Category Archives: Terrorism Issue

No Olive Branch in Gaza

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel, Palestine, Terrorism Issue


by Daniel Martin Varisco
[Originally posted on Anthropology News.]

Civil unrest continues to grip the Middle East. Adding to the battle to remove Syria’s Russian-backed Assad and the political infighting following the ousting of dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen is a recent flare up in Gaza, leaving more than 160 Palestinians dead before a fragile ceasefire took hold just before Thanksgiving Day.

Politics can often mirror geography, especially in a land considered holy by three major religions. The lowest geographical point on earth is the Dead Sea, a critical juncture point of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. But not far away sandwiched between Israel and Egypt is the narrow strip of Gaza, which is perhaps the lowest moral point in the current political strategy of the Israeli government and its vaunted IDF.

To say that the Gaza Strip is over populated and under resourced is an understatement. An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians live in a beleaguered area of 141 square miles, isolated and walled off like a Bantustan oasis. Before the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, this was a sparsely populated area with few resources to attract settlement, but some 200,000 Palestinians fled here at the time. Formal occupation of Israel, following the 1967 6-day war, officially ended in the mid-90s with the Oslo Accords. But there has been no peace in Gaza, whether under the control of the PLO or Hamas.

Pundits flood the airwaves with condemnation of Hamas, as though calling it a terrorist organization means open season on any Palestinian living in Gaza. So why does Hamas not sue for peace, given the obvious fact that a slew of puny missiles lobbed at Israel only brings more retaliation? A potent symbol of peace in the “Holy Land” is the olive branch. Students still read about this peace symbol in Virgil’s first century BCE Aeneid, so the need for such a symbol has certainly been around along the shores of the Mediterranean for a long time. Defenders of Israel’s continuing bombing strikes and assassinations in Gaza argue that Israel has a right to defend itself because Hamas is out to somehow destroy Israel. Hence Israel’s expensive prophylactic “Iron Dome” symbolically trumps an olive branch on the cable news. But it is hard to expect Palestinians to wave olive branches when there are so few olive trees left standing in Gaza. The recent “Pillar of Cloud” military campaign that rained down on Gaza occurred during the height of the olive harvest and processing season.

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Muslim Salafists and Moderates: What’s the Difference?

"Arab Spring", Terrorism Issue


Tunisian Salafists; Photo by Reuters

By Anouar Majid

Many people in the Muslim world are scrambling to get out from centuries (not just decades) of tyranny and build a good future for themselves and their descendants. They want to catch up to the West, build strong economies, and invent things that would make their nations proud, but they keep slipping further behind nations that were once their peers. This regression only intensifies their desire to get respect. With nothing to show for their pride, they go back to the distant nebulous past to sing the glories of long-dead warriors and savants. An imagined glorious history is a safer bet than the dysfunctions of the present or the bleak promises of the future.

It is this attachment to the past that produces the kind of extremism many of us find abhorrent. The new offenders these days are the Salafists, a loose confederation of Muslim literalists who believe that the pristine faith of the seventh century is the best remedy to what ails Muslim-majority nations today. Sporting robes and beards, they have declared war on churches, women with skirts, bars, insufficiently pious Muslims, and anything that smacks of the false West. Even Islamist parties, including Hamas, are not immune to the Salafist righteous indignation. Continue reading Muslim Salafists and Moderates: What’s the Difference? →

Johnsen on Yemen in New York

"Arab Spring", Books You Should Read, Conferences and Talks, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

Book Night With Gregory Johnsen

12 November 2012 – 6:00pm – 7:30pm

40 West 45th Street, Club Quarters, New York, Free admission

by Sonya K. Fry, Overseas Press Club of America

The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia [W.W. Norton & Company, November, 2012] is an eye-opening look at the successes and failures in fighting a new type of war in the turbulent country of Yemen, written by Gregory D. Johnsen, who is an OPC Foundation Scholar, a Fulbright fellow in Yemen, part of a 2009 USAID conflict assessment team and is now a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University.

Johnsen takes readers into Yemeni mosques where clerics in the 1980’s recruited young men to jihad to fight the Russian invaders in Afghanistan. These men eventually formed the basis for the Al-Qaeda movement. The story also leads to the presidential palace in Yemen where the country’s military dictator, Ali Abdullah Salih vascillated between helping the U.S. get rid of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and hindering the process. Salih himself called this delicate balancing act of staying in power a “snake dance.” For years this dance included concealing Islamists from the prying eyes of U.S. intelligence and yet later he allowed the U.S. to conduct attacks that killed dozens of Al-Qaeda operatives including Abu Ali al-Harithi, who was known as the “godfather” by U.S. intelligence. The dramatic story sounds like a Hollywood movie: Haritihi turned on his cell phone as he left a secret meeting which signaled a predator drone to track him. The first missile from the drone exploded next to Harithi’s speeding car. He threw the phone out of the window and screamed at everyone to get out, but there was nowhere to go since they were in the middle of the desert. The drone fired its second missile and the car exploded in flames. Continue reading Johnsen on Yemen in New York →

A Muslim Manual of War

Books You Should Read, Islamic History, Islamic Law, Islamic Texts, Scholars, Terrorism Issue


A Muslim Manual of War
being Tafrij al-kurub fi tadbir al-hurub by ‘Umar ibn Ibrahim al-Awsi al-Ansari
Edited and translated by George T. Scanlon
Foreword by Carole Hillenbrand

Free online facsimile anniversary edition

One of the first three books published by the AUC Press after its founding in 1960 was A Muslim Manual of War, an annotated editing and translation of a hitherto little-known fifteenth-century Arabic manuscript on the art of war, prepared by George Scanlon, then embarking on his career to become one of the most respected scholars in the field of Islamic art, architecture, archaeology, and history. Now, in celebration of 50 years of the AUC Press, and in honor of Professor Scanlon’s recent retirement after an illustrious career, most recently as professor of Islamic art and architecture in the Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations at the American University in Cairo, the AUC Press is proud to make available once again this long out-of-print book, as a freely accessible scanned facsimile with a new Introduction by the author and a Foreword by eminent scholar Carole Hillenbrand, a former student of Professor Scanlon.

Yemen: can southern separatists break up Yemen?

"Arab Spring", Terrorism Issue, Yemen


Photo in southern Yemen by Adam Reynolds

by Helen Lackner, Open Democracy, October 23, 2012

Yemeni unity in 1990 was greeted with enthusiasm by Yemenis at large, whether from the former Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) or People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). Although there was considerable discussion and disagreement in the leadership about the form it took, there is no doubt that for ordinary Yemenis the possibility of travelling anywhere in the country was welcome.

While many women in the YAR had looked forward to the spread of the PDRY’s Family Law to the whole country, many men and women everywhere hoped to see the same for qat consumption laws, and southerners were looking forward to economic liberalisation, all were swiftly disappointed when the economy collapsed after the sanctions taken against Yemen by neighbour states following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. In addition, after the initial flourishing freedom of expression through a multiplicity of new parties and newspapers in the first years of enthusiasm, the political situation rapidly deteriorated as tension developed between the two former ruling groups. Starting with some clearly targeted assassinations of Southern leaders, this eventually brought about the 5 months Civil War of 1994 which was decisively won by Sana’a’s forces. Continue reading Yemen: can southern separatists break up Yemen? →

Yemen Conference at Harvard

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Conferences and Talks, Development, Environment, Gender and Sexuality, Terrorism Issue, Yemen, Zaydi


This past Friday and Saturday a conference was held on “Yemen in Transition.” While I was originally scheduled to give a presentation, I was not able to attend. But here is an overview of the conference, with complete details on the conference website.

Date: October 19, 2012 (All day) – October 20, 2012 (All day)
Speaker: various
Yemen in Transition: Challenges and Opportunities
Organized by Steven C. Caton, Harvard University, and the Yemen Working Group, this conference brings together Yemeni American professionals and academics along with some of their counterparts from Yemen, and academics from the U.S., Europe, and Yemen to discuss the future of Yemen and what might be done to help the country as it transitions into its new historical phase. It also brings together students from Harvard and the Boston area who are from Yemen. The main topics to be discussed are: women and youth, economic development, politics and political reform, and the water crisis. As an academic conference, the focus will be on theory and analysis, though concrete proposals and recommendations will also be presented.

The panels and the keynote address are open to the public. These presentations will be videotaped and made available on the website of the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies but they will not be published as part of a conference proceedings. The use of recording devices by anyone other than the organizers is strictly prohibited.

On Drones

Afghanistan, Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Obama Administration, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


The Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human rights Clinic have recently produced a report on the impact of drones on civilians. Below is the abstract; the full report can be found in pdf format here.

The Civilian Impact of Drones: Unexamined Costs, Unanswered Questions
Publication | 29 Sep 2012

This joint report from the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic is an in-depth look at the US government’s covert drone program and its impact on civilian populations. Our objective is to critically assess US government procedures and standards for ensuring civilian protection and responding to civilian harm from drone strikes conducted both outside of full-scale military operations and with a degree of secrecy. The study is based on a review of publicly available materials, interviews with current and former government officials, responses to requests for information from agencies, and previous field interviews by Center for Civilians in Conflict.

Drones are touted as the most precise and humane weapons platform in the history of warfare. The technological advance is significant, but covert drone strikes carry costs for civilians and local communities even as they become a policy norm. Blinded by the promise of this technology and reports of short-term effectiveness in killing militants, policymakers are failing to ask hard questions of the drones program, including whether other tactics or strategies are more appropriate to counterterrorism strategy, and whether US expansion of strikes to new places and against new groups is truly justified.

Malala and malevolence

Anthropology/Sociology, Ethics, Gender and Sexuality, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue

Pakistani school girls pray for the recovery of teen activist Malala Yousufzai at their school in Peshawar on Friday.

A fourteen-year old girl is shot in the head for wanting to be educated. It is hard to imagine a more sadistic premeditated attack on innocence. Her name is Malala and her attackers are Taliban extremists who have so perverted the teachings of Islam that they commit the ultimate modern-day shirk: assuming that their cowardly act has divine sanction. The assassination attempt on a school bus is now one of those shots heard across the world. To be sure, the gunshots that have ripped through bodies in Muslim countries number in the thousands these days. The attack on Malala does not override the horrific bloodshed taking place in Syria, the continuing violence in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. But it stands out as a symbol of what goes terribly wrong when partisan religious fervor enters the political arena.

Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, recognizes this: “”The Taliban attack on the 14-year-old girl, who from the age of 11 was involved in the struggle for education for girls, is an attack on all girls in Pakistan, an attack on education, and on all civilised people.” He recognizes that such malevolence puts every young girl in Pakistan in danger and threatens to further divide debates in his country into violent conflict. But this is not only an attack on “all civilised people”; this is an assault on all people. And, as the photograph of a young Muslim girl praying above shows so well, an attack on the very idea of the merciful God she prays to.

I have never met Malala and probably never will. But Malala is my daughter, my wife and my mother. Shooting her is an attack on my family and yours. If the shooters dared to whisper bi-ism-Allah-al-rahman-al-rahim before they pulled the trigger against a child of God, may that same God have mercy on their souls, because they never learned the true meaning of the words they spoke. Continue reading Malala and malevolence →