Author Topic: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism  (Read 94314 times)

ccp

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #200 on: November 18, 2017, 09:35:27 AM »
well I am not sure the West exactly "let" communism rise

what were we supposed to do ?  go to war with the Soviets right after we went through what we did with Nazis
though Roosevelt did let Stalin get Eastern Europe too easily - in hindsight

we did fight in Korea and Vietnam
and have a cold war
and fought communism at home despite the Hollywood and liberal commies here

Crafty_Dog

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Criminalize Radical Islam?
« Reply #201 on: December 12, 2017, 06:12:32 AM »

ccp

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G M

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Crafty_Dog

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Muslim Brotherhood declares US an "Enemy State"
« Reply #204 on: January 16, 2018, 09:57:15 AM »
Analysis: Why the Muslim Brotherhood Declared U.S. an Enemy State
by Hany Ghoraba
Special to IPT News
January 16, 2018
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7247/analysis-why-the-muslim-brotherhood-declared-us

 
 In the first official statement of its kind, the Muslim Brotherhood announced last month that it now regards the United States of America as an enemy, following President Trump's decision to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The statement was published on the Brotherhood's Arabic language website, where it often publishes more incendiary rhetoric.

"Jerusalem is an Islamic and Arab land, for which we make blood, freedom and life, and we fight every aggressor and every supporter of aggression," the statement said.
It called for a unified Islamist and Palestinian response "to ignite an uprising throughout the Islamic world against the Zionist occupation and the American administration in support of the occupation and against the rights and freedoms of the peoples."

A week later, the Brotherhood issued a second release, an open letter to Arab leaders with similarly inciteful rhetoric, accusing the leaders of weakness in face of the "Zionist entity." It urged these leaders to "enable their people" to defend Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa mosque.

This statement cannot be brushed aside as simply harsh words or empty threats by some anonymous jihadist group online. The Brotherhood is the world's oldest and most famous Islamist group. Its message declaring America an enemy state is enormous because it reaches millions of followers across the globe. It is an unprecedented official confrontation with the United States.

While the statements mark a change in strategy by the Muslim Brotherhood, it isn't likely to lead to immediate violent action. The Brotherhood does not issue statements like these without a careful plan. It may wait to see if the U.S. embassy relocation takes place before any escalation.

The Diplomatic English language Message

Despite issuing an official statement in Arabic, the Brotherhood never posted it on its London-based English language website, Ikhwanweb. Instead, it published an alternative version of the second statement in the form of a plea to Muslims and their leaders convened in Istanbul to remain united on the Jerusalem issue. This is standard Brotherhood behavior, to striking a more "moderate" tone to Western audiences, while showing its true face to Arabic-speaking Muslims.

The toned down message published on Ikhwanweb called for "peaceful" protests in contradiction to the Arabic call to ignite "an Intifada." Though the message was directed to Arab and Muslim leaders, it was meant to be read by Western readers.

"The group urges Muslims in various parts of the World to rise up in peaceful popular protests to express their support of the freedom fighters in Palestine in their rejection of this move..." It called upon the Muslims and others "to express firmly the rejection of all evils committed (sic) against Palestine, and the determination to fully restore Palestinian people rights."

Antipathy toward the United States is nothing new for the Muslim Brotherhood. The group's literature includes dozens of references vilifying America. In addition, the group's most famous scholar, Sayyid Qutb, berated Americans in his 1951 essay, "The America I have seen."

"It is the case of a people who have reached the peak of growth and elevation in the world of science and productivity, while remaining abysmally primitive in the world of the senses, feelings, and behavior," he wrote.

Next to Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, Qutb remains the ultimate scholar for jihadist rhetoric. Yet Brotherhood Secretary General Ibrahim Munir recently described Qutb as a humanitarian teacher.

Nevertheless, the Muslim Brotherhood – through diplomacy and duplicity – managed to keep its real attitude toward the United States hidden over the years. That finally changed in the Dec. 6 official statement, and it remains quite a gamble. It could cost the Brotherhood diplomatic relations that it forged with the U.S. politicians in recent years. It also risks being lumped in with terrorist organizations that express blatant hostility towards the United States and its interests. But it is a gamble that the Brotherhood seems to be willing to take because the Palestinian cause has been its bread and butter issue since the 1940s. Traditionally, the group would use offshoots such as Hamas to do its bidding against America. For instance, Hamas leader Ismail Radwan said this after the Jerusalem embassy announcement: "Trump's decision will open the gates of hell on U.S. interests in the region."

This method provided the luxury of deniability and distancing itself from such inflammatory statements while presenting the Brotherhood as the "moderate" Islamist group to western media and political circles. In this case, however, the Muslim Brotherhood chose a more zealous stance in its Arabic statement in a desperate attempt to garner some of its lost popularity in the Middle East after its political fortunes suffered in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.

The Muslim Brotherhood is beleaguered; its leadership is either in jail or on the run. It may feel a tougher line is necessary to maintain relevance in the streets that it once dominated. The Muslim Brotherhood has exploited the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for decades to maintain its "Vanguard of the Faith" reputation. At this critical and desperate moment in its history, its leadership is willing to place all its chips on this cause, even if it means the group is in a direct political conflict with the United States.

Hany Ghoraba is an Egyptian writer, political and counter-terrorism analyst at Al Ahram Weekly, author of Egypt's Arab Spring: The Long and Winding Road to Democracy and a regular contributor to the BBC.

Crafty_Dog

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Straftor: 2018 world wide jihadi trends
« Reply #205 on: January 20, 2018, 11:42:09 AM »
Editor's Note

With the start of a new year, we once again examine the state of the global jihadist movement. Shared from Threat Lens, Stratfor's unique protective intelligence product, the following column includes excerpts from a comprehensive forecast available to Threat Lens subscribers.
In some ways "the global jihadist movement" is a misleading phrase. Rather than the monolithic threat it describes, jihadism more closely resembles a worldwide insurgency with two competing standard-bearers: al Qaeda and the Islamic State. To make matters more complicated, grassroots extremists have been known to take inspiration from each group's ideology — and, in some cases, both.
 
This complex network of international organizations, local militancies and individual adherents cannot be dismantled by simply killing its members and leaders one by one. Instead, governments around the globe will have to split off local groups from the Islamic State and al Qaeda ideologies they have chosen to adopt and tackle them separately using the principles of counterinsurgency if the jihadist movement is to be eradicated once and for all.
Al Qaeda: Surviving Under Pressure
Last year was a tough one for the al Qaeda core:

 
(Stratfor)
Throughout 2017, the group tried to promote Hamza bin Laden — the son of Osama bin Laden — as its new figurehead. But while Hamza's rhetoric seems to have found a receptive audience in the world of jihadism, it is unclear whether the warm welcome will translate into new recruits for his father's cause.
 
Even so, the al Qaeda core and many of its franchises remain intact at the start of 2018, albeit under mounting strain. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for instance,
(Stratfor)
Al Qaeda's offshoots in Egypt have made inroads among the locals as well, in part by criticizing their Islamic State rival in the area — Wilayat Sinai — for attacking civilians. (By contrast, Jund al-Islam and Ansar al-Islam tend to target Egyptian security forces.) The latter al Qaeda branch, led by former Egyptian special operations forces officer Hisham Ashmawy, is a particularly capable force. But Jund al-Islam has worked to earn the trust of Bedouin tribes in Sinai that have been appalled by Wilayat Sinai's brutality; the group has even attacked some of the Islamic State affiliate's fighters outright.
 
Some of al Qaeda's partners throughout the Middle East and Africa had bigger problems to grapple with last year. Amid Yemen's protracted civil war;
(Stratfor)

In much the same way, the United States cracked down on the positions of al Shabaab, al Qaeda's Somali franchise.
(Stratfor)

Despite the renewed pressure brought to bear against them, these groups have maintained their allegiance to the al Qaeda core. The same may not be true of al Qaeda's erstwhile ally on the Syrian battlefield, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra. The group now belongs to an umbrella organization called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham that advocates a nationalist agenda rather than al Qaeda's transnationalist goals.
(Stratfor)
Either way, Jabhat al-Nusra's decision to rebrand itself as a group with more interests at home than abroad will make it more difficult for al Qaeda to launch far-flung attacks from Syria this year.
Islamic State: Resorting to Old Tactics
Once the United States and its coalition partners started launching airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, the group was bound to lose its grip on the vast territory it had claimed. The so-called caliphate met its inevitable fate in 2017 as the Islamic State was beaten back from most of its strongholds in the region.
(Stratfor)
The Islamic State core may no longer function as an effective polity, but it still thrives as an insurgency and terrorist group. As a result, the Islamic State will keep planning and conducting attacks across Iraq and Syria over the coming year, in part to stoke ethnic and sectarian unrest.
 
The group's foreign partners will follow suit as the Islamic State's ideology continues to resonate around the globe. But like the central organization with which they have aligned, many of these branches have met stiff resistance in their traditional havens.
 
Among them is Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi, the Islamic State's Nigerian cell that is often better known by its former name, Boko Haram. The group has split into two factions with somewhat different means and ends: One led by Abubakr Shekau, whose use of women and children in suicide bombings has caused even the Islamic State to rebuke him, and one led by Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the son of Boko Haram's founder. The first wing, though larger, has had to retreat from most of its holdings in northeastern Nigeria into the Sambisa Forest, where it now wages a deadly campaign of insurgent and terrorist attacks throughout the region. Meanwhile, the second wing has concentrated its operations in Lake Chad Basin, where it harries military and security forces.

We believe al-Barnawi's faction would like to conduct attacks against Western interests in Nigeria, such as bombings or kidnappings.

To the north, Wilayat Barqa — the Islamic State's Libyan offshoot and, at one point, its strongest franchise — has likewise sought shelter from the punishing advances of its enemies.
(Stratfor)

Next door, however, another Islamic State affiliate has risen to prominence as Wilayat Barqa has faded from view: Wilayat Sinai. Though the Egyptian group has lost much of its manpower since its peak in 2015, Wilayat Sinai may be the largest and most capable Islamic State branch left today.
(Stratfor)
The Islamic State has fared better than we expected in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well. There the organization's Khorasan chapter has shown an impressive resilience to operations against it by Afghan security forces, the Taliban and the United States. Rather than being crippled by these efforts, Khorasan remains able to launch raids against rural communities and suicide attacks against the Afghan capital of Kabul.
 
But the Islamic State's most surprising success of 2017 was the capture of Marawi City in the southern Philippines. The group's supporters defied our forecast by drawing hundreds of heavily armed fighters to their cause and trying to seize territory — just as the Islamic State had in Iraq and Syria.
(Stratfor)
Grassroots Jihadists: A Rare but Present Danger
Since 9/11, al Qaeda and the Islamic State have struggled to project their terrorist power beyond their core operating areas. Consequently, grassroots jihadists — rather than the trained professionals among the ranks of established jihadist groups — have been responsible for most of the terrorist attacks waged on the West in recent years.
(Stratfor)
Inspired jihadists were responsible for the bulk of the terrorist attacks to hit the West last year. Even in operations involving cells of extremists, such as the London Bridge incident in June 2017 and a series of attacks in Barcelona in August, the perpetrators had no contact with and received no direction or equipment from their professional peers.
 
There were some noteworthy exceptions to this pattern, though.
(Stratfor)

Grassroots jihadists may not boast the sophisticated terrorist tradecraft needed to launch spectacular attacks, but it would be unwise to dismiss the danger they pose. At the right place and the right time, an inexperienced terrorist can still wreak havoc, leaving devastation in his or her wake. That said, circumstances rarely align in grassroots jihadists' favor — and certainly not as often as the groups calling them to action would like.

Lloyd De Jongh

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An Ideological Army - The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran
« Reply #206 on: January 30, 2018, 06:13:17 AM »
This is part of the preamble to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran

An Ideological Army

In the formation and equipping of the country's defense forces, due attention must be paid to faith and ideology as the basic criteria.  Accordingly, the Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps are to be organized in conformity with this goal, and they will be responsible not only for guarding and preserving the frontiers of the country, but also for fulfilling the ideological mission of jihad in God's way;

that is, extending the sovereignty of God's law throughout the world (this is in accordance with the Koranic verse

"Prepare against them whatever force you are able to muster, and strings of horses, striking fear into the enemy of God and your enemy, and others besides them" [Quran 8:60].
My freedom is more important than your good idea.

Lloyd De Jongh

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The literal word of Allah... Quran 13:41
« Reply #207 on: January 30, 2018, 06:14:21 AM »
“Do they not see that We are advancing in the land, diminishing it by its borders on all sides?”

My freedom is more important than your good idea.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #208 on: January 30, 2018, 06:18:20 AM »
It doesn't surprise me, but I didn't know that.  Good to have the citation for purpose of making our case.

Yet this sort of thing is rampant:  https://clarionproject.org/nj-mom-sues-school-islam-indoctrination/
 
« Last Edit: January 30, 2018, 06:55:42 AM by Crafty_Dog »

Lloyd De Jongh

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Hamas
« Reply #209 on: February 07, 2018, 08:17:50 AM »
Hamas

Also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement. Their aims are in their Charter. From the preamble:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory, [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood]).

Article 2: The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood ...

Article 5: ... the Koran is its constitution.

Article 7: It goes back to ... the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

Article 8: Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.

Article 11: The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day.

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.


So note - "Palestine" is Waqf, or endowment. The charter specifies that the land was conquered by the Muslims and thus must never pass out of their hands as it is now consecrated to Allah. Their aim, in the full document, is to return it to Islamic control. And again, Jihad has a strictly military connotation.
« Last Edit: February 07, 2018, 08:29:15 AM by Martel »
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Crafty_Dog

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #211 on: May 31, 2018, 08:47:11 AM »
New Developments in Suicide Attacks
by A.J. Caschetta
Jihad Watch
May 24, 2018
https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/new-developments-in-suicide-attacks

Last week was a busy one for analysts of suicide terrorism. The classic “profile” (21-year old single male) was shattered again, as entire families in Indonesia and dozens of Palestinians carried out attacks that required their deaths. The inspiration for such disparate populations to sacrifice themselves and their children was their desire to become holy “martyrs.”

Attacks on “the Sunday people” in their churches are not unknown in Indonesia, but on Sunday, May 13, an entire family of six conducted coordinated suicide bombings at three Christian churches in the city of Surabaya. According to police, Dita Futrianto and his wife were members of the local ISIS affiliate, Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD). The Futrianto family used a car, two motorcycles and suicide belts in the attacks.

Later that evening as another family was preparing pipe bombs, a mother and her 17-year-old son were killed in a blast presumed accidental. The next day, yet another Indonesian family conductedanother suicide attack. This time, five family members riding two motorcycles struck police headquarters in Surabaya.

Meanwhile five thousand miles away in Gaza, Hamas came up with a new tactic, one part Khomeiniesque human wave attack and one part “suicide by cop,” by coercing children to storm the border fence, telling them “the [Israeli] army won’t shoot girls…[it] won’t shoot little kids.”

The new Hamas tactic, which U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman calls “a suicide bomb on a large scale,” is actually a variation on the human wave attack invented by Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). German journalist Christoph Reuter described it as a “new military strategy [that] attempted to penetrate Iraqi lines of defense with frontal assaults consisting of wave upon wave of human soldiery without any kind of backup support.” Often that “human soldiery” consisted of thousands of children from the Basij.

The Basij children charged en masse, screaming at the tops of their lungs to scare the enemy. Hamas positions its children behind the smoke of burning tires as they wait for an opportunity to make a run at the fence with Hamas-issued wire cutters.

This tactic has an element of “suicide by cop” to it, only rather than the last desperate act of cowardice from a deranged killer, children in Gaza have been groomed for death, inculcated into the martyrdom culture. Hamas leaders require dead bodies for the global sympathy they hope to gain by the propaganda spectacle of what Gabriel Weimann calls a mass-mediated attack.

Seth Frantzman documents elaborate behind-the-scenes preparations at the border: “Hamas officials show up in the morning or early afternoon to rouse the people and encourage them in their protest. Speeches are made and prayers offered. It is well organized. Buses bring people to the protests. There are people there selling food. There is a macabre element to this, with protesters saying they’ll have a meal before they become ‘shahid’ or martyr at the front.”

The common denominator among Basij human wave attacks, Indonesian suicide families, and Palestinians rushing towards a telegenic death is belief in “martyrdom.” It is one of Islam’s most important narratives, yet it beguiles the Western perspective, which sees only a cynical use of children as pawns.

To motivate his wave attackers, Khomeini reached back to the origins of Shia Islam when the Caliph Yazid slaughtered Husayn Ali (grandson of the prophet Muhammad) and his 72 loyal followers. Khomeini fine-tuned the story by portraying Saddam Hussein as Yazid and the Iranian people as Ali’s followers. Dying for the cause became not only honorable, but desirable.

Khomeini sent his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, where the new politicized version of martyrdom was spread to AMAL and Hezbollah, inspiring some of the earliest suicide attacks against Iraqi diplomats and US and French peacekeepers. Soon what was originally a Shiite phenomenon spread among the PLO (exiled to Lebanon since 1970) and eventually to other Sunni Islamist groups including Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
 
Ayman al-Zawahiri

Many journalists continue to seek reasonable explanations for suicide attacks, failing to appreciate that the people encouraging and committing these attacks don’t consider them suicide. Current Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri explains that one who commits suicide does so “out of depression and despair,” whereas a martyr dies “to service Islam.” In fact, “martyrs” don’t really die. As Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin once explained, “Someone who commits suicide doesn’t want to live whereas a martyr is someone who likes life after death.”

In claiming responsibility for the Futrianto family’s attacks, ISIS announced “Three martyrdom attacks killed 11 and wounded at least 41 among church guards and Christians.” Likewise, when Yahya Sinwar of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades announced the deaths at the Gaza border proclaimed “We are going to Jerusalem, millions of martyrs…following in the path of martyr Yasser Arafat…if we explode we will explode in [Israel’s] face.”

Those who underestimate the cult of martyrdom will remain confused at “Palestinian children being sent to an extremely volatile border fence” and surprised by Indonesian family attackers “so far from the profiles of what you would think a terrorist would be.” As long as thousands, perhaps millions, believe in the virtue of sacrificing themselves and their children “to service Islam,” no one should be confused or surprised by whatever new development comes next.

A.J. Caschetta is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Crafty_Dog

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Stratfor: How to measure success against Jihadists?
« Reply #212 on: June 12, 2018, 08:29:48 PM »
How Do You Measure Success Against Jihadists?
By Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
Scott Stewart
Scott Stewart
VP of Tactical Analysis, Stratfor
A picture taken on April 29, 2018, shows Syrian army forces running for cover from sniper fire from Islamic State positions in Yarmuk, a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus.
(LOUAI BESHARA/AFP/Getty Images)
Highlights

    Measuring success against a militant organization requires understanding the group's objectives and how far it has progressed toward achieving them, as well as the types of warfare it is capable of waging.
    Instead of gauging a group's strength through the number of terrorist attacks, it is necessary to examine the quality of the assaults and determine how they fit into the group's other operations.
    Defeating a group requires more than victory on the physical battlefield; it also needs progress in the much more difficult ideological realm.

It was just last week that I was talking to a person who is working to help a country combat a significant jihadist threat. In the course of our chat, we started thinking, how do you actually measure success against jihadist groups? As operations the world over have shown, simply destroying a high number of Toyota Hiluxes driven by militants isn't necessarily the defining mark of success in the "war on terrorism," and a tally of terrorist attacks doesn't necessarily signal failure. I've written before on terrorism and insurgent theory and the trajectories of specific groups, but never on how to gauge militant groups. As it turns out, there's more to assessing a jihadist group's strength than straight numbers.

The Big Picture

The United States and its international allies are involved in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations against jihadist groups across a wide swath of the globe from West Africa to the southern Philippines. As the strength of militant groups waxes and wanes, it is important to consider how to measure the success of such operations.



With very few exceptions — including single-issue terrorist groups such as animal rights or anti-abortion activists — most terrorist acts are committed in pursuit of larger political goals. Marxism, anarchism, white supremacy and jihadism are all examples of ideologies that encourage the use of terrorism, albeit with the aim of becoming a more formidable military force. Accordingly, terrorism is not typically an end in itself, but a tool that is often, though not always, used by a weaker military force against a stronger one. Because of this, Stratfor generally refers to Marxist or jihadist groups as "militant groups," because they seek to use a wide spectrum of military tools to achieve their stated ends; ultimately, terrorism is merely one of those tools. The nomenclature has led some to accuse us of being "soft on terrorism" by referring to groups such as the Islamic State as a militant group instead of a terrorist group, but describing an organization that uses terrorism, insurgent warfare and — when possible — hybrid and even maneuver warfare as a "terrorist group" severely understates the threat they pose. Organizations such as the Islamic State are far more than just terrorist groups.

For revolutionary and radical thinkers from Mao Zedong, Vo Nguyen Giap and Che Guevara to even Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr Naji, terrorism occupies a comparatively small place on the military spectrum. In Cuban Focoist, Maoist, Marxist and even jihadist thought, it is a small vanguard that engages in terrorism to plant the initial seeds that will eventually lead to revolution. Terrorism is "the propaganda of the deed" and is intended to publicize the existence of the group and its ideology. More importantly, the goal of terrorism is to raise popular support with the aim of creating friendly human terrain that can provide protection, financial support and recruits — or, to quote Mao, a terrain that allows a guerrilla fighter "to move among the people as a fish moves in the sea."

For revolutionary and radical thinkers, terrorism occupies a comparatively small place on the military spectrum.

Naturally, the purpose of such operational freedom is not simply to conduct terrorist attacks but also to construct a military force that can conduct guerrilla warfare, thereby permitting a group to expand its areas of influence or control. And by always expanding its capacity, the group will evolve beyond mere insurgent warfare to conduct maneuver warfare, defeat the enemy and establish a new government — or maybe even an empire.

The basic concept behind insurgent or guerrilla warfare is to reject battle when the enemy is superior and attack when and where the enemy is weak. In general, insurgents adopt a long view of armed struggle, seeking to minimize losses and "live to fight another day" rather than risk total destruction at the hands of a superior enemy by remaining in fixed positions. At times, however, guerrilla leaders can misjudge and overestimate their popular support, resulting in a crushing blow from the state as in the case of Islamic State supporters who seized Marawi City in the southern Philippines.

For insurgents, merely surviving to continue the fight while forcing the enemy to disproportionately expend soldiers and resources represents a victory. In this asymmetrical form of warfare, time is on the side of the insurgents, who bank that a protracted and bloody struggle will exhaust and demoralize the opposition.

Many Maoist and Marxist leaders, including Mao, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, have advanced along this revolutionary military path, graduating from terrorism to insurgency, victory and, ultimately, governance. The story is similar among some jihadist groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in parts of Yemen, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in northern Mali and al Shabaab in parts of Somalia.
Measuring Progression

Differences in focus undoubtedly exist between jihadist groups, because some have more nationalist goals (the Afghan Taliban) while others are more transnational in nature (Islamic State). Yet all such organizations share the desire to establish an Islamic polity ruled by Sharia. Accordingly, it is possible to gauge a militant group's success by examining how far it has progressed toward achieving its goals and which forms of warfare it is capable of waging.

For example, the Islamic State controls far less territory than it did four years ago, and its ability to field large military units to engage in maneuver warfare has significantly declined. Simply put, the group does not possess the same number of tanks, artillery pieces and other military equipment that it did in 2014. Likewise, it does not wield control over as many people or as large a territory as it did. The group certainly has not been destroyed, but there is no doubt that it is significantly weaker than it was four years ago.

The problem, however, is that the group's leadership has not abandoned the struggle and that its followers continue to fervently believe in its ideology. The organization's insurgents continue to conduct lower-level terrorist and insurgent attacks in an attempt to regain footing and re-establish credibility within the human terrain of the Sunni portions of Iraq and Syria. The group has previously experienced such a situation, only to emerge stronger after a period of weakness. Today, members of Islamic State believe that their long-term insurgent campaign will foster renewed growth and eventual victory. Other jihadist groups, such as AQAP, the Afghan Taliban and al Shabaab, have also gone through boom-and-bust cycles, but these organizations have successfully regrouped and regained strength after significant losses of men, materiel and territory by maintaining a long-term focus. As in any military campaign, a group's progress along the militancy spectrum is not always smooth, because changes of direction can result in surges, plateaus and setbacks.

It is also important to understand that the tools on the militant spectrum are not mutually exclusive. An organization that boasts the ability to conduct peer-to-peer maneuver warfare can also engage in insurgent warfare or terrorism to augment its capabilities. Indeed, groups such as al Shabaab have frequently used terrorism in addition to insurgent tactics and hybrid warfare. Terrorist attacks serve to tie down security forces protecting the capital or other population centers, thus providing insurgents with more operational latitude in the hinterland. Such groups can also stage terrorist attacks to punish foreign actors for their support of their enemy and apply pressure so they withdraw and weaken their foe.

Critically, however, no direct correlation exists between the number of terrorist attacks and the strength of a militant group. Terrorist attacks are fairly economical to conduct in terms of fighters and materiel; indeed, a single conventional battle could exhaust a group's supply of fighters and ordnance, while the same amount of resources could last many years if it restricts itself to terrorist attacks. Hit-and-run insurgent attacks are unsurprisingly also more economical than set battles — especially against a foe with superior forces and firepower.

Although it is not an iron rule, resorting to terrorism often highlights a group's weakness — rather than its strength. As a group weakens, it becomes more dependent on terrorism to destabilize its opponent and remain militarily relevant.

And although it is not an iron rule, resorting to terrorism often highlights a group's weakness — rather than its strength. As a group weakens, it becomes more dependent on terrorism to destabilize its opponent and remain militarily relevant. The Islamic State exemplified this phenomenon in 2010, when it launched a number of significant vehicle bomb attacks against government targets inside Baghdad at a time of comparative weakness for the group. Conversely, a reduction in terrorist attacks may occur as a group becomes stronger and requires its resources to hold and govern territory, ensuring it feels little obligation to conduct spectacular terrorist attacks to remain relevant.

Quality Over Quantity

Ultimately, holding and governing territory requires far more personnel and resources than do insurgent operations or terrorist attacks. Because of this, I would argue that the sheer number of terrorist attacks in population centers is not necessarily a good measurement of a militant organization's strength. More than that, I'd argue that it's crucial to closely examine the quality of an organization's terrorist attacks and not merely the quantity. For example, Jemaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) conducted an unprecedented number of terrorist attacks over nine days in May, but the attacks were poorly planned and executed, revealing as much about the group's weaknesses as its strengths. A "quality" terrorist attack hinges on the number and type of weapons used, the tactics employed and the degree of planning and execution. Abubakar Shekau's Wilayat al Sudan al Gharbi, better known by its former name, Boko Haram, has launched an unprecedented number of suicide bombings — including the most in the world since 2015 and the most using women suicide bombers in history — since the Nigerian military ejected it from its strongholds in the country's north and into the bush. Boko Haram's attacks, however, are poorly planned and executed, giving the group an air of weakness and desperation rather than strength.

In the end, it is difficult to definitively measure a group's status and forecast its trajectory. However, a close look at the group's goals and position along the militant spectrum, as well as an assessment of its available manpower, level of funding, access to weapons and ability to plan and execute attacks, provides an effective indication of whether counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations are making an impact on the physical battlefield.

But any meaningful assessment must progress beyond the physical battlefield to examine its ideological counterpart. Revolutionary militant organizations are heavily dependent upon ideology, and as long as the group's ideology continues to gain traction to provide it with favorable human terrain, eradicating the group will prove difficult. And because firepower alone can't destroy a militant movement, mitigating the threat with force while combating the ideology underlying it is the name of the game. Any real progress must move beyond the first stage of the "clear, hold, build" counterinsurgency model, as lasting success will only occur when militant fighters lose their ability to "swim" among the people.


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Richard Dawkins: Something worses comes if Christianity continues to decline
« Reply #214 on: November 23, 2018, 02:19:04 PM »
Second post:

https://www.christiantoday.com/article/atheist-richard-dawkins-warns-of-something-worse-if-christianity-continues-to-decline-in-europe/127873.htm?fbclid=IwAR1vo7VqJnFkHmkAGGJnlDyLU-oIOw66zT8ljjv-7m83x-FAPIgpSmZnX-k

Hat tip to Lloyd de Jongh for both of these.

============

Chesterton.
"When men no longer believe in God, they will not believe in nothing - they believe in ANYTHING."
« Last Edit: November 23, 2018, 02:21:05 PM by Crafty_Dog »

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #215 on: November 23, 2018, 02:34:03 PM »
Islam or "progressivism" the West's new religion .


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ISIS
« Reply #216 on: December 21, 2018, 03:57:29 AM »
Well , we are supposedly fighting ISIS world wide if not in Syria I guess

This and the murder of two young ladies on a mountain in Morocco serves as sobering reminders of what we need to keep vigilante about.



https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/world/mapping-isis-attacks-around-the-world/index.html

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Re: ISIS, Morocco beheadings
« Reply #217 on: December 21, 2018, 08:14:58 AM »
Well , we are supposedly fighting ISIS world wide if not in Syria I guess

This and the murder of two young ladies on a mountain in Morocco serves as sobering reminders of what we need to keep vigilante about.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/17/world/mapping-isis-attacks-around-the-world/index.html


Louisa Jesperson, Denmark


Maren Ueland, Norway

Beheaded by ISIS.  Happen to be Scandinavian.  In the Middle East it's thousands and thousands of victims, even if you're Arab, even if you're Muslim.  By try being Jewish, Christian, European or American and you come across them, you hare no chance.    

When will we learn?  When will they learn, there is an entire culture and movement trying to take over various parts of the world - for starters - by infiltration, murder, terror.

Not just arrest the four perps, but trace back everyone in all their contacts, who preaches this, who teaches this, who supports this.  

"the (first) suspect arrested and the three" others, who have links to radical Islamic circles,"
Read more at https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/morocco-says-suspects-in-hikers-murder-pledged-allegiance-to-is-11051656
All three hail from Marrakesh, and one of them had "a court record linked to terrorist acts", police spokesman Boubker Sabik said.
"the four had recorded a video a week before the killings, pledging allegiance to the Islamic State,"
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/world/africa/morocco-tourists-killed-terrorism.html

“Everybody got along with her and she made everybody their best.” She [Danish girl's mother] added, “You would have to prove it to her if she was to believe in evil.”

A video posted on social media purported to show one of the victims screaming while a man cut her neck with a knife.

Proven.

Why aren't we (Morocco, Denmark, Norway) attacking and eliminating the "radical Islamic circles"?

God knows they have declared war on us.

Or as The Left says, "Everyone Welcome" - as they close Guantanamo.

"Everyone" is NOT welcome.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2018, 08:25:41 AM by DougMacG »

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Wafa Sultan in 2006
« Reply #218 on: January 14, 2019, 09:01:48 AM »

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What do we do with all these isis murderers?
« Reply #219 on: March 11, 2019, 07:09:11 AM »
https://www.ft.com/content/acf5a70e-3384-11e9-bd3a-8b2a211d90d5

just forgive and forget?

we should not be letting them cover their faces 24/7
lets see their murderous faces.

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Stratfor: Labelling the MB as terrorist invites complications
« Reply #220 on: May 11, 2019, 09:15:46 AM »


Labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as Terrorists Invites Complications for the U.S.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (L), shakes hands with U.S. President Donald Trump at the start of a bilateral meeting in New York on Sept. 24, 2018.
(NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)



    Washington's consideration of the matter demonstrates the influence Brotherhood opponents including Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel have — and will continue to have — on the current White House.
    The designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a specially designated global terrorist group would harm the U.S. government's ability to work productively with governments that include parties that are Islamist or aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, such as strategic U.S. allies Turkey and Kuwait.
    It will be impossible to categorize all Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups according to one blanket designation because each organization has varying ideological beliefs and attitudes toward violence.
    The designation could even become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as some political Islamists could respond with violence at what many in the Muslim world would perceive as proof that America is an enemy of Islam.

 

One of the standard bearers of political Islam finds itself square in the White House's crosshairs. The Trump administration confirmed that it is weighing whether to designate the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that is prominent in politics and society throughout the Sunni world, as a foreign terrorist organization. If the United States were to add the Brotherhood to its list, it would join Russia, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in doing so.

Such a move threatens to open a can of worms for the United States, however, not least because the group has so many incarnations — in so many countries — that it defies easy designation. More important, though, are the political difficulties Washington will create for itself in taking a firm stand against the Brotherhood: For while prominent foes of the group in Cairo, Riyadh and elsewhere will laud the move, the United States will struggle to work with the many regional governments that include Brotherhood-affiliated groups within their ranks.

The Big Picture

In pursuing its policies in the Middle East and North Africa, the U.S. government has come to rely heavily on the strategic preferences of a handful of regional actors, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel. As the White House again mulls whether to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, the influence of these regional actors is evident in the White House's seemingly black-and-white approach to a complex issue.

See The Pulse of Political Islam
Fulfilling the Criteria

Hassan al-Bana, a conservative Muslim thinker, formed the Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. Nearly a century later, the organization's Egyptian branch continues to be the most prominent, yet it has also inspired or aligned with the thinking of countless other Islamist groups across the Muslim world that oppose Westernization and secularization to some degree: Some of these groups have a clear link with the original Egyptian Brotherhood; others do not.

In considering its course of action, the United States must decide whether the Brotherhood fulfills the legal definition of a foreign terrorist organization. To apply the designation, the U.S. State Department must confirm that the group is 1) foreign, 2) engages in terrorist activity and 3) is a danger to the United States. But other than the indisputable fact that the Brotherhood is a foreign organization, it doesn't easily conform to the other two characteristics. Ultimately, the United States will find it difficult to adopt a single policy for a political group with so many facets and branches, all of which have varying degrees of separation from the core group in Egypt.

Differences of opinion about violence within the Brotherhood will also complicate the United States' efforts to designate the group a terrorist organization. The core group and many of its affiliates continue to seek change through political and non-violent means, and there are parties in Turkey, Tunisia, Kuwait and Morocco, among others. In the main branch, politically oriented violence is not a core tenet of the Brotherhood's ideology; accordingly, the group possesses no armed forces. Indeed, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has not conducted a terrorist attack, which is technically a prerequisite for a foreign terrorist organization designation. Its more extreme leaders and branches have pushed for dramatic reformations of society from the inside out and from the top down — which partly explains why Muslim monarchies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia perceive the group's ideology as such a threat.

In short, if the United States were to designate the organization a terrorist group, it would be sanctioning the governments of its allies.

At the same time, Brotherhood factions have emerged that support violence as a political tool — usually leading to spin-offs. In the most extreme case, the ideology has fueled groups such as al Qaeda, which draws on the same conservative Sunni ideology but takes it to a violent extreme. More moderately — and more aligned to the Brotherhood — the movement has spawned groups such as Hamas, which the United States lists as a terrorist organization. For Washington, however, the case for labeling Hamas as a terrorist entity was much more straightforward because the Palestinian group conducted and claimed responsbility for violent attacks against one of the United States' closest allies, Israel.

The Reach of the Brotherhood

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Washington's plans is the presence of a large number of Brotherhood-affiliated or -inspired parties in administrations around the Middle East and the greater Muslim world. Depending on the country, these parties are extremely important members of the political landscape, often as popularly elected members of parliament. In some cases, authorities in Muslim countries, such as Morocco, have permitted the growth of Brotherhood-inspired parties so that they can provide a more moderate counterweight to more extreme strains.

This graph shows the positions of parties with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in a number of different countries.

A Counterproductive Measure?

If the United States were to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist group, it would effectively be sanctioning the governments of its allies. There are many conflicts in the region (Yemen and Libya are just two examples) in which political Islamists are legitimate and critical parties to the discussion, as well as many partially democratic systems in which political Islamist groups operate as part of the government. U.S. allies including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and, especially, Egypt — which have long viewed the Brotherhood as an enemy to their system of governance — would welcome the designation and likely view the action as an indication of U.S. approval of other parts of their regional agendas. Others, including Turkey and Qatar, however, would express fury at such a move. Even more important, a sanctions designation, depending on its wording, could force U.S. government officials to restrict their travel or financial activity in countries in which a Brotherhood-affiliated group is active in the government. And for a country like Turkey, which is already embroiled in numerous diplomatic spats with the United States, the designation could spur yet another bilateral diplomatic crisis, possibly convincing Turkey to diversify its security partnerships beyond its traditionally Western base.

Another issue centers on the U.S. administration's balancing act between limiting regional actors from engaging in activity that — according to Washington — threatens U.S. security and supporting democratic developments and popular will in the region. This quandary dogged the Obama administration during the Arab Spring, which toppled a number of autocratic but friendly governments and paved the way for popular Islamist movements to join administrations after years in the shadows. Ultimately, the Brotherhood and other Islamist groups did not develop in a vacuum — they support values that a section of society espouses or wouldn't mind seeing reflected at the government level.

As times change and demographics shift, support for political Islam may wane.

Indeed, the recent Arab Youth Survey from Burston-Marsteller, a global public relations firm, suggests that many young Muslims across the region do not back Islamist groups as much as previous generations. For the moment, however, Islamist groups such as the Brotherhood retain a great deal of popular support among all segments of society in many countries. But as the popular elections in 2011 and 2012 in Egypt show, Islamist political parties — including those aligned with the Brotherhood — retain a sufficient degree of popularity among all segments of society to be a major political force. In the end, designating the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, thereby helping to narrow the space for legitimate political activity, could even fuel extremism as it would portray the American government as an enemy to Islam — the very narrative the White House says it is trying to fight. But even if such dire consequences don't come to pass, the United States could make its work in the region more difficult by taking an action that could shut it out of critical areas of the Muslim world.



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More countries ban Muslim Brotherhood
« Reply #231 on: July 21, 2020, 02:11:15 PM »


More Countries Ban Muslim Brotherhood
by Hany Ghoraba
Special to IPT News
July 21, 2020
https://www.investigativeproject.org/8483/more-countries-ban-muslim-brotherhood

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The Unconquerable Islamic World
« Reply #232 on: August 20, 2021, 02:49:33 PM »
The Unconquerable Islamic World
Afghanistan shows the folly of mistaking Christian ideals for ‘universal’ ones.
By Robert Nicholson
Aug. 19, 2021 6:26 pm ET



Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.

The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.


The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.

Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.


This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.

Euphemisms like “the Greater Middle East” reflect unease with a unified Islamic world. Never mind that Muslims themselves speak in such terms, or that local diversity between Indonesia and Morocco does not undermine the basic coherence of the umma. The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the “Jews and Crusaders” who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.


New trends may herald changing times. The recent decision of four Muslim-majority countries to normalize relations with Israel was a risky, concrete act of friendship that deserves recognition. But such acts are still anomalous in a region where religious and secular Muslims overwhelmingly reject Israel, the U.S., and the Hebraic ties that bind them. Those who call for liberalizing traditional doctrines are brave souls but still statistical minorities.

The West cannot change the Islamic world, but neither can it ignore the world’s fastest-growing religious community. The best strategy will move from rollback to containment and prioritize the defense of American interests and allies over the promotion of values and institutions. Muslim Americans naturally merit the same rights as other citizens. Muslim-majority states that seek friendship with the U.S. deserve a warm welcome, especially when they make difficult decisions for peace. And the American government can still provide humanitarian aid to the casualties of intra-Muslim wars, with a special concern for non-Muslims caught in the crossfire. But overall, the U.S. needs to step back. The best way to honor American values is to stop forcing them on those who reject them.

Only Muslim majorities can decide the Muslim future. Washington must affirm their right to build organic societies that align with their values because they will do so regardless. This does not mean we will stand by when their choices cross American red lines, but the U.S. must affirm their right to make them.

The Islamic world may not change, or maybe it will—but it was never our job to decide. Our focus must be on curing the spiritual sickness that blinded us in the first place, recovering our own sense of civilizational self and reorienting our priorities accordingly.

Mr. Nicholson is president of the Philos Project.

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Re: The Unconquerable Islamic World
« Reply #233 on: August 20, 2021, 02:52:10 PM »
Bullshit.

You must be willing to do what China is willing to do.


The Unconquerable Islamic World
Afghanistan shows the folly of mistaking Christian ideals for ‘universal’ ones.
By Robert Nicholson
Aug. 19, 2021 6:26 pm ET



Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.

The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.


The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.

Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.


This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.

Euphemisms like “the Greater Middle East” reflect unease with a unified Islamic world. Never mind that Muslims themselves speak in such terms, or that local diversity between Indonesia and Morocco does not undermine the basic coherence of the umma. The House of Islam has many rooms, but it stands on a few pillars: The Quran is Allah’s final revelation, binding on all humanity; faith is a matter of private devotion as well as public law, best lived out in a state that blends religion and politics; and Muslims should, where possible, hold power over non-Muslims to ensure that Allah’s law is rightly enforced. It is doctrines like these that cause the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Hamas to fight the “Jews and Crusaders” who tread on land that historically belonged to Islam. But their commitments are far from radical; most Muslims see them as normative even if they fail to act on them.


New trends may herald changing times. The recent decision of four Muslim-majority countries to normalize relations with Israel was a risky, concrete act of friendship that deserves recognition. But such acts are still anomalous in a region where religious and secular Muslims overwhelmingly reject Israel, the U.S., and the Hebraic ties that bind them. Those who call for liberalizing traditional doctrines are brave souls but still statistical minorities.

The West cannot change the Islamic world, but neither can it ignore the world’s fastest-growing religious community. The best strategy will move from rollback to containment and prioritize the defense of American interests and allies over the promotion of values and institutions. Muslim Americans naturally merit the same rights as other citizens. Muslim-majority states that seek friendship with the U.S. deserve a warm welcome, especially when they make difficult decisions for peace. And the American government can still provide humanitarian aid to the casualties of intra-Muslim wars, with a special concern for non-Muslims caught in the crossfire. But overall, the U.S. needs to step back. The best way to honor American values is to stop forcing them on those who reject them.

Only Muslim majorities can decide the Muslim future. Washington must affirm their right to build organic societies that align with their values because they will do so regardless. This does not mean we will stand by when their choices cross American red lines, but the U.S. must affirm their right to make them.

The Islamic world may not change, or maybe it will—but it was never our job to decide. Our focus must be on curing the spiritual sickness that blinded us in the first place, recovering our own sense of civilizational self and reorienting our priorities accordingly.

Mr. Nicholson is president of the Philos Project.

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #234 on: September 02, 2021, 01:19:06 PM »

September 2, 2021
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What the Taliban’s Resurgence Means for the Arab World
Could the Taliban's return to power present a threat to Arab nations?
By: Hilal Khashan

There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors. Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.

But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability. But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.

The Making of the Taliban

The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.

The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to al-Qaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks. But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. (In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.)


(click to enlarge)

Jihadism in Disarray

The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims. In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established al-Qaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched al-Qaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries. However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone. The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state. Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops. U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.

The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate. In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population. In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.

The Decline of Political Islam

Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since. In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists. In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote. In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.

Arab Spring
(click to enlarge)

In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office. The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power. In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.

The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence. There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities. The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors. Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.

G M

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #235 on: September 02, 2021, 01:22:11 PM »
It's inspiring the global jihad, from Saudi, to Iran, from Denmark to Detroit.

Watch.



September 2, 2021
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What the Taliban’s Resurgence Means for the Arab World
Could the Taliban's return to power present a threat to Arab nations?
By: Hilal Khashan

There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors. Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.

But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability. But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.

The Making of the Taliban

The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.

The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to al-Qaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks. But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. (In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.)


(click to enlarge)

Jihadism in Disarray

The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims. In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established al-Qaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched al-Qaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries. However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone. The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state. Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops. U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.

The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate. In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population. In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.

The Decline of Political Islam

Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since. In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists. In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote. In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.

Arab Spring
(click to enlarge)

In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office. The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power. In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.

The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence. There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities. The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors. Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #236 on: September 02, 2021, 01:31:20 PM »
I think you have the better of the argument GM.

G M

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Re: Articulating our cause/strategy against Islamic Fascism
« Reply #237 on: September 02, 2021, 01:53:54 PM »
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/312870


It's inspiring the global jihad, from Saudi, to Iran, from Denmark to Detroit.

Watch.



September 2, 2021
View On Website
Open as PDF

    
What the Taliban’s Resurgence Means for the Arab World
Could the Taliban's return to power present a threat to Arab nations?
By: Hilal Khashan

There have been mixed reactions in the Arab world to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Oman’s grand sheikh congratulated the Afghan people on what he described as a spectacular victory against aggressors. Radical movements, especially in Syria and Gaza, viewed the Taliban’s return to Kabul as a Western defeat in the war against Islam. The Syrian-based Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which considers itself a sister movement of the Taliban, saw the recent developments as representing the triumph of jihadism in Muslim countries.

But the ruling elite, especially in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have deep concerns about the Taliban’s return to power. The Saudis called on the Taliban to develop a comprehensive political arrangement that includes all segments of Afghan society. Similarly, the UAE expressed concerns over security and called on the Taliban to focus on bringing peace and stability. But both the concerns and celebrations seem out of touch with the reality that the Taliban does not present a serious threat to Muslim countries outside of Afghanistan.

The Making of the Taliban

The Taliban are a homebred movement with foundations in Afghan conservative society. Unlike al-Qaida and the Islamic State, they have no aspirations outside of their home turf; their focus is solely on Afghanistan and their Pashtun compatriots in Pakistan.

The group was founded in 1994 by Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, an Afghan city near the Pakistani border. His project was supported in part by Saudi funding dedicated to religious schools. Omar had lost his right eye in a battle against the Soviets, which withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Appalled by Afghan’s rampant corruption, he assembled scores of students from religious schools to help him establish a puritan Islamic state. Adopting “the Taliban” as the name of their movement, they seized control in 1996 of the whole country except Badakhshan province in the northeast, which was controlled by the Northern Alliance.

After the U.S. invasion in 2001, the Taliban were removed from Kabul but continued to pursue a national project to end the occupation and reestablish a model Islamic political system. During peace talks in Qatar in 2020 that led to the agreement to end the war, the Taliban assured the U.S. that they would not provide shelter to al-Qaida fighters and that it would engage Afghanistan’s vulnerable populations in political and social integration talks. But considering the group’s history, many Arabs didn’t take its promises seriously. The Taliban had told the U.S. after the attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that they were committed to preventing Osama bin Laden from launching attacks on American assets from Afghanistan – though they also claimed that the U.S. provided no evidence implicating bin Laden in the two attacks. After 9/11, the Taliban refused to turn in bin Laden and other al-Qaida personnel, viewing them as allies that had helped liberate Afghanistan from Soviet invaders. Only three countries recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. (In 2004, when Mohammad bin Zayed became crown prince of Abu Dhabi, the UAE stopped supporting Islamic political movements.)


(click to enlarge)

Jihadism in Disarray

The Taliban was founded to promote civic values compatible with the teachings of Islam. Al-Qaida, on the other hand, was focused on combating Christians and Jews, whom it blamed – in addition to self-serving national governments – for the travails of Muslims. In 1988, Osama bin Laden and other Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan established al-Qaida in Peshawar, Pakistan, as a decentralized, transnational movement. The group’s fighters eventually left Afghanistan and returned to their countries of origin, seeking to bring down unpopular regimes throughout the Arab world. In the wake of the Second Gulf War, they also launched al-Qaida’s first attack against the U.S. in 1993, detonating a bomb at the World Trade Center in New York City.

Al-Qaida and its affiliates have a presence in many parts of Asia and Africa, including the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Syria, the Caucasus, India, Egypt’s Sinai, Somalia, North Africa and the Sahel countries. However, they haven’t managed to bring down an existing government, largely because U.S. airstrikes and local security forces have kept them in check. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and targeted airstrikes, especially in Yemen and Somalia, decimated al-Qaida’s backbone. The group weakened and splintered, setting the stage for the rise of the Islamic State. Unlike al-Qaida, whose attacks primarily targeted the West and Israel, the Islamic State chose to deal with the enemy within, i.e., the nation-state. Its history goes back to the 1970s, when the Muslim Brotherhood splintered following the 1967 Six-Day War, leading to the emergence of many Islamic movements dedicated to toppling the secular Egyptian government and installing an Islamic state in its ruins.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant appeared in Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003 and gathered momentum among alienated Sunni Arabs in Anbar province. In 2014, the Islamic State seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, with a force totaling just 1,500 men against more than 45,000 Iraqi troops. U.S. airstrikes and ground forces halted their expansion toward Baghdad. With the participation of the peshmergas and the Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization Forces, a U.S.-led coalition soundly defeated IS in Iraq by 2017 and in Syria a couple years later.

The Islamic State-Khorasan, the group responsible for last week’s attack on the Kabul airport, emerged in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. Khorasan is a historical region in Central Asia, where the group seeks to operate. In addition to Afghanistan, the region includes Pakistan, India, Kashmir, eastern Iran and the Chinese province of Xinjiang, populated mainly by Muslim Uyghurs. IS-K’s membership is multinational and includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Chechens, Uyghurs, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Kazakhs. It has roughly 1,500 active members and does not have wide appeal among the Afghan population. In 2018, the Taliban decisively defeated the group in the Battle of Darzab. Even though IS-K has demonstrated an ability to stage high concept, bloody operations, it does not have the military capability to conquer territory – though Afghanistan’s neighbors, namely China, fear that it might attract young recruits from their restive populations.

The Decline of Political Islam

Arab uprisings saw the rise of Islamic political parties in a number of Arab countries, but their popularity has steadily declined ever since. In 2012, Mohammed Morsi, a candidate representing the Muslim Brotherhood, won the presidency in Egypt’s only democratic election since the 1952 military coup. A year later, the army ousted him, outlawed the Brotherhood and issued harsh prison terms for Brotherhood leaders and activists. In Tunisia, which political observers described as an exception to the turmoil that plagued Arab states, President Kais Saied suspended the parliament last July and concentrated most state powers in his hands. The popularity of the Islamist Ennahda party peaked in the 2011 general elections, in which it received 37 percent of the vote. In 2014, it received 28 percent, which declined to 20 percent in 2019. Charges of corruption and mismanagement have steadily chipped away at the party’s popular appeal.

Arab Spring
(click to enlarge)

In Morocco, King Mohammad VI placated protesters’ demands for political reforms by appointing a prime minister from the Justice and Development Party, which won 23 percent of the vote and the most seats in the 2011 elections. In 2016, the party won 27 percent of the vote and held on to the prime minister’s office. The law prevents a single party from winning an absolute majority in Morocco, where the king still reigns supreme and the Justice and Development Party’s success did not translate into real political power. In Yemen, the Islah Party, which in the last parliamentary elections in 2003 came in second to the ruling General People’s Congress party, lost much of its influence since the 2011 uprising. The surge of the Houthi rebels and their seizure of most Islah strongholds, in addition to the UAE’s hostility toward Sunni political Islam, made it irrelevant.

The Arab uprisings and the emergence of militant Islamic movements overshadowed other Islamic movements in the region that were focused on politics and opposed to violence. There is no justification for Arab concerns that the Taliban takeover will make Afghanistan a refuge for Islamic movements, a base for militant training, and a launchpad for subversive activities. The Taliban are not a transnational group, and Islamic movements in the Arab region should not expect to receive support from them. IS-K is focused on Central Asia, not the Arab world, but it’s still doubtful it can develop the capacity to mount serious attacks on Afghanistan’s neighbors. Neither the Taliban nor the Central Asian states will allow the group to become a real threat. Afghans from different political leanings are self-contained people with a particularistic worldview. The events of the past decade indicate that militant Islam cannot win.

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911 used to attack America
« Reply #239 on: October 06, 2021, 02:35:25 PM »
How the Media's 9/11 Anniversary Coverage Shifted from a Critical Look at al-Qaida to Attacking America
by Abigail R. Esman
IPT News
October 6, 2021

https://www.investigativeproject.org/9028/how-the-media-9-11-anniversary-coverage-shifted

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Re: We are losing Islamic Fascism's war against us
« Reply #241 on: September 13, 2022, 05:41:56 PM »
https://andmagazine.substack.com/p/the-war-continues-and-we-are-losing?s=w&utm_medium=web

You can't fight a war when you won't recognize the enemy.

Meanwhile, we are the targets of the USG.

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A Brief History of Islamic Atrocities
« Reply #242 on: October 21, 2023, 05:32:48 PM »
This piece demonstrates rape, mutilation, maiming and killing children et al is not anything new, though the excuses for doing so evolve expediently:

https://pjmedia.com/columns/miltharris/2023/10/21/its-not-about-politics-or-israel-its-about-islam-and-always-has-been-n1737024



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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Why I am a Christian
« Reply #244 on: November 20, 2023, 02:04:43 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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Facts about the Pals that need to be known
« Reply #245 on: November 20, 2023, 03:14:35 PM »
https://rumble.com/v3wxhq5-palestine-jordan-issues.html?fbclid=IwAR1X0NgSsb6_9HFXZBiZboAJVEXm78w3d0yZ8QRy8Oe5JUzaJg2Txa97C_I

This was on X/Twitter but I had a friend put it on Rumble for greater ease of viewing and facilitation of this getting played forward.