My latest New Matilda column is about the growing militancy in Gaza: The recent shootout in a Gaza mosque has highlighted the way Israel’s blockade of the strip radicalises people and encourages terrorism, writes Antony Loewenstein Gaza is facing yet another threat exacerbated by the ongoing Israeli siege: Islamic fundamentalism. In mid August, 24 people…
Showing all posts tagged al-Qaeda
A growing challenge to the rule of Hamas
Following the clashes in Gaza between Hamas and an al-Qaeda affiliated group, the Washington Post offers the following (largely believable) analysis: The deadly shootout in a Gaza Strip mosque Friday between members of the ruling Islamist Hamas movement and a militant splinter group may signal further challenges to Hamas’s authority in Gaza as it tries…
Dealing with al-Qaeda in Gaza
The National editorialises on the recent dramas in Rafah against Muslim extremists: It was perhaps only a matter of time before Hamas was outflanked by a more radical group in its Gaza stronghold, but the bloody showdown between the Palestinian Islamist movement and the shadowy Jund Ansar Allah is an unwelcome development for the Palestinian…
When Hamas are the moderates
When I was in Gaza I asked a number of people about extremist forces. I was told that they existed and Israel’s siege only makes them more likely to thrive. Looks like Hamas is taking action: Hamas security forces killed the leader of an al-Qaida-inspired group in the Gaza Strip Saturday in a shootout that…
It’s more than just beheading and murder
Foreign Policy informs of a new work about Islamism that challenges the oft-stated view of the movement: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, probably the single most influential living Sunni Islamist figure, has just written a major book entitled Fiqh al-Jihad (The Jurisprudence of Jihad) which decisively repudiates al Qaeda’s conception of jihad as a “mad declaration of war…
All terrorists welcome
Robert Fisk knows how to tell a joke (and mean it): …My favourite memory was at San Francisco International Airport, where Homeland Security spotted all the pariah visas in my passport. “Have you ever met a terrorist?” one of them asked me with a frown. Yes, I said. I met Osama bin Laden and I…
If they renounce violence, when will you?
Interesting analysis from the MEC Analytical Group about Britain, Hamas and Hizbollah: There are indications of some flexibility in British policy towards Hamas and Hizbullah. On 21 May the Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a speech at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (text here) in which he called for “a coalition of consent” between…
A meeting of the minds
Pakistan’s finest journalist on militancy, Syed Saleem Shahzad, on the region’s dark future: The militants plan to establish a new regional alliance. In this regard, Iranian Jundullah (Army of God) leader Abdul Malik Rigi is due to meet an al-Qaeda emissary in the near future near a Pakistani Balochistan coastal town to lay the foundation…
A day in the life of a conversation with an active Zionist
Earlier today I posted a comment about Israel/Palestine from Dan Diker, the foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs. He stressed that any kind of Middle East peace deal was impossible as long as Iran, Hamas, Hizbollah, terrorism and polluted water (!) was in the way (he may not have mentioned the…
Perhaps they should have their balls electrocuted now
A few words about torture from somebody who would know. Major Matthew Alexander personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq: The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa’ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology. It plays into the hands of al-Qa’ida in Iraq because it…