Here's Where To Fight Islamic Extremism

The place to battle Islamic extremism isn't Afghanistan. Try Cairo instead. The Washington Post shows where and how Islamic extremism breeds:

Egyptian police on Tuesday beat back and detained pro-democracy demonstrators in central Cairo calling for constitutional reforms and a repeal of the decades-old emergency law that restricts a broad array of personal rights.

At least 90 people were detained, according to organizers of the rally from the 6th of April movement, a mostly youth-led organization formed two years ago that is pushing for more political freedom
.
Protester Amal Sharaf, 35, an office manager in an advertising agency, was hysterical after being beaten by a police officer with a baton. "I've been to protests before, but I've never been beaten," she said, grabbing her wounded arm. "We're trying to change the emergency law that we've been living with for 28 years."

The demonstration came amid political uncertainty, with parliamentary elections slated for this year and a presidential election next year. President Hosni Mubarak, 81, who had his gall bladder and a growth on his small intestine removed in a surgery performed abroad last month, has ruled Egypt for nearly three decades. He has not said yet whether he will compete in next year's election, fueling speculation that he might try to ensure his son, Gamal, succeeds him.

Now there's your problem. As in Saudi Arabia and other places, we're propping up a tyrant. In this case it's Mubarak. Moderate Egyptians, Muslims of course, keep getting oppressed when they clamor for democratic reforms. Get too pushy and Mubarak's secret police whisk you away in the night.

What happens? Moderates eventually get frustrated. Many turn to the only organization that stands up to Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood, a decidedly Islamist outfit. They're the only game in town. They don't turn to us because they know that we're standing behind their oppressor, keeping the guy in power. We even give him the weapons he uses against them.

When we spend decades pursuing policies that radicalize the Arab Street what in hell do we expect except to drive moderate Muslims into the arms of the extremists - their one and only option?

British Police Monitoring Muslim Kids

I'm not sure how I feel about this. The Guardian reports that a British police programme has identified 180 children in Britain as potential Islamist terrorists.

The Channel project, a pilot scheme established in April 2007 and run by six police forces, provides parents, teachers and youth workers with training to recognise the warning signs of "grooming" by radicals and a mechanism to report concerns over a child, or group of children, to the police. A panel of community leaders then decides the best course of action, in the most serious cases referring them to social services.

Keen to assuage fears the scheme targets Muslim children unfairly, the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) last night said the aim was to steer vulnerable children away from radicalism before it was too late.

I suppose it makes sense but isn't there someone other than the police force that can handle this? There's just something about cops spying on kids that is worrying.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/28/children-extremist-terrorism-uk-polic

Pushing the Fear Agenda

Thanks to Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria for shining a spotlight on a Simon Fraser University report that reveals how "terrorism" statistics have been gamed for nothing other than to make us all afraid - very afraid.

"The U.S. government agency charged with tracking terrorist attacks, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), reported a 41 percent increase from 2005 to 2006 and then equally high levels in 2007. Another major, government-funded database of terrorism, the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terror (MIPT), says that the annual toll of fatalities from terrorism grew 450 percent (!) between 1998 and 2006. A third report, the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), also government-funded, recorded a 75 percent jump in 2004, the most recent year available for the data it uses.

The Simon Fraser study points out that all three of these data sets have a common problem. They count civilian casualties from the war in Iraq as deaths caused by terrorism. This makes no sense. Iraq is a war zone, and as in other war zones around the world, many of those killed are civilians. Study director Prof. Andrew Mack notes, "Over the past 30 years, civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bosnia, Guatemala, and elsewhere have, like Iraq, been notorious for the number of civilians killed. But although the slaughter in these cases was intentional, politically motivated, and perpetrated by non-state groups-and thus constituted terrorism as conceived by MIPT, NCTC, and START-it was almost never described as such."

Including Iraq massively skews the analysis. In the NCTC and MIPT data, Iraq accounts for 80 percent of all deaths counted. But if you set aside the war there, terrorism has in fact gone way down over the past five years. In both the START and MIPT data, non-Iraq deaths from terrorism have declined by more than 40 percent since 2001. (The NCTC says the number has stayed roughly the same, but that too is because of a peculiar method of counting.) In the only other independent analysis of terrorism data, the U.S.-based IntelCenter published a study in mid-2007 that examined "significant" attacks launched by Al Qaeda over the past 10 years. It came to the conclusion that the number of Islam-ist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.

The Simon Fraser study notes that the decline in terrorism appears to be caused by many factors, among them successful counterterrorism operations in dozens of countries and infighting among terror groups. But the most significant, in the study's view, is the "extraordinary drop in support for Islamist terror organizations in the Muslim world over the past five years." These are largely self-inflicted wounds. The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them.

The University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (I wish academic centers would come up with shorter names!) has released another revealing study, documenting a 54 percent decline in the number of organizations using violence across the Middle East and North Africa between 1985 and 2004. The real rise, it points out, is in the number of groups employing nonviolent means of protest, which increased threefold during the same period.

Why have you not heard about studies like this or the one from Simon Fraser, which was done by highly regarded scholars, released at the United Nations and widely discussed in many countries around the world-from Canada to Australia? Because it does not fit into the narrative of fear that we have all accepted far too easily."

There you have it. The far-right Bush/Cheney/McCain/Harper gang keep telling us that we're in a fight for the very survival of our civilization because they don't dare acknowledge that Islamist jihadism is collapsing under its own weight. They can't, make that won't, tell us the truth because it undermines what Zakaria properly calls their "narrative of fear."

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/fareed_zakaria/2008/05/the_only_thing_we_have_to_fear.html