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Terrorism - Counterinsurgency
The Demonization of Arabs and Muslims in the United States
![[Image from screenshot of below video.]](/content_images/3/sm_lamisdeek.png "[Image from screenshot of below video.]")
In the below episode of Akhir Kalam [The Last Word], an Egyptian show featured on On TV, human rights attorney Lamis Deek discusses currentnamics dy of demonization, surveillience, and criminalization of Arab and Muslim communities in the United States.
Keep Reading »Another Take on 'The Malian Crisis as Seen from Algeria'
"The Malian crisis seen from Algeria," by Thomas Serres (19 April 2012) presents an analysis of Algerian perceptions of the upheaval in northern Mali. This analysis is insufficient in explaining Algerian behavior in response to the rebellion in northern Mali or to the March coup d’etat and misidentifies Algerian priorities in relation to the "Sahelo-Saharan Space" and Algeria’s relationships with extra-regional actors in the west. Additionally, its underlying assumptions about Algerian foreign policy in the Sahel and the west do not match with observations of Algerian behavior in the past or at the present time. Serres’s ...
Keep Reading »Khalil al-Wazir: Paving the Way of Armed Struggle
![[Abu Jihad coordinates with fedayeen (Palestinian guerrilla fighters) during the siege of Beirut in 1982. Image from Ahram Archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_Khalil_Bdeir_Main_pic_1.jpg "[Abu Jihad coordinates with fedayeen (Palestinian guerrilla fighters) during the siege of Beirut in 1982. Image from Ahram Archive.]")
It took Israeli intelligence over two decades and many assassination attempts before they managed to hunt down the PLO’s military mastermind Khalil al-Wazir. On the 24th anniversary of his death, Al-Akhbar recounts his story. When Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) began his endeavor in the early 1950s, Israeli intelligence had no idea he existed. At the time, he was the twentysomething leader of the Palestinian al-Haq Brigade in Gaza. His family had been displaced from Ramleh in 1948. Back then, the security establishment in Israel did not believe that Palestinians were capable of organizing a resistance movement. Operations by the fedayeen (Palestinian guerrilla ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? Junaid Rana (JR): My book was borne out of ethnographic research I completed on the role of labor migration in the global economy. I started with some basic questions: why do people become labor migrants, how does labor migration become transnational and global, what are the conditions that lead to labor migration, and how are labor migrants treated abroad? Each of these questions led to complex answers driven by fieldwork I conducted with Pakistanis before and after 11 September 2001, in Lahore, Dubai, and New ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: Lawyering and Targeted Killing
![[Models of the UCAV's Elbit Hermes 900, 450 and 180 at the Paris Air Show 2009. Image by Tangopaso]](/content_images/3/sm_hermesajbnfdadbf.jpg "[Models of the UCAV's Elbit Hermes 900, 450 and 180 at the Paris Air Show 2009. Image by Tangopaso]")
[This is the third part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] The practice now commonly termed “targeted killing” was, before the turn of the twenty-first century, referred to as “assassination.” Both terms refer to the lethal use of force in a surprise attack against an enemy or foe, whether by a sniper, a surgical-precision drone strike, or a magnetic bomb placed on a vehicle. There are, however, important ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: A Meditation on Reciprocity and Self-Defense in Relation to Targeted Killing
![[A Predator drone in US Air Force base during the summer of 2011. Image by US Air Force]](/content_images/3/sm_640px-Predator_Drone_021.jpg "[A Predator drone in US Air Force base during the summer of 2011. Image by US Air Force]")
[This is the second part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] There is an emergent Israeli/American controversy on the lawfulness of targeted killing. Although the policy has not yet ripened into a national debate, in the United States at least it is beginning. Lisa Hajjar’s assessment of the “legalization” of targeted killing is compelling in a number of respects, including suggesting the analogy to the ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: The Secret Bureaucracy of Targeted Killing
![[Soldier from 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, conducts a night raid on 18 October 2007 in Baghdad. Image by Spc. Jeffery Sandstrum]](/content_images/3/sm_nightraidafd.jpg "[Soldier from 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, conducts a night raid on 18 October 2007 in Baghdad. Image by Spc. Jeffery Sandstrum]")
[This is the fifth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] Three US citizens were killed in Yemen in 2011 by drone strikes carried out under the auspices of the government’s targeted killing program. They were neither charged with any crime nor brought before a judge. The killings were carried out by the executive branch acting alone, with no oversight from the courts and no public presentation of evidence. ...
Keep Reading »What Is Cultural Terrorism?
![[Stop Cultural Terrorism in Lebanon. Image from the group's Facebook page.]](/content_images/3/sm_Screenshot2012-02-11at5.26.57PM.png "[Stop Cultural Terrorism in Lebanon. Image from the group's Facebook page.]")
As a well disciplined anthropologist I have learned to be weary of the word “culture.” In fact, it is difficult for me to write the word without using scare quotes. But after Lebanese boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) activists scored an important victory last month, the word has been everywhere in my online universe. Following BDS actions that highlighted Lara Fabian's recent Israeli Independence Day (which marks the Palestinian naqba) performance, Fabian cancelled her planned concert at the Casino du Liban. In response to her cancellation, an online group called Stop Cultural Terrorism in Lebanon (SCTL) went into overdrive. Members of the group were convinced ...
Keep Reading »Lawfare and Targeted Killing: Developments in the Israeli and US Contexts
![[Training photo of Israeli special forces; Image from Zvi Koren/Polaris Images.]](/content_images/3/sm_UndercoverUnit_ZivKoren_PolarisImages.jpg "[Training photo of Israeli special forces; Image from Zvi Koren/Polaris Images.]")
Over the last decade, the term lawfare, an amalgamation of “law” and “warfare,” has been adopted and popularized among people engaged in monitoring, judging and debating the legality of a state’s wartime behavior vis-à-vis enemies on and off the battlefield. Today, the dominant theme in debates about lawfare turns on the contested legitimacy of litigation to challenge military and security policies and practices; and efforts to sue or prosecute state agents, government-funded contractors, and corporations who are alleged to have engaged in or abetted serious violations of law in the conduct of war. While some people (myself included) attach a positive connotation to the ...
Keep Reading »"Operational Accidents": On the Turkish State and Kurdish Deaths
![[Funeral of killed Kurdish citizens of Turkey. Image from i.radikal.com]](/content_images/3/sm_fft5_mf885702.jpg "[Funeral of killed Kurdish citizens of Turkey. Image from i.radikal.com]")
Reading the press release issued by the Turkish Armed Forces on Thursday, 29 December 2011, it is impossible to get the sense that during the previous night, its warplanes struck and killed thirty-five citizens of Turkey, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. When referring to the young Kurdish villagers it killed, the Turkish Armed Forces merely noted that it received drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The army, the press release stated, “judged it necessary” to launch an air-strike at “the target” between the hours of “21:37 and 22:24” precisely. The Turkish Armed Forces ...
Keep Reading »Which is Scarier? Terrorists or Superheroes?
If you've caught the news lately, you will have noticed a terrorist plot was recently exposed in Greater Cleveland. Most of the community that is giving these five misguided self-proclaimed anarchists a second thought is wondering what on earth was motivating them and whether we should be worried about more homegrown discontent. If you ask the pundits who spend full time hours worrying about terrorism, though, the big threat to Cleveland isn't bomb plots. It's superheroes. The ...
Keep Reading »The Malian Crisis Seen from Algeria
The military blitz by rebels in Northern Mali is far from inconsequential for its Algerian neighbor. The hypothetical secession of the Azawad (in the northern half of Mali) is not viewed favorably in Algeria, to say the least. In addition to the threat of instability across the country's southern border, the Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad (MNLA) made the pragmatic choice to form a short-lived alliance with jihadists from Ansaar Eddine and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) during ...
Keep Reading »Personalizing Civil Liberties Abuses - The Case of Dr. Al-Arian
On Saturday, I was at the University of Chicago for an event to discuss humanitarian intervention and empire. One of my fellow speakers was Tariq Ramadan, the highly regarded Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford. He’s one of the world’s most accomplished scholars in his field. For almost six years — from 2004 until 2010 — Ramadan was banned from entering the U.S. In 2004, he had accepted a tenured position at Notre Dame University, but was forced to resign it when, nine days before he was ...
Keep Reading »The Draft Anti-Terrorism Law in Saudi Arabia: Legalizing the Abrogation of Civil Liberties
In July 2011, Amnesty International published a leaked copy of the draft Saudi Arabian Penal Law for Terrorism Crimes and Financing of Terrorism. This Anti-Terror Law, which grants the Ministry of Interior unprecedented levels of authority and discretion in intelligence gathering, policing, and detention, has already been reviewed by the Security Committee of the Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura) and the Committee of Experts in the Ministers’ Council, and awaits final approval for its enactment. ...
Keep Reading »Jadaliyya Roundtable on Targeted Killing: Introduction
[This is the first part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings. Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar.] On 5 March 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech in which he laid out the US position on law and national security. The second half of his speech was devoted to the targeted killing program, which has escalated dramatically during the Obama ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: The Need for Judicial Review of US Targeted Killing Practices
[This is the fourth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] In a speech at Yale Law School in February 2012, the US Defense Department’s General Counsel, Jeh Johnson, outlined several legal principles that form the basis for the Obama ...
Keep Reading »Roundtable on Targeted Killing: Lawfare and Targeted Killing Revisited--A Response
[This is the sixth part of a six-part series associated with a Jadaliyya roundtable discussing targeted killings . Participants include Richard Falk, Nathan Freed Wessler, Pardiss Kabriaei, Leonard Small, and Lisa Hajjar. Click here for the introduction to the roundtable.] The speech that Attorney General Eric Holder delivered on 5 March 2012 in which he outlined the Obama administration’s position on the legality of the targeted killing program ...
Keep Reading »Murdoch's Homeland
Terrorists have backstories, and American politicians play dirty in the “war on terror”. These revelations are what propel the Showtime’s hit series, Homeland, seemingly setting it apart from other pop culture representations of post-9/11 America. “How do you tell a thriller in the post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib, and post-Guantanamo world?” asks Howard Gordon, one of the show’s creators. “Homeland will challenge people’s notions of what a hero and a villain are. The show lives in that complexity and lives in ...
Keep Reading »"Have a Nice Day, Buddy:" What The Actions of a Few US Marines Say About Us All
Golden, like a shower, said one of the US marines as he urinated, along with three of his fellow officers, on three dead Afghans. Over the last forty-eight hours this grizzly spectacle has resuscitated the horrific images of US soldiers’ torturing and sexually humiliating men from Abu Ghraib prison to Guantanamo Bay. Then as now, brown bodies are the raw material through and upon which US soldiers realize their darkest fantasies and their deepest secrets. The pornography that popularized the “golden ...
Keep Reading »Letter from Istanbul Bakirkoy Women's Prison
[An October 2011 report on the so-called “KCK operations,” carried out in Turkey by Prime Minister Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party for the past two years, noted that the Erdoğan government has been using the judiciary, the police, and the media to penalize all civic activism in support of rights demanded by Kurdish citizens in Turkey. Since 2009, as many as 7748 people have been taken under custody on the alleged grounds that they are associated with the KCK—an organization ...
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