Tag: terrorism

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If you want to know what is happening in the world….

If you want to know what is happening in the world, don’t follow the news. News media nowadays is more about entertainment — attracting eyeballs — than about information. There is more coverage of Kim Kardashian’s sex life than analysis of major events. And if it bleeds it leads — the more shocking a story, the more eyeballs it will attract. Television and newspapers are full of coverage of the recent Paris attacks. The media and terrorism have evolved a mutually beneficial relationship.

Information on the other hand is boring and does not sell newspapers.

According to the WHO 153,000 people died yesterday. Most were from non-communicable diseases (104,000) with cardiovascular disease the top cause of death (20,000 from ischemic heart disease and 18,000 from stroke). Of the 33,500 deaths yesterday from communicable diseases, HIV accounted for 4000, the same number as diarrhoea, tuberculosis 2500 and malaria a paltry 1200. There were 13500 deaths from injury, the leading cause being road accidents (3500). Death from terrorism, fortunately, is too insignificant to even deserve a mention in the WHO tables.

Eradication of diarrhoea would have far greater impact than eradication of terrorism (which causes about 90 deaths/day according to a recent article in the SMH). And potable drinking water costs far less than bombs and missiles. Unfortunately it just doesn’t get enough media coverage to warrant attention.

….extracted from a discussion on Terror and Publicity.

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Margaret Thatcher: Terrorism (1985)

“….The terrorist uses force because he knows he will never get his way by democratic means.

Through calculated savagery, his aim is to induce fear in the hearts of people. And weariness towards resistance.

In this evil strategy, the actions of the media are all important. For newspapers and television, acts of terrorism inevitably make good copy and compelling viewing. The hijacker and the terrorist thrive on publicity: without it, their activities and their influence are sharply curtailed. There is a fearful progression, which the terrorists exploit to the full. They see how acts of violence and horror dominate the newspaper columns and television screens of the free world. They see how that coverage creates a natural wave of sympathy for the victims and pressure to end their plight no matter what the consequence. And the terrorists exploit it. Violence and atrocity command attention. We must not play into their hands…….

And we must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. In our societies we do not believe in constraining the media, still less in censorship. But ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, a code under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists’ morale or their cause….”

Margaret Thatcher
Speech to American Bar Association
1985 Jul 15

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Russia terror alert | Kyiv Post

Kyiv Post quotes Markian Lubkivskyi, an adviser to SBU head Valentyn Nailyvaichenko on the rise of terrorism outside of Eastern Ukraine:

“(Terrorists) are aiming to undermine Ukraine from within,” Lubkivskyi told the Kyiv Post, adding that terrorism is one of Russia’s tools in the war against Ukraine. “This is definitely a planned set of linked actions carried out to demoralize people, scare them, spread chaos and create protest moods.”

One of the latest incidents occurred on Jan. 20, when a bridge near the village of Kuznetsivka in Zaporizhzhia Oblast collapsed under a cargo train that was carrying iron ore to Volnovakha in Donetsk Oblast. As a result, 10 cars derailed.

This was the fourth railway explosion over the last two months.

In January, three fuel tanks on a freight train were set on fire at the Shebelynka station in Kharkiv Oblast, and a bomb blew up a freight tank with petrochemicals at the Odesa-Peresyp railway station. On Dec. 24, explosives hidden under the railways hit a train at the Zastava 1 railway station, also based in Odesa.

Odesa has become the main target of attacks in the last two months.

The word terrorism is widely misused. What we are dealing with is state-sponsored terrorism or war by proxy. Without state sponsorship — in the form of training, weapons, logistics and financial support — most terrorist organizations would shrivel up and die. The level of proxy warfare increased hugely since World War II, when direct confrontation between major powers became dangerous because of the advent of nuclear weapons. Instead of direct confrontation these powers resorted to deniable aggression, by proxy, in order to weaken their enemies. The former Soviet Union was a major sponsor of proxy wars, from Korea and Vietnam to support for guerrilla wars elsewhere in Asia, Africa and South America. It appears that Vladimir Putin has adopted a similar strategy and is expanding its use into Eastern Europe.

It is difficult to win a guerrilla war where there are few conventional battles. The lesson from Vietnam is that you can win every battle, but still lose the war. Far better to identify and attack the sponsor through unconventional (asymmetric) means such as sanctions. Make sure that the cost outweighs the benefits of proxy warfare.

When we read the word “terrorism” in popular media, our first question should be: who is the sponsor and how can we make them desist?

Read more at Russia terror alert.

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Robert Wright: Progress is not a zero-sum game [video]

Thought-provoking presentation by Robert Wright, best-selling author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal and The Evolution of God. Progress is not a zero-sum game — the network of linked fortunes and cooperation that has guided our evolution to this point can help us save humanity today.

Some thoughts:

Terrorism is a negative-sum game. The perpetrators commit atrocities to protest their sub-human treatment. The atrocities convince by-standers that these people are sub-human and deserve to be treated as such.

Non-violent protest is a testament to the moral/intellectual leadership of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi. Stoic acceptance of violence without retaliation convinces observers that the protestors are not sub-human and do not deserve such treatment.

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Shots fired in parliament building, Ottawa [video]

The suspect had apparently already shot and killed a reservist soldier standing guard at the National War Memorial.

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Masculinity and terror: the missing conversation

Prof. David Plummer argues that social changes have left a power vacuum that is open to exploitation:

Boys are spending more time in the sole company of their peers: on street corners, in shopping malls and in their cars.

Instead of growing up with the role models and standards of older, more experienced men, most of their role modelling comes from peer groups. In the absence of alternatives, these groups resort to raw physical masculinity as the yardstick for what masculinity should look like, how boys should behave and who should dominate.

They also develop their own rituals to admit members, some of which are extreme, anti-social and high-risk. It is a willingness to take risks that is considered the hallmark of a “real man”.

Read more at Masculinity and terror: the missing conversation.

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What If Everything You Know About Terrorism Is Wrong? | The XX Committee

Great insight into the murky relationship between various government intelligence services and terrorist groups. This goes far beyond provision of weapons and money and includes founding and direction of some terrorist groups which act as covert arms of the intelligence service while providing the sponsoring state with “plausible deniability”.

…One happy by-product of the current American-led war on the Islamic State is that some people are now more willing to state that Iran does in fact possess ties to various terrorist groups, among them AQ and the Islamic State. Yet it’s still a struggle to get many people to see what’s obvious here.

Part of this willful disbelief is due to simple ignorance. Most “terrorism experts,” and virtually all of them possessing academic credentials, have exactly zero personal interaction with operational counterterrorism; therefore they are ignorant of the fact that many intelligence services — and all of them in the Middle East — play a wide range of operational games with terrorist groups, AQ very much included, encompassing everything from placing agents inside terror cells to actually creating terrorist fronts like Tawhid-Salam…..

The appearance of the Islamic State as a major force in Iraq and Syria, with threats of terrorist attacks on the West, has concentrated minds again to a degree. But unwillingness to ask difficult questions persists in many quarters. Despite the fact that we have more than circumstantial evidence that the Islamic State is being manipulated by Syrian intelligence, and Iran’s too, these notions are dismissed out of hand by too many Westerners who study terrorism. Yet if we want to defeat the Islamic State, it would be wise to actually understand it. That Washington, DC, continues its bipartisan blocking of release of the full 9/11 Commission Report, which includes troubling details of Saudi misconduct regarding Al-Qa’ida, is not an encouraging sign.

Read more at What If Everything You Know About Terrorism Is Wrong? | The XX Committee.

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