Category Archives: Terrorism Issue

Human Rights Report on Yemen released

Development, Obama Administration, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

On March 11, 2010 the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the U.S. Department of State released its 2009 Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Yemen. The full report can be accessed online here, but I include below the preliminary paragraphs:

Yemen, with a population of approximately 23 million, is a republic whose law provides for presidential election by popular vote from among at least two candidates endorsed by parliament. In 2006 citizens reelected President Ali Abdullah Saleh to another seven-year term in a generally open and competitive election, characterized by multiple problems with the voting process and the use of state resources on behalf of the ruling party. Saleh has led the country since 1978. The president appoints the prime minister, who is the head of government. The prime minister, in consultation with the president, selects the council of ministers. Although there are a number of parties, President Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC) party dominated the government. Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces, although there were instances in which security forces acted independently of government authority. Continue reading Human Rights Report on Yemen released →

Gallup on Taliban Popularity

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue

Taliban Increasingly Unpopular in Pakistan
Four percent say Taliban’s presence is positive influence
by Julie Ray and Rajesh Srinivasan, gallup.com, March 12, 2010

This article is the first of a two-part series that looks at Pakistanis’ and Afghans’ views of the Taliban’s influence and their respective countries’ efforts to combat terrorism.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Taliban’s presence on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is largely unwelcome, but increasingly so in Pakistan, where Gallup surveys show they have lost much of the little appeal they had. Four percent of Pakistanis in a November-December 2009 poll, conducted prior to Pakistan’s current push to rout the Taliban within its borders, said the Taliban’s presence in some areas of the country has a positive influence, down from 15% in June. Continue reading Gallup on Taliban Popularity →

Yemen – the return of old ghosts

Aden, Maps, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


The British Residency Office, Aden

YEMEN – THE RETURN OF OLD GHOSTS

by Adam Curtis, BBC blog, January 8, 2010

What I find so fascinating about the reporting of the War on Terror is the way almost all of it ignores history – as if it is a conflict happening outside time. The Yemen is a case in point. In the wake of the underpants bomber we have been deluged by a wave of terror journalism about this dark mediaeval country that harbours incomprehensible fanatics who want to destroy the west. None of it has explained that only forty years ago the British government fought a vicious secret war in the Yemen against republican revolutionaries who used terror, including bombing airliners.

But the moment you start looking into that war you find out all sorts of extraordinary things.

First that the chaos that has engulfed the Yemen today and is breeding new terrorist threats against the west is a direct result of that conflict of forty years ago.

Secondly it also had a powerful and corrupting effect on Britain itself. To fight the war both Conservative and Labour governments in the 1960s set up international arms deals with the Saudis. These involved bribery on a huge scale which led to the Al Yamamah scandal that still festers today. Continue reading Yemen – the return of old ghosts →

What do Pakistanis want?

Ethics, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue

Secularism vs Islamism

By Iqbal Akhund, Dawn.com, 22 Feb, 2010

In a recent TV debate on this subject, the applause meter would have given the win to Islamism. The debaters, three on each side, faced a small mixed audience — quite a few girls, many wearing hijabs, also young men in jeans and a handful of beards.

The ‘secularists’ appealed, in measured tones, to the intellect, made references to European history, called for tolerance, pluralism and progress. The ‘Islamists’ were assertive, emotional and received applause when they spoke of the ‘moral decadence’ of the West and condemned, to louder applause, the West’s aggression against Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Iraq.

So do the people of Pakistan want an Islamist state? Well, yes and no. Continue reading What do Pakistanis want? →

Bombshell Boobs

Luke R. E. Publican, Terrorism Issue

Shoes failed flat out. Then there was a glitch in the underwear. So what next for the fashionable terrorist with no baggage and a one-way ticket to paradise? If this was the plot for a Monty Python sketch, why not bring in a sexy woman with big siliconcocted breasts? Then replace the silicon with a more volatile substance, turn the nipple into a fuse and it’s bombs away. Well, reports are now flowing through cyberspace about British intelligence intercepting Al-Qaeda cell phone chatter about this very thing. Here is one from February 5 in the online version of the Detroit Free Press:

British intel: Breast implants may hide bombs

WASHINGTON, DC — British intelligence agencies have reportedly monitored terrorist communications bragging that women suicide bombers have already undergone surgery to hide explosive bombs in their breast implants.

“You could certainly put a liquid of any kind in a saline device, and a gel implant theoretically could be opened and replaced with a different type of gel,” said Maryland plastic surgeon Dr. Craig Person.

“I believe that any liquid in a breast implant, or any gel with a silicone-type of implant would be hard to detect with a body scanner,” Person told 9NewsNow. Continue reading Bombshell Boobs →

Madrasa in Sufi Hands

Sufism, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


Students at Dar al-Mustafa in Tarim, Hadramawt

The image of the Islamic madrasa is severely tainted in the West. One of the oldest educational institutions in the world, and a pedagogical system that had influence on the evolution of colleges in medieval Europe, is generally portrayed in the media as a reactionary base for hateful anti-Western propaganda. Now that Yemen has surfaced as yet another “terrorist haven,” the idea of Islamic education in Yemen is likewise viewed negatively. One of the most important historical centers of Islamic education in Yemen remains Tarim in the Hadramawt valley. Yes, indeed the very Hadramawt from which the ancestors of Osama Bin Laden migrated. But Tarim has an international focus that many people are not aware of. For centuries Hadramis, including Sufi missionaries, have established strong ties with the people of India and Indonesia. The largess of Hadramis abroad has led to substantial support for schools back in Tarim. These are not backward enclaves with firebrands but devout Sufi masters who have long preached tolerance and the quest for spiritual truth. There is a video report posted on Al-Jazeera by Hashem Ahelbarra on “Students in Yemen fight Stereotypes” that is worth watching. For more information on Dar al-Mustafa, which is featured in the video, click here.

Eurabian Follies

Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia 101, Terrorism Issue

Eurabian Follies
The shoddy and just plain wrong genre that refuses to die

by Justin Vaïsse, Foreign Policy, January/February, 2010

By 2050, Europe will be unrecognizable. Instead of romantic cafes, Paris’s Boulevard Saint-Germain will be lined with halal butcheries and hookah bars; the street signs in Berlin will be written in Turkish. School-children from Oslo to Naples will read Quranic verses in class, and women will be veiled.

At least, that’s what the authors of the strange new genre of “Eurabia” literature want you to believe. Not all books of this alarmist Europe-is-dying category, which received its most intellectually hefty treatment yet with the recent release of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, offer such dire and colorful predictions. But they all make the case that low fertility rates among natives, massive immigration from Muslim countries, and the fateful encounter between an assertive Islamic culture and a self-effacing European one will lead to a Europe devoid of all Western identity.

For the rest of this much longer article, click here.


Justin Vaïsse is senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe and co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France.