reflectivepundit

The Christchurch Terrorist: The Personified Evil

By Brigitte Nacos

After seeing the most gruesome ISIS videos that showed the meticulously staged executions of hostages, the beheading, the drowning, the burning of victims, I thought that I couldn’t see anything worse, nothing more inhumane.

This morning I was proved wrong.

The video that the Christchurch terrorist shot with a camera seemingly attached to his helmet or cap and streamed on the best known social media platforms during his killing spree is of unspeakable cruelty.

Not only did the killer shoot peaceful, innocent human beings as they were worshiping in a mosque, he aimed at the same people—dead or injured already—again and again.

When he was nearly out of ammunition, he walked back to his car shooting at pedestrians further away to his right and left. He took another handgun from the trunk of the car, walked back into the mosque, and aimed his shots again at the people lying in their blood on the floor.

What I saw was the personified evil devoid of any humanity.

And, no, contrary to the common but false narrative of our time, this terrorist was not a Muslim, not a jihadist affiliated with ISIS or like-minded groups.

He was a White Nationalist, an angry, hateful racist with an Australian passport who wanted to fire the first deadly shots in a war against “invaders” of different religions and races.

When I read the 74-pages of a tract that the mass killer posted online, I was hardly surprised. He expresses the same hate, the same ignorance, the same calls for defending the white race, the same appetite for all-out race war, and the same attacks on humanitarian leaders who opened their countries’ doors to non-white, Christian refugees. On this count, he attacks most of all German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  

These racist outbursts are nothing new; they are central to the regular discourse on white supremacy/neo-Nazi online discussion boards, web sites, and social media accounts. The resemble the message sent by the Alt-Right’s “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville in 2017 that President Trump could not bring himself to condemn.

The mass killer of Christchurch is at home in the white nationalist online milieu. His primitive declaration that the news media characterized as "manifesto" celebrates among others the Norwegian white nationalist Anders Breivik (who killed 77 people to highlight his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim agenda) and the American white supremacist Dylan Roof (who in 2016 killed 9 African Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church).

While Facebook and Twitter closed the terrorist’s accounts and thereby tried to block access to the horrific video and the terrorist tract titled “The Great Replacement,” both were readily available on White Supremacy sites.

That alone attests to the fact that the Christchurch terrorist did not think, plan, and act in a vacuum. He is part of a growing international front of White extremism that spans from North America to Europe and Australia and poses just as serious a threat as does Muslim extremism.

A fact that European governments have come to recognize contrary to top-decision-makers in Washington. 

The White Nationalist Terrorism in Charlottesville and Trump’s Moral Impotency

By Brigitte L. Nacos

President Trump who doesn’t miss any opportunity to condemn “radical Muslim terrorism” could not bring himself to condemn yesterday’s white nationalist terrorism in Charlottesville, Virginia. Instead, he condemned hatred and bigotry “on many sides.”  

The white supremacists with confederate flags and the neo-Nazis with the Third Reich’s swastika flags came to Charlottesville equipped with guns, rifles, baseball bats, and an assortment of other weaponry—not to peacefully “Unite the Right” but to meet counter-demonstrators with violence.

When a 20-year old man from Ohio drove deliberately into a crowd of people, it was an act of vehicular terrorism—similar to jihadist attacks in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. Terrorists learn from each other; they copy what they perceive as successful act of terrorism regardless of their ideology, their grievances, and their causes.

Interestingly, the perpetrator’s mother told reporters that she thought the event her son attended had “something to do with Trump.”

It did. The alt-right movement that has finally consolidated the various strains of white supremacy, white nationalism, and Neo-Nazi groupings was during the campaign and remains squarely on the side of fierce Trump supporters. On the eve of the violent demonstration, White supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke said,

“This represents a turning point for the people of this country. We are determined to take our country back. We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. That’s what we gotta do.”

Some of the white nationalists wore Trump’s red caps with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”

Even though, Trump did not call the vehicular attack “terrorism” nor did he distance himself from the Alt-Right.

For a good reason: He is morally impotent with respect to the dangerous Alt-Right ideology with its ugly takes on domestic politics and foreign policy as long as he has prominent Alt-Righters among his advisers in the White House starting but not ending with the ex-Breitbart boss Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka.  

Even if his chief-of-staff or someone else convinces Trump to condemn alt-right terrorism, the president cannot be believed as long as the Bannon contingent remains in the White House.

London’s Latest Terrorist Attack: Another Example of Mass-Mediated Contagion of Political Violence

By Brigitte L. Nacos

As shocking as it is, nobody should be surprised about last night’s horrific terrorist attack in London starting with a van ploughing into pedestrians on iconic London Bridge and continuing with the killing and injuring of people by three jihadists armed with deadly knives. The incident took the lives of seven persons and injured 48. Since it was first reported, it has remained breaking news all-the-time.

As I see it, this terrorist attack is another in the latest string of over-covered terrorist incidents that may have inspired extremists to utilize a tactic for the sake of global publicity.

The series of similar attacks began on July 14, 2016: Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel (31) drives a 20-ton truck into a huge crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, France, killing 84 and injuring several hundred persons. The perpetrator is shot; ISIS claims responsibility. The shocking incident receives prominent and extensive global news coverage. In the following eight months there are at least four other lethal vehicular attacks in the West— at a Christmas market in the center of Berlin, in Jerusalem, on London’s Westminster Bridge, and at a popular department store in Stockholm. Additionally, solo-attackers in cars are either killed or arrested by police on the campus of Ohio State University in the U.S. and near a shopping center in Antwerp, Belgium, before they can kill.

This surge in vehicular strikes was merely the latest example of terrorists imitating particularly shocking and heavily covered modes of attack. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, Palestinian terrorist groups staged a number of spectacular hijackings of commercial airliners. Eventually, other groups, among them the German Red Army Faction and the Lebanese Hezbollah, carried out their own hijacking shockers.

While the take-over of planes remained fairly popular among terrorists, the highly publicized take-over of embassies proved contagious as well. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, there were 43 successful embassy take-overs and five failed attempts between 1971 and 1980 in 26 countries. “Like many other tactics of terrorism, hostage-taking [in embassies] appears to be contagious,” Brian Jenkins concluded. “The incidents do not fall randomly throughout the decade, but occur in clusters.” The idea here is that one event inspires another one. Presumably, terrorists knew of these takeovers from media reports since these incidents took place in a host of different countries on different continents. By late 1979, when the Iran Hostage Crisis began, the “students” who took over the U.S. embassy in Teheran and the Iranian leaders who backed them must have known  about the prominent news coverage such incidents received. After all, of the embassy takeovers during the 1970s, more than half occurred in the last two years of the decade.  

The massive coverage of ISIS atrocities, too, was not lost on ISIS devotees in various parts of the world. Shortly after the gruesome decapitation of James Foley in 2014, 30-year old Alton Nolen attacked former colleagues at a food plant in Moore, Oklahoma, beheading Colleen Hufford and seriously wounding a second woman. Nolen was a convert to Islam who had tried to convert his colleagues—without success. A month later, when Zale Thompson, 32, and another convert to Islam attacked a group of New York police officers with a hatchet, the conclusion was that he had planned to behead his targets. Similar incidents took place in Europe, Australia, and elsewhere. There is little doubt that those successful and failed modes of attack were examples of copy-cat violence.

“Wag the Dog” and Clinton and Trump’s Missile Strikes

By Brigitte L. Nacos

In 1998, two weeks after terrorists drove car bombs into U.S. embassy compounds in Kenya and Tanzania causing hundreds of deaths, the U.S. military targeted Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and what was described as a “chemical weapons related facility” in Sudan with 79 Tomahawk missiles. The strikes were launched three days after President Clinton had publicly admitted an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Opinion leaders, especially the president’s adversaries in Congress, claimed that Clinton had ordered what the White House labeled counterterrorist strikes in order to draw attention away from his sex scandal. Not only were the critics amply covered by the news media, reporters, too, expressed skepticism about the president’s motives.

 Characteristic for the media’s stance was an exchange during a press conference at the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense William Cohen was asked by one reporter whether he was familiar with the Wag the Dog movie in which an American president cooks up an imaginary war for the purpose of deflecting interest away from his sexual encounter with a teenage girl. “Some Americans are going to say this [the missile strikes] bears a striking resemblance to Wag the Dog,” one reporter said. “How do you respond?” Cohen replied that “the only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities.”

Strangely, after President Trump ordered last Thursday a cruise missile attack on a Syrian airfield controlled by President Assad’s military in response to a chemical attack that killed at least 80 people, neither Washington’s political elite nor media pundits and correspondents questioned Trump’s motive—even though he and his foreign policy advisers changed their posture vis-à-vis Syria’s autocratic ruler within days from no- interference-in-Syria’s-domestic-politics to a categorical no-peace-with-Assad at a time of an all-time low presidential approval rating for Trump.  

It is indeed astounding how 59 inconsequential missile strikes led immediately to a robust pro-president rally among the usual TV talking heads among Trump supporters and skeptics applauding the “decisive” presidential move and declaring that through this decision Donald Trump had truly become the President!

Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr.: Like Father Like Son

By Brigitte L. Nacos

On Wednesday, soon after the terrorist attack in London and in the midst of emergency responses to tend to the victims, Donald Trump Jr., the President’s son and name-sake, used his Twitter account to lay into London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan.

“You have to be kidding me?!: Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” Trump Jr. wrote.

Like father, like son!

Since Khan is a Muslim, the first Muslim of a major city in a Western European country, I do not doubt that Junior won Brownie points with this statement among Trumpian right-wing “others” haters. Just to make sure, though, he also retweeted fake news titled: “Al Jazeera Viewers Seem To React With Joy Over London Terror Attack.”

This was just like Dad seeing thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the horrors of the 9/11 attacks!

The Khan citation was taken from an article that the newspaper The Independent published in the wake of last fall’s ineffective bombing attempts in New York City’s Chelsea area. At the time, Mayor Khan told Londoners that nothing was more important than to keep them safe confessing that he had “a sleepless night” following the news from New York.

Khan said indeed what Junior Trump as a true son of his father cited without any context, namely, that the “threat of terror attacks are ‘part and parcel of living in a big city’ and encouraged Londoners to be vigilant to combat dangers.”   

Khan was right and is right now. After major terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin and many more in other cities there is no doubt that sooner or later more such strikes will be attempted and some of them are likely to succeed. London’s excellent Metropolitan Police, better known as Scotland Yard, America’s formidable counterterrorism community and their counterparts in France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe have prevented a large number of plots and they will prevent more; they cannot prevent all attacks--certainly not those carried out by lone actors with trucks, cars, guns, or kitchen knives. Today, one day after the London attack, there was another, luckily failed attempt to kill by a weapon-laden car in the Belgian city of Antwerp.

Just as no police force in the world can prevent all murders, no security service can prevent all acts of terrorism. As horrific as some crimes and some terrorist attacks are such, neither crimes nor terrorism amount to existential threats.

Recognizing this reality is essential for dealing effectively and properly with the threat of terrorism which means trying to prevent and at the same time preparing to respond to attacks by all kinds of organizations, cells, and lone wolves.

It is always regrettable when people who have no knowledge about a particular problem or issue, in this case terrorism and counterterrorism, and who have no inclination to think before they speak and insult. But it is particularly dangerous when this sort of stuff is publicized by the son of a sitting president who tends to mimic his father.   

The First 10 Days: Who Pulls Strings in the Trump White House?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

The first ten days of the Trump presidency gave enough reasons for alarm. Not merely because of President DJT’s continued bias in favor of alternative facts.

Clueless in matters of democratic governance and the truism that details matter in the implementation of executive orders and laws the president and his motley crew acted according to a reckless blueprint in unprecedented haste and thoughtlessness.

The ideological scheme guiding the new administration is the work of Steve Bannon, the former boss of Breitbart, one of the more influential among the far-right nationalist, nativist, and conspiracy theory promoting online organs.

During last year’s campaign, when Trump emerged as a serious presidential contender, some neo-Nazi voices expressed support for the reality show star with the caveat that as president Trump would only be a temporary front-man for the real national-socialist revolution under a bona fide leader of the cause.

For now, Trump’s chief strategist Bannon is foremost among those pulling the strings in the White House as he was in the decisive stretch of the presidential campaign.

He was the one who wrote the inauguration speech along with fellow hardliner and White House advisor Stephen Miller.

Bannon was—and is--the strongest advocate of Trump’s controversial executive order against Muslims that was enacted Friday night before relevant government agencies were informed of its full content and meaning. Not surprisingly, Bannon and Miller overruled Department of Homeland Security officials who did not want to include green card holders in the travel ban.

That the ban excludes Muslim majority countries whose citizens actually committed terrorism within America’s borders and/or have acute problems with terrorism today seems to suggest that the grey eminence in the White House does take his boss’s business interests into consideration, namely, in Turkey, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Those countries, along with others, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, are not part of the ban. That much for principles in fighting terrorism at home…

I actually agree with President Trump that terrorists are evil. I disagree that we must be equally as evil—or more so—in order to defeat terrorism.  

Most troublesome among the dubious decisions in the opening days of Trump’s governance were changes in the operations of the National Security Council which is led by the conspiracy theorist and Islamophobia-in-chief Michael Flynn. While Steve Bannon will be a regular at Council meetings, the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will no longer attend all meetings but merely those falling into their responsibilities and expertise. What a scary state of affairs: Leading intelligence and military officials are no longer regulars leaving lots of room to maneuver for Flynn, formerly a paid contributor to Vladimir Putin’s RT propaganda network, and Bannon, like his boss an admirer of Putin and authoritarian rulers in general.

What's next?

P.S. According to Politico, Senator John McCain said today, “I am worried about the National Security Council. Who are the members of it and who are the permanent members? The appointment of Mr. Bannon is something which is a radical departure from any National Security Council in history." 

Unfortunately, McCain praised Security Advisor Flynn although he is very critical of his pro-Russian stance.

ISIS Is Not Coming to Take Over America

By Brigitte L. Nacos

During this year’s campaign, Donald Trump said repeatedly that he knows more about ISIS than the generals and, therefore, as president will defeat the organization very quickly. Recently, in Florida, he warned his supporters, if Hillary Clinton wins, ISIS will take over this country.

No, ISIS is not coming to take over our country.  

Actually, ISIS is in trouble and forced to adjust its strategies and tactics. The military pressure reduced significantly the number of its leaders, rank and file jihadists, ISIS-held territory, and resources. 

There are several indications of the group’s predicament and its consequences.

First, ISIS’s strategy includes now the recruitment of female jihadists, mostly, because they are less suspect than their male counterparts. The switch resulted in a remarkable increase in females involved in actual or planned attacks. Thus, in early October, police in Morocco arrested 10 female ISIS recruits for allegedly planning suicide bombings. Earlier, French police arrested members of a female ISIS cell for allegedly planning two bombing attacks in Paris. One member of the group stabbed and injured a policeman outside of Paris. Investigators found also two women linked to the perpetrator of the lethal July attack in Nice.

According to an ISIS manifesto, taking care of house, husband, and children are the fundamental functions of devout Muslim women. However, in extraordinary circumstances, when there are not enough men to fight the enemy or “if the men are absent even they are present,” women are called upon to participate, to fight in the jihad. ISIS’s green light for female jihadist might also suggest that there is a shortage of male jihadists--that in the manifesto’s words, the men are absent even though they are present.

Second, according to a recent study at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, the media output of ISIS declined measurably “in response to the increasing amount of counterterrorism pressure brought to bear against the organization.” A case in point was the folding of ISIS’s glossy and comprehensive online magazine Dabiq after 15 issues. The name Dabiq was chosen to highlight the importance of the town Dabiq in Northern Syria, where ISIS was going to fight the apocalyptic last battle between faithful Muslims and infidels. Obviously foreseeing the loss of Dabiq that ISIS conquered in the summer of 2014, the magazine of the same name was discontinued and was replaced by the less ambitious Rumiyah. The first two issues of the new e-magazine contain about half the number of pages than those of its predecessor.

Children as Victims and Children as Killers: Where Is the Outrage?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

A few days ago, the disturbing image of a Syrian boy, injured in yet another bombing raid, was publicized by media around the world. Just for a short moment the news cycle drew public attention to the unnerving suffering of the youngest victims of war.

There was no outcry of humanity; there were no spontaneous peace demonstrations.

There were no signs that presidents and prime ministers from around the globe were particularly touched by the little boy’s image. Instead of finally cooperating in a credible effort to bring peace to the killing fields of Syria and Iraq, the most powerful governments hardened their positions against each other.

As distressing as the plight of this little boy and the many, many thousands of children like him is, equally, or perhaps even more disturbing are the visuals of children who kill on command of their ISIS handlers.  

The Islamic State is not the first terrorist organization that recruits and trains young boys to commit unspeakable violence but ISIS is the first terrorist enterprise that documents and publicizes how it runs its training camps for young boys, many not older than 9- and 10 years and some significantly younger. Nor does ISIS make a secret of its objective to use its “Sharia camps” to produce a whole new generation of jihadists.

Indeed, in one of these readily available online propaganda videos, one jihadist in an ISIS training camp for young boys declares proudly, “This generation of children is the generation of the Caliphate.” Some fathers are complicit in the transforming young children into eager killers. In one video, a man called Abdullah, the Belgian, is shown with his little son, perhaps 5- or 6-years old. The father prods the little boy again and again to say “The Islamic State.” He asks questions like, “What have the infidels done?” The son finally answers, “They kill Muslims.”

The Orlando Massacre: Terrorism or Hate Crime?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Terrorism experts have long recognized that the next terrorist act in the United States was a question of when, not whether it would happen. To the counterterrorism community it did not come as a surprise that another lone wolf or lone actor, presumably infected by violent online extremist propaganda, struck last weekend in the most horrific way killing 49 persons and injuring several dozens.

Donald Trump’s post-Orlando claim that he was right in predicting more terrorism within our borders is childish--at best.

What, then, was the most deadly mass shooting in this country ever and the most lethal terrorism strike within U.S. borders since the catastrophic 9/11 attack?  

In my view, the attack in Florida was an act of terrorism perpetrated by a self-declared jihadist who most likely believed that he killed in the name of ISIS and his religion.

While it is wrong to blame Islam and cast suspicion over all Muslims here and abroad, it is also wrong not to recognize a powerful strain within Islam, in more recent times especially espoused by Wahhabism, as potent fuel for terrorism against non-believers in their violent religious fanaticism.

Young Muslims in the Western diaspora, especially those with problems, such as social isolation, mental health issues, and criminal records, are particularly susceptible to jihadists’ hate propaganda.

European researchers found that among would-be foreign fighters, first for Al Qaeda and then for ISIS, mental health problems, past criminal activity, and societal alienation were more prevalent than in the general population.

According to the FBI, the Orlando killer did not have a criminal record. But his former wife and a former co-worker noted his bi-polar and instable personality, his hate toward others, his violent words and, in the case of his former wife, his violence.      

While we do not yet know about Omar Mateen’s activities on social media, perhaps on the dark web, we do know that he was clueless with respect to the leading Islamist terrorist organizations; otherwise he wouldn’t have claimed at different times his admiration for Hezbollah, a Shia group, and ISIS, a Sunni organization—two deadly enemies.

That the Islamic State now celebrates Mateen as a soldier of the Caliphate does not mean a direct link between ISIS and terrorist Mateen. But to the extent to which he embraced ISIS-style jihadism and the so-called Islamic State’s repeated calls for Muslims to attack in their Western environment, ISIS propaganda may well played a role in the Orlando shooting.   

What Should We Call the Violence Carried Out by ISIS?

By Brigitte L. Nacos

Language matters. And linguistic disagreements can make for political battles. What to call and not to call terrorism is one such battle ground since the attacks of 9/11.

From the time he took office more than six years ago, President Obama’s perennial critics complained about his benign language to characterize the most serious terrorist threat in the post-9/11 era. After avoiding the term “terrorism” for a while, members of the administration eventually did use the “t” word--sometimes. But as the President himself, others in the administration continued to speak of “violent extremism,” when discussing the lethal acts perpetrated by ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, and similar groups.

Recently, speaking at the National Press Club, Attorney General Eric Holder said, “We spend more time, more time talking about what you do call it as opposed to what do you do about it. Radical Islam, Islamic extremism, you know, I’m not sure an awful lot is gained by saying that. It doesn’t have any impact on our military posture; it doesn’t have any impact on what we call it on the policies that we put in place.”

Not surprisingly, then, the title of the current White House sponsored gathering is “Countering Radical Extremism” although the focus is not on generic radical extremism but exclusively on the Jihadist variety.

Among Obama’s harshest critics on this count is US Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) who said a while ago, “We are in a religious war with radical Islamists. When I hear the president of the United States and his chief spokesperson failing to admit that we’re in a religious war, it really bothers me.”

I think both sides should reconsider their linguistic choices.

To begin with, I disagree with Senator Graham’s terminology on two counts. First, although ISIS calls itself “Islamic State,” controls a chunk of Syrian and Iraqi real estate, and aims at establishing a Grand Caliphate beyond the outlines of the Ottoman Empire, we should not use language that plays into the hands of these barbaric terrorists. By characterizing the fight against these terrorists as “war,” Graham and others elevate ISIS to the level of a nation state and ISIS boss Al-Baghdadi and his henchmen to that of leaders of legitimate states.

That’s precisely what these inhumane men want.

Terrorism, by definition, has political objectives. And ISIS surely has political designs. To be sure, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and like-minded groups propagate their objectives and justifications in religious terms. For many of their followers and sympathizers, they are the only practitioners of pure Islam.  

And, here, President Obama’s insistence of the generic “violent extremism” comes in. If he were to address terrorism across the board, including secular forms at the far left and right, the term would be appropriate.

But when he and others in the administration speak clearly about the threat of ISIS and its appeal to young Muslims in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, why don’t they use a more pointed term? I just returned from Turkey, a Muslim country, where terrorists of the ISIS variety are called “Jihadists” in the media and elsewhere.

So, speaking of Jihadist terrorists or Jihadist terrorism would signal that the threat comes from violent extremists that claim to act in the name of their religion--and, yes, the term “Jihadist” signals that this religion is Islam. As everyone knows anyway--most of all those Arab and Muslim countries threatened by Jihadists at their gates.