9/11: the anniversary and the conspiracy theories
This week is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, if anyone hasn't been listening to the news or watching the calendar. It's fair to say that the day was a watershed; it...
Category: Terrorism
Scare raised over “terrorist training camps”
The Guardian today printed a story raising the urban legend of the “jihad training camp”, which in this case was supposedly based in British national parks. As you might expect when a scare story...
Terrorist suspects “did not have passports”
NBC: Disagreement over timing of arrests – Lisa Myers & the NBC Investigative Unit – MSNBC.com A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance...
Armstrong: extremists know they are heretical
[Karen Armstrong in today’s *Guardian*](http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1815604,00.html) on how extremists in Islam, like those in other religions, are deliberately outside the mainstream of their religion and in fact have contempt for it: >Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), whose...
Muslims, show us your moderation (for the 1,236th time)
On the same day that the Times (and the ITV evening news) featured a Populus opinion poll which supposedly showed that 13% of Britain’s Muslims think that the four men who carried out the...
More on conspiracy theories
Something that made me wish I'd written this post a few days earlier (like, when I first saw the report on the PGAP survey): this article about conspiracy theories surrounding the July bombings, and...
British Muslims, alienation and terrorism
The Guardian recently carried two related depressing stories about the Muslim community here and terrorism. The first was that, according to some survey carried out by the Pew Global Attitudes Project, British Muslims had more negative views about their non-Muslim fellow citizens than do Muslims in Europe and more likely to believe conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks
Zia Sardar on intelligence
Zia Sardar in the current edition of the New Statesman on the folly of “intelligence-led” police operations:
Don’t be fooled by the mantra that intelligence is an extremely difficult business, prone to absurdly wide margins of error. If that were so, Britain would have lost the Second World War. The remarkable success of British intelligence, including counter-intelligence, during that war proves that we can produce reasonable – say, 25 or even 50 per cent – rates of success.
Spencer, the NDU scholars, the securocrat and his books
Robert Spencer today posted to his blog *Jihad Watch* [a memo](http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/011960.php) by one LTC Joseph C. Myers, Senior Army Advisor at Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, in reply to [an article](http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2006/20060622_5489.html) on...
Forest Gate raid: another disaster
It now appears that the raid on a house in Forest Gate, east London, last Friday resulted in nothing suspicious being found and was based on false intelligence, as today’s papers are reporting. To...
Swiss spy reveals “extremists” as agents
Via Izzy Mo, this story in the LA Times is all about a Swiss man who was recruited as a spy, infiltrated Tariq Ramadan's circle in Switzerland and eventually converted to Islam. Among the...
No victory for civilisation
Earlier this week Zacarias Moussaoui, as we all know, was given a life jail term for his role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks: having prepared to participate and failed to alert the authorities while...
Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs (or: Don’t Give That Girl a Pen)
OK, who hasn't heard the single by Pink (or P!nk as it appears on the album covers, but for the benefit of anyone listening to this with Jaws or similar software rather than reading...
Muslims march against bombers
For anyone who still thinks Muslims "never protest against terrorism", here's a report on such a march – in London, not a state-sponsored march in Damascus or Riyadh: BBC NEWS: Muslim march over shrine...
Lotfi Raissi update
The BBC reports that an Algerian-born pilot accused of links to terrorism, jailed for five months in Belmarsh, slandered in the popular press, and then released when a judge ruled there was no evidence...
John Simpson: how Gitmo came to be
John Simpson, in a BBC commentary on the recently-released footage of British soldiers beating the daylights out of some Iraqi teenagers (probably in 2003) and why nobody is surprised, explains how many, and probably...
The State We Are In: new book from Amal Press
Amal Press has just brought out a new book, The State We Are In: Identity, Terror and the Law of Jihad in which Shaikh Hamza Yusuf, Shaikh Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti, Aftab A Malik, David...
Malicious bloggers stop Muslim meeting in Florida
I got this bit of news from the CAIR email circular: an article from the St Petersburg Times about how a malicious "blogger" named Joe Kaufman, a regular at Front Page and chairman of...
Briton likely to end up in Guantanamo
BBC News: Briton 'facing Guantanamo spell' The BBC reports that a British Muslim is likely to be sent to the Guantánamo concentration camp if an extradition request is honoured, according to a US attorney....
Spencer on mosque closures and “truth to power”
One of Robert Spencer's minions has come close to delivering the "wimp" taunt that politicians seem to fear these days, whether it is on the death penalty or on the so-called War on Terror....