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Terrorism General: A Developing Thread 1Sep Typologies: Revolutionary Anarchist
NSDFRand
FloridaRegistered User regular
FloridaRegistered User regular
There was some interest in a general terrorism thread from the Nice thread. I will write this up section by section as I can over the next week or so, as I'm still in class all day, and a few nights, during the week. The first sections I will cover are II, III, and IV. I will also likely add more sections as they come to me and I read back through my collected papers. I will lightly summarize I. until I can come back to it and go more in depth into each wave. This is written primarily from the US counter terrorism perspective, and as I have experienced, perspectives on the "most dangerous" terrorist groups and periods will differ significantly depending on where a given person lives (someone from Latin America would likely find New Left and related groups as the "worst" wave and groups due to their brutality and continued operational relevance, compared to someone from the US who may perceive the newest wave as the "worst").
HERE is a link to a folder full of sources. I haven't sat down and organized it yet, but most cover different topics on terrorism.
The FBI defines terrorism as:
There are many definitions, and some disagreement, which has thus far prevented a concrete definition being adopted by the UN, over defining terrorism when conducted by a state or against an occupying force. The key takeaway from the FBI definition however should be that Terrorism, to be defined as such, must include violence with a political aim and must include targeting of non combatant civilians. I would add "indiscriminate violence" and "symbolic over instrumental targeting" to this definition, though symbolic and instrumental targets may, and do, overlap.
The addition of "social objectives" in the FBI definition is also important, as terrorism can include indiscriminate violence conducted by one portion of a given population against another for social reasons (religion, ethnicity etc.). An example of this kind of "social terrorism" would be the Ku Klux Klan.
Terror acts do not necessarily have political or social aims attached to attacks, and this is a key difference. A terror act would include a school or workplace shooting, a spree killing, a mass killing etc. where the motivations are more personal to the actor.
Rapaport defines the beginning of the "fourth wave" as being centered on three key events: the fall of the secular Shah government in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the advent of a new century on the Islamic calendar in 1979. Islamic groups, however, are not solely the focus of this wave, though from a US perspective they are prominent.
Included by Rapaport in this wave are groups of many faiths, Buddhist, Jewish, non Abrahamic cults, and a group that is personally interesting: Aum Shinrikyo.
This wave is seemingly characterized by more nihilistic actors and significantly more brutal acts. This could be due to the less concrete political objectives of many current groups, and the prevalence of millenarian nature of the beliefs and goals of many current groups. They aren't all necessarily fighting for concrete political change as their predecessors in the New Left Wave, like the PLO, Red Army Faction/Baader Meinhof Gang, Red Brigades, or the IRA, but rather from there perspective there is a coming, significant societal shift and by doing away with the current order they may usher in the "new order". With some of the more prominent groups, such as DAESH/The Islamic State, this eschatological motive influences their desire for certain territories and their messaging/optics.
DRAFT
DRAFT
In order to further understand terrorism as a general topic, and specific terrorist groups and terrorists and their potential motivations, we must create a typology that can serve to better organize differing goals and motivations. While the motivations and/or goals of some groups within this typology (specifically repressive and religious) may seem, at face value, not inherently political, they can be products of a desire for social control as per the FBI definition. This social control can itself have an underlying political influence, such as resistance to political change, a power struggle due to demographics between majority (usually the perpetrator) and minority (usually the target) populations, or as a response to either actual or perceived attempts at social control.
Revolutionary terrorism is characterized by the desire of an actor to effect significant change or complete abolition of a given government. This desire for destruction of the "current order" can manifest in three generally different goals: Anarchist, Egalitarian, and Pluralist.
The goal of Anarchist Revolutionary terrorism is the destruction of the state. What makes this category of revolutionary terrorism separate from the proceeding two is that the end goal is the destruction of the state without the stated goal of establishing a "new order". This is most prevalent in the "Anarchist wave" in Rapoport's Four Waves Model, where the goal is simply the elimination of the state, characteristic of groups in the late 19th and early 20th century. This "wave" would span the globe, from Russia to the United States.
The ideology behind Anarchism is that the state exists through coercion, the threat of violence, and that with the elimination of the state (and the accompanying law and taxation) humanity would live cooperatively. The motivation for action, however, had an origin in the Industrial Revolution, ensuing poverty and political weakness of those in poverty, and state reaffirmation of power through force. The "campaign" of anarchist individuals and groups would spread across Europe, and result even in the assassination of a US President (William McKinley) by a proclaimed anarchist (Leon Czolgosz) and bombing campaign targeting politicians, journalists, and prominent business personalities.
The more contemporary examples of this category would include groups like the Red Army Faction, or Baader Meinhoff Gang. While a holding Socialist or Communist leaning ideology, the Baader Meinhoff Gang strove to destroy the capitalist system which it saw as oppressive, categorizing the German government as fascist, and fight American imperialism without necessarily a capability or intent to replace that system with a state as the Soviet revolution had replaced the Czarist government of Russia.
DRAFT
DRAFT
DRAFT
The popular conception of who becomes a terrorist (a position I've encountered in other places online, and surprisingly, IRL in an academic setting) is one who is uneducated and of low socioeconomic station. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, many individuals involved in the most prominent attacks from 1997 to 2003 have been fairly well educated and/or come from middle class or higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Engineers are heavily represented among individual terrorists with more than a high school education (I had a better source which went into more depth, but I can't find it now).
For a non Islamic millenarian example, we have Aum Shinrikyo (cached version of the site). Many members of this movement were highly educated professionals, who attended leading Japanese universities.
The grooming and radicalization process for cults is very similar to that for terrorist groups. The goal of the recruiter is to assess the target, and identify an angle that will allow them to "turn" their target (personal tragedy, ideological motivation etc.). This can also involve grooming, similar in nature to the process found in cult organizations. A Course in the Art of Recruiting, authored under the psuedonym Abu Amru Al Qa'idy, is a legacy recruiting document created for use by Al Qaeda members, outlines this process, and reads like a standard HUMINT source recruiting document.
(Will return with citations, reading through sources again)
There are a number of significant indicators of future radicalization of potential terrorist actors. Chief among these is proximity to already radicalized individuals. The connections to already radicalized individuals can include peers, friends, and family members.
This proximity to radicalized individuals is part of the social cohesion function terrorist groups serve. Part of this social cohesion factor also influences the life span of groups beyond their initial political goals (whether success is achieved, or goals become irrelevant).
Terrorism, and terrorist groups, not only serve to advance political ideologies through indiscriminately targeted violence, but also serve a social cohesion function for the individuals of the group. This social cohesion can be seen as a potential explanation for the extended "shelf life" of terrorist groups.
This is most observable in some of the groups which were founded or, in the case of the IRA as an example, formed their modern incarnation during the "New Left Wave" in Rapaport's typology. An example of this continued existence is the Basque separatist group Eta or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), which has remained cohesive and active (to some extent) as recently as March 2016. While Eta declared an end to their armed campaign almost five years ago, they did not disband.
Not only can groups stay cohesive due to socialization, but they can also serve as an alternative to non violent social movements. This alternative can form in the case that other political alternatives, such as participation in the electorate, are perceived as ineffective for addressing the grievances of a population. Terrorist groups can then position themselves as the vanguard of the interests of that population, whether ethnic (Tamil Tigers, Eta), religious (IRA, IS), or political (RAF/Baader Meinhoff Gang, Red Brigades). In the context of repressive terrorism, the interests of a majority population may also seemingly be represented by a group in the face of political and/or social change (Ku Klux Klan). There, of course, can and will be situations where these interests overlap and one group may represent (at least from their perspective) multiple interests of the same "client" population.
One explanation for the use of terrorism (or political violence) by such populations is Relative Deprivation. Relative Deprivation is defined as the experience of feeling deprived of something that one believes they are entitled to. In the context of terrorism I've had it defined for me as the difference between expectations and outcomes. The experience of Relative Deprivation can take the form of lack of political power compared to other ethnicities or religious groups, the feeling of loss of social standing to other populations, or even the feeling of deprivation of individual standing.
TBC (writing between classes)
HERE is a link to a folder full of sources. I haven't sat down and organized it yet, but most cover different topics on terrorism.
I. Terrorism Defined
A. Definition(s)
B. Terrorism v Terror Act
C. Rapaport's Four Waves of Terrorism
i. Anarchist Wave
ii. Anticolonialist Wave
iii. New Left Wave
iv. Religious Wave
a. Legacy of Sayyid Qutb
1. Al Qaeda
2. Islamic State
D. Typology of Terrorism
i. Revolutionary
a. Anarchist
b. Egalitarian
c. Pluralist
ii. Subrevolutionary
iii. Repressive
iv. International
v. Separatist and Ethno-Nationalist
vi. Religious
II. Who becomes a terrorist?
A. Misconceptions of Demographics
B. Recruitment, Radicalization, and Self Radicalization
III. Terrorism as a Social Outlet
A. Social Movement and Cohesion
B. Relative Deprivation as Explanation
IV. "Lone Wolf" Terrorism
A. The Digital Caliphate Model
B. Crystallization
V. Terrorist Group Organization
A. "Networks, Netwar, and Information Age Terrorism"
VI. Psychological Perspectives/Explanations of Terrorism
VII. Cyber Terrorism
A. Differentiating Cyber Terrorism and Cyber Crime
VIII. State Response to Terrorism
A. Policy Response
i. Effectiveness v Optics
B. Military v Police Response
i. Treating Terrorism as a Law Enforcement Issue
a. Intelligence Infrastructure
b. Considerations
1. Due Process
2. Equal Protection of Law
3. Profiling (when is it effective, and when is it not)
ii. Treating Terrorism as a Military Issue
A. Definition(s)
B. Terrorism v Terror Act
C. Rapaport's Four Waves of Terrorism
i. Anarchist Wave
ii. Anticolonialist Wave
iii. New Left Wave
iv. Religious Wave
a. Legacy of Sayyid Qutb
1. Al Qaeda
2. Islamic State
D. Typology of Terrorism
i. Revolutionary
a. Anarchist
b. Egalitarian
c. Pluralist
ii. Subrevolutionary
iii. Repressive
iv. International
v. Separatist and Ethno-Nationalist
vi. Religious
II. Who becomes a terrorist?
A. Misconceptions of Demographics
B. Recruitment, Radicalization, and Self Radicalization
III. Terrorism as a Social Outlet
A. Social Movement and Cohesion
B. Relative Deprivation as Explanation
IV. "Lone Wolf" Terrorism
A. The Digital Caliphate Model
B. Crystallization
V. Terrorist Group Organization
A. "Networks, Netwar, and Information Age Terrorism"
VI. Psychological Perspectives/Explanations of Terrorism
VII. Cyber Terrorism
A. Differentiating Cyber Terrorism and Cyber Crime
VIII. State Response to Terrorism
A. Policy Response
i. Effectiveness v Optics
B. Military v Police Response
i. Treating Terrorism as a Law Enforcement Issue
a. Intelligence Infrastructure
b. Considerations
1. Due Process
2. Equal Protection of Law
3. Profiling (when is it effective, and when is it not)
ii. Treating Terrorism as a Military Issue
I. Terrorism Defined
A. Definition(s)
It is very important to establish a definition of terrorism that is both accurate, and of operational significance (not too vague as to encompass any kind of violence).The FBI defines terrorism as:
“the unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.”
There are many definitions, and some disagreement, which has thus far prevented a concrete definition being adopted by the UN, over defining terrorism when conducted by a state or against an occupying force. The key takeaway from the FBI definition however should be that Terrorism, to be defined as such, must include violence with a political aim and must include targeting of non combatant civilians. I would add "indiscriminate violence" and "symbolic over instrumental targeting" to this definition, though symbolic and instrumental targets may, and do, overlap.
The addition of "social objectives" in the FBI definition is also important, as terrorism can include indiscriminate violence conducted by one portion of a given population against another for social reasons (religion, ethnicity etc.). An example of this kind of "social terrorism" would be the Ku Klux Klan.
B. Terrorism v Terror Act
The previous definition is key in differentiating Terrorism from Terror Acts. There are also some parallels between Terrorism and Terror Acts when you begin to discuss motivations of actors, radicalization or self radicalization, indiscriminate violence, and symbolic targeting over instrumental targeting.Terror acts do not necessarily have political or social aims attached to attacks, and this is a key difference. A terror act would include a school or workplace shooting, a spree killing, a mass killing etc. where the motivations are more personal to the actor.
C. Rapoport's Four Waves Model
i. Anarchist Wave (placeholder)
ii. Anticolonialist Wave (placeholder)
iii. New Left Wave (placeholder)
iv. Religious Wave
Rapaport defines the beginning of the "fourth wave" as being centered on three key events: the fall of the secular Shah government in 1979 during the Iranian Revolution, the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the advent of a new century on the Islamic calendar in 1979. Islamic groups, however, are not solely the focus of this wave, though from a US perspective they are prominent.
Included by Rapaport in this wave are groups of many faiths, Buddhist, Jewish, non Abrahamic cults, and a group that is personally interesting: Aum Shinrikyo.
This wave is seemingly characterized by more nihilistic actors and significantly more brutal acts. This could be due to the less concrete political objectives of many current groups, and the prevalence of millenarian nature of the beliefs and goals of many current groups. They aren't all necessarily fighting for concrete political change as their predecessors in the New Left Wave, like the PLO, Red Army Faction/Baader Meinhof Gang, Red Brigades, or the IRA, but rather from there perspective there is a coming, significant societal shift and by doing away with the current order they may usher in the "new order". With some of the more prominent groups, such as DAESH/The Islamic State, this eschatological motive influences their desire for certain territories and their messaging/optics.
a. Sayyid Qutb's Legacy
PLACEHOLDER
D. Typology of Terrorism
DRAFT DRAFT
DRAFT
In order to further understand terrorism as a general topic, and specific terrorist groups and terrorists and their potential motivations, we must create a typology that can serve to better organize differing goals and motivations. While the motivations and/or goals of some groups within this typology (specifically repressive and religious) may seem, at face value, not inherently political, they can be products of a desire for social control as per the FBI definition. This social control can itself have an underlying political influence, such as resistance to political change, a power struggle due to demographics between majority (usually the perpetrator) and minority (usually the target) populations, or as a response to either actual or perceived attempts at social control.
i. Revolutionary
Revolutionary terrorism is characterized by the desire of an actor to effect significant change or complete abolition of a given government. This desire for destruction of the "current order" can manifest in three generally different goals: Anarchist, Egalitarian, and Pluralist.
The goal of Anarchist Revolutionary terrorism is the destruction of the state. What makes this category of revolutionary terrorism separate from the proceeding two is that the end goal is the destruction of the state without the stated goal of establishing a "new order". This is most prevalent in the "Anarchist wave" in Rapoport's Four Waves Model, where the goal is simply the elimination of the state, characteristic of groups in the late 19th and early 20th century. This "wave" would span the globe, from Russia to the United States.
The ideology behind Anarchism is that the state exists through coercion, the threat of violence, and that with the elimination of the state (and the accompanying law and taxation) humanity would live cooperatively. The motivation for action, however, had an origin in the Industrial Revolution, ensuing poverty and political weakness of those in poverty, and state reaffirmation of power through force. The "campaign" of anarchist individuals and groups would spread across Europe, and result even in the assassination of a US President (William McKinley) by a proclaimed anarchist (Leon Czolgosz) and bombing campaign targeting politicians, journalists, and prominent business personalities.
The more contemporary examples of this category would include groups like the Red Army Faction, or Baader Meinhoff Gang. While a holding Socialist or Communist leaning ideology, the Baader Meinhoff Gang strove to destroy the capitalist system which it saw as oppressive, categorizing the German government as fascist, and fight American imperialism without necessarily a capability or intent to replace that system with a state as the Soviet revolution had replaced the Czarist government of Russia.
DRAFT
DRAFT
DRAFT
II. Who becomes a Terrorist?
A. Misconceptions of Demographics
The popular conception of who becomes a terrorist (a position I've encountered in other places online, and surprisingly, IRL in an academic setting) is one who is uneducated and of low socioeconomic station. However, this is not necessarily true. In fact, many individuals involved in the most prominent attacks from 1997 to 2003 have been fairly well educated and/or come from middle class or higher socioeconomic backgrounds. Engineers are heavily represented among individual terrorists with more than a high school education (I had a better source which went into more depth, but I can't find it now).
For a non Islamic millenarian example, we have Aum Shinrikyo (cached version of the site). Many members of this movement were highly educated professionals, who attended leading Japanese universities.
After the subway attack and as evidence of Aum’s violent transformation (which included a retreat from engagement with the wider world, a descent into paranoia, and a conviction among Aum devotees that the world at large was evil and needed to be purified by violence) became widespread, a key question that dominated discussions in Japan was why did its disciples become so committed to a belief system that was deeply paranoid and violent? The puzzle appeared greater because Aum devotees included many (including doctors, lawyers and other professionals) who had attended Japan’s leading universities and who, in the minds of society at large, ought to have been able to avoid becoming obsessed with such ways of thinking. The involvement of the highly educated indicated that education need not be a barrier to the development of extremist thoughts; indeed it suggested that those with high levels of education might even be more able to develop critical attitudes to the societies they lived in. Aum’s devotees clearly, as later research indicated, were successful in society but also found that success – grounded in modern capitalist careerism and materialism – to be unrewarding and shallow, leading them to seek spiritual alternatives. In a real sense, their rejection of society was linked to their ability to perceive the problems with it – and that would have been a potentially very painful issue for Japanese society to confront.
The grooming and radicalization process for cults is very similar to that for terrorist groups. The goal of the recruiter is to assess the target, and identify an angle that will allow them to "turn" their target (personal tragedy, ideological motivation etc.). This can also involve grooming, similar in nature to the process found in cult organizations. A Course in the Art of Recruiting, authored under the psuedonym Abu Amru Al Qa'idy, is a legacy recruiting document created for use by Al Qaeda members, outlines this process, and reads like a standard HUMINT source recruiting document.
B. Recruitment, Radicalization, and Self Radicalization
(Will return with citations, reading through sources again)
There are a number of significant indicators of future radicalization of potential terrorist actors. Chief among these is proximity to already radicalized individuals. The connections to already radicalized individuals can include peers, friends, and family members.
This proximity to radicalized individuals is part of the social cohesion function terrorist groups serve. Part of this social cohesion factor also influences the life span of groups beyond their initial political goals (whether success is achieved, or goals become irrelevant).
III. Terrorism as a Social Outlet
A. Terrorism Role as Social Movement and Cohesion
Terrorism, and terrorist groups, not only serve to advance political ideologies through indiscriminately targeted violence, but also serve a social cohesion function for the individuals of the group. This social cohesion can be seen as a potential explanation for the extended "shelf life" of terrorist groups.
This is most observable in some of the groups which were founded or, in the case of the IRA as an example, formed their modern incarnation during the "New Left Wave" in Rapaport's typology. An example of this continued existence is the Basque separatist group Eta or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), which has remained cohesive and active (to some extent) as recently as March 2016. While Eta declared an end to their armed campaign almost five years ago, they did not disband.
Not only can groups stay cohesive due to socialization, but they can also serve as an alternative to non violent social movements. This alternative can form in the case that other political alternatives, such as participation in the electorate, are perceived as ineffective for addressing the grievances of a population. Terrorist groups can then position themselves as the vanguard of the interests of that population, whether ethnic (Tamil Tigers, Eta), religious (IRA, IS), or political (RAF/Baader Meinhoff Gang, Red Brigades). In the context of repressive terrorism, the interests of a majority population may also seemingly be represented by a group in the face of political and/or social change (Ku Klux Klan). There, of course, can and will be situations where these interests overlap and one group may represent (at least from their perspective) multiple interests of the same "client" population.
B. Relative Deprivation
One explanation for the use of terrorism (or political violence) by such populations is Relative Deprivation. Relative Deprivation is defined as the experience of feeling deprived of something that one believes they are entitled to. In the context of terrorism I've had it defined for me as the difference between expectations and outcomes. The experience of Relative Deprivation can take the form of lack of political power compared to other ethnicities or religious groups, the feeling of loss of social standing to other populations, or even the feeling of deprivation of individual standing.
TBC (writing between classes)
NSDFRand on
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Technically, if the state is openly doing it in a time of war, it's legal and not terrorism. Practically, agree or disagree with the action, the motivations are different enough that it is probably unhelpful to consider it terrorism. Terrorism also tends to imply a certain asymmetry between the forces.
I sort of wonder about some of the African genocides. Though, those are probably more war crime than terrorism for similar reasons.
But I mean an Isis attack and Hiroshima are pretty similar in motivations (the unconditional surrender of an enemy) and Isis certainly thinks they are a state at war and the US acts like this is a war rather than a police action
Adding asymmetry to the definition also seems to create more problems since we would still want to call it terrorism if Isis attacked say the Vatican or another Microstate where the balance of power was the other way.
How much data is available on number and scale terrorist attacks over time? Am I right in thinking that this era has more deaths from terrorism than most (any?) others? At least in the US, EU, and Middle East/North Africa?
Is anyone else surprised at how rarely Russia suffers mass casualty terrorist attacks (at least from what I'm aware of)? You'd think Moscow would be up there with Paris as a target.
That's the thing; if you remove the word "lawfully" from NSDFRand's post the FBI definition, many state actions qualify. Which makes the qualifier sort of a cop out in the state's favor, in my opinion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the epitomes of terrorism; the point was literally to terrorize the Japanese into surrender.
I think seperating this discussion from refugees in general is also important. Of all the attacks in the EU only 1 person is an asylum seeker and a terrorist. (The Ansbach attack, which was done by a Syrian who was denied refugee status, on what seems like Dublin grounds, which means he was registered in another safe country (Bulgaria) and can only apply for refugee status there.
All others were people born in Europe, with Belgian, French or German passports.
How exactly do you separate the culture from the religion? Each feeds into the other - the culture influences which parts of the sacred texts are emphasised and the religion amplifies and redirects moral concerns and justifies the social mores that prevail.
Which is obviously not to equate either with the other.
That said the idea that Islamist terrorists are mostly poor and poorly educated isn't born out by the data. Such preoccupations cut across all class lines to different degrees.
I'm guessing a lot of house arrests will be revoked shortly.
But ISIS isn't a nation-state
That's the main differentiating factor
Why not? They claim to be. They operate like one within their conquered territories.
...
How?
Almost none of these people are refugees or asylum seekers. They are almost almost all nationals who have become radicalized. The Munich shooting is more like a USA style school shooting (That happened at a youthcentric part of a shopping mall, but still) than anything to do with ISIS. It was an Iranian (So 99% chance of being a Shia, who are heretics in the eyes of ISIS), born in Germany.
The Paris, Nice and Brussels attacks are all planned serious terrorists attacks but have nothing to do with refugees or Merkel, apart from one of the Paris bombers fighting in Syria and using the refugee path to cross into the Eurozone. But Merkel had nothing to do with that either. At no point has she held any control on the Border between Greece and Turkey. And Turkey was explicitly letting these refugees cross, in order to lessen their own problems. When it started it happened secretly at night, at the peak people were queuing up for boats in broad daylight as the Turkish police looked on.
If you have to blame anyone, it is all the nations in between Syria and Germany/Sweden (and to a lesser extent Belgium/Netherlands/France), that chose to interpret the Dublin accord in the extremely dodgy way of "If we don't do any checks on these people passing through our nation, we can pretend they were never here so we don't have to treat them as refugees"). That was the active policy of Greece, Italy, Austria, Hungary and others. Germany was the first nation to actually try to do some sort of checks.
Even then, with all that, only 3 people used that route out of a host of suspects. Only one of them actually claimed to be a refugee, the other 2 were born in France and born in Belgium and were only using the crowd because they saw it as the most convenient way. And the French one got caught, tried and convicted. And only then committed the terrorist act.
I read an interesting piece on the psychology of suicide attackers, written by a Dutch professor in the field, and it focused on how the best identifier is not known mental health problems (Just a Lone Wolf!), strict adherence to religion or ideals, or socioeconomic status, but people that feel deeply humiliated by their society. If you want to recruit a suicide bomber, you try to seek out such people, and tell them that such an attack is the path towards redemption, to becoming famous, a martyr for a cause. Sadly the article is behind a paywall and in Dutch so I can't link it, but it was an interesting read for sure, and seems pretty plausible.
The Munich shooter was excessively bullied and had become obsessed with revenge. The Paris attackers were petty criminals who had been in jail, became suspects of further crimes and fled to Syria, the Nice attacker was a divorced man with few social contacts who spent his life drinking and gambling before he turned to Islam. The same professor warns that you cannot apply such a template to every attack or seek evidence in circumstantial evidence, but I felt it was pretty plausible.
Quick google search on "Is ISIS a Nation State":
And that Würzburg thing... "17 years old" lol. It do has become pretty standard practice to just toss your identification papers and claim you're a teenager as a reasonably free ticket into Europe though, more valid in some outlets than others.
Refugees are traumatized victims, who are we to question their background and put our prejudices before their story? I mean,
But yeah the Wurzburg case is an edge case in this.
While the perpetrator was a refugee he appeared to mostly act in vengeance of his friend killed earlier in the week, and while he appeared indoctrinated by Isis by his letter and video this was by no means a planned attack instructed by a terrorist organisation. There is 0 evidence he had any contact with the organisation. It was a brutal lashing out, not a calculated move.
Lying about your age is sometimes done by refugees. But analysing someones age is not overly easy. Saying he looks old is laughable. In any case it has little influence on someones rights as a refugee, though it can influence family reunion rights. He spoke Pashtu which is spoken in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, apparently with some tendencies towards Pakistani words, but he also asked for family reunion with Afghani people, something that requires DNA tests in almost all cases.
Refugees are absolutely not believed on their words, and in fact language analysis as well as questions about where you grew up are very common tools. I read these reports for my job and they very often have lines of questioning like "Which city did you grow up in. What was the name of the school. Which streets would you take to get to school" and a hundred variants on these, just because they are fairly ingrained if you lived in a place and pretty easy to check, but pretty hard to study for. All asylum requests also ask for either paperwork or an explanation why it doesn't exist, flight route analysis is common to see if it's credible.
This is getting offtopic, and the line of discussion is banned anyhow, so I'll drop it. But it's still valid points about the setting to remember the next time some 'senseless' tragedy occurs, the "ehrmegehrd how could this possibly happen???" lines trotted out.
When my first post on the matter was that in all the most devastating attacks, refugees have nothing to do with it. Of all the attacks linked to refugees, the only people who are dead are the actual refugees, though there are still people in hospital. The death toll of nationals attacking their own country men in the last 12 months is roughly 300. They are on a different order.
Then you derail further by posting about underage refugees, for no apparent reason. And it's hard for me to google translate a swedish radioshow just as it bulgarian.
As I posted in that previous thread, there is also a huge difference between people who seek asylum and those who get it.
If you wish you can ask for asylum today, and start a procedure. It probably wouldn't last long, but you could. People sometimes think that showing up without paperwork improves their chances, and that lying can get you through the system. This doesn't happen much. And you can't resist, just after saying "I'll drop it" to place one more sweeping generalising attack.
You are yet to actually add any kind of meaningful contribution to the topic though......
There's kind of an elephant in the room in that ultimately, we hate Middle Eastern/"Islamic" culture and want to destroy it just as much as many people there hate ours. It isn't just the racist idiots, it's also the people who take an educated, open-minded look at their situation and conclude that it's terrible and needs to change. Not that all of us want an open culture war, of course. We'd prefer to use education, global communication, and media influence to subtly infiltrate their culture and cripple it from the bottom up.
We're convinced that we're right, and we're convinced that we're right about being right. But there are people who aren't convinced, and it isn't really reasonable to expect them to sit back and watch as everything that they've ever believed in dies. I'm not sure what to do about them, other than trying to destroy their culture even harder so they end up being too isolated to be a threat.
This implies that we already destroyed the culture of our ancestors.
true.
but, we haven't actually got to the ideal progressive cultural hegemony yet. We're still working on it. And we, and they, can keep a lot of the nice interesting stuff like food and art even after we get the last bits of fundamentalism washed out and free ourselves from the all the stuff the boomers cling to.
we still have work to do.
Hiroshima as a target was not entirely devoid of military and military industrial value.
Though I do think there is room for argument here, as a state is capable of sponsoring foreign terrorism and committing terrorism against it's own citizens or citizens of another state. Usually with the goal of status quo maintenance or social control (similar to the goals of groups like the KKK). There is significant disagreement among scholars and political leaders (Bruce Hoffman doesn't seem to be a fan of the label "state terrorism") on whether terrorism can only be committed by non state actors, or if states are capable of committing terrorism. The focus of this disagreement seems to center on lack of recognition in international law of "state terrorism", where other laws and treaties cover unlawful acts committed during war time by states, and the argument that states have a monopoly on violence and the concept of "state terrorism" threatens the legitimacy of that. Of course states have a vested interest in this argument.
I personally look at some of the actions the FBI took under Hoover as, at the very least, bordering on "state terrorism". Especially with regards to MLK Jr and the more heinous targeting of US citizens during COINTELPRO.
I imagine FBI developed that definition without consideration for "state terrorism" and from a law enforcement perspective. Which might explain why "unlawful" is explicitly stated.
You're right about one thing however, non-citizens and immigrants seeking asylum being very small factors in terrorist acts committed within the EU (although neither is 4 out of 25, in the last six years, a statistical insignificance). I do believe the relative ease with which you can enter the EU can/will become an issue in the near future though, since compared to the US the EU has quite porous security and ID checks at the borders. Enterprising individuals having good chances entering and, with the kind of parallel societies having sprung up in most population centres in these last 15-20 years, ample opportunity to act outside the law, as well as below the radar of various security agencies, are they intent on it.
Perpetrators from 'vulnerable and persecuted' immigrant groups will serve terrorist groups well, as well as far-right organizations in Europe. Unfortunately I'd say we're bound for this scenario, sooner or (but don't count on it) later.
Near the end of the conflict, before the Sinhalese majority government finished off the Tamils there were allegations of deliberate targeting of non combatants of Tamil ethnicity, and other more heinous acts such as rape and murder of captured female combatants (and a non combatant journalist of Tamil ethnicity).
The LTTE isn't entirely free from the label of "terrorism" either. And they fit within the framework of TTPs, goals, and motivations of a terrorist group.
I think this may be an example of two entities using "terrorism" (or, to fit international law, "war crimes" for the Sri Lankan government) to meet their own goals: the Sinhalese majority state with social control and/or status quo maintenance, and the LTTE under revolutionary/separatist. The LTTE attempted to distance themselves from the label "separatist", and frame the conflict as restoring sovereignty to a historical Tamil state.
I downloaded a couple of pdfs from the UN working group and the "panel of experts on accountability in Sri Lanka", and once I read though them I will upload them to the link in the OP and give my take on them.
For now here are a couple of articles about it.
I also think the way it is defined tends to have a very self serving bias. I don't know if there is a better indication of this than the shooting at Fort Hood. If Hasan was sitting in a trailer in TX flying a drone and firing a missile at a convoy of Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan he is a soldier engaging in war, instead he shoots a bunch of US soldiers traveling in the US and he is a 'terrorist'.
I think it's important. It's easy to have a series of difficult to trace crimes where the punishment for any particular instance would be relatively negligible, but they add up to a pattern of far greater harassment. There's a massive difference between setting a warehouse on fire and setting a church on fire, but if intent to terrorize is excluded I don't see any way they'd be different legally.
Christ, the fucking innocent Refugees that are going to be caught in the Neo-Nazi, Facist type of response that's going to fucking stew over, due to these fucking cowardly attacks.
And to the the many innocents lost, German, and Naturalized civilians, whom i'm sure while the call for peace will ensue, the right ring rhetoric is going to be galvanized to hell I fear.
The worst part, the architects of the Second Iraq WAR, are going to be vindicated in Europe because of this shit.
Hate crimes legislation is... difficult. The problem is that there is a strong argument to be made that it impinges freedom of conscience (which I believe SCOTUS has held to be under the 1st of necessity but I can't recall a case). You are, at a fundamental level, arguing that someone deserves worse punishment because he had thoughts society does not like. But that said, hate crimes legislation was originally introduced as a kludge to begin with iirc - a workaround for racist state courts.
Defining terrorism as a crime seems to be much the same as hate crimes. You're arguing that particular motives warrant harsher punishment. I don't quite want to say terrorism laws and hate crime laws are exactly the same thing, but they overlap heavily in function. And unlike hate crimes laws, there isn't any justification of workaround to deal with - nobody is letting people off for this, and you'd get them convicted just as surely on murder or conspiracy charges. The difference is that you wouldn't get to punish them as severely (well, excluding murder, which is already capital depending on jurisdiction, but...). I think there's a strong argument that the only reason there's an actual "terrorism" crime is to throw the book at the guy harder, and that's a terrible justification.
From a practical standpoint, I don't think there's anything you can write anti-terrorism laws for that isn't already illegal.
Another argument that has to be addressed is that by charging them with terrorism you're giving them what they want (whereas normal criminal charges diminishes the act in the public eye). I'm not sure how to debate this, but it's a point to consider.
Finally, there's the issue of courts giving greater leeway to the state when they can say "but terrorism!" (which they also have a habit of when the state parades other horribles in front of them. That's how you got the fucking Korematsu decision after all). This is somewhat insidious, because unfortunately worry is a great way to take irrational actions... it generally demands vigilance and courage, but... I think that terrorism as a crime feeds into this and with the prior points warrants getting rid of the damn laws (not that anyone would, they'd get destroyed in their next election... which brings me to a more general concern on crimes, that they're a ratchet... but I digress)
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Which isn't exactly encouraging...
some good graphs on terrorism here: https://ourworldindata.org/terrorism/
and here: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-12
interesting fact that I think should be more well known but I can't source at the moment: worldwide islamic terror kills vastly more people than any other source, but in western countries, separatists/nationalists types take the lead.
I seriously doubt the latter. From the Europeans I am listening to, they are still extremely pissed about the war and blame it for their current situation. No matter how bad things get, I doubt you'll get a chorus praising the leaders who started the whole clusterfuck.
Just to add, non tabloid German newspapers and the police are only mentioning a single aerosol can and only a deflagration not an actual explosion. Other stuff in the suitcase were clothes. So far no clue to a connection to the migration center.
Premeditation is a bit different from motive.
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