Political
Science
4354
DR. ARNOLD LEDER
THE POLITICS OF EXTREMISM
Department
Of
Political Science/Texas State University
The online version of this syllabus can be accessed @ http://arnoldleder.com/4354.htm.
Password protected materials for this course can be
viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Terrorism". Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the
course. For links to web syllabi for other
courses taught by
Dr. Leder see: http://www.arnoldleder.com/.
For a list of undergraduate courses in Political Science
by group, see: http://www.polisci.txstate.edu/courses/undergrad-courses.html.
Office: ELA 335
Office Hours: TBA & by
appointment
Texas
State University Academic Schedule
Texas State University Final Exam
Schedule
Schedule
of
Classes @ Texas State University
Selected Web Resources For Texas State
University
Texas State
University Library
Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library
Citation
& Bibliographic Styles & Related Information
Selected
Web Resources For Political
Science
Portals
to the World Home Page (Library of Congress)
Internet
Political Science Resources-Extensive University Links/University Of
Michigan
TheWWW
Virtual
Library:International
Affairs Resources
The
Ultimate Political Science Links Page
Internet
Islamic History Sources/Fordham University (Comprehensive Site With
Links
For Many Aspects Of The Islamic Experience)
Links
To Sites On Terrorism (Library of Congress)
B.A. POLITICAL SCIENCE –
PROGRAM
LEARNING OUTCOMES - Please see end of syllabus and view statements
@ http://www.polisci.txstate.edu/resources/learning-outcomes.html.
Students pursuing a BPA (Public Administration), please see the
program learning outcomes listed immediately below the B.A. in
Political Science Program Learning Outcomes at the end of this syllabus.
Note On Course & Syllabus Materials:
Students
may find books, articles, links, websites, and other materials provided
in this syllabus useful and of interest. Their listing in this
syllabus,
including those which are required and recommended, does not
necessarily
indicate endorsement of or agreement with any views or positions on any
issues found in these materials, websites, or on other sites to which
they
may provide links.
Note On Access To Articles: Access
to
articles through the Texas State University Library, @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library
available to all
Texas
State University students, requires a valid User Name and a
Password.
Most of the links in this syllabus provide direct access to the article.
Password Protected Materials:
Some
materials on this web syllabus are password protected and are directly
accessible @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
These
materials are for student use. The password will be provided to
students
in the course.
Note:
Wikipedia
is used in several instances in this syllabus as a convenient reference on a variety
of matters. Students should be
aware of the dispute among academics and others with respect to the
reliability
and accuracy of Wikipedia and they should not assume that a Wikipedia
entry is the last word or most accurate information
on the subject. For an interesting
essay on Wikipedia, see: Stacy
Schiff/Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?/The New
Yorker/July 31, 2006 (Note: See Naom
Cohen's NYT March 05,
2007 article,
also noted below, for a problem with Schiff's article.)
Schiff's article may be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library
A valid Texas State University student ID and
user name are required.
See also: Noam
Cohen/A History Department (Middlebury College in Vermont) Bans Citing
Wikipedia as a Research
Source/NYT February 21, 2007
Naom
Cohen/A Contributor to Wikipedia Has His Fictional Side/NYT March 05,
2007
With Wikipedia,
what
you see is not always what you
get (with related links)/blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/3872/March 06, 2007
(Note the reference in this piece to the Stacy
Schiff article above in which Schiff interviewed a Wikipedia site
administrator and contributor called
Essjay whose academic credentials were, in fact,
fabricated.)
For information on self-interested editing of Wikipedia, see:
Katie
Hafner/Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits/NYT August 19,
2007.
"... examples of insider editing came to light last
week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of
millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that
anyone can edit.
The site, http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/,
created by a computer science
graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with
the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using
the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address
information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes
it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network
owners.
Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet
users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people
at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central
Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested
edits have come from corporate networks".
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OVERVIEW OF COURSE
Course Title
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
Topics
I.
Conceptual Concerns: "Conventional", "Rancorous", & "Extremist"
Politics
II. Terrorism:
Definitions,
"Causes", & Dimensions
III.
Conceptualizing Terrorism: Strategic Choice; Product Of Psychological
Forces;
Fantasy; War; Culture
IV.
Religion & Terrorism: Radical Islam
V.
Suicide &
Terrorism
VI.
Women & Terrorism
VII.
Islam
in the West: Globalization, "Individualization", & Radicalism
VIII. Islam in Russia
IX.
Defeating
Terrorism: Terrorist Organization, Intelligence, Interrogation, &
Moral
Dimensions
X.
The Future Of
Terrorism
Note On Access To Articles: Access
to
articles through the Texas State University Library, available to all
Texas
State University students, requires a valid User Name and a
Password.
Most of the links in this syllabus provide direct access to the article.
Password Protected Materials:
Some
materials on this web syllabus are password protected and are directly
accessible @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
These
materials are for student use. The password will be provided to
students
in the course.
Course Description &
Purpose
This course is an undergraduate seminar on
international
terrorism. Theoretical literature, cross-national studies,
single-case
studies, and visits to selected web sites serve as the basis for
examination
and understanding of this phenomenon.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COURSE ORGANIZATION & STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES
Class Participation, Oral Presentations,
Exams,
Papers, Grades
1. This course will be conducted as a
seminar.
Students must attend every class meeting and be prepared to discuss
assigned
readings and other materials. Active participation in class
discussion
is essential. Course grades will be determined by oral
presentations,
class participation, and written papers.
2. Determinants of Course Grade: Oral Reports
&
Presentations 25%/ Seminar Participation 15%/ Essay Exams/Papers 60%
Attendance
1. One (1) unexcused absence is
permitted.
Students with two (2) unexcused absences will have their course grade
lowered by one letter grade. Students who have three (3)
unexcused
absences will have their course grade lowered by two letter
grades.
No absences beyond four (4) for any reason are permitted.
Any student who has more than four absences is likely to fail the
course
and, therefore, should withdraw from the course.
2. The instructor for the course is not
responsible
for bringing students who have missed class "up-to-date" on missed
material.
Each student has the responsibility to remain current with respect to
class
material.
************************************************************************************************
Academic Honesty Statement/Texas State University
STUDENT RESPONSIBILITIES
Please see: Academic
Honesty Statement for Texas State University @
http://www.txstate.edu/effective/upps/upps-07-10-01.html.
An
excerpt from this statement can be found at the end
of this syllabus.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COURSE CONTENT
Required Books
-Paul
Berman/Terror And Liberalism (Norton 2003)
-Mia
Bloom/Dying To Kill: The Allure Of Suicide Terror (Columbia University
Press 2005)
-Ian
Buruma & Avishai Margalit/Occidentalism: The West In The Eyes Of
Its
Enemies (Penguin 2004)
-Bruce
Hoffman/Inside Terrorism (Columbia University Press 2006)
-Walter
Reich(ed.)/Origins Of Terrorism:
Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States
Of Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press 1990 & 1998)
Recommended Books For Additional Reading
On
Issues
Related To This Course:
(Please Note: These books are listed for the
benefit
and convenience of interested students. They are NOT required reading.)
Jean
Bethke Elshtain/Just War Against Terror (Basic Books 2003)
Joseph
Conrad/Under Western Eyes (Penguin - First Published 1911)
David
Cook/Understanding Jihad (University of California Press 2005)
*Jessica
A. Coope/The Martyrs of Cordoba:Community & Conflict In An Age Of
Mass
Conversion [During Muslim Rule In Spain 850-859]/(Univ. Of Nebraska
Press1995)
Joel
S. Fetzer, J. Christopher Soper/Muslims and the State in Britain,
France,
and Germany (Cambridge University Press 2005)
Fawaz
A.Gerges/The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge University
Press
2005)
Philip
Jenkins/Images Of Terror;What We Can And Cannot Know About Terrorism
(Aldine
de Gruyter 2003)
Farhad
Khosrokhavar/Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs (Pluto Press
2005-Translated
from the original 2002 French editon)
Walter
Laqueur/No End To War: Terrorism In The Twenty-First Century (Continuum
2003)
Matthew
Levitt/Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
(Yale University Press 2006)
Ami
Pedahzur/Suicide Terrorism (Polity Press 2005)
Olivier
Roy/Globalized Islam: The Search For A New Ummah (Columbia University
Press
2004)
Marc
Sageman/Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press
2004)
*Coope, The Martyrs of Cordoba, is
not about
terrorism. This overlooked, interesting book provides insight
into
the connection between religion and a willingness and even desire to
die
in defense of one's faith among radical Christians who feared
assimilation
into the flourishing Arab Muslim culture during the period of Muslim
rule
of much of Spain or al-Andalus.
Required Articles
Required articles are listed separately in each
section
of the syllabus.
Required Films/Videos
One
Day In September (1999) [1hr. 34 min.] Academy Award winning
documentary on the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian
terrorists
at the Olympics in Munich.
The
Battle Of Algiers (1967) [French with English Subtitles - 2hrs. 1 min.]
The classic propaganda film justifying terrorism. This film has
inspired many terrorist groups and it has been studied by various
counter-terrorist agencies.
Recommended Films/Videos
My
Son The Fanatic (British 1997) [1hr. 27 min.]
For more on this film see: June
Thomas/The First 7/7 Movie: In the Wake of the London Bombings, a look
back at My Son the Fanatic/slate.com/July 18 2005
Excerpt from June Thomas essay on the film My Son
The Fanatic:
"After 9/11, the big question was why: Why do they
hate
us? In the days following 7/7, everyone seems to be asking how: How
could
apparently assimilated, British-born Muslims end up stuffing bombs into
their backpacks and murdering dozens of their compatriots in the Tube
and
on a London double-decker bus?"
Some possible answers are offered in Udayan
Prasad's 1997
movie My Son the Fanatic. Written by Hanif Kureishi (based on a
skeletal
short story he first published in The New Yorker), the film shows how
the
British-born son of Pakistani immigrants morphs from a
clothes-obsessed,
cricket-playing, music-loving accountancy student into a devout Muslim
who rails against the corruption and emptiness of Western society, much
to the uncomprehending consternation of his father."
Hate
(French w/English subtitles 1995 [1hr. 35 min.]
An intense, violent film that depicts the life of
angry,
disaffected minority youth in the suburbs of Paris. Offers some
insight
into the perspective of mostly Muslim rioting youth in France, although
the three young men on whom this disturbing film focuses are ethnically
African, Arab, and Jewish.
For more on this film see: Alan
Riding/In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years NYT
November 24, 2005
Excerpt from Alan Riding essay on the film Hate:
"So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent
uprisings
in some French immigrant neighborhoods, this cliché came with a
new twist: art in the form of movies and rap music has long been
warning
that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from
French society, that their banlieues were ripe for explosion.
Certainly, anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz's
film, 'La
Haine', or 'Hate' a decade ago had no reason to be surprised by this
fall's
violence. At the time, Kassovitz's portrayal of a seething immigrant
Paris
suburb, even his choice of the word 'hate' for his title, seemed
shocking,
even exaggerated. Today, the movie could almost pass as a documentary.
In 'Hate', burning cars light up the soulless
space between
high-rise public housing projects as local residents protest the
beating
of a young Arab, Ahmed. Nearby, graffiti proclaim: 'Don't forget, the
police
kill.' Three angry and restless youths - a Jew, an Arab and a black -
visit
Ahmed in the hospital and are themselves beaten by the police. They
plan
revenge."
See also: http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/contemp1/lahaine.htm
Chaos
(French w/English subtitles 2001 [1hr. 49 min.]
"Although comedy takes precedence in most parts of
the
film, it is the social commentary part that will spark the most debate.
France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, mostly from its
citizens
who are from its former colonies in North Africa. Culture clashes are
inevitable
when a burgeoning and mostly traditional Muslim society slowly
assimilates
itself within a Western society that lives by much different values. In
this film, Serreau tries to address the hot issue of traditional Muslim
society’s treatment of women, specifically the issue of fathers
'selling'
their teenage daughters into marriages with much older men. Melodrama
aside,
'Chaos' has a serious message to convey to its audience and it does it
with force and without fear".
Excerpt from: http://www.dvdtown.com/review/chaos/11612/1928/
For a Review Essay on Films Related to Islam in
the West
see:
Alan
Riding/On Screen, Tackling Europe's New Reality (Review of Films by
and/or
about Muslims In Europe-w/links to information on noted
films)/NYT/January
18 2005
Munich (Spielberg 2005 [2hrs. 44 min.]) See
reviews
below in "3. Dimensions Of Terrorism: Ethno-Nationalist &
Separatist
Terrorism; International Terrorism" in Section II.
Topics For Reading, Oral Presentations,
& Discussion
I.
Conceptual Concerns: "Conventional", "Rancorous", & "Extremist"
Politics
Lecture & Discussion
Readings: Joel Olson, "The Freshness of
Fanaticism: The
Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry", Perspectives
on Politics, Volume 5, Number 4, December 2007,
pp. 685-701. This article
can be viewed
@ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
Abstract:
Zealotry or fanaticism is increasingly regarded as one of the
principal threats to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century. Yet
even as it is universally disparaged, zealotry is a severely
understudied concept. This article seeks to formulate a critical theory
of zealotry and investigate its relationship to democracy through a
close reading of the speeches of the radical abolitionist orator
Wendell Phillips. The American abolitionists were passionate democrats.
Yet many of them, such as Phillips, were also self-defined fanatics who
believed in using extremist language and tactics on behalf of the
slave. Phillips's speeches suggest a specifically political definition
of zealotry as a strategy that seeks to mobilize populations in defense
of a particular position by dividing the public sphere into friends
(those who support the position) and enemies (those who oppose it) and
pressuring the moderates in between. Through his defense of fanaticism
and his argument for disunion, Phillips articulates a democratic form
of fanaticism that challenges common pejorative associations of
zealotry with irrationality, intolerance, fundamentalism, or
terrorism. (boldface added)
Cass
R. Sunstein, "The Polarization of Extremes", Chronicle of Higher Education,
December
14, 2007, Volume 54, Issue 16, p. B9. Direct Texas State
University library permalink
@ http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=28105290&site=ehost-live.
A valid Texas State University user name and password are required.
"... an experiment conducted in Colorado in 2005, designed to
cast
light on the consequences of self-sorting.
... In almost every case, people held more-extreme positions
after they spoke with like-minded others.
...
A key consequence of this kind of self-sorting is what we might
call enclave extremism. When
people end up in enclaves of like-minded
people, they usually move toward a more extreme point in the direction
to which the group's members were originally inclined. Enclave
extremism is a special case of the broader phenomenon of group
polarization, which extends well beyond politics and occurs as groups
adopt a more extreme version of whatever view is antecedently favored
by their members. Why
do enclaves, on the
Internet
and
elsewhere, produce political
polarization? The first explanation emphasizes the role of
information. (boldface added)
The final explanation is the most subtle, and probably the
most
important. The starting point here is that on many issues, most of us
are really not sure what we think. Our lack of certainty inclines us
toward the middle. Outside of enclaves, moderation is the usual path.
Now imagine that people find themselves in enclaves in which they
exclusively hear from others who think as they do. As a result, their
confidence typically grows, and they become more extreme in their
beliefs. Corroboration, in short, reduces tentativeness, and an
increase in confidence produces extremism. Enclave extremism is
particularly likely to occur on the Internet because people can so
easily find niches of like-minded types — and discover that their
own
tentative view is shared by others".
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM
II. Terrorism
1. Defining Terrorism: An Overview
Readings: Hoffman, Chapter 1; Laqueur, pp. 138-149
and
Appendix, pp.232-238; Avishag Gordon, "Terrorism as an Academic Subject
after 9/11: Searching the Internet Reveals a Stockholm Syndrome Trend",
Studies
in Conflict & Terrorism, January-February 2005, Vol. 28:
45-59.
This article can be accessed @
Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas State University User Name and Password are
required.
This article can also be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
For some
discussion of the "Stockholm Syndrome" in a different
context, see this recommended article:
Rick
Perlstein/That Girl: The Captivity and Restoration of Patty Hearst/The
Nation December 29, 2008
"The story of the hostage who comes by turns to identify with
the
captor is one of the oldest ever told. Tales of unsullied Puritan
maidens kidnapped by Indians only to end up 'going native' were staples
of early American literature. The
Captivity and Restoration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson, which describes the ordeal of a minister's wife
held
for eleven weeks by Narragansett Indians during King Philip's War in
1676, was among the first such narratives, and it was enormously
popular when it was published in Boston in 1682. Three hundred years
later, a similar story seized the West's imagination: in Stockholm in
1973, after four customers were taken hostage in a holdup of the
Sveriges Kreditbank, there were reports that one of them became
affianced to one of the bank robbers. The archetype is of such sturdy
provenance, in fact, that it surprised me to learn from William
Graebner's Patty's Got a Gun
that it wasn't until six years after the
Kreditbank incident that the term 'Stockholm
syndrome'
appeared in the American mass media. The phrase first surfaced in 1979,
Graebner explains, 'when Time magazine suggested that the syndrome
might have taken hold among those being held hostage by Iranian
militants in Tehran.' Perhaps the obsession with the notion of a loss
of self under conditions of duress is so primal, so elemental of modern
anxieties, that people feared to give it a proper name. Until, that is,
the 1970s--a time so drenched in the detritus of captivity that the
culture suddenly could not do without the shorthand." (boldface
added)
For background information on the related issue
of
"brainwashing",
see this highly recommended article on the 1962 film "The Manchurian
Candidate":
Susan
L. Carruthers,"The
Manchurian Candidate (1962) & The Cold War Brainwashing
Scare", Historical Journal
Of
Film, Radio & Television, March1998.
The classic film
on conspiracy thinking referred
to by both
the left and the right. "Brainwashed" Americans held as prisoners of
war
by the North Koreans and others during the Koran War of 1950-1953
return
to America where one of them has been programmed to commit
assassination. See this review of the film "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962).
This article is
directly accessible with a valid Texas
StateUniversity
User Name and password @ http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=472884&site=ehost-live.
2. "Causes" Of Terrorism
Readings: Laqueur, Chapter 1 (recommended).
James
Q. Wilson/What Makes a Terrorist?/City Journal/Winter 2004
Alan
Krueger/What Makes a Terrorist/The American/November-December 2007,
Vol. 1, No. 7.
Politicians, pundits, and religious leaders ascribe terrorism
to
poverty and lack of education. Economic research points elsewhere.
3. Dimensions Of Terrorism
a. Ethno-Nationalist
&
Separatist Terrorism
Readings: Hoffman, Chapter 2.
b. The Internationalization of Terrorism
Readings: Hoffman, Chapter 3.
c. Public Opinion: Old & New
Media
Readings: Hoffman, Chapters 6, 7.
d. Tactics
& Targets
Readings: Hoffman, Chapter 8.
Noah
Feldman/Islam, Terror & the Second Nuclear Age/NYT-Sunday
Magazine/October 29, 2006
Films/Videos:
One
Day In September (1999) [1hr. 34 min.] For remarks on the 1972
Munich
massacre, see Hoffman, "The PLO and the Internationalization of
Terrorism", pp. 65-71. On deception and
"pseudo-groups"
as a framework for examination of the "Black September" terrorist group
which carried out the 1972 Munich massacre, see Jenkins, "False Flags",
pp. 87-109. For specific remarks on the links between Arafat's
al-Fatah
group and the "Black September" group, see Jenkins, p. 97. [The Jenkins
materials cited here are available at the Reserve Desk Texas State
University
Library.]
See also: Alexander
Wolff/When the Terror Began/Sports Illustrated/August 26 2002
Munich (Spielberg 2005 [2hrs. 44 min.] )
See: Aaron
J. Klein/The History Behind Munich: Separating truth from fiction in
Spielberg's
movie/Slate/December 23 2005
David Brooks, "What 'Munich' Left Out", NYT, December
11,
2005 @
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2005/12/what_munich_lef.php
This Brooks article can also be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas State University User Name and Password are
required.
This article can also be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
Edward
Rothstein/Seeing Terrorism as Drama With Sequels and
Prequels/NYT/December
26 2005
Leon
Wieseltier, "Hits-Washington Diarist", The New Republic, December
19 2005. The complete text of
Wieseltier's essay can be
accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas State University User Name and Password are
required.
For a wide ranging selection of links to both
positive
and negative views in the print media as well as in the "blogosphere"
on
Spielberg's film "Munich", see: http://www.keshertalk.com/archives/2005/12/munich_the_movi_2.php
The publishers of this blog, "Kesher Talk", describe the blog as "News
and views from a hawkish liberal Jewish perspective..." The views
expressed on the sites to which this blog links and its own views as
well
do not necessarily reflect any views held by the instructor for this
course.
The archival link to this blog's roundup of many different perspectives
on Spielberg's film is provided here for interested students.
III.
Conceptualizing Terrorism
1. Terrorism As Strategic Choice
Readings: Martha Crenshaw, "The Logic Of Terrorism:
Terrorist
Behavior As A Product Of Strategic Choice" in Reich, Chapter 1.
Films/Videos:
The
Battle
Of Algiers (1967) [French With English Subtitles - 2hrs. 1 min.]
Film Clip from "The Battle of Algiers"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhfOVIueEdg
(02:16)
See also: Alan
A.
Stone/ReelTerrorism: Reconsidering The Battle Of Algiers/Boston
Review/February-March
2003
Philip
Gourevitch/Winning & Losing (Iraq&TheFilm"The
Battle Of Algiers")/The New Yorker/December 12, 2003
Charles
Paul
Freund/The Pentagon's Film Festival: A Primer for The Battle of
Algiers/Slate/August
27, 2003
Christopher
Hitchens/Guerrillas in the Mist:Why the war in Iraq is nothing like The
Battle of Algiers/Slate/January 2, 2004
Leslie
Camhi/Battle Cries: Fifty years on, a guerilla leader revisits the
fight
of his life/Village Voice/January 14-20, 2004
Links to Reviews of the film "The Battle Of Algiers":http://www.filmforum.org/films/algiers.html
Elisabetto
Povoledo/Gillo Pontecorvo, 86, Director of "Battle of Algiers" Dies/NYT
October 14, 2006
Todd
Shepard/Algeria/Dissent Winter 2009, Vol. 56, No. 1.
This article is accessible @ this location: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dissent/v056/56.1.article_sub05.html. This article is also directly accessible @ this Texas
State University Library permalink: http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=36407225&site=ehost-live.
Note:
On some browsers, it may be necessary or more convenient to save the
article to desktop as pdf with the extension .pdf following the title
of the article. A valid Texas
State University
User Name and password are required.
Abstract:
In March
1962, in the eighth year of the Algerian War, the French government
signed off on the Evian Accords, which established a ceasefire as well
as a process that led to the July 5 proclamation in Algiers of
independence—one hundred and thirty-two years to the day after the
Ottoman ruler of that city had surrendered to French invaders. Few
people were surprised—the only surprising thing was that ending the
French occupation took so long. The end was, after all, inevitable, or
so it can seem in retrospect. But the war was long, and its violence
was shocking to contemporaries both in its forms—the French Armed
Forces' systematic use of torture on suspected nationalists and the
embrace of terrorism by the Algerian National Liberation Front
(FLN)—and its effects: the dead numbered some 17,000 French soldiers,
about 3,500 French civilians, and (according to current estimates)
between 250,000 and 578,000 Algerians, the vast majority of whom were
noncombatants.
2. Terrorism As A Product Of Psychological
Forces
Readings: Jerrold M. Post, "Terrorist Psycho-logic:
Terrorism
As A Product Of Psychological Forces" in Reich, Chapter 2.
Sarah
Kershaw/The Terrorist Mindset: An Update NYT Week in Review, Sunday,
January 10, 2010
Sabrina
Tavernise and Waqar Gillani/Frustrated Strivers in Pakistan Turn to
Jihad (w/photos)/NYT February 27, 2010
"It is the lower middle class in Pakistan that is most vulnerable
to radicalization, according to Amir Rana, director of the Pakistan
Institute for Peace Studies.
They consume virulently anti-American media. They are recruited
aggressively by Islamic student groups in public universities, which
are attended almost exclusively by lower- and middle-class youth.
...
A Powerful Addiction (boldface
in the original)
...
... socio-economic theories explain only so much. For
Mr. Kundi, an
emotional young man with thwarted ambitions, militancy had a
psychological pull. Mr. Parvez of the National Counterterrorism
Authority said militants he had interviewed called jihad an addiction,
a habit that made them feel powerful in a world that ignored them.
(boldface added)
Out there I’m a useless guy,
unemployed and cursed by my
family,” one
militant said. “Here I’m a commander. My words have weight.”
Recommended:
Joseph
Conrad/Under Western Eyes (Penguin - First Published 1911)
For remarks on the insights of Conrad's book, see:
Tom
Reiss/The True Classic of Terrorism/NYT/September 11, 2005
3. Terrorism As Fantasy & "Theater Of The
Mind"
Readings:
Lee
Harris/Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology/Policy Review August-September 2002
(For Lee Harris' views on how the West has perceived the terrorism
practised by radical Islam, in this syllabus see Edward Rothstein's
reflections on Lee Harris' recent book as well as Lee Harris'
article in the Summer 2007 issue of City Journal below in
Section c. of IV.)
Michael
Ignatieff/The Terrorist As Auteur/NYT Sunday Magazine November 14, 2004
Arthur Saniotis, "Re-Enchanting Terrorism: Jihadists
as 'Liminal Beings'", Studies in
Conflict
& Terrorism, November 2005, Vol. 28: 533-545. This
article
can be accessed @
Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
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required.
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Scroll
to section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
4.
Terrorism As Totalitarianism's War Against
Liberalism
Readings: Berman, Chapters I, II.
For more information on Paul Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism,
and The Rebel
by
Albert Camus whose ideas Berman examines, see:
Paul
Berman Interviewed @ The
Carnegie Council/April 15, 2003/cceia.org
by John
P. Diggins
"... Paul Berman, a writer ... recognized for his penetrating
philosophical perspectives on
a vast array of social and cultural topics. His latest work, (Terrror
and Liberalism (Norton 2003 Paper Reprint 2004) focuses
on a subject that is generating a great deal of
interest, as it
is the first book to address the political/philosophical dimensions of
the current conflict found in Islamic fundamentalism and on the War on
Terror."
Allen Barra/The rebel/Salon/November 01, 2004
"The rebel. The political right
and left
have been fighting for Albert Camus' legacy, but Europe's most
influential literary export remains stubbornly elusive."
Scott
McLemee/Fighting Words:Camus, Sartre, And The Rift That Helped Define
Them/bookforum.com/Spring 2004
For a negative critique of Paul Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism,
see:
Ian Buruma/Revolution
from Above (A review of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism)/New York
Review of Books/Vol. 50, No. 7, May 01, 2003
The book
The Rebel
by Albert
Camus is
important in
the
development of Paul Berman's views in his book Terror and Liberalism.
See also: Richard
Eder/Uncomfortable in His Skin, Thriving in His Mind/NYT June 25, 2008,
p. B8. A review of Albert
Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, Translated by Ryan Bloom (Ivan R. Dee 2008).
For additional materials on Camus, see: Albert
Camus
"The split took place when Camus took issue with the absolutism of
revolutions. Seeking to realize their ideals, he argued, they end up
using violence and tyranny. It was an attack on Soviet Communism at a
time when Sartre and his followers were becoming its increasingly rigid
supporters.
... They insisted that overt repression, however
repellent, was the only way to fight the insidious structural tyranny
of colonialist capitalism. One must choose, painfully. No we mustn’t,
Camus rejoined: neither be killers nor victims.
... There was nothing convenient in Camus. He was closer to Milovan Djilas,
once a hard-line Communist, then jailed by Tito, and in the end
proclaiming his battle-won political credo: 'the unperfect society.'
... The vicious war between French forces and the F.L.N. — the
Algerian nationalists — was his own civil war.
... He writes to an Algerian friend, an F.L.N. supporter: “You should
not
ignore the shooting, nor justify that they shoot at the
French-Algerians in general, and thus entangled, shoot at my family,
who have always been poor and without hatred ... No cause, even if it
had remained innocent and just, will ever tear me from my mother, who
is the greatest cause that I know in the world.” (boldface added)
For more discussion of Albert Camus and his views on the Algerian
War, see:
Souleymane Bachir
Diagne/Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, University of Notre Dame,
April 16, 2009 - A review of David
Sherman/Camus (Wiley-Blackwell 2009).
"Camus the Algerian
(to
paraphrase D. Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian, Columbia UP, 2007)
occupies an important place in Sherman's analysis of Camus' ethics. It
is certainly the 'battle against the events' of the Algerian war, which
Camus felt in such a deep and personal way, as a pied-noir, that was
the most dubious' of all. When he was a journalist writing for Alger
Républicain just before World War II, Camus' engagement was
clearly on the side of the colonized subjects, those who were called
the 'Algerian Muslims or 'the Arabs' in opposition to the pieds-noirs
who enjoyed French citizenship. Camus called for justice for these
people who were treated as outsiders in their own homeland. But after
the Algerian war broke out in 1954 and the Front for National
Liberation was committed to only one goal, independence, while the
colonial administration and its army were left with the alternative of
brutal repression or withdrawal, how 'narrow' -- to the point of
inexistence -- the 'pure' path became! Sherman's book shows perfectly
how Camus' 'stubborn humanism' led
him to declare desperately that one should not have to choose between
justice and the murder of an innocent victim. (Camus famously
considered the possibility that his own mother could be the innocent
victim. Even when Camus decided not to speak publicly anymore about
'the events of Algeria', he continued to think that one should not have
to make the choice between justice and an innocent victim's murder.)
Sherman discusses this without falling, as others do, into the inanity
of talking about a 'clash of civilizations', and pretending,
anachronistically, that today's 'age of terror' proves Camus right, in
retrospect, when he did not fully embrace the war of liberation as
Sartre and the French Left then did." (boldface added)
See also: Jason
Herbeck/Review of:
Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt
by John Foley (McGill-Queen's UP, 2008) in
Notre Dame
Philosphical Review August 22, 2009.
Paul Berman/Why Radical Islam Just
Won't
Die/NYT Week in Review/Sunday, March 23, 2008
"... radical Islamism is a modern
philosophy, not just
a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on
local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws
on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. I wanted my
readers to understand that with its double roots, religious and modern,
perversely intertwined, radical Islamism wields a lot more power,
intellectually speaking, than naïve observers might suppose....
... Five years ago, anyone
who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have
recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the
region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist,
secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so
forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.
Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern
background
would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle
Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the
Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human
rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open
society.
But that was then. In today’s
Middle East, the various radical
Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and
opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or
Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in
the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous
accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western
consumption. (boldface added)
Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the
outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to
mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the
Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant
example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their
non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely
berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated
nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves
pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if
any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a
few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine
must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.
A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the
extremist
ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the
other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises".
For discussion of the similarities and differences between
radical Islamism/Jihadism and fascism, see: David A.
Charters, "Something Old, Something New...?
Al
Qaeda, Jihadism, and Fascism", Terrorism &
Political Violence, Spring 2007, Vol. 19, Issue 1 in section IV. 2C Jihad: Theory & Practice of
this syllabus.
See also: Fouad
Ajami/The Furrows of Algeria (review essay of The German Mujahid by Boualem
Sansal, translated by Frank Wynne [Europa Editions 2009]
/The
New Republic February 18, 2010, Vol. 241, Issue 2, pp. 27-33.
This is a direct permalink to the Texas State University
Library. A valid Texas State University user name and password
are required.
From the product description
at amazon.com:
"Banned in the author's native Algeria for of the frankness with which
it confronts several explosive themes, The German Mujahid is a truly
groundbreaking novel. For the first time, an Arab author directly
addresses the moral implications of the Shoah (The Holocaust). But this
richly plotted
novel also leaves its author room enough to address other equally
controversial issues-Islamic fundamentalism and Algeria's "dirty war"
of the early 1990s, for example; or the emergence of grim Muslim
ghettos in France's low-income housing projects. In this gripping
novel, Boualem Sansal confronts these and other explosive questions
with unprecedented sincerity and courage."
From Fouad Ajami's review
essay:
"In Sansal's unforgettable portrait of this malevolent figure,
the
totalitarianism of the first half of the twentieth century speaks to,
and finds an echo in, a new totalitarianism. Its insistence upon
this
echo is one of the novel's most significant contributions to our
understanding. After all, the Islamists did not descend from the sky.
They were radical children of the faith, literalists in the way they
read the scripture, angry men committed to forcing history's pace. They
were convinced that the society around them had abandoned and betrayed
the true faith. And in their attitude toward the Jews, in the way they
dealt with the Zionist project in Palestine, and in the manner in which
they came to read the Holocaust, the Islamists worked their will on
older and "traditional" forms of prejudice, and forged a new and very
lethal version of anti-Semitism." (boldface added)
5. Terrorism As Murderous
Occidentalism
Readings: Buruma & Margalit, pp. 1-99.
See also: Ian
Buruma, "The Origins Of Occidentalism", Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 6,
2004, Vol. 50, Issue 22, pp. B10-12. Direct Texas State
University permalink @
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From the publisher's note
for Ian
Buruma & Avishai Margalit/Occidentalism: The West In The Eyes Of
Its
Enemies (Penguin 2004):
"Twenty-five years after Edward Said's Orientalism,
a whole field of study has developed to analyze and interpret the
denigrating fantasies of the exotic "East" that sustained the colonial
mind. But what about the fantasies of "the West" in the eyes of our
self-proclaimed enemies"?
For more on Edward Said's Orientalism
and critics of his book, see:
Charles P. Freund/2001
Nights:The End Of The Orientalist Critique/Reason/December, 2001
Bernard
Lewis, "The Question of Orientalism", The New York Review of Books,
Vol.
29, No. 11, June 24, 1982.
This article can be accessed @
http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Readings on Islam" and look for Lewis: The Question
of Orientalism.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
From the first paragraphs of
above Bernard Lewis article: "Imagine a situation in which a
group of patriots and
radicals from
Greece decides that the profession of classical studies is insulting to
the great heritage of Hellas, and that those engaged in these studies,
known as classicists, are the latest manifestation of a deep and evil
conspiracy, incubated for centuries, hatched in Western Europe, fledged
in America, the purpose of which is to denigrate the Greek achievement
and subjugate the Greek lands and peoples. In this perspective, the
entire European tradition of classical studies—largely the creation of
French romantics, British colonial governors (of Cyprus, of course),
and of poets, professors, and proconsuls from both countries—is a
long-standing insult to the honor and integrity of Hellas, and a threat
to its future. The poison has spread from Europe to the United States,
where the teaching of Greek history, language, and literature in the
universities is dominated by the evil race of classicists—men and women
who are not of Greek origin, who have no sympathy for Greek causes, and
who, under a false mask of dispassionate scholarship, strive to keep
the Greek people in a state of permanent subordination.
The time has come to save Greece from the classicists and bring the
whole pernicious tradition of classical scholarship to an end. Only
Greeks are truly able to teach and write on Greek history and culture
from remote antiquity to the present day; only Greeks are genuinely
competent to direct and conduct programs of academic studies in these
fields. Some non-Greeks may be permitted to join in this great endeavor
provided that they give convincing evidence of their competence, as for
example by campaigning for the Greek cause in Cyprus, by demonstrating
their ill will to the Turks, by offering a pinch of incense to the
currently enthroned Greek gods, and by adopting whatever may be the
latest fashionable ideology in Greek intellectual circles.
...
Stated in terms of classics and Greek, the picture
is absurd. But if for classicist we substitute "Orientalist," with the
appropriate accompanying changes, this amusing fantasy becomes an
alarming reality. For some years now a hue and cry has been raised
against Orientalists in American and to a lesser extent European
universities, and the term "Orientalism" has been emptied of its
previous content and given an entirely new one—that of unsympathetic or
hostile treatment of Oriental peoples. For that matter, even the terms
"unsympathetic" and "hostile" have been redefined to mean not
supportive of currently fashionable creeds or causes".
Edward Said-Bernard
Lewis Exchange/The New York Review of Books, Vo. 29, No. 13, August 12,
1982
Edward
Said/Islam Through Western Eyes/The Nation April 26, 1980 (Posted
online January 01, 1998)
Martin
Kramer/Said's Splash-chapter
two (pp. 27-43.) of: Martin
Kramer/Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in
America (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2001)
Robert
Irwin/Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism And Its Discontents (The
Overlook Press 2006 -paperback edition 2008)
From Publishers Weekly:
"Almost 30 years ago, in his classic Orientalism,
the late cultural critic Edward Said published a scathing denunciation
of Oriental studies, blaming the field for the rise of Western
imperialism and racist views about Arabs and other Eastern peoples.
British historian Irwin (The Alhambra) fiercely condemns Said's
misinterpretation, offering both a brilliant defense of Orientalism and
a masterful intellectual history of the Orientalists and their work,
which opened windows on the world of Asia in general and Islam in
particular, providing the West with glimpses of the social and
religious practices of these cultures. Irwin surveys the history of
Orientalism from the Greeks through the Middle Ages to its height in
the 18th and 19th centuries. He chronicles the lives and works of the
men who introduced the ideas of Islamic and Asian culture to the West.
Many of these men were biblical critics whose command of Hebrew allowed
them to move easily to Arabic and to explore the Koran. In the 17th
century, the dragomans, or translators, moved the study of Islam
forward by providing translations of Turkish, Arabic and Persian texts.
Irwin's wide-ranging study splendidly captures a time when intellectual
polymaths traversed foreign territories in search of new and compelling
ideas".
From the Introduction to
Robert Irwin's book: "... that book (Edward
Said's Orientalism)
seems to me to be a work of malignant charlantry in which it is hard to
dsitinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations". (p. 4.,
hardcover edition)
See also:
Robert
Irwin/Edward Said's shadowy legacy/The Times Literary Supplement
(London), May 7, 2008
Tricky with argument, weak in
languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still
dominates debate.
"So many academics want the arguments
presented
in Edward Said’s Orientalism
(1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique
angle
in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a
hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western
achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in
Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics
who
are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political
activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something
much
more exciting, namely 'speaking truth to power'.
...
Said had a problem with languages. For example, when discussing the
writings
of Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, he was mysteriously
determined
to deny that Sanskrit, Persian, German and Greek all belonged to the
same
broad group of languages – a sort of club to which Arabic could not
belong.
Ibn Warraq, in discussing Said’s attitude to Orientalists, remarks that
he
was “particularly jealous of their mastery of languages”. German
scholars
dominated Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit studies in the nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries, yet Said avoided any substantial discussion of
their
work. Some critics have argued that this was because the pre-eminence
of
German Orientalists did not fit his thesis about the interdependence of
Orientalism and imperialism in the Middle East, but others have
suggested
that it was because his German was not very good
...
Said died in 2003, and it is thirty years since he launched his assault
on
Western culture. Things may have moved on since then. As a last resort,
some
of Said’s nervous apologists have suggested this, hoping, perhaps, to
fend
off further criticism of his inconsistent methodology and shaky grasp
of
facts".
Gary
Kamiya/How Edward Said took intellectuals for a ride/Salon.com December
06, 2006
Maya
Jasanoff/Before and After Said/London Review of Books, June 8, 2006
Efraim Karsh and Rory
Miller/Did Edward Said Really Speak Truth to Power?/Middle East
Quarterly, Winter 2008, pp. 13-21.
See also:
David
Cannadine/Ornamentalism: How The British Saw Their Empire (Oxford Univ.
Press 2001)
"David Cannadine's Ornamentalism
is so
stimulating and original that it will now and forever after be read
hand in hand with Edward Said's Orientalism."
(boldface added) This is the comment
of Wm. Roger Louis,
Editor-in-Chief,
The Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford University Press.
Reviews of David
Cannadine's Ornamentalism:
Sarah
Lyall/Was the Sahib, Then Just a Snob?/NYT August 25, 2001
His (David Cannadine's book Ornamentalism)
serves as a riposte of
sorts to Edward Said's highly
influential work ''Orientalism'' (1978), which argued that Western
attitudes toward the nonwhite world have traditionally been informed by
a manufactured notion of ''otherness,'' used both to interpret and
control it and to bolster the West's own sense of identity.
Mr.
Cannadine feels that Mr. Said's thesis is indeed valid, but only up to
a point. (boldface added)
Benjamin
Schwarz/A Bit Of Bunting/The
Atlantic,
November 2001
6. Terrorism As
Part Of A Cultural Template
Stanley
Kurtz/I and My Brother Against My Cousin/Weekly Standard, April 14,
2008, Vol. 013, Issue 29 This is a direct Texas
State University permalink.
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State
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The Stanley Kurtz article can also be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required. This
article is a
review essay on Culture
and Conflict in the Middle East by Philip Carl Salzman (Humanity
Books
2008). See also: Philip
Carl Salzman/The Middle East's Tribal DNA/Middle East Quarterly, Winter
2008, pp. 23-33.
From Stanley
Kurtz's article:
Is Islam the best way to understand the war on terror? Tribalism
may offer a clearer view of our enemies' motivations.
"Universal male militarization, surprise attacks on apparent
innocents
based on a principle of collective guilt, and the careful group
monitoring and control of personal behavior are just a few implications
of a system that accounts for many aspects of Middle Eastern society
without requiring any explanatory recourse to Islam. The religion
itself is an overlay in partial tension with, and deeply stamped by,
the dynamics of tribal life. In other words--and this is Salz-man's
central argument--the template of tribal life, with its violent and
shifting balance of power between fusing and fissioning lineage
segments, is the dominant theme of cultural life in the Arab Middle
East (and shapes even many non-Arab Muslim populations). At its
cultural core, says Salzman, even where tribal structures are
attenuated, Middle Eastern society is tribal society.
...
The swift and seemingly disproportionate resort to retaliatory force
against apparently trivial offenses is an effective technique for
suppressing future challenges. Most of the feuds Salzman describes,
however weighty and enduring, break out over seemingly petty and
inconsequential matters, like the mistaken appropriation of some palm
trunks. Rifle shots, intentionally off the mark, are used to
intimidate, as are calculated threats of murder. The careful use of
targeted force and credible threats against Western critics of Islamism
shows genuine mastery of the technique of deterrent intimidation. Here
as elsewhere, an overtly religious action is actually shaped by a
hidden tribal template.
...
The most disturbing lesson of all is that, in the absence of
fundamental cultural change, the feud between the Muslim world and the
West is unlikely ever to end. Tribal feuds simmer on and off for
generations, with negotiated settlements effecting only temporary
respites. Among the tribes of Waziristan, the saying goes: "I took my
revenge early. I waited only 100 years." The Western liberal template
takes an experience of peace under the lawful authority of a state as
the normal human condition. In this view, when peaceful equilibrium is
disturbed, reasonable men reason together to restore normalcy".
Philip Carl Salzman's
first-person statement on his book may be
read at @ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/04/culture_and_conflict_in_the_middle_east/.
"I argue that a major influence is Arab culture, grounded in
Bedouin culture—understanding
“culture” as cognitive frames which serve as “models of” the way the
world is, and “models for” action in the future. Two major
characteristics of Arab culture are particularist group loyalty, and
balanced or complementary opposition. These models serve well for
decentralized social control and security in segmentary tribal
settings, but are uncongenial to inclusive polities and universalistic
legal regimes.
...
Postcolonial theorists, inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism,
take a harder line, arguing that no generalization about the Middle
East is valid, because such generalizations suppress the variety and
diversity of reality, essentialize where no essence exists, and imposes
disparaging interpretations in the service of imperialism and
colonialism. But my judgment is that these postcolonial arguments are
unsound and without foundation. First, all concepts and categories,
without which thinking is impossible, are abstractions, encompassing
the many variations of the unique individuals (whether trees, camels,
or cultures) included. So abstraction and generalization are not only not
the wrong things, they are the only things
possible. Second, all peoples and societies are not the same; they are
different, and differ significantly. Ignoring these indisputable
differences is not good manners; it is ignorance or denial".
See also:
Robert
Irwin/Edward Said's shadowy legacy/The Times Literary Supplement
(London), May 7, 2008 (revisited)
Return To
Beginning
Of Syllabus
IV.
Religion & Terrorism: Radical Islam
1. Religion & Terrorism
Readings: Hoffman, Chapter 4.
Bernard
Lewis, "The Roots Of Muslim Rage", Atlantic
Monthly, September 1990-reprinted @ this location. (pdf)
This Lewis article can also be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
This article can also be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Jonathan
Fine/Contrasting Secular and Religious Terrorism/Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, Vol. XV, No. 1, pp. 59-69
"Since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, there has been a steady rise in
Islamist terrorism. Too many analysts
underestimate the ideological
basis of terrorism and argue instead that rational-strategic rather
than ideological principles motivate Islamist terror groups.
Comparison
between terrorist groups with secular and religious agendas, however,
suggests that ideology matters for both and that downplaying religious
inspiration for terrorism in an effort to emphasize tactical
motivations is both inaccurate and dangerous." (boldface added)
2. Radical Islam & Terrorism
a. Origins
Readings: Laqueur, Chapter 2 (recommended).
Bernard
Lewis, "The Revolt of Islam", The
New Yorker, December 19, 2001- reprinted
@ http://www.aijac.org.au/updates/Dec-01/031201.html
Quintan Wiktorowicz, "A Genealogy of Radical Islam", Studies
in Conflict & Terrorism, February 2005, Vol. 28: 75-97. This
article
can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas State University User Name and Password are required.
William
Dalrymple/Inside the Madrasas/The New York Review of Books/December 1,
2005, Vol. 52, No. 19. Access to the
entire article
is restricted at this site. The entire Dalrymple
article as well as the entire
Wiktorowicz article can be
viewed
@ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Terrorism" and look for the authors and titles of
these
articles. This location is password protected. Password and
user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Frank Hairgrove; Douglas M. Mcleod, "Circles Drawing Toward High
Risk Activism: The Use of Usroh
and Halaqa in Islamist
Radical Movements", Studies in Conflict &
Terrorism,
Volume
31,
Issue
5, May
2008, pages 399
- 411.
Abstract:
Kurzman (2004) argued that social movements research and Islamic
studies “followed parallel trajectories, with few glances across the
chasm that have separated them.” This article will illuminate one
influential process that has relevance to both these areas, the use of
small groups for the purpose or radical mobilization. Specifically, it
examines the impact of the use of small Islamic study groups (usroh
and halaqa)
for fundamental and radical Islamic movements. Although small-group
mobilization is not unique to Islam, the strategic use of these study
groups empowered by the Islamic belief system has yielded significant
returns in capacity building for high-risk activism.
The full text of this article by can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
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State
University User Name and Password are required.
Matthias
Küntzel/Jew-Hatred and Jihad: The Nazi Roots of the 9/11
attack/Weekly
Standard September 17,
2007, Vol. 013, Issue 01
Jeffrey
Goldberg/Seeds of Hate/NYT Sunday Book Review January 6, 2008
A
German scholar argues that Muslim anti-Semitism can be traced to a
project of the Nazi Party. A review
essay on Matthias
Küntzel,
Jihad and Jew-Hatred:
Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press 2007).
Read
the first chapter of this book.
Joshua
Muravchik & Charles Szrom/In Search of Moderate Muslims/Commentary,
Vol. 125, No. 2, February, 2008
"When we speak of moderate Muslims as a
counterweight to extremists, then, what we seek has nothing to do with
the ardor of their religious convictions. Rather, it centers on the
acceptance or rejection of pluralism. In this view, Muslims may still
hope and pray for the eventual recognition by all mankind of the truth
of Muhammad's message. (Christians and Jews do something similar.) But
they may not take up the sword to hasten the advent of that goal or
pursue disputes among or within countries by violent means. That
implies democratic methods and a spirit of tolerance.
... But if this explains what we mean--or ought to mean--by moderate
Muslims, where can we find them, and how can we tell the real thing?
... ... there are six questions to be asked of any such group.
Does it both espouse democracy and practice democracy within its own
structures?
Does it eschew violence in pursuit of its goals?
Does it condemn terrorism?
Does it advocate equal rights for women?
Does it advocate equal rights for minorities?
Does it accept a pluralism of interpretations within Islam?
... Any group that meets these six criteria seems to us to merit
support
and cooperation, and groups that go a long way toward meeting them
deserve at least a second look".
Tamara Cofman Wittes/Islamist
Political Parties: Three Kinds of Movements, Journal of
Democracy, Vol. 19, No. 3, July 2008 (pdf)
See also: Tamara
Cofman Wittes/Categories of Islamism/Middle East Strategy at Harvard
(MESH), July 30, 2008.
For responses to Tamara Cofman Wittes' analysis of Islamism,
scroll down from Tamara Cofman Wittes' comment to the responses by Michele
Dunne, Steven A. Cook, and Lee Smith.
b. Seyyid Qutb
Readings: Buruma & Margalit, pp. 101-149.
Frederick
W. Kagan/The New Bolsheviks: Understanding Al Qadea/aei.org November
16, 2005
Recommended:
Sayed Khatab, "Hakimiyyah and jahiliyyah in the
thought
of Sayyid Qutb", Middle Eastern Studies, July 2002, Vol. 38.
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and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Book
Notes: Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (C-SPAN, June 22, 2003)
Links
To Sayyid Qutb's Writings-"Milestones" & More online
On Seyyid Qutb in America,
see: http://www.vagablogging.net/06-11/from-the-october-2006-issue-of-the-believer.html
Michael
Scott Doran/The Saudi Paradox:The Schizophrenic Saudi State/Foreign
Affairs/January-February
2004
"Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its
elite
is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Liberal reformers seek
rapprochement
with the West while others side with an anti-American Wahhabi religious
establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda".
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Bernard
Lewis/What Went Wrong?/The Atlantic Monthly/January 2002
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c. Jihad: Theory, Interpretation,
& Practice
Readings: Berman, Chapters III, IV.
Mary
Habeck/Knowing the Enemy:Jihad and Jihadism/Australia-Israel Review
December 2006
Douglas E. Streusand/What
Does Jihad Mean?/Middle East Quarterly/September 1997
Mark
Gould/Understanding Jihad/Policy Review/February 2005
David A. Charters,
"Something Old, Something New...?
Al
Qaeda, Jihadism, and Fascism", Terrorism &
Political Violence, Spring 2007, Vol. 19 Issue 1, pp. 65-93, 29
pages.
- Abstract
(from author): [Note: This article by David Charters is referenced
above in the section of this syllabus labeled "International
Terrorism" - No. 4: "Terrorism As Totalitarianism's War Against
Liberalism" - immediately above No. 5: "Terrorism As Murderous
Occidentalism".]
- This
article attempts to answer the question: Is Al Qaeda a new fascist
movement? It explores this issue by comparing the situations and
ideas
which gave birth to fascism and jihadism and the beliefs and behaviours
common to both movements. The essay demonstrates a close coherence
between the two movements, but concludes that the differences between
them are significant enough to proclaim that they are not the same.
Indeed, Al Qaeda's jihadism may
warrant a new category of analysis.
Jihadism's differences from fascism notwithstanding, defeating it will
be very difficult. (boldface added)
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- Irshad
Manji/Soldiers of Allah/NYT
Sunday Book Review January 6,
2008 - a review essay on John
Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam
(Harvard 2007).
David Cook, "The Implications of Martyrdom Operations for
Contemporary
Islam", Journal of Religious
Ethics, Vol. 32, Issue 1, Spring 2004, pp. 129-151.
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David
Cook/Anti-Semitic Themes in Muslim Apocolyptic and Jihadi
Literature/Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs No. 56, May 01, 2007
Pete Lentini,
Muhammad Bakashmar, "Jihadist Beheading: A Convergence of Technology,
Theology, and Teleology?", Studies
in
Conflict & Terrorism,
Volume 30, Issue 4, April 2007, pp. 303-325. This article can be accessed @ Locating
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Abstract:
Although contemporary jihadist terrorists are most well known for
perpetrating operations that generate mass casualties, they also
conduct violent acts that yield fewer victims, such as beheading
hostages. Examining the religious and cultural contexts that surround
jihadist beheadings, developments in new media, and drawing on examples
from the Chechen Wars and the Iraq War, this article argues that
jihadists have employed this tactic for a range of reasons, including
obtaining ransom payments, hampering foreign investment, discrediting
transitional states, and recruiting supporters. It also suggests that
jihadists' beheading of their captives corresponds with aspects of
cosmic war, particularly on how religious terrorists' desires to please
a deity and secure a place of honor in the hereafter has devalued the
lives of both captor and prisoner. Consequently, contemporary jihadist
beheading is an outgrowth of the practice of terrorist hostage taking.
As this article goes to press (February 2007) UK authorities disrupted
a terrorist cell allegedly plotting to behead British Muslim soldiers
who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to broadcast the filmed
executions through jihadist websites. Journalists have described the
intended beheadings and their dissemination as "Iraq-style." There is
no doubt that jihadist beheading became more widely known as a result
of the Iraq conflict. However, the beheadings in Iraq were largely used
to recruit future jihadists and to demonstrate jihadists' strength to
their potential support base, the global Muslim community. In contrast,
the alleged UK beheading plot was aimed at striking terror into Muslims
living in the UK so that they would not support or serve their
government. Indeed the Iraq beheadings were intended to persuade, and
the UK plot was intended to dissuade. These alleged activities suggest
that contemporary jihadist beheading is not only an extension of
hostage-taking, it is also an independently evolving terrorist tactic.
Assaf Moghadam, "Mayhem, Myths, and Martyrdom: The Shi'a
Conception of Jihad", Terrorism
&
Political Violence, Spring 2007, Vol. 19 Issue 1, pp. 125-143,
19 pages.
Abstract (from
author): The
article examines the perception of jihad in Shi'a Islam. It first
provides an overview of the understanding of jihad in Islam at large,
and then examines the reflections of four central Shi'a thinkers on
jihad. More so than the traditional Sunni approach to this concept, the
Shi'a understanding of jihad is heavily influenced by perceptions of
historical suffering, placing an emphasis on injustice, tyrannical
rule, indignity, humiliation, and resistance. In recent decades, Shi'a
and Sunni notions of jihad have become more closely aligned, as
Salafi-Jihadists, who increasingly monopolize the Sunni discourse on
jihad, persistently frame jihad as a response to the oppression by
Western "infidel" regimes and tyrannical "apostate" regimes in the Arab
and Muslim world. (boldface
added)
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Edward
Rothstein/Reconsidering the Role of the Warrior in our
Post-Enlightenment World/NYT August 06, 2007
Edward Rothstein's
reflections on Lee
Harris/The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West (Basic
Books 2007).
"... Harris argues that the modern view of how to vanquish
enemies is
based on false ideas: first, that history progresses; second, that it
progresses toward greater influence of reason; and finally, that
reason, through its powers, can overcome all opposition. Our smug
disdain for the warrior, he suggests, is based on a mistaken view of
the powers of modernity and the Enlightenment....
In Mr. Harris’s view these errors are affecting the crucial
confrontations now taking place between jihadists and Western liberal
culture. We keep straining, he says, to see terrorists as if they were
just slightly more extreme versions of ourselves, reflecting our own
convictions, as if the jihadist were advocating destruction in the name
of a version of liberalism.
... Harris suggests that the jihadist is more accurately thought of as
a
fanatic, a warrior of the old school, whose technique has been
remarkably successful over the centuries. Such warfare accepts no rules
other than fealty to the tribe and accepts no compromise other than
victory. Islam, he points out, has made 'permanent conquests in every
part of the world into which it has expanded with only three
exceptions: Spain, Sicily, and certain parts of the Balkans': three
areas where Islamic fanaticism was confronted with opposing fanaticism.
... Harris argues that by failing to characterize Islamist warfare
accurately, the West deludes itself, even employing another
Enlightenment idea — tolerance — to grant harbor to those who seek to
destroy it. And the West implicitly affirms that, in the end, reason
will triumph".
See also Ayaan Hirsi Ali's review essay on Lee
Harris, The Suicide of
Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West @ Ayaan
Hirsi Ali/Blind Faiths/NYT Sunday Book Review January 6, 2008.
She maintains that the West’s “fanaticism of reason” is no match for
the
fanaticism of radical Islam.
For a brief indication of Lee Harris' own expression of his views
on radical Islam, terrorism, and
the Enlightenment, see:
Lee
Harris/Mad Scientists: The disturbing lessons of the Doctors' Plot/City
Journal Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer 2007.
From Lee Harris' essay: "This
Enlightenment model, which has worked quite effectively in
Europe and the United States, as well as in other parts of the world,
has always relied on an advanced elite that brings learning to the
masses through universal secular education. Many have hoped that
Muslim
nations would adopt the same model, with the same results. A
minority
of Muslim technocrats, who had received Western-style scientific
educations, would help lead the Middle East into the modern era.
They,
too, would be eager to transcend their own narrow cultural
perspectives, and to join other like-minded men and women across the
globe.
... But if Westernized technocrats like the Glasgow terrorists and the
London bombers can enthusiastically embrace radical Islam, what group
is left that can bring about the modernization of the Middle East?"
For another view of radical Islam and reason, see: Riaz
Hassan/The Jihad and the West-Part I/Yale Gobal online September 21,
2006.
"Jihad is ultimately political action that can be influenced by
dialogue
and negotiations".
d. Jihadis: The Near Enemy, The Far Enemy,
&
Internal
Debate
Readings: David C. Rapoport, "Sacred Terror: A
Contemporary
example from Islam", Chapter 7 in Reich (ed.) - See especially
Rapoport's
analysis of Abd Al-Salam Faraj, author of "The Neglected Duty",
referring
to jihad. Faraj coined the terms "near enemy" and "far enemy".
Recommended:
Fawaz
A.Gerges/The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (Cambridge University
Press
2005)
Steve
Coll/Young Osama:How he learned radicalism and may have seen
America/The
New Yorker/December 12 2005
Noah
Feldman/ Islam, Terror & the Second Nuclear Age/NYT-Sunday
Magazine/October 29, 2006
Peter
Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, "The Unraveling: Al Qaeda's Revolt Against
bin Laden", The New Republic,
June 11, 2008, Vol. 238, No. 4, 837, pp.
16-21.
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See also: Lawrence
Wright/The Rebellion Within: An Al Qaeda mastermind questions
terrorism/The New Yorker, June 2, 2008
Hamas:
Matthew A.
Levitt/Hamas from Cradle to Grave/Middle East Quarterly Winter 2004,
Vol. XI, No. 1
"Yet there is one terrorist organization that still benefits from an
ostensible distinction drawn by some analysts between its "military"
and "political" or "social" wings: Hamas. Analysts who make such a
distinction regularly dwell on the "good works" of Hamas, as though
these activities had no connection whatsoever with the attacks on
civilians and the suicide bombings that are the trademark of the
organization. Because of the notion that Hamas has independent "wings,"
its political and charitable fronts are allowed to operate openly in
many European and Middle Eastern capitals.
This distinction is convenient for certain governments and supporters
of the Palestinian cause. It is certainly convenient for Hamas.
However, it is totally contradicted by the consistent if scattered
findings of investigators, journalists, and analysts. This article
assembles and reviews the evidence for the integration of social
service and terrorism in Hamas. That evidence demonstrates that the
distinction is not only false but actually abets the very acts of
terrorism that have thwarted all initiatives for peace."
Matthew
Levitt/Could Hamas Target the West?/Studies in Conflict and Terrorism,
Vol. 30, No. 11,
November 2007, pp. 925-945. (pdf)
Abstract:
A violent Islamist organization, Hamas, is also a nationalist
movement
that holds "resistance" to Israel as its highest goal. Unlike global
terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, Hamas has traditionally confined its
violent activities to the local arena comprising Israel, the Gaza
Strip, and the West Bank. While citizens of Western countries have been
killed in Hamas' indiscriminate suicide bombings, Hamas has not taken
its violent campaign abroad targeting Israeli diplomats or Western
allies. Indeed, several layers of disincentives mitigate against Hamas
targeting Israeli interests abroad or targeting Western interests. But
under what conditions might Hamas be prepared to target Western
interests? The answer to this question requires a level of analysis
approach that considers Hamas as an organization, as a conglomerate of
semi-independent cells, and as a wellspring for rogue cells and
independent actors, with these last two entities posing the greatest
future threat. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is precedent for
Hamas considering the attacks on Israeli interests abroad and on
Western interests themselves. In final analysis, the author believes
Hamas unlikely to attack Western interests in the short term. But the
following analysis reveals that under certain conditions Hamas' attack
calculus could change in the future.
See also: Matthew
Levitt/Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad
(Yale University Press 2006).
Read
the entire Introduction to Levitt's book here. (pdf)
From
the Introduction: "The Myth
of Disparate Wings" (Section Title)
"As a result of the heightened focus on exposing terrorist
networks in the post-9/11 global environment, investigators have
revealed how terrorist groups systematically conceal their activities
behind charitable, social, and political fronts. Indeed, many of these
fronts have seen their officials arrested, their assets seized, and
their offices shut down by authorities. Still, Hamas benefits from an
ostensible distinction drawn by some analysts between its 'military'
and 'political' or 'social' wings. Analysts who make such a distinction
regularly dwell on the good works ofHamas, rarely looking at the
connections between these activities and the attacks on civilians and
the suicide bombings that are the organization's trademark. Because of
the notion that Hamas has independent 'wings,' its political and
charitable fronts are allowed to operate openly in many Western and
Middle Eastern capitals. In these cities, Islamic social welfare groups
tied to Hamas are often tolerated when their logistical and financial
support for Hamas is conducted under the rubric ofcharitable or
humanitarian assistance.
While convenient for Hamas and its supporters, this
distinction is contradicted by the consistent if scattered findings of
investigators, journalists, and analysts. A review ofthe evidence
regarding the integration of Hamas' political activism, social
services, and terrorism demonstrates the centrality of the group's
overt activities to the organization's ability to recruit,
indoctrinate, train, fund, and dispatch suicide bombers to attack
civilian targets.
The social welfare organizations of Hamas answer to the same
political leaders who play hands-on roles in Hamas terrorist attacks.
In some cases, the mere existence of these institutions is invoked to
classify Hamas as a social welfare rather than a terrorist
organization. To debunk these specious assumptions, it is necessary to
fully expose what Hamas calls the dawa (its social welfare and
proselytization network). This is sometimes difficult because, as one
U.S. official explained, Hamas is
loosely structured, with some
elements working clandestinely and others working openly through
mosques and social service institutions to recruit members, raise
money, organize activities, and distribute propaganda."
V.
Suicide
& Terrorism
1. An Overview
Readings: Hoffman,
Chapter 5; Laqueur, Chapter 4 (recommended);
Bloom, Chapters 1 &
4.
Ariel Merari, "The Readiness to kill and die:
Suicidal
terrorism in the Middle East", Chapter 10 in Reich (ed.).
Michael Roberts, "Suicide Missions as Witnessing: Expansions,
Contrasts", Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 30, Number 10 (2007), pp. 857-887.
Abstract:
Studies of suicide missions usually focus solely
on attacks. They also have highlighted the performative character of
suicide missions as acts of witness. By extending surveys to suicidal
acts that embrace no-escape attacks, theatrical assassination,
defensive suicide, and suicidal protest, one gains further insight into
the motivations of individuals and organizations. Illustrative studies,
notably the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and Sadat as well as Tamil
Tiger operations, generate a typology that underlines the benefits of
such extensions. The Japanese and Tamil contexts reveal the profound
differences in readings of sacrificial acts of atonement or punishment
by local constituencies. Norman Morrison in Washington in 1965 and Jan
Palach in Prague in 1969 did not have such beneficial settings and the
immediate ramifications of their protest action were limited.
Morrison's story highlights the significance of a societal context of
individuated rationalism as opposed, say, to the "pyramidical
corporatism" encouraging martyrdom operations in the Islamic world.
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Yuki
Tanaka/Japan's Kamkikaze Pilots and Contemporary Suicide Bombers: War
and Terror/japanfocus.org September 25, 2005
Recommended Books:
Farhad
Khosrokhavar/Suicide Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs (Pluto Press
2005-Translated
from the original 2002 French editon)
Ami
Pedahzur/Suicide Terrorism (Polity Press 2005)
2. The Logic Of Suicide Terrorism
Readings:
Robert
A. Pape/The Strategic Logic Of Suicide Terrorism/American Political
Science
Review(pdf)August 2003/danieldrezner.com
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For a critique of Pape's article, including a
challenge
to Pape's conclusion, see: Martin Kramer's remarks in his web log @
Political
Science Targets Suicide Terrorism. Bystanders: Take Cover!
"Robert Pape's analysis is solid. Just his data and conclusions are
flawed."
An additonal critique of Robert
Pape's conclusions can be found in: Jonathan
Fine/Contrasting Secular and Religious Terrorism/Middle East Quarterly
Winter 2008, Vol. XV, No. 1, pp. 59-69 (revisited)
For another critique of Robert Pape's work, see: Max
Abrahms/Why
Terrorism Does Not Work/International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall
2006), pp. 42-78. (pdf)
See also:
Scott
Ashworth, Joshua D. Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher W.
Ramsay/Design, Inference, and the Strategic Logic of Suicide
Terrorism/American Political Science Review April 23, 2008, Vol. 102,
No. 2. (pdf)
Abstract
In The Strategic Logic of
Suicide Terrorism, Robert Pape
(2003) presents an analysis of his suicide terrorism data. He uses the
data to draw inferences about how territorial occupation and religious
extremism affect the decision of terrorist groups to use suicide
tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape
'sconclusions because he “samples on the dependent variable.”—The data
only contain cases in which suicide terror is used. We construct bounds
(Manski, 1995) on the quantities relevant to Pape's
hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about the
relevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design.
For comments on this critique, see: http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/04/reassessing_the_strategic_logi.html
@ the Political Science blog http://www.themonkeycage.org/.
"To know whether X causes suicide
terrorism, we need to
know
how the propensity to use suicide terrorism varies with X. That is, we
not only need data on when suicide terrorism occurs, we need data on
when suicide terrorism does not occur — i.e., when groups
choose other tactics besides suicide terrorism. Analyzing only
instances when suicide terrorism occurred is not sufficient.
... Ashworth et al. conclude:
The data Pape collects do not speak to the correlates of
suicide terror, and the policy conclusions he advocates cannot be
justified by appealing to the data he collects".
For Robert A. Pape's reply to this critique, see:
Robert A. Pape, "Methods and Findings
in the Study of Suicide
Terrorism, American
Political Science Review, May 2, 2008, Vol. 102, No.
2. (pdf). Direct access to Robert Pape's
reply at this Texas State University permalink: http://ejournals.ebsco.com.libproxy.txstate.edu/direct.asp?ArticleID=493DAB064A260DA9BA46. A valid Texas State University user name and
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Abstract
Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton,
Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have
committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering
only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe
of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might
have committed suicide attacks, and so cannot measure the effects of
any independent variables. They go on to describe a method that they
say I should have used, which is not of interest because the accusation
that is supposed to motivate this discussion is inaccurate.
The
main claim—that my work on suicide terrorism samples on the dependent
variable—is simply wrong. Indeed, the authors paid no attention to the
large portions of my recent book that explain what we know about
factors that make resort to suicide terrorist campaigns more or less
likely, and how we know it. Hence, this letter is mainly devoted to
updating Ashworth, Clinton, Meirowitz, and Ramsay on my work. I also
make a few comments about the general question of whether concerns
about “sample bias” should carry significant weight when dealing with
the complete universe of a phenomenon, as is the case in my work on
suicide terrorism.
Bruce
Hoffman/The Logic Of Suicide Terrorism/The Atlantic Monthly/June 2003
"The perceived randomness of suicide bombings is in
large
part responsible for the emotional suffering that they inflict on
society.
But the planners of these attacks use a strategy that is anything but
random:
they aim to relentlessly shrink to nothing the areas in which people
can
move freely".
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Bruce Hoffman; G. H. McCormick, "Terrorism,
Signaling,
& Suicide Attack", Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
July-August
2004, Vol. 27, Issue 4.
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David Bukay/The
Religious Foundations of Suicide Bombings: Islamist Ideology/Middle
East Quarterly Fall 2006
Recommended:
David
Brooks/The Culture Of Martyrdom:How Suicide Bombing Became Not Just A
Means
But An End/The Atlantic Monthly/June 2002
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Egyptian
Muftu's Opinions On Suicide Bombings & Jihad/Memri /October 01, 2003
Andrea
Elliott/Where Boys Grow Up to Be Jihadis (a small neighborhood in the
Moroccan city of Tetouan)/NYT Sunday Magazine, November 25, 2007
Many of the men involved in the
Madrid train bombings came from one small
neighborhood in the Moroccan city of Tetouan. A number of would-be
suicide bombers in Iraq are from there, too.
"Since the start of the war, a few thousand foreign jihadis
have
heeded the call to join militant networks in Iraq. Most are men in
their 20s. Typically, they fall under the influence of an imam who
helps them contact intermediaries for the insurgents in Iraq, the
American official told me. They go
off expecting to fight a heroic
battle but often find out after arriving in Iraq that they are to be
deployed instead on suicide missions targeting other Muslims, the
official said. Based on the accounts of captured fighters, even when
they protest, they are sometimes given no choice. 'At the end of
the
day, nobody cares about these kids,' the official said. 'They are Al
Qaeda precision-guided munition.' ...
The
numbers of foreign fighters entering Iraq have dropped substantially
since this spring, the official said, at least in part because would-be
jihadis have become more aware that the majority of suicide attacks are
aimed at other Muslims. Military officials also gleaned information
from the raid in September that indicates a shift: fewer jihadis are
coming from Saudi Arabia, while more are arriving from North Africa, an
estimated 40 percent of the roughly 60 to 75 fighters who land in Iraq
every month. The shift happened in the summer of 2006, when the first
men from Jamaa Mezuak began leaving for Iraq. ...
None
of them, it appears, left behind videos explaining their
decisions, as is common for suicide bombers in some Arab countries.
There are no posters in the neighborhood exalting them".
(Boldface added)
Adam
Nossiter/Lonely Trek to Radicalism for Terror Suspect (w/links to
related materials & video)/NYT January 17, 2010
Behind Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s journey from gifted student to
terrorism suspect was a struggle between an investment in this life and
a longing for the next.
Katrin
Bennhold/A Grandfather's Suicide Bombing Puzzles Algerians/NYT December
18, 2007
"The case of Rabah Bechla casts doubt on
the practice of profiling. As a prominent Algerian journalist observed,
If a grandfather can blow himself up,
anyone can".
Michael
Slackman/In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds [w/photos & links
to related stories]/NYT June 23, 2008
Ronen Bergman/Living to Bomb Another
Day/NYT September 10, 2008
"It may well be that we
are witnessing a shift toward advanced technologies that will enable
jihadist bombers to carry out attacks and live to fight another day".
3. Case Studies of
Suicide Terrorism
a. Palestinian Suicide Bombing
Readings: Laqueur, Chapter 5 (recommended); Bloom,
Chapter 2.
b. Suicide Attacks in Sri Lanka
Readings: Bloom, Chapter 3.
c. Kurdish Suicide Terrorism in Turkey
Readings: Bloom, Chapter 5.
VI.
Women & Terrorism
1. Women's Role in Secular & Religious
Terrorism
Readings: Cindy D. Ness, "In the Name of the Cause:
Women's
Work in Secular and Religious Terrorism", Studies in Conflict &
Terrorism, September 2005, Vol. 28: 353-373.
This article can be accessed @ Locating
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article.
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access
will be provided to students in the course.
Anat Berko, Edna Erez, "Gender, Palestinian Women, and
Terrorism: Women's Liberation or Oppression?", Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
Volume 30, Issue 6, June 2007, pp. 493-519. This
article can be accessed @
Locating
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State
University User Name and Password are required. (Note: Use the EBSCO
data base and save to your desktop as a pdf file.)
Abstract:
Prior literature on women's participation in terrorism has
paradoxically interpreted this involvement as a sign of women's
newfound empowerment, and as an indication of ongoing gender
oppression. The study examines the hypothesis that Palestinian women's
involvement in terrorism indicates women's liberation. The data are
derived from in-depth interviews with fourteen women who were detained
or incarcerated in Israeli prisons for security offenses. The
interviews shed light on the women's pathways to terrorism, the roles
that they play in terrorist activity, and the aftermath of their
security offenses within Palestinian society and culture. The study
underlines the "no return" option and "no win" situation that
Palestinian women who embark on terrorist activities encounter. The
results demonstrate that although some women became involved in
terrorism due to the sense of liberation that it provided, the women
largely became disempowered in the aftermath of their offenses; rather
than receiving praise for their activism as they had expected, they
were shunned by others for their violation of gender expectations, and
failure to fulfill traditional gender roles. The social and personal
costs of involvement in terrorism for Palestinian women are analyzed,
and policy implications of the findings for theory and practice are
discussed.
Jolande
Withuis/Suffer, fight, become a saint/signandsight.com June 12, 2007
(An essay on women and terrorism.)
"Muslima terrorism – to
many this new word will sound like a
contradiction in terms. This is an erroneous and dangerously naive
response. The common association of women with peacefulness and harmony
is a myth. Although it is quite rare for women to carry out terrorist
attacks, the phenomenon is not new. (boldface added)
... Regardless of how different their respective cultures were,
politics
was traditionally the domain of men in all of the cultures. Women were
excluded and as they were also considered to have no interest in
politics, they had to prove, more than their male counterparts, their
commitment and loyalty to the cause. More than that: to be allowed to
participate at all, they also had to prove their courage, loyalty and
competence to those sceptical and sexist brothers-in-arms, and refute
the expectation that they would probably desert or fail. And there you
have it: the pathway to taking it one step further.
... Political and spiritual female
radicalism has a long tradition in which a pattern can be
distinguished. (boldface added)
... We should not overestimate the importance of the ancient texts in
order
to understand what is going on around us. The answer is not in the
texts of Islam, but rather in how they are interpreted and in how they
are used. It would be an illusion to think that we can find answers by
studying the Koran, and a misunderstanding that we cannot comprehend
anything without studying it. As a person radicalizes, the pure
doctrine unmistakably becomes an obsession, but never without
mediation: it always requires opportunistic interpretations and
teachers. Women do not have enough power to push through a new
interpretation as pure doctrine.
... Muslim fundamentalism is gender fundamentalism. Muslima
terrorism is complex in that it concerns a faith that focuses on the
global (and also smaller-scale) preservation of patriarchal power,
while at the same time there are women who want to use this patriarchal
faith to emancipate themselves, and who are even willing to resort to
acts of terrorism. Based on the same ambiguity it could be appealing
for their male brothers to "allow" their "sisters" to participate in
the jihad, i.e.: use the women to aid terrorists or even for suicide
attacks". (boldface appears in the essay)
2. Women in Jihad
Readings: David Cook, "Women Fighting in Jihad?", Studies
in Conflict & Terrorism, September
2005, Vol.
28: 375-384.
Anne Nivat, "The Black Widows: Chechen Women Join the
Fight for Independence - and Allah", Studies in Conflict &
Terrorism, September
2005, Vol. 28: 413-419.
These articles can be accessed @ Locating
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See also:
Clifford
J. Levy and Ellen Barry/Russia Says Suicide Bomber Was Militant's
Widow (with photo)/NYT April 2, 2010
Officials said one of two bombers in the Moscow subway attacks
(March 29, 2010) was
the
17-year-old widow of an insurgent.
See photo: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/04/03/world/03moscow-cnd-inline1/03moscow-cnd-inline1-popup.jpg.
"In this photo distributed by
Newsteam,
a Russian
news
agency, and published in Kommersant, a Russian daily newspaper,
Dzhennet Abdullayeva is identified posing with her husband Umalat
Magomedov. Russian investigators have said that Ms. Abdullayeva, 17,
was one of the suicide bombers who blew themselves up in the Moscow
subway on March 29, and Mr. Magomedov was a militant Islamist who was
killed in 2009. The agency did not give a date for the photo or explain
the circumstances in which it was taken."
From the article:
"... posing with his arm around this 17-year-old woman is the man
who
would put her on this path, a 30-year-old militant leader who lured her
from her single mother, drew her into fundamentalist Islam and married
her. He was killed by federal forces in December, driving her to seek
revenge. On Friday, as the photograph circulated widely, the couple
turned
into an unsettling symbol of Islamic militancy in Russia
— deeply repugnant to most people but also likely to be embraced by
other extremists as a propaganda coup, a
kind of Bonnie and Clyde of
the insurgency. (boldface added)
...
'These religious ideas are very attractive, because they give a kind
of
alternative to the world that exists,' said Zaur Gaziyev, editor in
chief of Svobodnaya Respublika, an independent newspaper in Dagestan.
'And so this young girl, who grew up without a father, who didn’t know
male power, suddenly she meets a strong, brutal man, who gives her the
sense of support.'
'She is herself a child,' Mr. Gaziyev said. 'I don’t think she
even
understood what she was doing.'
In the photograph, Ms. Abdullayeva and her husband, Umalat
Magomedov,
are both brandishing weapons. In a separate photograph, she is holding
a grenade. Her head is covered by a black Islamic scarf.
Ms. Abdullayeva — whose first name means 'paradise' in her
local
Dagestani language — was one of two female suicide bombers who attacked
the Moscow subway system, killing 40 people and wounding scores, the
authorities confirmed Friday.
She is a striking example of the phenomenon of the so-called Black
Widows
— young women from the Caucasus who are deployed as human bombs and
sent off to kill civilians in Russian cities, often after their
husbands are killed by security forces.
Especially active in the early part of the last decade, they
have
carried out at least 16 bombings, including two aboard planes.
An official at the Interior Ministry of Dagestan said that it
was
not
difficult for militant groups to recruit teenage women in a region with
more women than men.
'The girls say, ‘Here is how you will live, and a man will
always be
beside you,’ the official said. 'There is some romance about a
man
with a gun, with an automatic weapon. They make the fighters into
heroes, naturally. These girls aren’t thinking straight.'
Ms. Abdullayeva apparently met Mr. Magomedov through the
Internet.
This happens with increasing frequency, as young women strike
up
Internet relationships with older men who persuade them to accept
fundamentalist Islam and, out of naïveté and romantic
impulse, to
abandon their families, said Ragimat Adamova, news editor for Novoye
Delo, a newspaper in Dagestan.
Ms. Adamova says that once women are brought into the militant
structure, they typically never leave. If a woman’s husband is killed,
she typically marries a second, third or even a fourth fighter.
'Crudely speaking, these women
are
passed along like trophies, she
said. 'They do not let their girls go.' " (boldface added)
Farhana
Ali/Rocking the Cradle to Rocking the World: The Role of Muslim Female
Fighters/Journal of International Women's Studies/Vol. 8. #1, November
2006 (pdf)
Somini
Sengupta/Red Mosque Fueled Islamic Fire in Young Women (Pakistan)/NYT
July 24, 2007
3. Female Suicide Bombers
Lindsey
O'Rourke/Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb/NYT August 2, 2008 (op ed
piece)
There is precious little
evidence of uniquely feminine motivations driving women’s suicide
attacks.
"... the root cause of suicide terrorism appears to be anger at
occupying forces..."
For several informative responses to and comments on Lindsey O'Rourke's
essay, including the author's reply, see: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/08/suicide_bombers_f/.
The responses and comments contain useful links to additional materials
on this subject. These links include Mia Bloom, Female
suicide bombers: a global trend, Daedalus, Winter 2007.
Anne
Speckhard/The Emergence of Female Suicide Terrorists/Studies in
Conflict and Terrorism Vol. 31, No. 11, November 2008
Note:
This is a permalink directly accessible @ the Texas
State University Library.
A valid Texas
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some browsers, it may be necessary or more convenient to save the
article to desktop as pdf with the extension .pdf following the title
of the article.
Abstract:
Female suicide terrorists do not differ significantly from their male
counterparts in terms of individual motivations. Although societal
oppression may play a minor role in their self-recruitment to terror
organizations women do not bomb themselves primarily to drive a
feminist cause. Instead they act out of motivations inside conflict
zones of trauma, revenge, nationalism, expression of community outrage
and in non-conflict zones feelings of alienation, marginalization,
negative self-identity, and a desire to act on behalf of those inside
conflict zones. Groups find it to their advantage to use female bombers
as they receive more media attention, increased sympathy for the
terrorist cause, are able to pass security measures more easily than
men, and are more dispensable because they are rarely in leadership
positions.
Alissa
J. Rubin/How Baida Wanted to Die/NYT Sunday Magazine, August 16, 2009
An encounter in Iraq with a (would-be) female suicide bomber.
Return To
Beginning
Of Syllabus
VII.
Islam in the West: Globalization, "Individualization", & Radicalism
1. An Overview
Readings: Akil N. Awan, "Antecedents of
Islamic Political Radicalism Among Muslim
Communities in Europe", PS:
Political Science & Politics, Volume 41, Issue
01, January 2008, pp 13-17. This article
can be viewed
directly @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/Awan.htm
or @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article. For both of these protected links, password and user
name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
Abstract:
Recent years have witnessed a rapid
proliferation of radical
Islamist activity in western Europe, from MI5's claim in 2006 of 30
incipient “terror plots” and 1,600 individuals under surveillance, to
actual terrorist atrocities in European cities, the most infamous and
deadly of which included the transport network bombings in Madrid in
2003 and in London in 2005. ... This paper will attempt to
address the complex issues by providing a fuller, more nuanced
understanding of some of the causes and antecedents of Islamic
political radicalism among western European Muslims.
For a British film that depiicts several of the themes addressed in
this article, see:
My
Son The Fanatic (British 1997) [1hr. 27 min.]
For more on this film see: June
Thomas/The First 7/7 Movie: In the Wake of the London Bombings, a look
back at My Son the Fanatic/slate.com/July 18 2005
Robert
S. Leiken/Europe's Angry Muslims/Foreign Affairs/July-august 2005
This article can be accessed @ Locating
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and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Timothy M. Savage, "Europe and Islam: Crescent
Waxing,
Cultures Clashing", The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2004, Vol.
27, No. 3, pp.25-50.
This article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
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Olivier
Roy/Born again to kill:Why Islamic terrorism is born in
Europe/signandsight.com/August
08 2004
Lorenzo
Vidino/Aims and Methods of Europe's Muslim Brotherhood/Hudson
Institute-Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, vol. 4 November 1, 2006
Ian
Buruma/Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue: Is he an activist scholar
or an extremist in scholarly garb?/NYT Sunday Magazine February 04, 2007
For a critical, highly recommended, review of
this article by
Buruma and much more on Western intellectuals and radical Islam, see:
Paul Berman, "Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?: The
Islamist, the journalist, and the defense of liberalism", The New Republic, June 4,
2007, Vol. 236, No. 4, 814.
Berman's
essay can be directly accessed here
and here. This essay can also be
accessed @ Locating
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State
University User Name and Password are required.
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Berman: on Tariq Ramadan". This
location is password
protected.
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course.
"The equanimity on the part of some
well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death
threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in
regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to
acknowledge that women's rights have been at stake in the debates over
Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in
European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the
role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of
understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic
presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss
with any frankness the role of Ramadan's family over the years; the
accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who
finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks--what can
possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes,
omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders? ... Two
developments account for it. The first development is the
unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The
second is terrorism".
See also
this critical review of Tariq Ramadan's writings and views:
Malise
Ruthven, "The Islamic Optimist", The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No.
13, August 16, 2007 @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section labeled "Readings on Islam" and look for "Malise
Ruthven: The Islamic Optimist". This
location is password
protected.
Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the
course.
For a discussion of the Ian Buruma-Paul Berman debate and the larger
issues addressed, see:
Peter
Collier, "Backbone, Berman, and Buruma: A Debate that Actually
Matters", World Affairs,
Winter 2008 @ this Texas State University permalink:
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A valid Texas State University user name and password are required.
For a collection of essays debating issues discussed in Paul
Berman's essay in the June 4, 2007 issue of The New Republic
(noted above), see:
The
"Islam in Europe" debate/signandsite.com 22/03/07
Who should the West support: moderate Islamists like Tariq
Ramadan, or Islamic dissidents like Ayaan
Hirsi Ali? Are the rights of the
group higher than those of the individual? With a fiery polemic against
Ian Buruma's "Murder in
Amsterdam" and Timothy Garton Ash's review of this book in the New York
Review of Books, Pascal Bruckner has kindled an international debate. By
now Ian Buruma,
Timothy Garton Ash, Necla
Kelek, Paul Cliteur, Lars Gustafsson, Stuart Sim, Ulrike Ackermann, Adam Krzeminski, Halleh Ghorashi, Bassam Tibi and Margriet de Moor have all stepped into the ring.
This collection of essays is accessible @ http://www.signandsight.com/features/1167.html.
See also: Michael
Kimmelman/When Fear Turns Graphic/NYT Sunday Arts Section, January 17,
2010
Switzerland stunned many Europeans, including not a few Swiss,
when near the end of last year the country, by referendum, banned the
building of minarets. Much predictable tut-tutting ensued about Swiss
xenophobia, even though surveys showed similar plebiscites would get
pretty much the same results elsewhere.
See photo @ http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/01/17/arts/17abroad_CA0.html
& slide show @ http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2010/01/17/arts/0117-abroad_index.html.
Populist parties in Europe mobilize posters as weapons in their culture
wars.
For links to readings on Islamism and democracy, see
the section
of the web syllabus on Islam (Political Science 4313) labeled "Issues
in Contemporary Islam: Islamism/Radical Islam; Democracy" @ http://arnoldleder.com/4313.htm#VI..
Recommended Books:
Joel
S. Fetzer, J. Christopher Soper/Muslims and the State in Britain,
France,
and Germany (Cambridge University Press 2005)
Olivier
Roy/Globalized Islam: The Search For A New Ummah (Columbia University
Press
2004)
The following
works by Caldwell (and the reviews), Warner & Wenner, and Fetzer
and Soper are listed here as different views on the issue of Muslim
minorities in Western Europe.
Christopher
Caldwell/Reflections On The Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam,
And The West (Doubleday 2009)
See these reviews of this book:
Dwight
Garner/A Turning Tide in Europe as
Islam Gains Ground/NYT July 30, 2009 and Fouad
Ajami/Strangers in the Land (w/photo) NYT
Sunday Book Review, August 2, 2009.
For a perspective very different from that of Christopher Caldwell
on Muslims in Western Europe,
see: Carolyn
M. Warner, Manfred W. Wenner/Religion and the Political
Organization of Muslims in Europe, Perspectives on Politics,
Volume 4, Number 3 (September 2006), pp. 457-479. (pdf) Note: This
is a Texas
State University Library permalink. A
valid Texas
State University
User Name and password are required to access this article.
Recommended Films/Videos:
For a Review Essay on Films Related to Islam in the
West
see:
Alan
Riding/On Screen, Tackling Europe's New Reality (Review of Films by
and/or
about Muslims In Europe-w/links to information on noted
films)/NYT/January
18 2005
2. Muslims in France
Readings: Christopher Caldwell, "The Crescent and the
Tricolor", The Atlantic Monthly, November 2000.
This article can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
This article can also be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Claire
Berlinski, "The Hope of Marseille", Azure Winter 2005, No. 19.
This article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section labeled "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and
title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Michael
Kimmelman/In Marseilles, Rap Helps Keep the Peace/NYT December 19, 2007
It is hip-hop, as much a source of
local pride as the town’s soccer team, that turns out to be a lens
through which to examine why this city didn’t burn.
"When the slums outside Paris, Lyon, Toulouse and Strasbourg
exploded
last month, repeating the violence that erupted two years ago, here in
Marseille, France’s second-largest city, all remained calm.
...
Here the basic interconnectedness of all modern music expresses a local
truth about the city’s cultural identity. An ancient, gritty seaport,
Marseille flaunts its history as an immigrant magnet. Its population of
820,000 includes 200,000 Muslims, 80,000 North African Jews, 80,000
Armenians. One of the largest immigrant groups is made up of Muslims
from the Comoro Islands, near Madagascar.
...
Different communities in
Marseille
are still quite separate,
there’s racism here, but it’s a city in which you have the freedom to
move among communities if you choose.
...
Marseille can surely use the money, but hardly at the cost of
undoing the social chemistry that has kept the peace and fostered,
among other things, the city’s musical life. At Le Mille-Patte those
dozen or so young rappers outside were a typical Marseille mix: first-,
second- or third-generation immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, the
Comoro Islands, Eastern Europe, Argentina.
Habib was a skinny
18-year-old with a doleful face and a band called Urban Revolution. We
all get along because we share music, he explained. Le
Mille-Patte had
first encouraged him to rap as a young boy: I didn’t know what to do
with my days, so this place was very important". (boldface
added)
Clara
Beyer/The Jihadist Threat in France/Hudson Institute-Current Trends in
Islamist Ideology, Vol. 3 February 16, 2006
John
Rosenthal/The French Path to Jihad: Islamist inmates tell their
stories/Policy Review October & November 2006
(Note: Much of the Rosenthal piece is based on the work of Farhad
Khosrokhavar. Farhad
Khosrokhavar's book, Suicide
Bombers: Allah's New Martyrs [Pluto Press
2005-Translated
from the original 2002 French edition], is a recommended book for
this course.)
See also: "French Riots Special
Feature"/December 6, 2005 @ http://www.signandsight.com/features/500.html.
This
Special Feature contains links to many articles on Muslims in France.
Steven
Erlanger/For a French Imam, Islam’s True Enemy Is Radicalism
(w/photo)/NYT February 13, 2010
Hassen Chalghoumi supports a ban on the full facial veil, the
burqa,
and favors dialogue with France’s Jews, but many Muslims say he does
not speak for them.
Recommended Films/Videos:
Hate
(French w/English subtitles 1995 [1hr. 35 min.]
An intense, violent film that depicts the life of
angry,
disaffected minority youth in the suburbs of Paris. Offers some
insight
into the perspective of mostly Muslim rioting youth in France, although
the three young men on whom this disturbing film focuses are ethnically
African, Arab, and Jewish.
For more on this film see: Alan
Riding/In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years NYT
November 24, 2005.
Excerpt from Alan Riding essay on the film "Hate":
"So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent
uprisings
in some French immigrant neighborhoods, this cliché came with a
new twist: art in the form of movies and rap music has long been
warning
that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from
French society, that their banlieues were ripe for explosion.
Certainly, anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz's
film, "La
Haine," or "Hate," a decade ago had no reason to be surprised by this
fall's
violence. At the time, Kassovitz's portrayal of a seething immigrant
Paris
suburb, even his choice of the word "hate" for his title, seemed
shocking,
even exaggerated. Today, the movie could almost pass as a documentary.
In "Hate," burning cars light up the soulless
space between
high-rise public housing projects as local residents protest the
beating
of a young Arab, Ahmed. Nearby, graffiti proclaim: "Don't forget, the
police
kill." Three angry and restless youths - a Jew, an Arab and a black -
visit
Ahmed in the hospital and are themselves beaten by the police. They
plan
revenge".
See also: http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~os0tmc/contemp1/lahaine.htm
Chaos
(French w/English subtitles 2001 [1hr. 49 min.]
"Although comedy takes precedence in most parts of
the
film, it is the social commentary part that will spark the most debate.
France has the largest Muslim population in Europe, mostly from its
citizens
who are from its former colonies in North Africa. Culture clashes are
inevitable
when a burgeoning and mostly traditional Muslim society slowly
assimilates
itself within a Western society that lives by much different values. In
this film, Serreau tries to address the hot issue of traditional Muslim
society’s treatment of women, specifically the issue of fathers
“selling”
their teenage daughters into marriages with much older men. Melodrama
aside,
“Chaos” has a serious message to convey to its audience and it does it
with force and without fear".
Excerpt from: http://www.dvdtown.com/review/chaos/11612/1928/
3. Muslims in Britain
Readings:
Christopher
Caldwell/Jihadtropolis?: After Londonistan/NYT June 25, 2006
James
Brandon/Islam rises among young Britons/The Christian Science
Monitor/July
11 2005
Sukhdev Sandhu, "Come hungry, leave edgy", London
Review of Books, October 9, 2003, Vol. 25, No. 19. - An informative
review essay on the novel Brick
Lane by Monica Ali. The essay provides much material on the
experiences
of immigrants to Britain, including Muslim immigrants. Sukhev
Sandu's review essay can be accessed onine @ http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n19/sand01_.html. This
review essay can also be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
John
F. Burns/British Muslim Leaders Propose 'Code of Conduct'/NYT November
30, 2007
"Moderate British Muslim leaders on Thursday proposed guidelines that
aim to root out extremism, promote a culture of “civic responsibility”
and foster women’s rights in the country’s mosques, Islamic centers and
Muslim schools.
... The guidelines, circulated in draft form to
Muslim groups across the country, represent a sweeping new effort by
the moderate leaders to combat alienation among disaffected Muslim
youth and to foster a new atmosphere of openness and tolerance among
Britain’s
two million Muslims, particularly in the country’s 1,500 mosques".
Elaine
Sciolino/Britain Grapples With Role for Islamic Justice (w/photos)/NYT
November
19, 2008
Recommended Films/Videos
My
Son The Fanatic (British 1997) [1hr. 27 min.]
For more on this film see: June
Thomas/The First 7/7 Movie: In the Wake of the London Bombings, a look
back at My Son the Fanatic/slate.com/July 18 2005
4. Muslims in Germany
Readings: Peter
Schneider/The New Berlin Wall/NYT Sunday Magazine/December 4 2005
Andrew Curry, "Riot Control: Why There Were No Riots
In Germany", The New Republic, TNR
Online |
Post date 11.16.05
This article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
Mark
Landler/German Judge Cites Koran, Stirring Up Cultural Storm/NYT March
23, 2007
Mark
Landler/After Lifetime in Germany, Turks Still Alone/NYT March 25, 2007
"Four decades after the first Turks arrived as guest
workers, they are reaching retirement in a land that still feels
foreign."
Mark
Landler and Nicholas Kulish/Arrest of One Turk in Germany Brings New
Scrutiny to a Society of 2.7 Million/NYT September 08, 2007
Nicholas
Kulish/Turkish Newspapers Vie for Fluency in Two Societies/NYT November
11, 2007
Norbert
F. Pötz/Life in a Parallel Society: Muslims in
Germany/spiegel.de/international/April 16, 2008
5. Muslims in America
Readings: Spencer Ackerman, "Religious Protection:
Why
American Muslims Haven't Turned To Terrorism" The New Republic,
December 12, 2005.
This article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the
course.
Nina
Bernstein/In American Cities, No Mirror Image of Muslims of
Leeds/NYT/July
21 2005
For another perspective on the issue of Muslims in America turning to terrorism see:
Andrea
Elliott/A Call to Jihad, Answered in America/NYT, Sunday, July 12, 2009.
"The case has forced federal agents and terrorism analysts to
rethink some of their most basic assumptions about the vulnerability of
Muslim immigrants in the United States to the lure of militant Islam.
For years, it seemed that “homegrown” terrorism was largely a problem
in European countries like Britain and France, where Muslim immigrants
had failed to prosper economically or integrate culturally. By
contrast, experts believed that the successful assimilation of
foreign-born Muslims in the United States had largely immunized them
from the appeal of radical ideologies.
The story of the Twin
Cities men does not lend itself to facile categorizations. They make up
a minuscule percentage of their Somali-American community, and it is
unclear whether their transformation reflects any broader trend. Nor
are they especially representative of the wider Muslim immigrant
population, which has enjoyed a stable and largely middle-class
existence."
See also: From
the Midwest to Mogadishu - Does the U.S. really face "homegrown"
jihadist threats? (with updates)/Room
for Debate.blogs/NYT
July 13, 2009.
Radical movements have been a problem in Britain and other
European
countries. How can the U.S. government prevent such movements here? An
article
in The Times
by Andrea Elliott on Sunday examined the case of more than 20 young
Somali-Americans who are now the focus of a major domestic terrorism
investigation. Most of the men are refugees who left
Minnesota, which has one of
the largest Somali communities in the United States, and are suspected
of joining Al
Shabaab, a militant Islamist group in Somalia. One of the men blew
himself up in a suicide attack in Somalia in October. We
(NYT editors) asked some experts what dynamics in the Somali community
might
make it more possible to lure these young men to that group. While
“homegrown” jihadism has caused alarm in Britain and other European
countries, does the United States face challenges of its own?
Can the
government detect and prevent such movements from gaining footholds
here? (boldface added)
Ken
Menkhaus, political scientist
Bruce
Hoffman, professor of security studies
Zainab
Hassan, The Minneapolis Foundation
Steven
Simon, co-author, “The Next Attack”
Thomas
Sanderson, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Guido
Steinberg, German Institute for International and Security Affairs
Andrea
Elliott/The Jihadist Next Door/NYT Sunday Magazine, January
31, 2010
In his small-town Alabama high school, Omar Hammami was among the
coolest, most gifted students in his class. How did he grow up to
become a leader in an African terror group linked to Al Qaeda?
See also Interactive Timeline w/photos for this article @ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/27/magazine/20100127_OMAR_TIMELINE.html.
Note: Access with this
link requires more recent browsers.
Scott
Shane and Squad Mekhennet/Imam's Path From Condemning Terror to
Preaching Jihad (w/photos)/NYT Sunday, May 9, 2010
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric, has become a central figure
in the luring of Western Muslims to violent extremism.
"Notably, he was enraptured by the works of Sayyid Qutb, an
Egyptian whose time in the United States helped make him the father of
the modern anti-Western jihadist movement in Islam.
Because of the flowing style of
Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day, Mr. Awlaki
wrote. I would be so immersed with
the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me
directly.”
Andrea
Elliott: An Imam In America- 3 Articles (links)/NYT/March 05 through
March 07, 2006
Andrea
Elliott/A Cleric's Journey Leads to a Suburban Frontier/NYT January 28,
2007
For critical comments on Andrea Elliott's reporting in the
above
articles, see: Jonathan
Tobin/Another Pulitzer Prize Disgrace/jewishworldreview.com April 23,
2007
"The most
important was Elliot's failure to mention anything about the role of
the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in the murder of 16-year-old Ari
Halberstam in a van filled with Jewish children on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Not one of her 11,000 words refers to the fact that it was this same
mosque that was the forum for the sermon that inspired one of its
congregants, Rashid Baz, to go out and try to murder as many Jews as he
could in March of 1994. ... How, you may ask, could one
write about any religious institution and ignore the most notorious
aspect of its recent history? ... In a subsequent article in The
New York Sun, Halberstam's mother, Devorah, related that she called
Elliot to ask why she had omitted the story of her son's murder from
the feature on the mosque. Elliot replied that she knew nothing about
it".
See also: Daniel
Freedman/For Ari Halberstam - Opinion Piece/New York Sun March 8, 2007
Gary
Shapiro/Pulitzer for Imam Feature Called 'Outrageous'/New York Sun
April 20, 2007
Neil
MacFarquhar/Iraq's Shadow Widens Sunni-Shiite Split in U.S./NYT
February 04, 2007
Michael
Moss and Souad Mekhennet/An Internet Jihad Aims at U.S. Viewers/NYT
October 15, 2007
Neil
MacFarquhar/For Muslim Students (in U.S.), A Debate on Inclusion (with
photos)/NYT February 21,
2008
Neil
MacFarquhar/To Muslim girls in U.S., Girl Scouts offer a chance to fit
in NYT November 28, 2007
VIII. Islam in
Russia: 19th Century Empire, Soviet and Modern Eras
For an informative and
insightful
analysis of the pre Soviet
Russian empire's relations with its large Muslim populations that
may offer a comparative perspective on the allegiance of Muslim
populations in modern Western states, see the review
essay by Orlando Figes, "Islam: The
Russian
Solution", The New York
Review of Books, December 21, 2006, Vol.
LIII, No. 20, pp. 74-77. The review
essay is on two books: Robert
D. Crews/For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central
Asia (Harvard University Press 2006) and Shireen
T. Hunter/Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security (M.
E. Sharpe 2004).
Sections 1 and
2, pp. 74-76, of this essay focusing on Robert Crews' book are
especially useful.
"For Prophet and Tsar is an original and revelatory
book.
Clearly written and well researched, it
sheds new light on the complex
interplay between the imperial state and its Muslim subjects in a way
that may illuminate contemporary debates about how to secure the
allegiances of Muslim populations in modern Western states.
Crews's
analysis of the imperial politics of religion presents a cogent and
persuasive explanation of the Russian empire's relative stability in
its Muslim territories during the long nineteenth century. It is
refreshing to see the question posed this way, not with a view to
discovering the social forces that undermined the empire in the longer
run, but with a view to understanding the sources of the empire's
durability. For what strikes one about the Russian empire is not that
it collapsed, as all empires do, but rather that it managed to survive
so long (and resurrect itself in the Soviet era) in such a vast and
backward landmass as Eurasia, where the Russians were themselves no
more than a large minority. The first national census of 1897 showed
that Russians made up only 44 percent of the empire's population, and
that they were one of the slowest-growing ethnic groups. The Muslim
population, with its high birth rate, was the fastest-growing ethnic
group in the empire". (boldface added)
Read the first 38 pages of the Introduction to Robert D.
Crews'
book here.
This review essay by Orlando Figes can be
accessed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on "Readings on Islam" and look for "Figes: Islam:The
Russian Solution". This location is password protected.
Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
See also: Leon Aron, "Jihadi Murat"- a
review essay on Robert
D. Crews/For Prophet and Tsar:
Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Harvard University
Press, 2006) and Gordon
M. Hahan/Russia's Islamic Threat
(Yale University Press, 2007), The New Republic, November
5, 2007, Vol. 237, No. 4, 824, pp. 42-49. This review essay is
directly accessible @ this
location. This Leon Aron
essay in The New Republic
is also accessible @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library
with
a valid Texas StateUniversity User Name and password.
Return To
Beginning
Of Syllabus
IX.
Defeating Terrorism: Terrorist Organization, Intelligence,
Interrogation,
& Moral Dimensions
1. Terrorist Organization & Strategy
Readings:
Brad McCallister, "Al Qaeda & the Innovative
Firm:
Demythologizing the Network", Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
July-August
2004, Vol. 27, Issue 4.
This article by McCallister can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
Bruce Hoffman, "The Changing Face of al Qaeda &
the
Global War on Terrorism", Studies in Conflict & Terrorism,
November-December
2004, Vol. 27, Issue 6.
This Hoffman article can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
Bruce
Hoffman, "The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism", Foreign Affairs, May-June,
2008. A review essay on
Leaderless Jihad:
Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Summary: Marc Sageman claims that al Qaeda's leadership is finished and
today's
terrorist threat comes primarily from below. But the terrorist elites
are alive and well, and ignoring the threat they pose will have
disastrous consequences.
This article can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
See also: Elaine
Sciolino and Eric Schmitt/A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism/NYT
Week in Review, Sunday, June 8, 2008
Two theorists (Marc Sageman & Bruce Hoffman) see the threat
differently, setting the scene for
new turf fights in Washington.
See: Marc
Sageman - Bruce Hoffman Exchange - Does Osama Still Call the Shots?:
Debating the Containment of al Qaeda's Leadership, Foreign Affairs,
July/August 2008.
This exchange btween Hoffman and Sageman is accessible at the following
two Texas State University permalinks. A valid Texas State
University user name and password are required.
Bruce Hoffman: http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=32556556&site=ehost-live
Marc Sageman: http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=32556580&site=ehost-live
See also: Bruce
Hoffman/Al-Qaeda has a new strategy. Obama needs one, too./Washington
Post January 10, 2010.
"First, al-Qaeda is increasingly focused on overwhelming,
distracting
and exhausting us. To this end, it seeks to flood our already
information-overloaded national intelligence systems with myriad
threats and background noise. Al-Qaeda hopes we will be so distracted
and consumed by all this data that we will overlook key clues, such as
those before Christmas that linked Abdulmutallab to an al-Qaeda
airline-bombing plot.
Second, in the wake of the global financial crisis, al-Qaeda
has
stepped up a strategy of economic warfare. "We will bury you," Soviet
Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised Americans 50 years ago. Today,
al-Qaeda threatens: "We will bankrupt you." Over the past year, the
group has issued statements, videos, audio messages and letters online
trumpeting its actions against Western financial systems, even taking
credit for the economic crisis. However divorced from reality these
claims may be, propaganda doesn't have to be true to be believed, and
the assertions resonate with al-Qaeda's target audiences.
Heightened security measures after the Christmas Day plot,
coupled
with the likely development of ever more sophisticated
passenger-screening and intelligence technologies, stand to cost a lot
of money, while the war in Afghanistan constitutes a massive drain on
American resources. Given the economic instability here and abroad,
al-Qaeda seems to think that a strategy of financial attrition will pay
outsize dividends.
Third, al-Qaeda is still trying to create divisions within
the
global alliance arrayed against it by targeting key coalition partners.
Terrorist attacks on mass-transit systems in Madrid in 2004 and London
in 2005 were intended to punish Spain and Britain for participating in
the war in Iraq and in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and al-Qaeda
continues this approach today. During the past two years, serious
terrorist plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda's allies in Pakistan, meant to
punish Spain and the Netherlands for participating in the war on
terrorism, were thwarted in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
...
Fourth, al-Qaeda is aggressively seeking out, destabilizing and
exploiting failed states and other areas of lawlessness. While the
United States remains preoccupied with trying to secure yesterday's
failed state -- Afghanistan -- al-Qaeda is busy staking out new
terrain. The terrorist network sees failing states as providing
opportunities to extend its reach, and it conducts local campaigns of
subversion to hasten their decline. Over the past year, it has
increased its activities in places such as Pakistan, Algeria, the
Sahel, Somalia and, in particular, Yemen.
Once al-Qaeda has located or helped create a region of
lawlessness,
it guides allies and related terrorist groups in that area, boosting
their local, regional and -- as the Northwest Airlines plot
demonstrated -- international attack capabilities. Although the exact
number of al-Qaeda personnel in each of these areas varies, and in some
cases may include no more than a few hard-core terrorists, they perform
a critical force-multiplying function. Their help to indigenous
terrorist groups includes support for attacks -- by providing weapons,
training and intelligence -- and, equally critical, assistance in
disseminating propaganda, such as by building Web sites and launching
online magazines modeled on al-Qaeda's.
Fifth and finally, al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits
from
non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the
West. The group's leaders see people like these -- especially converts
to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny
that persons from Islamic countries might -- as the ultimate fifth
column. Citizens of countries that participate in the U.S. visa-waiver
program are especially prized because they can move freely between
Western countries and blend easily into these societies."
For a different view of Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks
in the Twenty-first Century by Marc Sageman and
remarks on several other books concerning terrorism and Islam, see this
review essay: Malise
Ruthven/ The
Rise of the Muslim Terrorists/New York Review of Books May 29, 2008,
Vol. 55, No. 9.
See also Cass Sunstein's review and analysis of Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks
in the Twenty-first Century by Marc Sageman.
Cass R. Sunstein, "Misery and Company", The New Republic, October
22, 2008.
Does Religion Have Anything
To Do With Terrorism?
This article by Cass Sunstein is accessible @ http://www.powells.com/blog/?p=3893.
"Sageman's distinctive contribution lies in his emphasis on
social
interactions among like-minded people, and in particular the effects of
enclaves of young Muslims.
...Sageman's database and method do not permit him to compare those who
became terrorists with those who did not; and for all their
plausibility, his claims about the causal force of networks have not
been shown to count as social science. So the core narrative of his
book has not been adequately corroborated by his own evidence."
See also: Nicholas
Schmidle/The Saharan Conundrum/NYT Sunday Magazine February 15, 2009.
"Are legions of these 'free agent' jihadis, operating loosely in
the
name of Al Qaeda, more worrying or less worrying than a centralized Al
Qaeda? Western intelligence agencies no longer agree on the nature of
the threat.
... But political and religious violence in the Sahel usually had
nothing to do with militias fighting for Shariah
or bidding to join Al Qaeda. More often than not, the fighting involved
long-running territorial disputes; ethnic, clan or tribal quibbles like
those constantly plaguing Chad; and Muslims fighting Muslims, seen most
vividly in Darfur. It is difficult to isolate and identify the extent
to which Islam does or doesn’t play into each instance of violence in
the Muslim world."
Thomas Rid, "Cracks in the
Jihad", Wilson Quarterly,
Winter 2010, Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 40-47.
For a limited time this article is directly accessible @
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=587396.
Permalink direct access @ Texas State University Library:
http://libproxy.txstate.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=47570680&site=ehost-live.
A valid Texas State University user name and password are required.
"Al
Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no longer an
adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be defeated. But
the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength: Because of its
transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired yet fitter
to survive its present crisis.
...
In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition forces toppled
the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s core organization
in Afghanistan, the bin Laden brand has been bleeding popularity
across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result, has been torn
by mounting internal tensions. Today, the holy war is set to slip into
three distinct ideological and organizational niches. The U.S. surge in
Afghanistan, whether successful or not, is likely to affect this
development only marginally.
The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by
grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt,
or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the
three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most
visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe,
fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities.
In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young
second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in
a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex
personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis
who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its
appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and
promise."
Benjamin
Popper/Build-a-Bomber:Why
do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? (with links to papers
referenced)/slate.com/Dec.
29, 2009
Jakub
Grygiel/The Power of Statelessness: The withering appeal of
governing/Policy Review April & May 2009
"The state is no longer the be-all and end-all, and many modern groups
prefer to disrupt rather than control political and administrative
activities.
... Statelessness is a form of power."
Scott
Atran/To Beat Al Qaeda, Look to the East/NYT Week in Review, December
14, 2009
The key in the Afghan-Pakistani area, as in Southeast Asia, is to
use local customs and networks to our advantage.
For a critique of Scot Atran's view, see: Max Boot, "Atran's Silly
Thesis", December 13, 2009, posted @ http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/boot/195022.
"Atran doesn’t seem to realize this. Instead he comforts himself with
foolish fairytales about how supposedly benign the Taliban would be if
only we left them alone. He adopts the “accidental guerrilla” thesis
propounded by Dave Kilcullen, which holds that it is American military
action that is driving the Pashtuns into the Taliban’s hands. This
flagrantly ignores the historical record which shows that the Taliban
were far more powerful back in the 1990s when there was not a single
American soldier on the ground in Afghanistan. In those days, too, the
Taliban cemented a close alliance with al-Qaeda, which they have never
renounced even though it would have been to their advantage to do so.
This suggests rather strongly that if we followed Atran’s advice and
left Afghanistan to its own devices, it would soon be taken over by
jihadists bent on attacking not only Pakistan but also Europe and the
United States."
Robert
F. Worth/Hezbollah Seeks to Marshall the Piety of the Young
(w/photos)/NYT November 21, 2008
Shmuel
Bar/Deterring Terrorists: What Israel has learned/Policy Review,
June-July, 2008
Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor, "Are Voters Sensitive to
Terrorism?
Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate", American Political Science Review,
Vol. 102, No. 3, August 2008, pp. 279-301. This article is
accessible in pdf @ http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR477-1/.
Abstract:
This paper relies on the variation of terror attacks across time and
space as an instrument to identify the causal effects of terrorism on
the preferences of the Israeli electorate. We find that the occurrence
of a terror attack within three months of the elections is associated
with a 1.35 percentage points increase on the local support for the
right bloc of political parties out of the two blocs vote. This effect
is of a significant political magnitude given the level of terrorism in
Israel and the fact that its electorate is closely split between the
right and left blocs. Moreover, a
terror fatality has important
electoral effects beyond the locality where the attack is perpetrated,
and their electoral impact is stronger the closer to the elections they
occur. Interestingly, the observed political effects are not affected
by the identity of the party holding office. These results provide
empirical support for the hypothesis that the electorate shows a highly
sensitive reaction to terrorism, and substantiate the claim that terror
organizations especially target democratic regimes because these
regimes are more prone to make territorial concessions.
(boldface added)
Frank Hairgrove; Douglas M. Mcleod, "Circles Drawing Toward
High
Risk Activism: The Use of Usroh
and Halaqa in Islamist
Radical Movements", Studies in Conflict &
Terrorism,
Volume
31,
Issue
5, May
2008, pages 399
- 411. (revisited)
Abstract:
Kurzman (2004) argued that social movements research and Islamic
studies “followed parallel trajectories, with few glances across the
chasm that have separated them.” This article will illuminate one
influential process that has relevance to both these areas, the use of
small groups for the purpose or radical mobilization. Specifically, it
examines the impact of the use of small Islamic study groups (usroh
and halaqa)
for fundamental and radical Islamic movements. Although small-group
mobilization is not unique to Islam, the strategic use of these study
groups empowered by the Islamic belief system has yielded significant
returns in capacity building for high-risk activism.
The full text of this article by can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
Alan
Cullison/Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive/The Atlantic Monthly/September
2004
The complete text of Cullison's article can be
accessed
@ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas State
University
User Name and Password are required.
Alison
Leigh Cowan, Alain Delaquérière, Souad Mekhennet, Michael
Powell, William K. Rashbaum (reporters) & written by Michael
Powell/U.S. Recruit Reveals How Qaeda Trains Foreigners/NYT July 23,
2009
The testimony of Bryant Neal Vinas offered a rare window into the
life and training of Al Qaeda recruits.
Eric
Schmitt and Tom Shanker/U.S. Adapts Cold-War Idea to Fight
Terrorists/NYT March 18, 2008
Recommended Book: Marc
Sageman/Understanding Terror Networks (University of Pennsylvania Press
2004)
David
J. Betz/The
Virtual Dimension of Contemporary Insurgency and
Counterinsurgency/April 15, 2008 (pdf)
"The paper looks at the virtual dimension of contemporary
insurgency
and
counterinsurgency. It argues that the
West is faltering in the ‘War of Ideas’ with global
Jihad for the main reason that the messages that we wish to convey lack
narrative coherence. This is a
result of the fact that we misapprehend the nature of the virtual
operational environment whereas
our opponents possess an intuitive grasp of it as a result of
which their structure and
method of operations are better adapted and more effective than our
own. There is no reason, beyond
inertia, that this should remain the case.
...
Islamists are succeeding in the virtual dimension because the
organization and method of their operations is better adapted to the
Information Age than our own: our
forces are unmatched in the ability to manoeuvre metal and machines to
deadly effect in physical
battle; the other side is proving to
be better at the purposeful shaping of people’s thoughts and
beliefs". (boldface added)
For a more critical view of the sophistication of radical Islamists'
use of the Web, see:
Daniel
Kimmage/Fight Terror With You Tube/NYT, June 26, 2008
"When it comes to user-generated content and interactivity,
Al Qaeda is
now behind the curve. And the United States can help to keep it there
by encouraging the growth of freer, more empowered online communities,
especially in the Arab-Islamic world.
... In July 2007, for example, Al Qaeda released more than 450
statements, books, articles, magazines, audio recordings, short videos
of attacks and longer films. These products reach the world through a
network of quasi-official online production and distribution entities,
like Al Sahab, which releases statements by Osama bin Laden.
... But
the Qaeda media nexus, as advanced as it is, is old hat. If Web 1.0 was
about creating the snazziest official Web resources and Web 2.0 is
about letting users run wild with self-created content and
interactivity, Al Qaeda and its affiliates are stuck in 1.0."
(boldface added)
See also: Daniel
Kimmage/The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus/An RFE/RL Special Report, Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, March 2008 (pdf)
Max
Abrahms/Why
Terrorism Does Not Work/International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall
2006), pp. 42-78. (pdf)
2. Intelligence, Interrogation/Torture, &
Moral
Dimensions
Readings:
Elshtain, Chapter 4, "Is The War Against Terrorism
Just?"
[At Reserve Desk Texas State University Library]
Laqueur, Chapters 6, 8 (recommended).
Berman, Chapters VI., VII.
Bruce
Hoffman/A Nasty Business (Torture & Intelligence Gathering Against
Terrorists-Should We Care?)/The Atlantic Monthly/January 2002
Mark
Bowden/The Dark Art Of Interrogation/The Atlantic Monthly/October 2.
2003
"The most effective way to gather intelligence and
thwart
terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A
survey of the landscape of persuasion."
The complete texts of the Hoffman & Bowden
articles
can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
Charles
Krauthammer/The Truth about Torture/The Weekly Standard/December 5
2005,
Vol. 011 Issue 12
Andrew Sullivan, "The Abolition of Torture", The
New
Republic, December 19, 2005 - A critique of Krauthammer's position
on torture.
This article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Terrorism" and look for the author and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
Edward
Rothstein/Reconsidering the Role of the Warrior in our
Post-Enlightenment World/NYT August 06, 2007 (revisited)
Benjamin
Weiser/How to Keep an Ex-Terrorist Calm and Talking/NYT December 9, 2007
Michael
Moss & Souad Mekhennet/Jail Protests by Militants Win Privileges
and Visits by Wives/NYT December 31, 2007
Scott
Shane/Inside the Interrogation of a 9/11 Mastermind (w/multimedia
& photos)/NYT Sunday, June 22, 2008
Katherine
Zoepf/Deprogramming Jihadists (w/photo)/NYT Sunday Magazine November 9,
2008
The Saudi government is trying to rehabilitate violent Islamists by
addressing their psychological needs. Could therapy be the best sort of
counterterrorism?
"Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief
plays in the recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate
among scholars of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is
far less important than family and group dynamics, psychological and
emotional needs. 'We’re finding that they don’t generally join for
religious reasons,' John Horgan told me. A
political psychologist who directs the International Center for the
Study of Terrorism at Penn State,
Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. 'Terrorist
movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision,
purpose, camaraderie,' he went on, 'and involvement with them has an
allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually
something you acquire once you’re involved.'
Other scholars
emphatically disagree, stressing the significance of political belief
and grievance. But if the Saudi
program is succeeding, it may be
because it treats jihadists not as
religious fanatics or enemies of the
state but as alienated young men in need of rehabilitation. (boldface
added)
...
In Saudi Arabia, psychological disorders are often understood as the
results of a person finding himself somehow outside the traditional
circle of family and community. Most of the counseling that the inmates
receive is focused on helping them to develop more healthful family
relationships. “We use Western psychiatric techniques together with
Islamic techniques,” T. M. Otayan, the center’s staff psychologist,
says, referring to the intensive religion classes. A number of the
inmates have received diagnoses of antisocial personality disorder, he
adds, but he claims serious mental illness among the former jihadists
is rare.
...
How and why violent extremists come to leave their organizations are a
fairly new focus in academic studies of terrorism. Horgan’s findings —
that simple fear and disillusionment can play a major role in an
individual’s decision to disengage from his group — seem to be echoed
by a recent RAND Corporation report on the demise of terrorist groups,
which found that efforts by police and intelligence agents to create
intense internal pressure within terrorist groups are more successful
at fighting extremism than military actions."
Eric
Lipton, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti/Review of Jet Bomb Plot Shows
More Missed Clues (w/links to related materials & graphic for
unconnected threads)/NYT January 18, 2010
Films/Videos:
Battle
Of Algiers (1967) (Revisited)
Readings Related To This Film:
Jenkins, "The Battle Of Algiers", pp. 72-79; Jenkins,
"Terrorism And Politics", pp. 79-83.
[The Jenkins materials cited here are available at
the
Reserve Desk Texas State University Library]; Hoffman, pp. 57, 60-64.
Alan
A. Stone/Reel Terrorism: Reconsidering The Battle Of Algiers/Boston
Review/February-March
2003 (Revisited)
Richard Vinen, "Electric Koran" (Use &
Ramifications
Of Torture In The Algerian War 1954-1962), London Review Of Books,
Vol. 23 No. June 2001.
The Vinen article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to the section on the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" and look for the author
and title of this
article.
This location is password protected. Password and user name for
access
will be provided to students in the course.
X.
The Future Of
Terrorism
Readings:
Laqueur, Chapters 9, 10, and Conclusion
(recommended); Hoffman,
Chapter 9.
The first chapter
(pdf) of How
Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of
Terrorist Campaigns by Audrey Kurth Cronin (Princeton 2009).
Scott
Shane/Rethinking Which Terror Groups to Fear/NYT Week In Review Sunday,
September 27,
2009
The terrorism news is mixed: Charges of fresh plots amid signs
that Al
Qaeda’s appeal is on the slide among Muslims.
Thomas
Rid, Marc Hecker/The Terror Fringe: The deterritorialized tail of
jihad/Policy Review December 2009 & January 2010
"The afghan-pakistan border
region is widely identified as a haven for jihadi extremists. But the
joint between local insurgencies and global terrorism has been
dislocated. A combination of new technologies and new ideologies has
changed the role of popular support: In local insurgencies the
population may still be the “terrain” on which resistance is thriving —
and counterinsurgency, by creating security for the people, may still
succeed locally. But Islamic violent extremism in its global and
ambitious form is attractive only for groups at the outer edge, the
flat end of a popular support curve. Jihad failed to muster mass
support, but it is stable at the margin of society. Neither the West
nor its enemies can win — or lose — a war on terror. "
Jessica
Stern/The Protean Enemy (al Qaeda)/Foreign Affairs/July-August 2003
[This link provides access to a preview of the article.]
The entire Stern article can be viewed @ http://www.arnoldleder.com/readings/index.html.
Scroll
to section on "Readings on Islam" and look for the author and title of
this article. This location is password protected. Password
and user name for access will be provided to students in the course.
BruceHoffman, "Al-Qaeda,Trends In Terrorism &
Future
Potentialities:An Assesssment" Studies In Conflict & Terrrorism,
Vol.
26:429-442 November 2003.
The Stern and Hoffman articles can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
This Hoffman
article
can also be accessed @ BruceHoffman/AlQaeda,TrendsInTerrorismAndFuturePotentialities:AnAssesssment/rand.org/publications/P/P8078/P8078.pdf.
James Fallows, "Declaring Victory: A New Stategy
For The Fight Against Terror", The Atlantic Monthly,
September 2006.
This article can be accessed @ Locating
Periodicals @ Texas State University Library.
A valid Texas
State
University User Name and Password are required.
Mark
Landler & John Markoff/Digital Fears Emerge After Data Siege in
Estonia/NYT May 29, 2007
"... what some here describe as the first war in cyberspace
(boldface added), a
monthlong
campaign that has forced Estonian authorities to defend their pint-size
Baltic nation from a data flood ... The bulk of the cyberassaults
used a technique known as a
distributed denial-of-service attack. By bombarding the country’s Web
sites with data, attackers can clog not only the country’s servers, but
also its routers and switches, the specialized devices that direct
traffic on the network. ... To magnify the assault, the
hackers infiltrated computers around the
world with software known as bots, and banded them together in networks
to perform these incursions. The computers become unwitting foot
soldiers, or zombies, in a
cyberattack. ... In one case, the attackers sent a single
huge burst of data to
measure the capacity of the network. Then, hours later, data from
multiple sources flowed into the system, rapidly reaching the upper
limit of the routers and switches. ... Because of the
murkiness of the Internet — where attackers can mask
their identities by using the Internet addresses of others, or remotely
program distant computers to send data without their owners even
knowing it — several experts said that the attackers would probably
never be caught. American government officials said that the nature of
the attacks suggested they were initiated by “hacktivists,” technical
experts who act independently from governments. ... Mr.
Evron, an executive at an Internet security firm called Beyond
Security, is a veteran of this kind of warfare. He set up the Computer
Emergency Response Team, or CERT, in Israel. Web sites in Israel are
regularly subjected to attacks by Palestinians or others sympathetic to
their cause. ... 'Whenever there is political tension,
there is a
cyber aftermath,' Mr. Evron said, noting that sites in Denmark became
targets after a newspaper there published satirical cartoons depicting
the prophet Muhammad".
********************************
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Beginning
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Academic Honesty
Statement Texas State University
Learning and teaching take
place
best in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and openness. All members
of the academic community are responsible for supporting freedom and
openness
through rigorous personal standards of honesty and fairness. Plagiarism
and other forms of academic dishonesty undermine the very purpose of
the
university and diminish the value of an education.
Academic Offenses
Students who have committed academic dishonesty,
which
includes cheating on an examination or other academic work to be
submitted,
plagiarism, collusion, or abuse of resource materials, are subject to
disciplinary
action.
a. Academic work means the preparation of an
essay,
thesis, report, problem assignments, or other projects which are to be
submitted for purposes of grade determination.
b. Cheating means:
1. Copying from another student’s test paper,
laboratory
report, other report or computer files, data listing, and/or programs.
2. Using materials during a test unauthorized by
person
giving test.
3. Collaborating, without authorization, with
another
person during an examination or in preparing academic work.
4. Knowingly, and without authorization, using,
buying,
selling, stealing, transporting, soliciting, copying, or possessing, in
whole or part, the content of an unaministered test.
5. Substituting for another student—or permitting
another person to substitute for oneself in taking an exam or preparing
academic work.
6. Bribing another person to obtain an
unadministered
test or information about an unadministered test.
c. Plagiarism means the appropriation of
another’s
work and the unacknowledged incorporation of that work in one’s own
written
work offered for credit. (Underline Added)
d. Collusion means the unauthorized collaboration
with another person in preparing written work offered for credit.
e. Abuse of resource materials means the
mutilation,
destruction, concealment, theft or alteration of materials provided to
assist students in the mastery of course materials.
Penalties for Academic Dishonesty
Students who have committeed academic dishonesty
may
be subject to:
a. Academic penalty including one or more of the
following
when not inconsistent:
1. A requirement to perform additional academic
work
not required of other students in the course;
2. Required to withdraw from the course with a
grade of “F.” (Underline
Added)
3. A reduction to any level grade in the course,
or
on the exam or other academic work affected by the academic dishonesty.
b. Disciplinary penalty including any penalty
which
may be imposed in a student disciplinary hearing pursuant to this Code
of Conduct. ****************************************************************************************************
B.A. in POLITICAL
SCIENCE - LEARNING OUTCOMES:
1. Students will demonstrate the ability to
ask
relevant questions pertaining to Political Science.
2. Students will demonstrate the ability to recognize
and evaluate assumptions and implications.
3. Students will demonstrate the ability to examine
and evaluate different sides of an issue.
4. Students will demonstrate the ability to state and
defend a
thesis that is clear, direct, logical, and substantive in the area of
Political Science.
5. Students will demonstrate the ability to find and
use a variety of appropriately cited sources.
6. Students will demonstrate substantive knowledge of
concepts and facts relevant to Political Science.
For students in Public Administration:
BPA – PROGRAM
LEARNING
OUTCOMES:
1. Students will demonstrate critical thinking and
problem solving skills.
2. Students will demonstrate the ability to
communicate effectively in writing.
3. Students will demonstrate effective oral
communication skills.
4. Students will demonstrate a fundamental
understanding of key
public administration and management concepts related to their
internship experience or applied research project.
5. Students will demonstrate an understanding of
ethical issues in public administration.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________