ICSR

In the wake of the Fort Hood shooting, commentators on this blog and elsewhere have been exploring more broadly the connections between grievances, ideology and violent action. Too often there is a tendency to see a certain inevitability in processes of violence, to believe that people with particular grievances will inevitably be tempted to engage in or at least support violent acts. I thought it might be interesting to look at a case that disrupts these assumptions.

A very fine organisation that I used to work for in Washington, the Middle East Institute, is hosting its annual conference this week. At the opening session, an award was presented to Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor, for his efforts in promoting peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. An obstetrician who worked for many years in both Israel and Gaza, he continually engaged people on
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Last Friday, Foreign Policy ran an online article by the NEFA Foundation’s senior investigator Evan Kohlmann, 'A Web of Lone Wolves', in which he exhorted US security agencies to get their act together in dealing with terrorist propaganda on the internet.  In a refreshing departure from his occasional hawkishness, Evan rightly summed up one particular factor in governments’ responses to the problem:

With such a generalized threat, it will be a continuing challenge for Western governments and societies to draw the fine line between what is protected under the freedom of speech and what is criminalized as direct incitement to murder.

This is correct, as we flagged up in our ICSR report on online radicalisation earlier this year,
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I disagree with David Kilcullen on several matters, but I agree 100% with what he said recently at Georgetown, as reported by Bellum. Some highlights:

•    We've suffered from only incrementally increasing the number of troops over the years. The Taliban has proven itself capable of absorbing the impact from an additional 10-30 thousand troops. We need to either "overmatch" them with a substantially larger deployment  or not send any at all (or possibly draw down).
•    Whenever we send more troops, violence will spike almost by definition.
…
•    There is "not much point" to negotiating with the Taliban right now. This is because the Taliban believe they are winning and so have no reason to bargain. Our goal should be to fight firs
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Major 'Abbud al-Zumur, the former military intelligence officer who served on the governing bodies of both the Jihad organisation and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group - IG) in Egypt, published in August 2009 a book entitled The Third Alternative: Between Authoritarianism and Surrender which analyses the causes of violent radicalism and prescribes ways of ending political violence within Arab- and Muslim-majority states.

This book is the latest development in what can be called a second wave of modern Islamist de-radicalisation. It is one of several instances of this literature to address political participation and pluralism explicitly. However authors from the very same movement sometimes have different views on this topic: IG's ideologue Nagih Ibrahim, for example, has called on Islamist movements to abandon politics and focus on missionary activities, while IG leader, Karam Zuhdi, declared that the group's current rejection of democracy could change base
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The UN General Assembly, last Thursday (5 November), adopted a resolution asking Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to deliver to the Security Council the Goldstone Report, which accuses Israel and "Palestinian armed groups" of committing war crimes during Israel's military operation in Gaza ("Operation Cast Lead") in winter 2008/9. Denying any wrongdoing, Israel expects the United States to use its veto power in the Security Council to bury Goldstone for good. 

In the meantime I had a go at Professor Asa Kasher. An eminent Israeli philosopher, Professor Kasher, in 2004, headed a team of experts in developing a Code of Conduct for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which emphasizes how it should behave in low intensity warfare and when operating in densely populated areas.

The o
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