I wish it really were all like Four Lions

In the proud tradition of violent Islamic extremism being mostly counterproductive, a suicide bomber who seems to have been supporting Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (which has claimed responsibility against a rival group who had been taking over territory from TTP. They are referred to as "the Salarzai tribe," (though my reading in more specialized places suggests that going straight to tribal classifications is often not the best course, cough, understatement).

The counterproductive part is that while the bomber (gender apparently still in contention, no ID that I've seen anywhere) took out several of the intended targets, the chosen place for this event was...a World Food Programme event. The words coming to my mind go something like "I mean, honestly" but that doesn't seem right. It just seems, again, counterproductive--there was no other way to do this? Of course intimidation is a major part of coercing the local populace in any insurgency effort, but this sort of thing is not too far off from what lost al-Qaeda a lot of support elsewhere.

At any rate, 43 people were killed in this incident, and:

On Friday, a force of 150 militants in Mohmand Agency (just south of Bajaur), had targeted 5 checkpoints of the Frontier Corps, a Pakistani government paramilitary unit, killing 11 troops in the Safi and Baizai districts. Some 24 of the rebels were killed in a riposte by government sources. This attack also came in revenge for the Taliban having been expelled [by the Salarzai] from those areas of Mohmand Agency.

On Saturday, Pakistani troops using helicopter gunships came back after the insurgents, allegedly killing 40 of them in Baizai and Lakro villages.

This leaves the headline at "Over 80 Dead."

Juan Cole has a pretty good roundup of what all went down.

If only Four Lions were all there was to it.


[Note: embedded video is even worse now than it was before. Once upon a time I could adjust the size in the code, but not now, noooo. Link is all you get. Sorry.]

They're coming to get you

I just. I can't. This is really quite amazing. Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) has convinced Huckabee--who had her on his Fox News show to talk about this--that Hizballah operatives are being funneled from Iran through to Venezuela, up to Mexico, and then infiltrating the U.S. via the Mexican border in collaboration with drug cartels. In order to plant car bombs, or something.

I swear, I am not making this up:

As [TPM has] reported, Myrick believes Hezbollah "is partnering with Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. borderlands and may be planning 'Israel-like car bombings of Mexican/USA border personnel or National Guard units.'" Part of her evidence of this is that "well trained officials are beginning to notice the tattoos of gang members in prisons are being written in Farsi" along the Southwest border.

She's since expanded on this theory, claiming that because Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are "very good friends," Iranian members of Hezbollah "go from of course Iran into Venezuela, stay up to two years, learn the language, get false documents, and then transit up through Mexico to come across our border."

Huckabee had Myrick on his show on Sunday, and was quite alarmed at this "pretty explosive information," because "we're not hearing this - not from the Department of Homeland Security."

This is shatteringly stupid for a number of reasons. As many commenters at TPM pointed out, the drug cartels would have to be very, very dumb indeed to do anything like this, as it would certainly be very bad for business. Secondly, a Hizballah member with Farsi tattoos on would be an odd duck indeed, Iranian influence or no.

Thirdly, the slender thread of truth here--that Hizballah once was active in Latin America--is being rather abused. Hizballah has not been active in a major way in this hemisphere for over a decade, as far as I know; and when they were active in Latin America, the attacks took place in Argentina.

Now, if you Google around, you can find what look like some fairly reliable sources backing this claim up (MSNBC, for one). But no serious academic source I've encountered has ever mentioned the ongoing existence of a widespread fundraising operation by Hizballah in Latin America (which at least seems a slightly more plausible version of a similar claim), and the DHS has officially stated that it has no "credible information on terrorist groups operating along the Southwest Border."

Finally, the only way this could ever possibly work would be if a) all brown people looked alike and b) no brown people of any kind had any interest in stability/the absence of car bombs in the U.S.; otherwise the terrorists would be immediately distinguishable from the drug dealers, and/or the loyal American citizens of Hispanic or Arab descent might choose to enlighten their chalky overlords neighbors.

I assume I don't need to elucidate what's wrong with those premises.

We all have our burdens in life

I must say that all of this yelling about Miranda rights and the fact that it's now being referred to as "the Miranda debate" consistently leaves me very confused. This on top of years of people making jokes about how I should read them their rights upon being told my name.

Little did my parents know what they were burdening me with.

Duck

I wonder what Mike Vanderboegh's opinions are on terrorism. I bet he'd say he's not a fan. And yet:

Mike Vanderboegh of Pinson, Ala., former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia, put out a call on Friday for modern “Sons of Liberty” to break the windows of Democratic Party offices nationwide in opposition to health care reform. Since then, vandals have struck several offices, including the Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters in Wichita.

[...] “We can break their windows,” he said. “Break them NOW. And if we do a proper job, if we break the windows of hundreds, thousands, of Democrat party headquarters across this country, we might just wake up enough of them to make defending ourselves at the muzzle of a rifle unnecessary.”Vanderboegh told The Kansas City Star that the action was meant to “get everyone’s attention.”

“What I was trying to get across was that people do not understand how on the edge of civil conflict this country is,” he said.

Al-takfir (التكفير)

Ta-Nehisi Coates was away in Chicago for a while, so he had some friends guest blog in his absence. Adam Serwer was one, and his post, "American Takfiris," is as good a piece as any blogger could hope for from a guest.

The theological justification for al Qaeda's wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, "The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge," that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.

The legal memos justifying torture aren't very different in terms of reasoning--it's clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.

It's worth reading the rest. I don't subscribe to the more or less optimistic conclusion Serwer comes to, but I'm very inherently cynical about this sort of thing. It would certainly be nice if he were proved right.

Israel-Hizballah conflict on the horizon?

"Everybody and their brother thinks that 2010 will witness a second round between Hezbollah and Israel," says Qifa Nabki; like him, I hope that's not the case and don't see it as inevitable (at least for the next few months, barring a game-changing event--which, in today's Middle East, is not too unlikely). The post is worth reading--it features a few different takes on what might be the catalyst for a conflict between Israel and Hizballah and how Hizballah and/or Israel (depending on the scenario) might try to spin it.

The short version of my opinion: you never know, it doesn't take much for these two, but it would be stupid on Israel's part. The long version is below.

Nabki's reason for thinking conflict doesn't have to happen too too soon is that the current situation is mutually beneficial: "Israel gets a quiet northern front and Hezbollah gets to re-group, re-arm, and weigh their options while certain relevant regional powers weigh theirs." (Cough cough Iran.) I think there's one more reason: the current Israeli leadership doesn't have any hawk cred to prove or warlike, manly flexing to do. They're still pretty fresh off Operation Cast Lead and they're not due for elections anytime soon.

In addition, Operation Cast Lead didn't exactly go well for Israel in global public or diplomatic opinion--I mean, who outside of Israel was happy about that? Anyone? Not even the U.S. was on board (okay, maybe Charles Krauthammer)--and another war, even one provoked by Hizballah, would not help Israel in that department. The Goldstone Report is still being investigated by both sides, and the U.N. will probably send it to the Hague--a reasonably ominous development for Israel and its ongoing investigation, since according to The Majlis "Richard Goldstone recommended the UN send the report to the International Criminal Court only if both sides aren't willing to conduct legitimate investigations." Human rights groups are still on the scent. Israel doesn't need to give them new material.

I think the half-life on Goldstone will have a lot to do with whether we see a full-scale conflict in Southern Lebanon, even if Hizballah provokes--Israel has a choice to escalate, and right now there are few upsides and lots of downsides to taking it. (Indeed, that choice is a large part of what won Ehud Olmert such opprobrium in the aftermath of 2006's July War, and has won him the privilege of being referred to as "stupid," "idiotic," etc. forever after whenever that war is discussed.)

Of course, that hasn't always stopped them before. Nabki says, "Israeli strategists are talking about the Dahiyah doctrine and the concept of punishment, not dissimilar to Ops Accountability and Grapes of Wrath in 1993 and 1996. Next time, they say, we won’t bother try to defeat Hezbollah, instead we’ll smash Lebanon to demonstrate to the Lebanese the folly of tolerating them."

On the one hand, not trying to crush Hizballah is probably wise. It didn't go well last time and will just add fuel to a number of fires. On the other, punishing the people for a group's politics and actions hasn't been working too well in Gaza, nor, as Larison keeps hammering away (here too--there are too many good ones), does it generally in the case of sanctions (against Burma, Iran, Gaza, ad nauseam) or in principle.

What's more, while I have no doubt in Israel's ability to lay waste to Lebanon no matter what Hizballah does (unless Nasrallah is hiding a large air force very well), they still have to deal with the risk of Hizballah's managing to make them look bad tactically. Israel doesn't just have to win to avoid that; they have to embarrass Hizballah. Otherwise, in the context of asymmetrical expectations, the specter of 2006 combined with an impressive or even decent showing from Hizballah will not help the nyah nyah narrative one bit.

Finally, I fail to see how this plan works out well for Israel in the strategic long run. Even if it goes brilliantly, they'll then border an impoverished, destabilized Lebanon full of a lot of very mad, very suddenly poor people for whom employment with Hizballah could start looking very good (especially if Iran is smart and sends a bunch of cash Hizballah's way to pay recruits--Hizballah was offering $100-$200 a week back in the mid-eighties, thanks to their Shi'i parent). Hizballah, in this scenario (only the one-sentence version, to be fair), will be left more or less intact, and it will be ready, willing, and able to make Israel's northern border very unhappy (especially given their stated intention, per Nabki, to go on the offensive "next time" rather than fighting "defensively and reactively" as they did in 2006). (Though Syria has a role to play here, too, which I think could go either way in terms of giving the green light.) The Israeli government will probably have a reasonably doubtful chunk of the electorate on its hands, especially if the government is seen to have started or disproportionately escalated the conflict that created this situation.

This particular plan of attack would really, really not help Israel on the human rights front, either--Hizballah is their best target from the point of view of avoiding civilians and hitting an internationally unpopular enemy, despite recent softening from Britain and international observers toward the group in response to their new platform.

All of this said, I wouldn't be shocked if it happened: Hizballah is maybe due to remind everyone of its war-waging chops (it's coming up on four years now)--they did just redeploy their rockets deeper into Lebanon, raising the stakes of a conflict--and Israel has been known to get in deeper than necessary when the IDF feels it has something to prove (cf. Israeli-Lebanese war, 1982-2000), which it probably does with regard to Hizballah. On that front, it's at least promising that Ariel Sharon isn't Defense Minister, even if Netanyahu isn't a huge improvement on Menachem Begin.

Plus, well, in this arena, it doesn't take much. But if there's a good option for Israel that includes conflict, I don't see it.

Colbert Speaks

Regarding new TSA policies, that is.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Ideal or No Deal
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

It's Idiot Day and this time someone told me

Reproducing John Cole's post in its entirety:

And 100% of Popes are Catholic

by John Cole

Here is the MSM’s go-to guy on terrorism, Rep. Peter King (R, NY), on Fox News:

The fact is while the overwhelming majority of Muslims are outstanding people, on the other hand 100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims, and that is our main enemy today.

We are to the point that merely exposing yourself to right-wingers makes you dumber.

This on the same day that I read this discussion of environmental economics from Ezra Klein featuring a lovely quotation from Larry Summers:

THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.

Some quick hits

The situation for Afghani women isn't getting any better. There's not much new in the report, which could be fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, I guess; just a tragic sameness. I've posted about this topic before, and I wrote a paper that was about half on this subject. I don't really want to go over it again right now--it's too sad.

I'm getting to this way late, but Switzerland banned minarets a couple of weeks ago. In protest, a Swiss businessman built a minaret on top of his business in protest. Awesome.

Morand said he viewed the ban was all the more "scandalous" given that Switzerland actively encourages Arabs to "visit the country and to spend their money here."

The minaret, which has been in place since Tuesday, has "generated a lot of interest," he said, adding that he will wait and see before deciding if further action was needed to push his point.

I vote further action.

Andrew Sullivan flagged a video a while ago where a suicide bomber was interviewed on "All Things Pakistan." He titled the post "Interviewing Evil," which I object to--I think largely because I don't believe in evil. I'm not interested in this interview for purposes of staring into the underbelly of moral absolutes; I want to know what the suicide bomber thinks, that's all. Here's the video:



As always, there's more, but I'm too tired right now.

What I'm doing with myself

Today (yesterday) I had to write and send in a 6-page (double-spaced) statement about what my B.A. thesis will be. I was pretty happy with it and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. So without further ado:


I intend to examine Hamas and Hizballah from a perspective much different from that prevailing in political and journalistic discussions of these organizations. It is my view that the existing literature on political organizations does not account for the particular forms of power and violent tactics practiced by Hamas and Hizbollah. While these two are probably not the only organizations to employ such practices, my intention is to begin to build a framework for understanding their particular roles, capabilities, and structures as political organizations that could be applied more broadly to other cases.

I will show that Hamas and Hizballah are an unusual type of political organization, which I will term parallel or alternative government. Both Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories have been in the process of building a strong, democratic state for decades, but both have been hamstrung by a lack of agreement among their respective populations on questions that are fundamental to the statebuilding project. They have consequently been unable to build the robust institutions that would begin to constitute a state. In Lebanon, the question of a quota system in government institutions—whether one should exist, and whether the existing one is correct, just, and so on—is still contested; the current system has weakened the government to the point of paralysis, while the disagreement still existing over this structure has sapped the government’s authority and legitimacy. In the Palestinian Territories, the population is riven over the proper methods of “resistance” to Israel; the existing Palestinian institutions were created in negotiations with Israel and as such are inherently illegitimate to those Palestinians who reject negotiation and rather favor violent resistance. In both cases, the government structure represents a “side” of this fundamental question and so is inherently politicized, illegitimate to a significant segment of its population. Rather than serving as the location of policy, institutions themselves are policy. Finally, structural factors in the military, economic, and international political spheres have served to further weaken these regimes’ abilities to project power, deliver services, and command loyalty.

This weakness and the political divisions at its root have created a political space in both polities for a second, parallel government to spring up with the support of those factions which are in opposition to the “side” represented by the existing political structure. These parallel governments perform many functions of a governing institution: service delivery, security, national defense (as perceived by their supporters), and political representation. They are parallel rather than rival in that they do not seek simply to control the institutions of the existing regime, nor do they attempt to create a separate state; rather, they build their own institutions to further their preferred outcomes while remaining committed to a united Lebanon or a free Palestine. Rather than attempting to secure the reforms and policy shifts they want within a system that is too weak and dysfunctional to produce the desired outcomes, these constituencies have chosen simply to build the state they want.

Hamas’ and Hizballah’s use of violence has been one of the primary factors agitating the international discourse about them. I will examine the particular ways in which these groups deploy violence—when they use it, when they do not, against whom and employing what techniques—in order to show that their violent methods also distinguish them from most other political organizations. They are neither states, nor insurgents, nor guerrillas, nor decentralized terrorist networks; and they do not use violence in the same way as any of these. I will attempt to link their unique employment of violence to their status as parallel governments and to elucidate the relationship, if any, between their particular forms of violence and their particular forms of political power.

Both Hamas and Hizballah have used a variety of violent tactics, borrowing methods from a variety of forms of political organization. Hamas, in particular, has taken on statelike functions in terms of controlling violence. The group has done more to secure Gaza than the PA had ever accomplished: it integrated its police forces into the Gazan security forces (Crisis Group 2006: 9), secured the interior of Gaza against clan warfare for the first time, and made a credible attempt at controlling the inflow of weapons through the tunnels to Egypt (Crisis Group 8) as well as their display and sale within Gaza (Crisis Group 2003: 10). The Qassam Brigades were converted into an external security force and set to patrolling Gaza’s borders—a strong statement in the context of their longstanding domination by Israeli forces. Hamas also did its best to coordinate and control military resistance to Israel for the first time (Crisis Group 2003: 8), though this effort was not fully successful.

At the same time, Hamas has continued to use violence against Israel in ways that do not reflect the behavior of a state; rather than deploying an army, invading, or attacking Israel’s military capabilities, Hamas has continued to fire rockets into Israel, a tactic widely described as terrorist since the rockets largely impact civilian life. However, rather than mounting spectacular exhibitions of violence connected to high civilian deathcounts in connection with specific demands, Hamas has more often used its rockets as a reminder of its continued presence and resistance: the rockets are often aimed to avoid harming anyone, and do not have the sophisticated technology that would allow them to target specific Israeli buildings, persons, or resources. Hamas’s rocket fire is curiously ambivalent: it constitutes neither full-on war nor straightforward terrorism. Rather, it is a legitimacy-seeking exercise: Hamas is simultaneously able to demonstrate its commitment to the cause by being seen to be doing something and to declare its existence, defiance, and relevance to Israel and to the international community. Through rocket fire, Hamas carries out its mission of resistance and refuses to allow itself—and by extension Palestine—to be forgotten.

Hizballah, meanwhile, emerged from “a loose coalition” of Shi‘a groups who were radicalized by U.S. and Israeli interference in the Lebanese civil war (GlobalSecurity.orgb 2008), and originally most resembled a militia, drawing its soldiers from ordinary people in villages as needed. Its first major accomplishment was Israel’s ignominious withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the group employed classic insurgency tactics in this struggle. Hizballah sought to secure the IDF’s complete withdrawal from Lebanon, including the Security Zone, and made its point with missiles, attacks, and suicide bombings. Their efforts lasted up through the 1990s, when the civil war officially ended (Morris 2001: 558), and have continued sporadically since. Suicide bombing was not a common tactic at the time, and it proved to be a crucial innovation on Hizbollah’s part in terms of making its name as well has having a clear impact on American and Israeli forces in Lebanon.

But Hizballah, too, has taken on statelike military functions. The Lebanese Army disintegrated more than once under internal and external pressures during the civil war, and Hizballah’s military wing was far more effective, disciplined, and cohesive. Its military no longer consists of The group has, essentially, taken on the task of national defense and border security against Israel, without regard for the policies of the official Lebanese government but with the approval of its constituency (primarily, but not exclusively, Shi’a in the south of Lebanon). Hizballah de facto rules several areas of Lebanon, including the northeast and, of course, the South, and one is more likely to find a Hizballah member or supporter than a government policeman in these areas.

These are a few of the variety of tactics Hamas and Hizballah have adopted as part of their repertoire of violence. While their individual practices or campaigns can be described using existing terms—insurgency, state-within-a-state, terrorism—the combination of them all within single, coherent organizations has so far gone unnamed in political science literature, just as the political function of these groups remains undescribed. What remains to be seen is whether there is a connection between the groups’ idiosyncratic uses of violence and their anomalous political status. How do Hamas and Hizballah view themselves as acting? What effect do these views have on Hamas’s and Hizballah’s parallel statebuilding projects, and on their countries’ statebuilding projects more generally?

Both Hamas and Hizballah not only practice violence but have constructed strong ideological links between their exercise of violence and their political identity. Hizballah has declared, “our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier” (Hizballah 1988: 1). Hamas’s mission is connected to violence at the most basic level: it exists for the purpose of violent resistance to Israel. In parallel with Hizballah, it argues that “It is necessary to instill the spirit of Jihad in the heart of the nation so that they would confront [sic] the enemies and join the ranks of the fighters” (Covenant: Article 15). Furthermore, both have asserted their independence from their supposed governments through maintaining their violent practices and capabilities against these regimes’ wishes. Alone of all the militias that sprang up in the civil war, Hizballah has refused the state’s injunction to disarm; it has also resisted political pressure to integrate its military wing into the Lebanese national army (Jamail 2006). Prior to its electoral victory in Gaza, Hamas maintained the operations of its military forces (Boudreaux 2007; Crisis Group 2008: 6) despite the orders of the Palestinian Authority and later took over government of Gaza through a violent coup.

These facts are suggestive of several links. The first, and simplest, is between the groups’ violent tactics and their political constituency: after all, their basic mission is violent resistance to Israeli dominance and to Western interference. Second, they seem to understand themselves and their operations—including nonviolent undertakings—in terms of war, as shown by their rhetoric. Even a worker in a Hizballah-run hospital is in some sense a soldier, just as a Hamas member who guards the tunnels through which necessary goods are smuggled from Egypt correctly understands himself to be committing an act of war against Israel. The role of religion and religious history in this understanding is important and bears further exploration, not only in terms of teachings regarding jihad but also because another aspect in which the groups are metaphorically fighting is for particular practices of Islamic life in their respective territories.

Third, violence and control of violence has been used by both groups in constructing their parallel governments, often directly in opposition to the regimes that ostensibly rule (or ruled) Gaza and Lebanon. One of the basic definitions of a state is a political entity that monopolizes violence within a bounded territory; by exercising and controlling violence, Hamas and Hizballah have concretely removed territory from the states in which they live and constructed separate zones of domination—yet they have managed to do so without seceding or attempting to partition the territory in question. Through a delicate balance of both internally and externally directed violence, service delivery, construction of parallel institutions, and participation in existing political institutions, Hamas and Hizballah have successfully built their parallel states.

Gaza is cracking open

This past Saturday, Hamas and a group of Al-Qaeda loyalists clashed violently in Gaza.

What I find most interesting about this is the following: that both sides were from the same clan. This means that within one notable family we had essentially a splinter group of Salafi Al Qaeda supporters, despite the obvious benefits of sticking with Hamas when one lives in Gaza. Why is this? True Salafi religious fervor? (To be honest, I doubt it.) Perhaps the notion that Al Qaeda could get more done against the Israelis? A power struggle within the family? It couldn't have been a simple attempt to overthrow Hamas--or if it was, it was one of the stupidest things I think I've ever heard.

Hamas has managed more than any other recent governing authority in Gaza to break down clan power as well as dominate and control the other violent organizations present in Gaza. Clearly, they won this one, so nothing has changed too much--but why did this happen in the first place? What did "the sheikh" think he had to gain by declaring loyalty to Al Qaeda?

This Daniel Levy piece from 2007 has a lot to say on the subject. A sample:

There is a battle, both ideological and physical, taking place within the world of political Islam. Hamas have been targetted and criticized by Al-Qaeda. Most notably AQ number two, Ayman al-Zawahri, went after Hamas after it agreed to participate in Palestinian parliamentary elections and again after the Unity Government deal with Fatah. On both occassions Hamas were rejected as apostates and their actions as kufr - an abomination to Islam, they had sold out to the 'Zionists and the Great Satan'. All this does not automatically make Hamas a partner, but it certainly begs the question and demands a serious exploration of the alternatives. AQ is a franchise and any Gazan mutation if it gains a foothold, will threaten Palestinian and Israeli society alike.

He was commenting on the excellent piece "Jihadist Groups Fill a Palestinian Power Vacuum", which suggests that Hamas's control over Gaza has been weakening for some time. What is so ironic about the whole thing is that the deteriorating situation in Gaza is a result of the unrelenting embargo. The embargo was intended to weaken Hamas, but weakening Hamas is not actually, and never was, the most important goal. Without Hamas, no one rules Gaza, and no one can stop these groups. And yet even last year the American administration failed to understand this:

Bush administration officials say they are increasingly concerned that Hamas and even more radical groups may be hijacking the Palestinian movement. [...]

Mr. Taha’s fears are remarkable because of who he is: not a secular campaigner or a Fatah apparatchik, but a senior member of Hamas. In the violent underground of the militias, men like him have become unlikely moderates, calling for calm and seeking to build bonds with the other militias and the government.

Except that their status as moderates is neither unlikely nor surprising: it is obvious and to be expected. They have always had an interest in governing--and, of course, in maintaining their power--and so equilibrium, calm, and a controlled monopoly of violence has always been in their interest. Why this is so impossible for the West to understand is beyond me at times.

So it seems that the sheikh threw his lot in with the radical trend. Unfortunately for him, he misjudged the situation; Hamas still controls Gaza enough to take out someone like him, particularly when he makes rash statements and particularly when he is a member of a Hamas-loyal family, to which he was essentially a traitor.

A last note: the comments on the Ynet article are unpleasant. Should you click through, you've been warned.

Hamas does not understand PR

Or at least, not outside of Gaza. MotherJones has a photo essay about a summer camp for Palestinian youth that Hamas has been running. The blurb reads:

A kinder, more moderate Hamas? That's the image Gaza's ruling militant group is hoping to sell, in any case. Having scaled back the rocket attacks on Southern Israel that prompted Israel to strike back last December and invade Gaza in a conflict that lasted three weeks, Hamas has refocused on public relations. "Armed resistance is still important and legitimate," Hamas leader Ayman Taha told the New York Times in July. "But we have a new emphasis on cultural resistance."

The new emphasis includes state support for films, television, art shows, and poetic works that portray Gaza residents struggling under Israeli policies. It also includes countless government-run summer camps....

Cool, right? But.

But what, you ask? Well, these pictures show lots of young, skinny, Palestinian boys lying in the dirt pretending to shoot wooden guns, doing sit-ups and other training-looking exercises, and perhaps worst of all, doing the iconic terrorist monkey bars:



Let's revisit that blurb now, shall we?

The new emphasis includes state support for films, television, art shows, and poetic works that portray Gaza residents struggling under Israeli policies. It also includes countless government-run summer camps, which Israel has criticized as ideological training grounds where kids learn how to use weapons.

Now, Israel would say that even if they were fingerpainting and planting trees all day, but that doesn't change the fact that when you look at these pictures you have to concede that Israel might have a point here.

Look, I'm not about to start going all Chicken Little about these camps. I don't think they are likely to do much one way or the other in terms of turning the next generation of Palestinian men into potential terrorists when you consider the larger context of being from Gaza and having had Israel and the U.S. & Co. basically directly ruin your entire life--and on top of that having nothing to do and no outlets. Whether or not a given young man in this situation went to a kind of iffy summer camp run by Hamas when he was twelve doesn't seem likely to be that big a deal when you consider that.

But if Hamas is trying to moderate its image (which impression, to be fair, I got from the MoJo blurb and not from anywhere else), this is probably not the best way to do it. At least not on the Internet.

Compassion

I will here reproduce Mark Blumenthal's post on the Holocaust Museum shooting in full. I can think of no better meditation.

This is Personal

By Mark Blumenthal

Regular readers will probably remember my that my father-in-law Frank Burstin, who passed away about a week before last fall's elections, was a survivor of the Auschwitz death camp. For that reason, as you may imagine, the news this afternoon about a shooting at Washington's Holocaust Museum hits pretty close to home for me and for my family.

But you don't know the half of it.

I have a special memory of Pop (as we knew him) from last summer. It was a few weeks before he received his cancer diagnosis, during what turned out to be his last visit to the Holocaust Museum. Because he lost his parents and all of his siblings to the Nazis, and because no grave site exists for any of his family, Pop made it a habit to visit the Museum at least once a year. It fulfilled for him the custom that many Jews practice of visiting the cemetery of loved ones once a year. I only got to accompany him on one of these visits, that one last year, along with my wife's nephew Jake.

I described him last year as "kind and optimistic soul," and he certainly was. But when he entered that museum, something changed. He was not unkind, but in that place, as I soon learned, he suffered no fools (nor anyone else).

We wandered into the museum, through the same doors and into the same foyer where shots rang out this afternoon. My wife had given us visitor passes that she receives as a member of the Museum. The lines were long, and it was not obvious which line we needed to stand in.

Pop was having none of it. He walked away from me and wandered up to the museum staffer standing at the head of the long line leading to the elevators that takes all visitors to the museum exhibits. I thought for a moment that Pop was going to ask directions. I was wrong.

He thrust out his arm in the direction of the staffer, displaying the number the Nazis tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz just a few inches from her face. Without making eye-contact and barely breaking stride, Pop kept walking. Understandably, the staffer barely blinked. She didn't make a move to stop him.

Pop kept walking right into the elevator that had just filled with the visitors that had been waiting in that long line. And even though the elevator was already quite crowded, he walked right in. Jake and I had to run past the guard to catch up. "Pop, Pop," I said, feeling a little embarrassed, hoping to talk him into at least waiting for the next elevator.

The staffer inside the elevator must have heard me, because he smiled, held the door and said with smile, "We have room for Pop. You guys too. C'mon in."

And up we went. I have been to the Holocaust Museum many times, but none as memorable as that visit.

About a month ago, in a conscious effort to carry on her father's tradition and to commemorate his birthday, my wife Helen paid her own solo visit to the Museum. She arrived at the end of a busy work day, in a rush, just a few minutes before closing time. Unfortunately, given the late hour, they had run out of the candles usually provided in the Hall of Remembrance for visitors to light and leave in the niches of the outer walls.

Already feeling emotional -- her dad had passed away just six months before -- she broke down sobbing.

A staffer nearby immediately came to her assistance, asking if she needed help. She explained, and the gentleman asked her to wait. He soon returned with a candle, explaining with a conspiratorial wink that he kept his own special supply for such emergencies.

The guards and staff at the Holocaust Museum have a special duty. The do more than just protect and operate one of Washington's many heavily trafficked museums. On a daily basis, they help open the doors to the elderly survivors of the atrocities of World War II. As my stories attest, they do it with a remarkable degree of kindness and professionalism.

As far as I know, the Holocaust Museum personnel that we encountered were not armed guards, though it is possible they were. But when I heard about the shooting this afternoon, and more specifically that at least one of the victims is a security guard now apparently in critical condition, it struck very close to home.

This is personal.

As far as I am concerned, the staff members of the Holocaust Museum are part of our family and the Museum itself is hallowed ground, and we pray for the recovery of the wounded guard. "Never take your guard force and security people for granted," William Parsons, the museum's chief of staff said on television a few minutes ago. Our family never will.

May Stephen Tyrone Johns rest in peace. And may his family find some soon.

Oh, no.

Oh my god.

Dr. George R. Tiller’s clinic was one of the few in the country to provide abortions to women late in their pregnancies, and for decades, women had traveled there from all over the nation and from overseas. It was also the only remaining abortion clinic, even for first trimester abortions, in the Wichita region.

“The family of Dr. George Tiller announces that effective immediately, Women’s Health Care Services, Inc., will be permanently closed,” according to a statement issued on Tuesday morning by the family’s lawyers.

And, as if one needed more reasons to worry:

Even some abortion opponents, who had long devoted their efforts to closing down Dr. Tiller’s clinic, said they did not wish to see it happen under these circumstances. Last week, Troy Newman, the leader of Operation Rescue, had said that closing the clinic now would send a worrisome message. “Good God, do not close this abortion clinic for this reason,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Every kook in the world will get some notion.”

H/t Balloon Juice

Tiller links

George Tiller needs more than candlelight vigils

Why Clinic Violence is Obama's Problem

The Murder of Dr. Tiller, a Foreshadowing

Voices of Choice: Dr. Tiller

From the last, in Tiller's own words:

It is my fundamental philosophy that patients are emotionally, mentally, morally, spiritually and physically competent to struggle with complex health issues and come to decisions that are appropriate for them.

This should not be a radical idea.

Meditation 17

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."
--John Donne, Meditation 17


George Tiller is dead.

I am heartbroken, angry and sick at heart, all at once.I feel as though I've been punched in the stomach.

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5107 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

"It's a terrible loss. I'm just really sad about the whole thing," said a former employee of the clinic who asked not to be identified. "He was a great guy. I understand people were against a lot of what he did, but for those who he helped, they'll never forget the kind of person he was."

He went through a lot to help those people:

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993. Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

The clinic was bombed in June 1986, and was severely vandalized earlier this month. According to the Associated Press, his lawyer said wires to security cameras and outdoor lights were cut and that the vandals also cut through the roof and plugged the buildings' downspouts. Rain poured through the roof and caused thousands of dollars of damage in the clinic. Tiller reportedly asked the FBI to investigate the incident.

I read about him somewhere years ago and I remember being shocked that anyone would have done such things to such a man and deeply grateful for his service. His story stuck with me ever since. As soon as I read the headline I was hoping that name was ringing the wrong bell, but to my deep sadness, I was right.

(The epigram, I know, is cliche and overused, but it encapsulates the way I feel connected to him and to this.)

As Digby said,

If you think that women should have to endanger their lives in order to give birth to a fetus with no brain, then you probably think this man was a murderer. For the women who went to him, and for whom he put up with a horrifying amount of harrassment and violence before they finally managed to kill him, he was a Godsend.

May he rest in peace.

I don't think I can answer that

Via digby:

I hardly know what to say. What’s worse: A healthcare system where someone is so desperate, he’d blow up buildings to pay for his brother’s treatment, or homeland security that thinks nothing of setting people up so they can claim they caught some “terrorists”?

Defining terrorism

Nir Rosen in The Guardian:

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?

I don't agree a hundred percent with this, mostly in that I'm not as radical about it as he is. A few points:

1. I believe that there is a useful and meaningful place for the word "terrorism." The main difference between intimidation as practiced by states and their armies and intimidation as practiced by terrorists has to do with power relations and technology. When states do it, it is a military action implemented by a national power against an equivalent or lesser national power or population. It has conventional military technologies and huge resources. When terrorists do it, they are by definition less powerful in the arena of force than their object--that is, they can't invade the object of their terror and just make what they want to happen happen. Their primary tactic is to get what they want through intimidation, whereas a state army uses intimidation among a broader array of tools (subjugation, shaping government policy, trying to win hearts and minds among the population). In addition, terrorists cannot engage on some level of diplomatic equality the way two governments, particularly two governments of similar military strength, can. The terrorists are not a government; there is no reason for a more powerful state to negotiate with them until they can make themselves known and dangerous by posing a threat. Until then, they are only concerned foreign citizens and easily ignorable.

Properly used, "terrorism" is a name for a particular technology or form of implementation, subject to severe military and political asymmetry. This is why terrorism and insurgency--another term for a technology or form of political-military action--are so frequently correlated; they are subject to the same restrictions in terms of power, resources, and legitimacy as a political actor. The distinction between intimidation as practiced by states and intimidation as practiced by small, non-state actors is important and useful. The problem is that "terrorism", predictably, is a highly politicized word that has come to include a negative moral dimension, which means it is very useful for anyone involved in any conflict to describe their opponents as terrorists--which, as we have seen, everyone does. Israelis are terrorists according to Palestinians and vice versa. The U.S. is a terrorist nation according to, well, lots of people, and lots of people are terrorist organizations or nations according to the U.S. The fine line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" has been discussed many times before (more on that later).

2. Following on that, and provided that that politicized context is present, I absolutely agree with his assessment of how "terrorism" is defined in practice, which is as any use of force that is inconvenient to the more powerful actor. Since the more powerful actor typically has the sympathy of the media as well as greater control over it, not to mention comity of interests with other powerful actors (for example, the U.S. and E.U. lists of terrorist organizations look pretty similar), it generally gets to dictate these terms more easily. This is the valuable thing about this article--he lays this out incisively and convincingly.

3. The paragraph describing the attacking of civilians as a last, most desperate use of force by people or groups without options seems a little too morally pure, and in places too radical, to me. The fact is that powerful actors with lots of options do it too--this is part of why Rosen is so pissed at Israel. Plus, it is entirely possible to understand why Hamas does what it does, or why groups operating sometimes with Hamas's consent and sometimes not such as Islamic Jihad do what they do (bomb Israel), why it makes sense for them, and why it's even morally understandable (everybody understands frustration and revenge), without declaring it morally justified. This is the difference between compassion, and/or realism, and partisanship.

I find his claim that the Israeli government "uses civilians", by which he means settlers in this instance, a bit far-fetched. Are there elements in the government--or at least in Israeli politics--who still refuse a two-state solution and see the settlers as a means toward eventually eradicating Palestinian territory? Almost certainly. Is that state policy? No. The Israeli government has, in the past, agreed to massively curtail settling and relocate existing settlers, and has in fact done so--at fairly intense political cost--rather recently (was it 2006? Maybe 2005--my memory is not perfect). The radical elements among settlers can safely be said to have gone rogue from the state, and this has been seen when Israeli soldiers attempt to intervene in neighborhood Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. That the state has not yet publicly acknowledged and faced this problem does not make it state policy. The more general version of this claim, that powerful actors use civilians as props in conflicts, is certainly possible and historically documented--I just don't think it applies here.

4. The final paragraph, I think, points to another sloppy elision in the use of the word "terrorist". A terrorist individual or organization has a stated objective, which they attempt to achieve through the planned and organized use of spectacular, pyrotechnic, but small-scale violence (as distinct from military force) and coordinated threats. Most of his examples seem to be instances of very frustrated and, at that moment at least, reckless individuals attacking their oppressors. If it can be proved that these individuals acted at the behest and with the support of actual terrorist organizations; and/or, that they planned these attacks in advance and attempted to extract some kind of concession from their victims before or after the attacks, then they can be said to be terrorists. If these conditions are not present, they are not terrorists; they are violent, and they are quite arguably very amateurish and disorganized freedom fighters.

5. Coming back to the definition of "terrorism", it is important to point out that it is objectively very possible to be freedom fighters and terrorists at the same time--in fact, especially in modern times, it is likely. "Freedom fighter" describes the objective, and "terrorist" the method. Theoretically, one can fight for freedom conventionally, without employing terrorist or guerrilla tactics (I'm having a hard time distinguishing between those two, and I'm pretty sure in practical terms the distinction is entirely moral and subject to the power relations described by Rosen), but that would require a balance of power, popular support, and resources that is almost never present in terrorist/guerrilla situations. Anticolonial struggles could take this form, since it became people's militias against the state, as could conventional civil wars (see the American or Spanish examples), but these circumstances are largely obsolete. At this point, any oppressed group within any state is small enough and oppressed enough that it cannot martial these kinds of resources, OR, in the case of some civil conflicts in Africa that come to mind (Rwanda, the Sudan) the violent group has always chosen to employ terrorist tactics even though it doesn't have to.

Now, an actor with the parity just described that engaged in the kind of horrific and pyrotechnic violence typical of terrorist acts could, I think, be objectively described as morally bankrupt and despicable (shout out to the janjaweed), and treated as such, because it would be engaging in horrific acts when it has other options. The Mongols might be an example of this. I would say, frankly, that Hiroshima or the firebombing of Berlin might count. That's why we have the term "war crime". (Abu Ghraib, anybody? Nazis?) This does not apply to any Palestinian organization, however, no matter how violent and horrific its tactics.

In this sense, then, the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists tends to be whether we like them, and/or whether we dislike the state or people they are attacking. Turkish Kurds are, for some Americans, freedom fighters who sometimes employ regrettable or even terrorist tactics; Islamic Jihad, to many Americans (if many Americans had ever heard of IJ instead of lumping them in with Hamas, as is common), would be terrorists who are, admittedly, in a shitty situation. That's what the many discussions of the line between freedom fighting and terrorism reflect.

Very rarely, of course, freedom fighters adopt the spectacularly nonviolent tactics of Nelson Mandela or Ghandhi. One could argue that these freedom fighters are also terrorists, but the force they bring to bear is not bombs or killings but the threat of total international disgust, divestment, and even military intervention by others to save the peaceful resistance from the violence of the state. However, since I firmly believe that "terrorism" refers properly to particular tactics of force, this would not be terrorism. I'm not sure there's a name for it; "nonviolent resistance" is such a politically and morally sanitary and sugar-laden term that it escapes the pragmatic element of tactics that I want to denote.

At last

Someone said it! What I've been thinking!

Through a convergence of terrorists' savvy with the structural changes in the mediasphere, an enormously disproportionate impact can be brought to bear by applying what really amounts to minute pressure to geopolitical faultlines. To give an idea, based on these World Bank automobile statistics, more people died of car accidents in India on the day of the attacks than in the attacks themselves. But we are now seriously and soberly considering the possibility of a worst-case scenario that involves nuclear war.

To my mind, this underlines the need to formulate a new paradigm for how we, by which I mean the global community, experience and respond to these kinds of attacks in order to defuse their asymmetric power. An approach that combines restraint, resilience and resolve, and that balances the need to protect ourselves from these pathological psychopaths with the acceptance that we can never be fully immune.

I don't know quite what that would look like, or whether it's possible. But I, for one, am tired of how much power is being handed over to so few people with so little imagination.

When it rains, it pours

There was a car bomb in Peshawar. (Peshawar being the capital of the FATA, or the tribal areas that are causing the U.S. so much trouble right now.)

So far 21 dead, 90+ injured. The electricity also went out and there were fires that destroyed a number of shops and warehouses due to an explosion in a nearby gas line.

Of course, everybody thinks this is India or Indians getting back at Pakistan for Mumbai, even though nobody actually knows whether Pakistan is responsible in the first place.

I would not be too surprised if this were the same group making sure they get what they want, which is conflict between India and Pakistan; or if it were unrelated (after all, this is the FATA, and there have been a lot of bombings and violence around there lately) and it's impossible for people not to construe it as a part of this narrative. After all, Peshawar is hardly analogous to Mumbai. While it is a center of arts and culture, something it shares with Mumbai, it's not the financial or economic center of Pakistan the way Mumbai is of India. It doesn't strike at the same pressure point.

A bomb in Peshawar makes much more sense in the context of the American war on terror than it does in the context of whatever chess game someone is playing with India, Pakistan, and Kashmir. (Unless, of course, we count this chess game as part of a larger one that has to do with Afghanistan, which seems eminently possible to me, although its similarity to a 24 plot makes me suspicious. Then again I continue to be no kind of expert or authority.)