I have lived abroad for most of the last 30 years, in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Italy, Belgium, Canada and Morocco. I now live in England.
In the case of Fnideq, with its extraordinary density of young terrorist recruits (see my last post) I find myself mulling not just over propaganda, but over contagion, and wonder if the tools of epidemiology might not be as useful to understand it as radicalization theory. I don’t of course mean by this simply the glib image of ‘radical Islam’ as … More Herd Immunity and e-pidemics
A couple of weeks ago I was in Morocco for a conference about the Social Media, at Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane; and then went on down to Rabat for a day or two. It was a visit bracketed by terrorist attacks in Tunis and Sana’a, with much blood shed and much more, I’m afraid, to come. … More The Pied Pipers of Fnideq
When you are building a state you need women. Without them, the state is bunch of warriors who, however heroic, ferocious and bloody, and however magnificent their whiskers, will eventually get killed, grow old, go home. Without women there can be no state because there is no permanence, no real settlement, no homes, no children. … More Electronic Sabine Women
At the very end of 2013 Patrick Cockburn was asked by his editor to nominate a Middle Eastern ‘Man of the Year.’ He named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a name that did not resonate much except with a small number of Western specialists – and a growing number of Iraqis and Syrians. In January al-Baghdadi’s troops … More A Heavily-armed Mediæval Hyperlink
At the beginning of 1973 I spent a few months in Cairo. War with Israel was in the offing, and preparations for it were under way. At the most mundane level, blast walls were built in front of the entrances to blocks of flats, and windows taped; at the Egyptian Museum Tutankhamun’s mask and regalia were … More Ash-sha’ab yurid … what, exactly?
There’s a picture that comes up quite often in the social media, of a line of severed heads on a drystone wall in Morocco. It’s actually a picture postcard, with the caption SOUVENIR D’AGOURAI. NOS TIRAILLEURS FURIEUX DES MUTILATIONS INFLIGES A LEURS MORTS SE VENGENT, and the example I find on the web is stamped, … More A Warped Mirror
Four million Frenchmen and women marched through the streets of France last weekend to protest against the murders at Charlie Hebdo. It was a devastating event, evil in the purest sense of the word – the cold-blooded murder of a bunch of mostly elderly cartoonists at an editorial meeting. It has brought France together – or … More Am I a right Charlie? Or a real Ahmed?
The day after I posted about Peter Pan and the romantic, heroic vein of youth jihadism, a friend sent me an interesting article, which I recommend. Published in the New York Times, it is a profile by Danny Hakim, of a Jordanian called Suleiman Bakhit. Bakhit is fascinating because he has understood the craving for superheroes … More Edward Casaubon and Global Jihad
More thoughts on Abu Faraj. When I can wrench my mind away from the absurd notion of the Leader as jihadist, I find a more realistic cross-reference in Pierre Poujade, the French politician of the mid twentieth century. Poujade, a one-time RAF pilot, commercial traveller, Pétainiste, pied-noir by marriage and sympathy, organized a movement of resistance to big business, … More Blowback in Rochester
A few weeks ago a Dutch mother from Maastrich stormed magnificently off to Raqqa in Syria to fetch home her daughter ‘Aicha,’ a ‘blue-eyed, blonde-haired’ convert to Islam who had run away to marry a Dutch Muslim jihadist by the name of Omar Yilmaz. Aicha, first married to, and then discarded by, the faithless Omar arrived … More Peter Pan with a Machine-gun
Martin Rose 