a clear goal that is secular and political: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

FACT: Al-Qaeda fits the above pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, one major objective of al-Qaeda is the expulsion of U.S. troops from the Persian Gulf region, and as a result there have been repeated attacks by terrorists loyal to Osama bin Laden against American troops in Saudi Arabia and the region as a whole.

FACT: Despite their rhetoric, democracies–including the United States–have routinely made concessions to suicide terrorists. Suicide terrorism is on the rise because terrorists have learned that it’s effective.

In this wide-ranging analysis, Professor Pape offers the essential tools to forecast when some groups are likely to resort to suicide terrorism and when they are not. He also provides the first comprehensive demographic profile of modern suicide terrorist attackers. With data from more than 460 such attackers–including the names of 333–we now know that these individuals are not mainly poor, desperate criminals or uneducated religious fanatics but are often well-educated, middle-class political activists.

More than simply advancing new theory and facts, these pages also answer key questions about the war on terror:

• Are we safer now than we were before September 11?
• Was the invasion of Iraq a good counterterrorist move?
• Is al-Qaeda stronger now than it was before September 11?

Professor Pape answers these questions with analysis grounded in fact, not politics, and recommends concrete ways for today’s states to fight and prevent terrorist attacks. Military options may disrupt terrorist operations in the short term, but a lasting solution to suicide terrorism will require a comprehensive, long-term approach–one that abandons visions of empire and relies on a combined strategy of vigorous homeland security, nation building in troubled states, and greater energy independence.

For both policy makers and the general public, Dying to Win transcends speculation with systematic scholarship, making it one of the most important political studies of recent time.


Note

Use Google with the keyword `` Professor Pape ``....and it will churn out... YOU know how many Links...

#334 by ferozk on July 14, 2005 10:45am PT


P.S.: BTW, if had a dollar for every peal of laughter you must be expressing, I would not need my day job! :)


If the backlash turns Pakistan and pakis away from their pro-jihadi leanings, the whole jihad/holy war will be a irrelevant footnote in the subcontinent`s history...

It`ll be like like Manto`s jinnah obsession...it`ll be a thing of the past, nobody will care about it and we`ll all be laughing over it, enjoying a beer together in bombay or lahore....

Re: # 331

Arjun, the article`s analysis was exceptional.

As to the Daily Times article and the reaction in Lahore, I think that something unique has happened. Probably, for the first time in history of Pakistan, its ``elites`` have been shorn of their previleged status and identified, with common criminals by the virtue of their nationality. The fact, which is scaring them is not that they will not visit their summer homes in London, but because they are being held accountable. In Pakistan, these people owned the law and they could skip out of any problem or trouble by using their power and privileged niches in Pakistani society.

However, to the average British person, their social, political and educated status will not matter, because his/her identification of them will be based on their nationality, creed and ethnic origins. They are on the threshold of feeling and being treated, as they have treated their fellow citizens in Pakistan for so long; with contempt. In the eyes of the British, they are exactly, what and how they viewed their lesser privelieged compatriots in Pakistan - as human garbage.

They are scared and afraid, because for the first time in their lives, they are being judged and held accountable in a court of justice, where they cannot bribe a verdict in their favor.

Ciao

P.S.: BTW, if had a dollar for every peal of laughter you must be expressing, I would not need my day job! :)

#319 by ferozk on July 14, 2005 9:13am PT


Pakistan`s prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, preaches enlightened moderation, and about Pakistan`s image.
Pakistan`s president, General Pervez Musharraf, has not commented upon the unfolding events,


What can they say that wouldn`t make it worse than it already is...Anything they would say would be disingenous...The ``Pakis are victims`` isn`t selling well in the west..

The brit-pakistani suicide bombers are being trained in camps run by the Lashkar-e-Toiba..you know...the same LeT freedom fighters that the pakistani army bred to fight it`s wars...

New wave of British terrorists are taught at schools, not in the mountains

Some Pakistani-based militant groups are reported to still scout for recruits at mosques among Muslim communities in Britain.

Smaller British mosques have their own links with madrassas in the Punjab and other regions of Pakistan though they insist these are genuine schools of Koranic study, not terror training camps.

Well known militant groups, lsuch as Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat ul Mujahideen have operated openly in the past and in some cases with the military’s support, and boasted of their British recruits.

Mohammed Bilal, a Briton who was associated with Jaish-e-Mohammed, was the UK’s first suicide bomber when in Christmas Day 2000 he rammed a vehicle packed with explosives into an Indian military post in Kashmir.

Attacker `was recruited` at terror group`s religious school

ONE of the suicide bombers who struck in London was probably recruited when he attended a religious school in Pakistan with strong links to al-Qaeda and its south-east Asian offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyyah, The Scotsman can reveal.

Security sources in Pakistan are investigating a tip-off that Shehzad Tanweer attended a religious school run by the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) during a recent visit to the country. The group`s founder has publicly stated that he believes suicide bombing to be the ``best form of jihad [holy war]``.

Re: # 330

Ahmed sahib, I was not talking about western nations taking steps to deal, with the problem.

The Muslim governments will be forced to deal, with the problem and sort out their internal issues.

Ciao

Brilliant op-ed piece..

The act of small-time losers
Anatole Kaletsky
Thursday`s atrocities should be compared to the lunacy of Timothy McVeigh`s Oklahoma bombing

HOW SHOULD we react to the news that the killers responsible for last week’s London bombings were probably “home-grown terrorists”, born and brought up in respectable suburbs of northern England, rather than medieval religious fanatics, brutalised and desensitised to the value of human life in the bloodbaths of Chechnya, Iraq or Afghanistan?

The most important conclusion to be drawn from the bombers’ banal backgrounds is that these killings should be treated as pure criminal acts with no political significance whatsoever. The only point of trying to understand the political or religious motivations of the bombers is to identify and pursue any accomplices, a task that is best left to police and forensic psychologists. For politicians, media commentators and community leaders to try to understand or explain the killers’ motives is not only to glamorise these suicidal misfits as religious or political martyrs, but also to mislead ourselves about the true reasons for their acts.

Osama bin Laden has a philosophy which, however deranged and repugnant, is genuinely important in trying to explain and anticipate his actions. But the four young Muslims who made a suicide pact and decided to take 60 Londoners with them, are best compared to the random psychopathic killers who shoot their way to brief notoriety in every advanced society from time to time.

In this sense, the most useful analogue for last week’s outrage in London may not be September 11 or even the bombing of Madrid last year, but the worst act of terrorism in postwar Western history before September 11: the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people in 1995. Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator, was, like the London bombers, a small-time loser who felt he was acting out of intense ideological and religious motives. He was a fervent white supremacist and belonged to an extensive network of neo-Nazi fanatics who are generally believed to number many thousands across the US. His commitment to an essentially religious doctrine — that a global Jewish conspiracy, using African-Americans as their subhuman foot-soldiers, was taking over the world and preparing to exterminate or enslave all white Christians — was every bit as sincere as the faith and “piety” of many jihadist terrorists.

After McVeigh’s arrest, thousands of heavily armed neo-Nazis quite like him continued to live in the mountains of Idaho and Utah and the hills of Missouri (and live there to this day), yet the Oklahoma atrocity was not repeated. Partly this may have been because McVeigh was treated as a common criminal after his capture, not as the standard-bearer of a politico-religious movement. There was, of course, intense interest in McVeigh’s background and motivation, but it focused almost entirely on his psychological aberrations, not on his politics or religion. Instead of appearing as a glamorous martyr, McVeigh came across as a lonely loser, a pathetic embarrassment to his family and all who knew him, rather than a role model for other rebellious youths.

It certainly did not occur to anyone after the Oklahoma bombing to apologise for the racial desegregation which had provoked the American neo-Nazis and their ideological antecedents, the Ku Klux Klan. Nobody suggested abolishing affirmative action or banning Jews from public office on the grounds that racial mixing and the prominence of Jews was angering white supremacists and acting as “a recruiting sergeant” for more neo-Nazi terrorists who might copy McVeigh.

Should the political sensitivities and religious aspirations of jihadist killers be treated with any greater respect? The answer is clearly, no.

But if a studied, contemptuous indifference is the right response to the personal motivations of Britain’s home-grown jihadists, this does not mean that public policy should do nothing in the face of their psychopathic acts. The obvious responses are the same as they were after Oklahoma — more security and surveillance and better infiltration of domestic extremist groups, which should be easier than the infiltration of foreign jihadist movements. Above all there must be a rock-solid commitment to give no quarter to any of the terrorists’ alleged grievances or ideological demands.

Morally, today’s Muslim extremists must be put exactly on a par with neo-Nazis. Their violence and hatred may be motivated by deep philosophical convictions and a genuine sense of grievance, but the same was true of Hitler. Thus the soul-searching and debate that Britain — and the rest of the modern world — must undertake about the religious sensitivities of Muslim extremists is not about how to accommodate them but how to isolate them completely from the mainstream of Muslim thinking, which is compatible with peaceful coexistence alongside other cultures in the modern world. To do this jihadism must be recognised explicitly as exactly equivalent to the neo-Nazi movement, even if it manifests itself as sincere religious belief.

The serious response to the jihadists’ religious demands should be to trace them back to their source in the Wahhabi religious schools of Saudi Arabia, with their exaltation of death and martyrdom. For Saudi princes to support religious charities and schools that extol martyrdom — or for British mosques to accept money from such Saudi charities — must become as shameful as it would be for Alabama politicians to remain KKK members or for German political parties to take donations from self-confessed followers of Adolf Hitler.

Just as conservative America totally isolated the white supremacists and neo-Nazis after the bombings in Oklahoma, the rational Muslim community in Britain must be forced to reject completely the small minority of Wahhabi fanatics who boast that they “love death”. Only then can there be any hope of restoring respect for human life in the Islamic community and reducing the concept of martyrdom to what it really amounts to: a sad, lonely and utterly futile suicide.

ferozk #325 I agree with you that UK/US will fix the problem of muslim terrorism in due course. But to do that, they wont need to change the character of these people hamidm was talking about.

What will likely happen is that UK and US etc. will tighten their security measures (the cameras in London that pictured the bombers were originally installed to keep a lookout for irish terrorists); tighten their immigration laws, tighten their free speech laws (much abused by the mullahs in UK for example). But I have no doubt they will fix the problem to the extent they can within their national jurisdiction.

But will Pakistanis (the characters hamidm talked about, and the many other middle class types in Pakistan) get off this religion-trip they are on? I think that will happen only when the military government steps aside, and after that it will take a long time for withdrawal from the religion-trip that too many pakstanis are on nowadays.

mohammad tufail yehi sochta hoga ke teen din maiN ye saabit nahiN kiya ja sakta ke ye pakistani musulmaanoN ka kaam tha, par ek din maiN wo ye soch sakta hai ke 9/11 ya 7/7 ek zionist saazish tha.

bimaari hi bimaari.

#322 by ferozk on July 14, 2005 9:40am PT


The reaction in Lahore has been, to say the least, remarkable. People are denying the fact that the instigators of the London bombs were Pakistani Muslims.


From the daily times(I think they plagiarized this from a brit newspaper)

Pakistanis shows disbelief at links to 7/7

ISLAMABAD: Pakistanis reacted with shock and disbelief on Wednesday to news that at least three of four suspected London bombers were of Pakistani ancestry, with some saying they were afraid a backlash might make it harder to get visas to travel to the West. Many refused to acknowledge that members of Britain’s Pakistani community could have been involved, despite increasing evidence pointing to the men. “How can they establish in three days that Pakistanis or Muslims were involved in it? It seems to be a fake story. It seems to be a drama,” said Mohammed Turfail, a 45-year-old computer salesman in Lahore. “I don’t think that any Pakistani or British citizen of Pakistani origin could have been involved.”

Tahmad #320: ``So, being the genius that you are, you imply that Hamidm did not in fact go to a mosque to attend a funeral.``

Not, at all. I think he definitely went to a mosque. Where did I state that he did not go to a mosque? I just stated that I am surprised that he visits the mosque, so much, considering his views on Islam, and religions, in general. There is a regular mention of going to mosques and to Islamic functions, in the interacts, I have had with him.

Normally, people who reject religion, don`t go to mosques, churches, temples etc., so much. If at all.......I hope that clarifies my position. If you have any other queries, kindly ask, before making an assumption..........

Hamidm: I shall hasten the to complete my work of reinterpreting the Quran in order to alleviate your suffering. ;-)

Re: # 317

I have to disagree, with you.

The terrorist bombings in London had nothing to do, with Iraq.

It had everything to do, with the generic mentality of a Pakistani mind, bred in the total unflinching absolutism of Islam and educated in the virulence of an Islamic indoctrination predicated on the glorification of religiously sanctioned violence.

Ciao

there are pakistani papers that wouldn`t even acknowledge that the bombers were pakistani. they were being referred to as south asians. a term many pakistanis do not care for. it comes as no surprise that there would be pakistanis who`d be living in denial.

as long as they were british of pakistani descent they had pakistani heritage and they were muslim, but when they bomb and kill, suddenly they are not muslim anymore? or even pakistani?

if you ask me i think it is escapism, denial and insanity.

Salim Effendi #316 Marhabba!! Nasilindiz? Yes, it is indeed a sad to read the news. Much better to visit Turkey as I hope to do some day. There is a map at the Topkapi museum called the Piri Reis map made around 1513 AD, that I hope you will check out if you happen to go that way. It is a map by some turkish admiral of the time (Piri Reis), which shows a fairly accurate map of south america and antartica - in 1513!! This map is based on chinese maps even earlier, and has helped show that the chinese went around south america almost a hundred years before columbus ever touched the caribbean shores.

Anyway - that is what I am reading nowadays. Much better than the depressing news. :-)

re: tahmed32

Ahmed sahib, the time for choices are over.

I promise you that the people, will be made to drink the water, whether they like it or not. :)

I am baffled that people still think that there is another chance for redemption. I honestly do not understand this state of mind, as if this was unexpected. It was not. Twenty years of preaching intolerance and glorifying violence made it possible for events of July 7, 2005 to become a reality.

re: hamidm2

I read your comments, with a sense of wry amusement.

The reaction in Lahore has been, to say the least, remarkable. People are denying the fact that the instigators of the London bombs were Pakistani Muslims. They are claiming that these people, are not Pakistani because their were British and that being such, they cannot be considered as Muslims, because they only practice Islam to please their parents and thus, are not real Muslims at heart.

I have had my share of circular and increasingly tottering arguments, but this must be considered as a new precedent setting argument and I am having an interesting time deciding, whether I should place this argument in the realm of pure escapism, denial or simply in the category of outright insanity.

Ciao

Re: # 317 romair
//....In the past 11 years, I have been to the mosque once....//

Yeah - may be you should go there more often. Then you would know what`s really going on inside muslim ``world``..... And then you wouldn`t come up with gems like ``t-shirts with paki flag`` or other bullsh!t that you keep repeating ad nauseam.