#radicalizing

How Extremist Scholars Promote Terrorism, Violence

“I would like to pay tribute to the sincere scholars of Al-Azhar and the Ministry of Awqaf [Endowments] who are working to correct the misconceptions about the tolerant Islamic religion and its moderate middle approach, to address and counter extremism — Read on www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13073/scholars-terrorism-extremism

New Post has been published on http://usnewsaggregator.com/trump-is-radicalizing-the-democratic-party/

Trump Is Radicalizing the Democratic Party

For years, a cadre of left-leaning, political-science-aligned or -curious pundits have offered a simple diagnosis of what ails American politics: the Grand Old Party.

That’s not an oversimplification of the stance. In 2012, for example, my colleague Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann wrote a Washington Post column titled, “Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.” The critique hinged on what they call asymmetric polarization—yes, politics is more polarized than any time in recent memory, but that is not (the argument goes) because both parties have become more extreme. Nor is it a factor of partisan sorting, the idea that while both parties used to have liberal and conservative wings, the Democrats are now a uniformly liberal party and the Republicans a uniformly conservative one. Rather, the Democratic Party moved slightly left, but the Republican Party has moved far right.

But what if the asymmetric trend is no longer so asymmetric? Recent polling from Pew finds, as one might expect, that not only are parties becoming ideologically homogeneous, but so are people. Two decades ago, or even one decade ago, most Americans had a mix of conservative and liberal views. That’s increasingly not the case. Today, 97 percent of Democrats are more liberal than the median Republican—an even more extreme concentration (by a hair) than across the aisle, where 95 percent of Republicans are more conservative than the median Democrat.

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At Commentary, Noah Rothman is annoyed that the Pew results aren’t getting more attention. They are newsworthy, but they might have gotten more attention if not for the squall of other huge stories over the last week. The major culprit for those stories is also the likeliest reason for the partisan shifts: Donald J. Trump.

Digging into Pew’s numbers, something notable emerges. Starting around 2015, views among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters (I’ll just refer to this group as Democrats from here on out) tend to change sharply. For example, here are Democrats’ view on immigrants, perhaps Trump’s No. 1 target on the stump:

My colleague Peter Beinart has written about how the Democratic Party’s views on immigration went from heterogeneous to peculiarly single-mindedly in favor, but this chart illustrates just how dramatically the trend accelerated from 2015 on, when Trump came out slurring Mexicans as rapists and criminals. Democrats reacted to Trump’s rhetoric by sprinting in the opposite direction.

Or how about the idea that discrimination holds African Americans back? The discourse around “white supremacy” has gotten louder in recent years, along with a focus on police violence against people of color, but Trump was also busy with racial dogwhistles. Look at the sharp curve in Democratic opinions:

How about the value of diplomacy? It had risen somewhat since 1994 overall, but from 2015 to present, the trend gets steeper, just as Trump dismissed diplomatic methods:

These are merely the most drastic examples, but there are several other cases where Democratic sentiment turns dramatically around 2015.

These results don’t really falsify the argument that Ornstein, Mann, and other pursued. For one thing, not everything they identified as a problem hinged on polarization per se; norms are also an essential part of the equation, and there’s no Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump. The asymmetric polarizers also focused most of their attention not on the general public but on the way that legislators voted, and this data is about the general populace.

Yet there is, naturally, a connection between the voters and their representatives, as Mann and Ornstein pointed out about the GOP in 2012. One question to track is whether Democratic legislators now start behaving as Republicans have in Congress. Predictions of a “Democratic Tea Party” or an irredentist faction equivalent to the House Freedom Caucus have so far come to naught. One reason is that Democratic voters tend to value compromise more per se, and the Pew poll suggests that is one thing that hasn’t changed. Seven in 10 Democrats say they like elected officials who can reach deals, while a slim majority of Republicans prefer ones who stick to their positions.

Predicting the durability and effects of the changed positions of so many Democrats is a job for people with political-science degrees and the stomach to make bold predictions. Even without peering into the future, the Pew results craft a vivid image. Trump has radically changed what the Republican Party stands for, but he’s had a powerful impact on the Democratic Party’s identity too.

Original Article:

Three years ago, on December 17, 2009, the Obama administration launched its first strike on what it believed to be an AQAP training camp in southern Yemen.

Unfortunately, what the Obama administration believed to be a terrorist training camp turned out to be a bedouin encampment, and the Cruise missiles equipped with cluster bombs ended up killing at least 55 people, including 35 women and children.

That opening strike in the US’ war against AQAP in Yemen was a disaster, a strike so bad that the Pentagon lawyer who authorized it famously said later: “if I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

Of course, that strike also had a radicalizing effect on people in southern Yemen and - despite US claims to the contrary - appears to have driven recruits into the waiting arms of AQAP.

The US, we have been told over and over, has worked hard in recent years to make sure that something like the al-Majalla strike never happens again. Not only because it kills civilians but also because it actually exacerbates the problem the US is trying to solve in Yemen: the continued threat of AQAP.

... Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post details exactly how damaging these mistaken strikes are to the US’ overall goals in Yemen.

As one man tells Raghavan: “If I am sure the Americans are the ones who killed my brother, I will join al-Qaeda and fight against America.”

This is exactly what people told me on my latest trip to Yemen in September/October earlier this year. When the US kills women, children and tribesmen (whom the US considers militants, but Yemenis all to often do not) the US is driving people to join AQAP, not because al-Qaeda’s ideology or theology has suddenly become palatable to them, but rather because as Raghavan’s article points out: AQAP is the only one fighting back against the country that killed their relatives.

This is a serious problem.

Letta Tayler for Human Rights Watch also has an excellent if heart-wrenching piece at Foreign Policy on the aftermath of that failed strike from earlier this year.

Like Raghavan’s piece this is a must read and when read together two paragraphs jumped out at me.

First, from Talyer’s piece:

“Seven of the victims were breadwinners. Now we have 50 people in our village with no one to care for them,” said Awadh, the local sheikh. “Who will raise them? Who will educate them? Who will take care of their needs?”

Now from Raghavan’s piece, talking about the same strike:

AQAP sent emissaries to Sabool to offer compensation to the victims’ relatives, seeking to fill the void left by the government, which has provided no compensation to the survivors and the families of those killed. Some relatives have joined AQAP since the attack, said Hamoud Mohamed al-Ammari, the security chief of Radda.

This is clear: the US bombs, kills civilians and AQAP sends compensation - ie, helps out the families that have been killed - and takes advantage of the carnage the US has sown to reap more recruits.

"Yemenis complain the U.S. focus on militants is a violation of sovereignty that is driving many towards al Qaeda and diverting attention from other pressing issues such as unemployment, corruption, water depletion and economic revival. Beyond the effect the winnowing of the president’s kill list is having on domestic politics in Yemen, there is a larger threat to security from blowback."

From the conservative New American no less:

Part of President Obama’s daily briefing must include the report of the number of “suspected militants” killed by his drones. That is, it would be part of the briefing but he reportedly doesn’t count the casualties.

In the pre-dawn hours Thursday Hellfire missiles fired from a U.S. drone turned a farmhouse in rural Yemen into a smoldering heap of charred wood that served as a bier for at least eight of those “suspected militants.”

For President Obama and those pulling the triggers on the joysticks guiding the missiles toward their human targets, “suspected militant” means (presumably) “all military-age males in a strike zone.” For those of us more concerned with the Constitution and with the rule of law than the President, “suspected militant” means nothing other than a person not charged with any crime, not afforded even the most perfunctory due process protections, but summarily executed upon order of the president anyway.

The president’s lexicon is apparently shared by some of his functionaries, as well. Harold Koh was sent by the president to make a pitch to the United Nations for the United States to maintain its seat on the U.N.’s Human Rights Council (HRC). During a brief question and answer period after Koh’s presentation, a reporter from Inner City Press asked Koh if the United States would use its position on the HRC to investigate the use of drones in executions. Koh’s answer was faithful to the party line:

He said that killings by drone “in the course of armed conflict or in self defense is consistent with international law.” He cited Al Qaeda, the Taliban and “associated forces” — presumably including Al Shabab in Somalia and forces in norther Mali or Azawad — and said it is “not illegal to target an individual who is leader of an opposing force.”

Was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki a “leader of an opposing force”? No. He was a 16-year-old American citizen searching for his father in Yemen. He and some relatives with whom he was eating supper were killed nonetheless by a U.S. drone. Presumably that’s because his cousins were old enough to be considered by the president terrorists by default.

That question is crucial, but this pretext for the killings brings up another question: When did militancy become a crime? If it is a crime, moreover, where is it defined? How can anyone know if he is guilty of militancy if such a crime is not defined? Could one hypothetically be a militant without knowing it, given that the crime is nowhere defined?