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 9/11 Anniversary--Combat Terrorism!
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Posted on 09-11-06 11:25 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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The nation is solemnly observing the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks Monday, with sorrowful family members reading the names of the victims at the World Trade Center site and quiet remembrances holding around the country.

Five years have gone. International terrorism has threatened the United States, its allies and interests, and the world community. Defeating the terrorist enemy requires sound policies, concerted U.S. Government effort, and international cooperation.

US policy on counter-terrorism is to deter, defeat and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens, or facilities, whether they occur domestically, in international waters or airspace or on foreign territory. The United States regards all such terrorism as a potential threat to national security as well as a criminal act and will apply all appropriate means to combat it. In doing so, the U.S. shall pursue vigorously efforts to deter and preempt, apprehend and prosecute, or assist other governments to prosecute, individuals who perpetrate or plan to perpetrate such attacks.

Personally, I don't think violence can be barricaded by counter-violence. US, inarguably the most powerful nation at status quo should delve into the root causes which generate violence and terrorism. Why would a young muslim from middle east join Al-Qaeda? Why would a young nepali join maoists troops? These are some questions that have to be answered.

I also believe that there is a thin line between terrorism and revolution. If maoists are terrorists then so could be the freedom fighters of 2007 BS revolution or 2046 BS people's movement. It's just a matter of time before things reveal: who were terrorists and who were revolutionists. US and the republicans are paving an incorrect way to combat terrorism. I don't know where would this path lead them to in the future.

LooTe
 
Posted on 09-11-06 11:44 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Look who is talking ..hahahaha
 
Posted on 09-11-06 11:57 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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dude, did you read the whole thing? hehe....
i am just trying to analyze the ways that US and its allies have opted to combat terrorism. "we will smoke 'em out!"--as our president would say. do you think this is how it should be done?

this is how i see. let me take a metaphor. if your house is filled with mosquitoes. what would you do?
1) buy a repellant and try to kill them ("smoke 'em out! hehe).
2) keep your house and neighborhood clean so that mosquitoes are not produced in the first place.

US is following solution 1) which is not gonna work in the long run, it will only take them to exhaustion. That ape president and his hypocritical policies ain't worth solutions!

LooTe
 
Posted on 09-11-06 12:08 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Again look who is talking ..hahahah
 
Posted on 09-11-06 12:22 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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imi, you high or what? looks like you have gone insane after going through posts pertaining to terrorism all these months.

this is where you should contact:

Shri 420 Sexy Mental Hospital
Mesra, Ranchi, India 00000

hehe
 
Posted on 09-11-06 12:45 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Some interesting read about 9/11:

THE DAY NOTHING MUCH CHANGED

By William J. Dobson (Managing Editor, Foreign Policy Magazine)

We were told the world would never be the same. But did 9/11 actually alter the state of global affairs? For all the sound and fury, the world looks much like it did on September 10.

At 8:45 a.m., Sept. 11, 2001, we were living in the post-Cold War era. At 9:37 a.m., just 52 minutes later, as the third hijacked airliner careened into the Pentagon, the post–9/11 era had begun. Everyone told us that everything had changed.

It was the beginning of a new chapter in history. The image of thousands of people perishing as the Twin Towers collapsed in a cascade of fire and dust, live on television, was a bookmark for the ages. There was a world before this tragedy, and then there was something very different that was about to follow. It is tempting to assume that this attitude was just another example of American narcissism. (The United States was attacked, so the world had changed.) But that wasn’t the case. A poll taken shortly after the attacks by the Pew Research Center found a remarkable degree of agreement among opinion leaders around the world about what the September 11 attacks represented. In Western Europe, 76 percent of those polled said the events of that day had amounted to a turning point in world history. In Russia and Asia, 73 and 69 percent of people agreed. In the Middle East and Latin America, the percentage of opinion leaders who believed 9/11 marked the beginning of a new era rose to 90 percent. Rarely have so many agreed about the meaning of a single moment.

Five years on, this response must be understood as one being born out of shock. Certainly, for some, there could not have been a more life-changing moment. Collectively, we feared what was about to end. Globalization would surely grind to a halt. Borders—in particular, the need to maintain them—would undergo a renaissance as governments looked to shield themselves from the next attack. Global trade, capital flows, and immigration could no longer be what they once were. National economies would cool, as the realization of a “clash of civilizations” grew hot. Industries like tourism and air travel would be crippled.

Yet, if you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11, what is remarkable is how little the world has changed. The forces of globalization continue unabated; indeed, if anything, they have accelerated. The issues of the day that we were debating on that morning in September are largely the same. Across broad measures of political, economic, and social data, the constants outweigh the variations. And, five years later, the United States’ foreign policy is marked by no greater strategic clarity than it had on Sept. 10, 2001.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were theatrical terrorism of the worst kind. But, even in an age when image usually trumps substance, the tragic drama of that day did not usher in a new era. No, if there was a day that changed the world forever, it was 15 years ago, not five. New Year’s Eve, 1991. It was on that day, far away from any cameras, that the Soviet Union finally threw in the towel, dissolving itself and officially bringing an end to the Cold War. From that moment on, the United States reigned supreme—“the sole superpower,” “the hyperpower,” “the global hegemon,” call it what you like. And from that moment on, the world was out of balance—and it still is. The tragedy of 9/11 was a manifestation of the unipolar disorder the world had already entered a decade earlier. A day after 9/11, we were still living in the post-Cold War era, we still are today, and that is precisely the problem.

Where We Left Off

If you were in either of the two cities that were attacked on September 11, you might have picked up a copy of one of the daily newspapers. The headline of one story in the Washington Post read, “Israeli Tanks Encircle a City in West Bank.” The front page of the New York Times led with a story headlined, “Scientists Urge Bigger Supply of Stem Cells.” Inside the paper, readers might have also noticed a small item that read, “Iran: Denial on Nuclear Weapons.” The headlines on that morning—before the world learned of the attacks—suggest that our pre-9/11 preoccupations are certainly not that different from those we carry today.

The global economy offered the first sign that a new, darker day hadn’t dawned. On September 10, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9,605.51. Once markets reopened on September 17, it took only 40 days for the market to close above that level again. The value of the United States’ monthly exports has continued to rise steadily from $60 billion to more than $75 billion between 2001 and 2005. The value of global trade dipped slightly in 2001 from $8 trillion to $7.8 trillion. Then, once markets found their footing, they came racing back, increasing every subsequent year, topping $12 trillion in 2005. Hard-hit businesses such as the tourist industry bounced back remarkably fast. In 2001, more than 688 million tourists traveled abroad; by 2005, that number had climbed to 808 million—a 17 percent increase in four years. Confidence returned so quickly that we are not even shying away from building skyscrapers. Fourteen buildings taller than the World Trade Center have either been built, proposed, or began construction since 9/11.




The United States’ openness to the immigrants of the world was supposed to be another unfortunate casualty of September 11. University presidents, ceos, and, of course, those seeking to immigrate for work or study, have complained loudly that the United States has fallen into a “Fortress America” mentality. It’s a legitimate concern, but the picture is far less dire than they claim. For example, the United States granted far more worker visas in 2005 than in 1998, the heyday of America’s triumphant, open-for-business dot-com boom. Last year, 255,993 student visas were handed out—only 541 fewer than in 2002. Also in 2005, the United States rejected fewer foreigners for H1B visas—the work permit given to those who have a special occupational expertise in, say, medicine, engineering, or science—than in 2001; in fact, last year was the lowest refusal rate of the past 5 years. The number of people becoming American citizens is also on the rise. More foreigners were naturalized in 2005 than in 1998, and the number of naturalizations leapt 12 percent from 2004 to 2005. Overall levels of legal immigration may have fallen off somewhat since 2001, which was a high-water mark, but it’s hardly the case that the United States is cutting itself off from the world’s best and brightest.

Surely, though, there is a growing gulf between America and the world. Otherwise, how could anyone explain the mounting anti-Americanism in recent years? It is true that anti-American sentiment runs wide and deep today, but it is also true that it is not new. Europeans had only slightly more confidence in President George W. Bush than in Russian President Vladimir Putin on the eve of 9/11. In an August 2001 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, strong majorities—more than 70 percent—of four West European nations characterized the Bush administration as unilateralist. They held this opinion before the war on terror or the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which in their execution are far more responsible for the current antipathy toward the United States than anything else.

Anti-Americanism, however, has a far longer lineage than the Bush administration. Its roots are in the world’s collective fear that U.S. preeminence would become so great that the United States would come to dominate others. In 1983, a Newsweek poll conducted by the Gallup Organization found that in six countries, Brazil, Britain, France, Japan, Mexico, and West Germany, only the Brazilians approved of U.S. government policy. In the same poll, a majority in Brazil, Japan, and Mexico believed that a strong U.S. military presence around the world increased the chance of war.

Sensibly, those fears grew with the end of the superpower contest. In 1995, in a survey conducted by the United States Information Agency, majorities around the world said that the United States was intent on dominating them. Even with a president as beloved abroad as Bill Clinton, America was considered a bully by 83 percent of people polled in Israel, 77 percent in Morocco, 71 percent in Colombia, and 61 percent in Britain. In December 2001, resentment of U.S. power was still the leading reason for disliking the United States in Europe, Russia, and Latin America, and a close second everywhere else. But the fact that anti-Americanism has spiked since the U.S. invasion of Iraq is, again, entirely sensible. For the rest of the world, it is the realization of the fears of American dominance that they have long harbored.

What Has Changed

In 2002, then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said of the time following September 11: “I really think this period is analogous to 1945 to 1947 in that the events ... started shifting the tectonic plates in international politics.” Of course, it is tempting to see 9/11 as the beginning of a new era. Destruction as unexpected and dramatic as occurred on that day almost demands a label or name all its own. But the plates had already shifted 10 years earlier. The United States was a target on September 11 because it was perceived to be the global hegemon. Al Qaeda’s efforts to overthrow the Arab regimes had been an abysmal failure in the 1990s. Unable to accomplish his objectives in the Arab world, Osama bin Laden plotted to strike the “faraway enemy,” the United States. By striking at the colossus, which for decades had helped shore up the bedrock of Arab regimes, bin Laden hoped to remake the world. What Rice saw on September 11 was an explosion that had been building for some time.

The attacks of September 11 have not altered the balance of power. Instead, they only aggravated differences in the imbalance that already existed. Perhaps the truest thing that changed because of 9/11 was the way in which the Pentagon’s budget soared. The American military’s budgeted defense spending grew 39 percent between 2001 and 2006. Put another way, in 2001, the United States’ military expenditure of $325 billion was the same as the next 14 biggest militaries combined. By 2005, the Pentagon was outspending the next 14 militaries by $116 billion.

This monumental increase in military spending has helped finance the U.S. war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. And some would argue that these campaigns, and the general American foreign policy that has undergirded them, have made the world a far more dangerous place for everyone—everyone, that is, except Americans. Consider that between Sept. 12, 2001, and Dec. 31, 2005, 18,944 people around the world died in acts of terrorism. Only eight of those deaths were on American soil.

If the world resented the imbalance between the United States and everyone else before September 11, you can understand how that resentment could be so much greater today. The gulf between the United States and the rest of the world has only grown wider. For better or worse, only when the international system achieves some sort of balance—whether it happens because of others’ progress, American decline, or both—will the post-Cold War era come to a close. Until then, 1991 will remain the year that matters most.
 
Posted on 09-11-06 12:49 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Next generation of Jihadis:

What turns a man into a terrorist, and what can be done about it?


Muslim extremism in Europe
The enemy within

THE residents, both white and Asian, of certain quiet suburbs of Leeds, in northern England, were understandably confused by the news that their neighbours had caught a train to London and brought mayhem to the capital. Some described the bombers as ordinary young men whose interests did not go much beyond football and cricket. But one suspect was said by a neighbour to have found another solution to suburban boredom—a long trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a chance to be trained in the arts of terror.

Two related questions haunt Britain, and Europe, in the wake of the London attacks. First, what is it that prompts a small minority of the continent's Muslims to shift from discontent or personal frustration to active terror? And second, was the attack on London indeed an act of home-grown terror, or an atrocity initiated by people in some distant war zone who had a grudge against Britain? The Leeds arrests, while impressively swift and a credit to the police (see article), have proved there is no easy answer to these questions. In an age of globalised ideologies, globalised communications and porous borders, there is no real distinction between domestic and foreign threats.


Even if everyone involved in terrorising London turns out to have been British-born, it is clear that the bombers had access to sophisticated explosives, not easily available in suburban Yorkshire; and, more important, that they were influenced by ideas, images and interpretations of Islam that would continue to circulate electronically, even if every extremist who tried to enter Britain were intercepted. So the best that terrorist-hunters in Britain and elsewhere in Europe can do is to trace how disaffected people from their own tranquil suburbs form connections with ideological mentors, and ultimately terrorist sponsors, who live overseas, and how those godfathers find recruits in western countries.

An example of such sponsorship is the recent report that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the mastermind of terror in Iraq, has built up a network of supporters and volunteers in Spain. For a case of mentoring, consider the trial that began in Amsterdam this week of Mohammed Bouyeri, who has confessed to killing Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director who had enraged Muslims with his fiery attacks on Islam.

Mr Bouyeri, who refused at his trial to recognise the Dutch legal system and came to court clutching the Koran, is linked to the Hofstad group of Dutch youngsters, some 15 of whom are on trial separately. They began as a group of second- or third-generation Dutch Muslims, mostly male and in their late teens or early 20s, who became discontented with their country and surfed the internet for ideas. At least at first, this and other groups of disaffected Dutch Muslims were pathetically unsophisticated. One was caught in 2003 trying to make a bomb—drawing on tips from a website, but using the wrong fertiliser. At some point, however, the group found a mentor who was more sinister and sophisticated: a Syrian jihadist-recruiter who came to the Netherlands and coached them in doctrine.

In Britain, too, security services have concluded that these days, connections between local youths and foreign godfathers are usually formed at the youths' behest. To a surprising extent, the onus is on individual zealots (or groups of them) to find mentors. Al-Qaeda does not actively seek recruits for the jihadist cause, partly because that would attract the attention of the security services and partly because, ever since the destruction of its bases in Afghanistan, it has—in the view of well placed British observers—been too loosely organised to recruit systematically.

This highlights one of the main difficulties of the “war on terror”. In 2001, when America and its allies responded to the attacks on New York and Washington by declaring war on the al-Qaeda network, it seemed an identifiable adversary, with bases, financial structures and a leadership that could be singled out and struck. Since then, it has become something much looser: not even a “franchise”, as it is commonly labelled, but more an ideological community, held together above all by electronic connections, which seeks inspiration from a common source.
Radicalism-by-internet

What prompts young British, French or Dutch Muslims to look for such mentors? Senior British insiders say that, although paths to extremism vary widely, they tend to follow certain social and psychological patterns. Frequently, a young Muslim man falls out of mainstream society, becoming alienated both from his parents and from the “stuffy” Islamic culture in which he was brought up. He may become more devout, but the reverse is more likely. He turns to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing a “solution” to his problems—and the world's—in radical Islam.

Olivier Roy, a French writer on global Islam, has described “neo-fundamentalism” (which may or may not be violent) as a broad reaction by Muslims in western countries against their families and background, as well as against their host societies. As Mr Roy portrays them, such Muslims have abandoned the food, music and customs of the “old country” but still feel repelled by the ethos and values of the “new country”. Adrift from both, they are attracted by a simple, electronically disseminated version of the faith which can readily be propagated among people of all cultures, including white Europeans.

Another French “Islamologue”, Antoine Sfeir, has identified relations between the sexes as a big factor in the re-Islamisation of second-generation Muslims in Europe. Because young Muslim women often do better than men at adapting to the host society (they tend to do better at school, for example), old patriarchal structures are upset and young men acquire a strong incentive to reassert the old order.

In many cases, say British specialists, groups of young, disaffected Muslims goad one another down the path to extremism. People who may be bound together by ethnicity, worship or criminal activity develop a common interest in the suffering of Muslims across the globe. Websites and satellite television channels then supply visual images and incendiary rhetoric from any place where Muslims are fighting non-Muslims. The favourite war used to be Chechnya; now it is Iraq.

As an incipient extremist group grows more obsessive, and its weaker brethren fall away, hard-core members often withdraw from the mosques. Indeed, a big recent trend in European Islam, says Mr Roy, is the mass withdrawal by militants from mosques that are under surveillance. This has made extremism even more elusive, and the internet's influence even greater. To a large extent, “the internet has replaced Afghanistan” as a source of training and inspiration for militant Muslims, says Stephen Ulph, a scholar working for the Jamestown Foundation, an American think-tank.

Through the web, even dead al-Qaeda fighters live on, says Mr Ulph. On one website that ceased operations last year (but has several imitators), it was possible to read the writings of senior, recently slain al-Qaeda men on everything from physical training to guerrilla tactics.


A group of young Muslims will often travel quite a long way down the road to violent jihad before meeting anybody with terrorist expertise. Some never find the contacts they seek, and resort to their own devices; only occasionally does this have deadly results for anybody besides themselves. One example of such amateurism is that of two Moroccan men from the Dutch city of Eindhoven, Ahmed el-Bakiouli and Khalid el-Hassnaoui, who tried to enter Afghanistan in December 2001 in the hope of fighting some Americans. Having failed, they went to Kashmir, where they were swiftly killed by Indian security forces. In Britain, several terrorist plots uncovered since 2001 have been striking for their incompetence and lack of outside expertise.

Things become far more dangerous, of course, when committed radicals come into contact with veterans of wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, or of the Afghan training camps where several hundred Britons are believed to have been schooled. These veterans either have the know-how to plan an atrocity, or can find somebody who does, and it is under their influence that hopeless missions can turn deadly. Whether this happens or not is often a matter of chance. Take the Egyptian Mohammed Atta and other members of the “Hamburg cell” that plotted the September 11th attacks. They were drawn into mega-terror after meeting someone who introduced them first to an al-Qaeda operative in Germany, and then to masterminds in Afghanistan. If this had not happened, the Hamburg group might have ended up as cannon-fodder in Chechnya.
Profiling the would-bes

These patterns of self-recruitment and self-radicalisation are a headache for security services, who have no easy way to infiltrate close-knit, local groups that operate at first without foreign help. But in the Netherlands the intelligence services reckon they have identified three broad categories of people from which actual and would-be terrorists are drawn: recent arrivals, second-generation members of immigrant communities, and converts.

Recent arrivals are often intensely involved in—and in a few cases, protagonists of—bitter ideological and ethnic conflicts in their home countries. During the 1990s, Algeria's internal bloodbath—which pitted a secular, military regime against its armed Islamist opponents—was exported to France, culminating in bomb attacks on the Paris metro. (Some of these Islamists, to French disgust, later found refuge in London.) Among recent Muslim immigrants to Britain, many are deeply embroiled in the internal conflicts of south Asia—including intra-Muslim squabbles like that which divides the Barelvi form of Islam, followed by most Pakistanis, from the more purist Deobandi tendency which gave rise to the Taliban movement.

While most followers of the Deobandi line, which stresses the brotherhood of all Muslims over national or civic ties, are perfectly peaceful, their doctrine can inspire extremism. In the same way, violent extremists from the Arab world often share ideological roots with Saudi conservatives, or opposition-minded Egyptians, who are far from being exponents of generalised violence against soft western targets. Whether they like it or not, European security services are having to learn these fine distinctions.

The vast majority of “white” converts to Islam adhere to forms of the faith that eschew violence. But some of them turn to violent Islam in a spirit of alienation from society, or personal bitterness. Some are “rescued” from a life of petty crime; quite a few, like the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, are touched in prison. Lacking any sense of Islamic tradition, and perhaps eager to prove themselves to their new peers, they are susceptible to extremism.

On the other hand, because the path to extremism so often involves the renunciation of everything in one's own background, material comfort and a liberal upbringing seem to be no bar to the development of a terrorist. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a young Briton of Pakistani origin who is believed to have masterminded the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan of an American journalist, Daniel Pearl, was privately educated and studied at the London School of Economics. At least one of the London bombers identified this week seems to have come from a middle-class background. Whatever motivated the two Britons who became suicide-bombers in Israel in 2003, it was not material want.

Nor does the story of the Dutch Islamist, Mr Bouyeri, suggest any easy correlation between suffering and the impulse to crime. The killer had suffered setbacks at university, and had been unsuccessfully involved in trying to set up a youth club. In 2002 his mother died, his father remarrying soon afterwards. But as one specialist on the Netherlands points out, if such problems were enough to turn a youngster into an assassin, most young Dutch Muslims would be loading their guns.

On the evidence of most European countries, adequate material and social conditions do not always stop people becoming terrorists. But the reverse may hold good: if people are economically deprived or socially excluded, the pool of potential killers and bombers will grow.

In the highest levels of the British government, the dominant thinking is that economics does matter. If this is right, Europe's problem is obvious. Even in Britain, where anti-discrimination laws are relatively stringent, Muslims tend to be poor. Of all religious groups, they are the least likely to own their own homes. They are also the least likely to hold professional jobs and the most likely to be out of work. Just 48% of British Muslims reported that they were economically active in 2001, compared with 65% of Christians, 67% of Hindus and 75% of those who professed no religion.

Lack of jobs in the areas where Muslims have settled is part of the problem, but another reason is that women are less likely to do paid work. Four out of ten look after home and family, compared with little more than one in ten women in Britain as a whole. In a sense, the Muslim household is resilient—many fewer children are brought up in one-parent families than is the case among non-Muslims—but there is, literally, a price to be paid.

Britain's approach to tackling domestic extremism has sought to mix vigilance with openness, on the principle that militants are least dangerous in places where they and their followers can be closely watched. The domestic intelligence service, MI5, has expanded and moved its lens away from Irish terrorism; these days, about half its attention is directed at Islamist activities. But nobody, not even the spooks, believes wiretaps and infiltrators alone are enough to defeat Islamist extremism. To achieve that end, Muslims must learn to police themselves.
The perils of co-operating

An official outreach campaign accelerated in 2001, a year that saw not only attacks on America but also riots involving South Asian Muslims in northern English towns. After a tentative start, meetings between mosque committees and local police officers have become routine. Muslims do not like to admit it, but an implicit quid pro quo is involved: heightened protection in return for information and good publicity. The trade-off was illustrated on July 7th, the day of the London bombings, when the Metropolitan Police deployed scarce officers to defend mosques. Police in Leeds, who had to close a mosque on July 12th as they combed the bombers' neighbourhood, helped people find alternative arrangements for worship.

Muslim clerics did their part by denouncing the London bombings, and by reminding co-religionists of prohibitions against the taking of innocent lives and of the importance of co-operating with the police. The point, according to Mohamed Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, was to inform misguided members of the Muslim community of the correct religious teaching. As for those who choose to ignore it, says Mr Naseem, “they are on their own.”

That is, of course, the problem with expecting mosques to police Muslims. Extremists may be denounced from the pulpits, but that does not prevent them meeting like-minded folk in living rooms. Similar problems dog the British government's outreach efforts. It has chosen to deal mostly with the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella-group with which most significant Muslim organisations—including some radical ones—are affiliated. The government has allowed the MCB to influence, or at least comment upon, policies both domestic and foreign. Consequently, however, the MCB looks to some like a toady of the government.

The authorities in Paris have, if anything, gone even further than those in London in trying to co-opt and co-operate with the mainstream of their country's Muslim community. At the risk of compromising France's secular traditions, the government has groomed the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM), elected via mosques rather than by ordinary Muslims, as a privileged interlocutor.

As both Britain and France have found, such tactics can involve hard trade-offs. As liberal French Muslims see things, their government, in its haste to find Muslim friends, has needlessly given some crypto-fundamentalists a bigger say in the nation's affairs than their numbers warrant. In Britain, too, the government has found that offering sops to the MCB ties them to policies (such as the bill to outlaw religious hatred that is going through Parliament) to which other citizens object.

But these days, European governments have few higher priorities than draining the waters in which incorrigible Muslim extremists can so easily swim. If wooing moderate European Muslims and, in the process, offending others is the necessary price, they will gladly pay it.
 
Posted on 09-11-06 1:00 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Another one from FP:

Think Again: 9/11
By Juan Cole

Source : - http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3541

The attacks on the United States were neither a clash of civilizations nor an unqualified success for al Qaeda. They were, however, a clash of policy that continues to this day. As al Qaeda struggles to strike again, the United States wrestles with a confused war on terror that won’t end until Americans are forced to choose between Medicare and missiles.

“September 11 Changed Everything”

No. The massive forces of international trade and globalization were largely unaffected by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. China’s emergence as a new economic giant in East Asia continues, with all its economic, diplomatic, and military implications. Decades-old flash points remain. China and Taiwan still stare at each other suspiciously across the strait. The conflict between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan over Kashmir shows no signs of resolving itself. North Korea’s cycle of provocation and retreat with the United States and Japan hasn’t changed fundamentally since the Clinton administration.

Even within the Middle East, there is more continuity than change. Al Qaeda’s strike didn’t answer the questions of Iranian influence in Syria and Lebanon and of the long-term impact of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution on the region. The world’s reliance on oil from the Persian Gulf is as strong as ever. The sclerotic but stubborn Saudi and Egyptian regimes linger on. Israel is still battling militants in southern Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. For all their visibility and drama, the 9/11 attacks left untouched many of the underlying forces and persistent tensions that shape international politics.

“9/11 Was a Victory for Al Qaeda”

Probably. Post-9/11 terrorism—from Bali to Madrid to London—has become the province of small, local groups who are emulating al Qaeda but not in direct contact with it. These cells can learn a few tricks on the Internet, and they can certainly inflict pain, but they cannot hope to accomplish much. At most, they can carry bombs onto trains.

The economic and social disruption of these operations is limited, which is why al Qaeda itself would not bother with them. The core al Qaeda leadership prefers terrorism that has a powerful psychological and political impact. Attaining that level of impact has now become very difficult. The 9/11 hijackers exploited conceptual gaps in U.S. security procedures: American experts did not expect hijackers to be capable of piloting jetliners, and they did not expect them to commit suicide. It would be very difficult to accomplish such an advanced operation again. The organization’s command and control has been severely disrupted, and security agencies around the world are watchful.

But al Qaeda is not out of the game entirely. In February 2006, its operatives almost succeeded in bombing the Abqaiq oil refining facility in Saudi Arabia, which would have caused an enormous short-term spike in the price of petroleum and widespread fuel shortages. But the fact that a once porous Saudi security apparatus foiled the attack highlights al Qaeda’s limited capabilities.

“9/11 Was a Clash of Civilizations”

False. The notion that Muslims hate the West for its way of life is simply wrong, and 9/11 hasn’t changed that. The exhaustive World Values Survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents in much of the Muslim world endorsed democracy as the best form of government. Polling by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has found that about half of respondents in countries such as Turkey and Morocco believe that if a Muslim immigrated to the United States, his or her life would be better. The one area where Muslim publics admit to a value difference with the United States and Europe is standards of sexual conduct and, in particular, acceptance of homosexuality. In other words, Muslims reject what might be called Hollywood morality, just as do American conservatives and evangelicals. Those differences alone do not drive people to violence.

If it is not a clash of civilizations, what is it? It is a clash over policy. Bin Laden has expressed outrage at the “occupation of the three holy cities”—Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem—by the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia (now ended) and the Israeli possession of Jerusalem. Before the Iraq war, polling consistently showed that Muslims were most concerned about the United States’ wholehearted support of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. The bloody U.S. occupation of Iraq has now created another point of tension: The Muslim world does not believe that Iraq will be better off because of the U.S. intervention. Autonomy and national independence appear to be part of what Muslims mean by “democracy,” and they consider Western interventions in Muslim affairs a betrayal of democratic ideals. September 11 and the American response to it have deepened the rift over policy, but they haven’t created a clash of civilizations.

“The War on Terror Has no End”

That’s the plan. The Bush administration has defined the struggle vaguely precisely so that it can’t end; George W. Bush clearly enjoys the prerogatives of being a war president. So, the administration has expanded the goals and targets of this war from one group or geographical area to another. There is an ongoing counterterrorism effort against al Qaeda and, more broadly, the Salafist jihadi strain of Sunni radicalism. Then there is the struggle to empower the Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and to crush permanently the Pashtun-centered Taliban. In Iraq, the goal is to ensure the primacy of the Kurds and the Shiites over the Sunni Arabs. And then there is the effort to contain or overthrow the secular Baathist regime in Syria and the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran. Even North Korea sometimes gets included in this sprawling campaign. It is less a coherent war than a hawk’s wish list.

If the “war on terror” is indeed all these things, then it could drag on for decades. More likely, the American public will not tolerate such a costly grab bag of initiatives for much longer. If there is no major attack in the United States, pressure will build on Washington to stop fiddling with the politics of Kandahar and Ramadi, much less those of Damascus and Tehran. At some point, the American public will have to choose between paying for Bush’s ongoing wars and Medicare. And that will be the true end of the war on terror.

9/11 Radically Changed U.S. Foreign Policy

No. American policy has changed only at the margins. The attacks temporarily removed constraints on U.S. political elites, allowing them to pursue their policies more aggressively. As we now know, President Bush and his advisors wanted to undermine Saddam’s regime well before September 11. Absent the attacks, the administration might have employed a limited bombing campaign, a covert operation, or a coup attempt. The attacks suddenly made a years-long land war in the Middle East politically palatable. But that energy has now dissipated, and it has left behind little fundamental change in U.S. policy.

Despite talk of a “war on terror,” Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, the Persian Gulf monarchies, Morocco, and Pakistan remain close U.S. allies. Relations with Libya were warming in the Clinton era, and the Iraq war didn’t alter its trajectory. American support for Israel remains steadfast. And Iran and Syria were in Washington’s sights well before 9/11.

It is possible to imagine a response to 9/11 that would have been dramatically different. The United States might have allied with the Baathist secularists in Syria and Iraq, and with the Shiites in Iran, to counter the extremist Sunni threat. Instead, all Washington’s old friends in the area (including the three regimes that had recognized the Taliban—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) are still friends, and the old enemies are still enemies.

The most dramatic changes, of course, are in Afghanistan and Iraq. But both countries have effectively been fighting civil wars for 25 years, with the United States backing the losing side (the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq). After 9/11, the Bush administration transformed the losers in those conflicts into winners. But the civil wars continue, with the unseated groups now playing the role of insurgents. The change is significant, but the transformation is far less complete than what was imagined in the spring of 2003. The administration’s plan for liberalization and democratization in the Middle East has yielded little beyond a failed state in Iraq, an unstable Lebanon torn between Hezbollah and Israel, and polite but noncommittal noises from allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

“The Next 9/11 Will Be Even Worse”

It’s anyone’s guess. Al Qaeda’s efforts to acquire nuclear material have been amateurish. In 2002, U.S. agents in Afghanistan seized canisters from Taliban and al Qaeda compounds, only to discover that al Qaeda operatives had likely been duped into purchasing phony nuclear materials. The organization has pursued other tools of mass destruction, but without much success. Al Qaeda agents were reportedly planning to use poison gas in New York’s subway system, though it appears that Zawahiri mysteriously called off the operation. Perhaps the experience of the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist group in Tokyo deterred him; its 1995 attack killed 12 people rather than the thousands the terrorists had hoped to claim.

Still, it would be irresponsible to minimize the threat. Technological advances are allowing small groups to wreak major damage, and al Qaeda has often attracted skilled engineers and scientists. Breakthroughs in DNA research, for example, could lead to designer viruses that would be a terrorist’s dream. The Internet has created new vulnerabilities as major engineering infrastructure, from dams to nuclear plants, has come to rely on it. The world’s financial systems are increasingly vulnerable as well. Governments, universities, and corporations must ensure that emerging technologies don’t go astray. Al Qaeda may not have fundamentally changed the world on 9/11, but that is no reason to give it a second chance.

Juan Cole is professor of history at the University of Michigan and author of the blog Informed Comment.
 
Posted on 09-11-06 1:24 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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the only America and American can fight terrorism is by learning about other countries.
American do not seems to know that other nations exists and only thinks that about itself.
If America learns to accept other nation belief and way of life i guess Osama wouldn''t have HIT USA in the first place.
 
Posted on 09-11-06 1:39 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Loote, only now you found out that ImI is a cretin??? Why didn't you believe me before??? :P

On a serious note, people with minor mental problem are unble to see the facts and reason behind the 'doings'. They cannot put themselves in other's shoe. They cannot ask the question "why".
 
Posted on 09-11-06 2:05 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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This is a great thread! Blessed be the person whoever started it. Hehe..!!

The rhetoric about why martyrs/terrorists/revolutionaries become so, is a deep point to ponder over.

If any government or authority is genuinely inclined to eradicate the factors contributing to the problem, then they should try-to cure the disease rather than treating the symptoms.

That's all I have to say about that...
 
Posted on 09-11-06 2:13 PM     Reply [Subscribe]
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Hear hear! (what TM has to say ...he he).

Lute, I don't mean to make a mockery of 9/11, but allow me a bit of levity on the subject, and, in the spirit of 9/11 and heroism, commend your wit and wisdom for starting all kinds of fascinating threads, including this one, on Sajha.

:)

To good life!
 
Posted on 09-12-06 1:28 AM     Reply [Subscribe]
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