Terrorism
Bin Laden speaks
A couple of things stand out, aside from the priceless shout-out to Noam Chomsky: You permitted Bush to complete his first term, and stranger still, chose him for a second term, which gave him a mandate from you — with your full knowledge and consent — to continue to murder our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then you claim to
“Dying to Win”
I recently finished Robert A. Pape’s very interesting book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (Random House). It’s refreshingly data-driven and non-ideological, if a bit out of date — the paperback edition is 2005, and news moves fast, in Iraq and elsewhere. One of Pape’s arguments is that suicide terrorists, and the militant organizations that deploy them,
Quote for the day
“We are not afraid of being named terrorists … But I want to ask, is someone who detonates one kilogram a terrorist while someone who detonates tons in Arab and Islamic cities not a terrorist?”— Shakir al-Abssi, leader of the Lebanese-based Fatah al Islam, an al-Qaeda offshoot This is a standard trope not only of the Islamist far-right but also
“This is how they fight”
Last night during a panel discussion at Barnard College, I heard choreographer Jawole Willa Jo Zollar of Urban Bush Women talk about what she called the “pitfalls” of the radical left politics she embraced in the ’70s. Mentioning the Black Panthers and other cultural nationalist groups, she spoke of her discomfort with “reducing people to generalities.” To paraphrase, Zollar felt
They hate us because…
PBS ran an excellent documentary this week on the war photographers’ collective known as “Seven.” This is a smart, experienced group of people with diverse views. One of them, now focused on photographing the American social and political scene, offered his thoughts on Bush’s oft-repeated slogan that terrorists “hate us for our freedom.” I can’t pin down this person’s name