Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Transcript: Osama bin Laden’s latest video, September 7, 2007

“The holocaust of the Jews was carried out by your brethren in the middle of Europe, but had it been closer to our countries, most of the Jews would have been saved by taking refuge with us. And my proof for that is in what your brothers, the Spanish, did when they set up the horrible courts of the Inquisition to try Muslims and Jews, when the Jews only found safe shelter by taking refuge in our countries. And that is why the Jewish community in Morocco today is one of the largest communities in the world. They are alive with us and we have not incinerated them, but we are a people who don’t sleep under oppression and reject humiliation and disgrace, and we take revenge on the people of tyranny and aggression, and the blood of the Muslims will not be spilled with impunity, and the morrow is nigh for he who awaits.

No overt threats in new bin Laden video - Yahoo News, September 7, 2007

WASHINGTON - A new video of Osama bin Laden makes no overt threats against the United States and appears to have been made as recently as this summer, a government official said Friday.

BBC, Pakistan prostitutes beheaded, September 7, 2007

Suspected Islamic militants in north-western Pakistan have beheaded two women they accused of being prostitutes, police say.

The bodies of the two women were found by villagers on the outskirts of the city of Bannu.

A note found on the bodies accused the women of “acts of obscenity”, a term that usually refers to prostitution.

The region is a known base for militants who want to impose their interpretation of Islamic law.

Bush’s new friends: The Sunnis | Salon, September 5, 2007

Steven Simon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the sheiks are telling U.S. leaders what they think they want to hear. “They are not going to go to the U.S. commanders and say, Lets strike a deal because I want you to strengthen me so that when the time comes, I can go after the Shiites,” Simon said dryly. “For tactical reasons, you tell your benefactor whatever you need to tell your benefactor.”

By strengthening Sunni groups the United States could be helping to set the stage for a full-blown, if more balanced sectarian conflict, rather than a slaughter of the Sunnis by the Shiites if conflict spreads.

The Myth of AQI - Andrew Tilghma, Washington Monthl, October 2007

Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. “It was kind of a running joke in our office,” he recalls. “We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda.”

To describe AQI’s presence, intelligence experts cite a spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such “a big window” exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, indicates that “[those experts] really don’t have a very good perception of what is going on.”

It’s notable that military intelligence reports have opted to cite a figure at the very top of that range. But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement, if you consider some of the government’s own statistics.

The north Caucasus: politics or war? | openDemocracy, September 7, 2007

It cannot be stated often enough that the Chechens are not Afghans. They are a small mountain people with a history of resistance to the Russian state, but also one of pragmatic accommodation with it. Most of them speak Russian much better than they do Chechen and almost all have relatives working in the rest of Russia. While they are Muslim, they are Sufis practicing a form of local Islam that is all but incomprehensible to Arab incomers. For years Chechens have dismissed these foreign interlopers with curses when they were told to stop visiting their local shrines or to start veiling their women.

Over the last decade the Russian state has given these ordinary Chechens nothing but contempt and violence, yet they remain the key to restoring some kind of stability to the north Caucasus. The trouble is that the Kremlin will have to make two difficult changes if it wants even to begin to enlist their support.