Tag: war on terror

REFLECTIONS ON WOOLWICH

May 23, 2013 by Kenan Malik

1 It was a mad, barbarous attack, more akin to a particularly savage form of street violence than to a politically motivated act. What was striking about the incident was not just its depravity but the desire of the murderers for that depravity to be captured on film. This was narcissistic horror, an attempt to create a spectacle, enact a performance, and generate media frenzy. In that it succeeded. We should not provide the act with greater legitimacy by rationalizing […]

Categories: Britain, War on terror • Tags: britain, islam, islamism, terrorism, war on terror

REASONING ABOUT TERROR

May 2, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, has stirred up controversy with his claim, on Iran’s Press TV, that behind the Boston bombings lay anger about Western foreign policy and its attitudes to Islam: There was such ignorance in the Bush White House about Islam and about the history of so many disputes that exist in the Middle East. People get angry. They lash out. It’s the whole squalid intervention that has disfigured the record of the Western democracies. I […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: chechnya, islam, islamism, olivier roy, terrorism, usa, war on terror

ON NUANCE AND ITS BAGGAGE

October 10, 2012 by Kenan Malik

On Monday I chaired an illuminating discussion called ‘Inside the Mind of the Taliban’ with Alex Strick van Linschoten, Felix Kuehn and Jason Elliot. Strick van Linschoten and Kuehn, who until recently lived in Kandahar, have written a series of outstanding books on Afghanistan, including An Enemy We Created, which tells the story of how the American insistence that al Qaeda and the Taliban were in effect a single, unified enemy, and Washington’s view of the Taliban as just another […]

Categories: International • Tags: afghanistan, alex strick von lindschoeten, felix kuehn, jason elliot, relativism, taliban, universalism, war on terror

OUT OF BOUNDS

August 5, 2012 by Kenan Malik

As a coda to my previous post on abuse and how to deal with it, I am republishing this essay on changing notions of incitement that was first published in Index on Censorship in 2008. The essay was written in the context of the debate about the war on terror – it is an edited version of a talk I gave at an Index on Censorship conference on ‘Extremism and the Law: Free Speech in an Age of Terror’. It does not […]

Categories: Free Speech • Tags: free speech, hate speech, incitement laws, iqbal sacranie, liberties, lyrical terrorist, offence, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, terrorism, war on terror

ON THE POETRY OF THE TALIBAN

June 21, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Everything has gone from the world, The world has become empty again. Human animal. Humanity animality. Everything has gone from the world, I don’t see anything now. All that I see is My imagination. They don’t accept us as humans, They don’t accept us as animals either. And, as they would say, Humans have two dimensions. Humanity and animality, We are out of both of them today. So begins Samiullah Khalid Sahak’s poem Humanity. It is a poem about the […]

Categories: Culture & Books, War on terror • Tags: afghanistan, islam, islamism, jihadism, poetry, taliban, war on terror, war poetry

FAREWELL, FIRST AMENDMENT?

April 26, 2012 by Kenan Malik

in 2004, Tarek Mehanna traveled from America to Yemen with a friend. He claims he was searching out schools at which to study classical Islamic law. The US government insists that he was looking for a jihadi training camp. What all agree is that, even if he was looking for jihadis, he never found any. The US authorities accept that Mehanna never joined the jihadi groups he never found, nor ever funded any such groups. He did, however, on returning to the […]

Categories: Free Speech, War on terror • Tags: first amendment, free speech, jihadism, tarek mehanna, war on terror

TO RENDITION JUSTICE

February 15, 2012 by Kenan Malik

By next Monday William Hague and Phillip Hammond could be behind bars. In December, the Court of Appeal ruled that the foreign and defence secretaries had by February 20th to produce before the court a Pakistani rice merchant, Yunus Rahmatullah; if they did not, then the court would ‘be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ’. Hague and Hammond will not, of course, be sent down. But the Rahmatullah case does reveal, yet […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, barack obama, britain, guantanamo bay, liberal hypocrisy, liberties, rendition, usa, war on terror

AMERICA IS NOT BOTSWANA

January 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was charged this week with espionage for disclosing to journalists classified information about the capture and torture of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaeda member. Before Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, just three Americans had ever been prosecuted by their government for espionage for leaking stories to journalists. Kiriakou Is the sixth person to face such charges under Obama. In less than four years under Obama, in other words, twice as many people […]

Categories: Free Speech, Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: barack obama, free speech, liberties, rendition, usa, war on terror

THE TERRORISTS THAT ARE AND THE TERRORISTS THAT AREN’T

January 16, 2012 by Kenan Malik

When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When, apparently, he is ‘our’ terrorist. Last week Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a professor at Tehran’s technical university, and deputy director of commerce at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was blown up by a bomb attached to his car. He was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be killed in the past two years, part of what appears to be a concerted assassination campaign against people deemed key to Teheran’s nuclear ambitions. It is […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: britain, iran, israel, libya, rendition, terrorism, war on terror, western policy

MYTHS AND REALITIES OF 9/11

September 9, 2011 by Kenan Malik

A recent poll by the Pew Trust showed that virtually every American can remember where they were on the morning of 11 September 2001. Most recognize the profound changes that 9/11 has wrought to the nation. But America is divided down the middle on the question of whether the USA brought the attack upon itself. Forty-three percent of those polled thought that 9/11 was caused by US ‘wrongdoing’; 45% disagreed. Perhaps no set of statistics better expresses the confusions and ambiguities […]

Categories: International, War on terror • Tags: 7/7, 9/11, 9/11 commission, anders breivik, anti-imperialism, anti-terror laws, charles kurzman, clash of civilizations, culture of fear, ground zero mosque, guantanamo bay, identity politics, imperialism, islamism, islamophobia, jason burke, jihadism, liberties, mary beard, muslims, osama bin laden, phillip zelikow, stephen howe, tariq ali, terrorism, tzvetan todorov, usa, war on terror, western civilization, western policy

JASON BURKE ON ISLAMIC MILITANCY

August 23, 2011 by Kenan Malik

British journalist Jason Burke, one of the more perceptive writers on the issues of Islam, Islamism and the war on terror, has chosen five books on Islamic militancy for The Browser. And among the five is From Fatwa to Jihad. A snippet from his interview:

Categories: War on terror • Tags: british asians, british politics, From Fatwa to Jihad, identity politics, islamism, jason burke, jihadism, kenan malik's books, muslims, rushdie affair, terrorism, war on terror

THE TRAGIC IRONIES OF BREIVIK’S TERROR

July 30, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Three weeks ago London marked the sixth anniversary of the 7/7 tube bombings. Now Oslo will have its own heart-wrenching day of remembrance every year. Even for those who lived through 7/7 – not to mention countless other bombings, from IRA to neo-Nazi, that London has witnessed in the past few decades – there was still something viscerally shocking about Anders Breivik’s murderous rampage through Oslo and Utoya, the mindlessness of the massacre combined with its cold-eyed homicidal brutality. It […]

Categories: Multiculturalism, War on terror • Tags: 7/7, anders breivik, anti-terror laws, christianity, diversity, far right, identity politics, immigration, islamism, jihadism, liberties, multiculturalism, muslims, racism, terrorism, war on terror

INVASION OF PRIVACY WE SHOULD TRULY WORRY ABOUT

May 16, 2011 by Kenan Malik

Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, a seminal account of the CIA, extraordinary rendition and torture, has an interview in the New Yorker with Thomas Drake, a former senior executive at the National Security Agency who is about to be tried for violating the Espionage Act by leaking to a journalist secret documents about America’s covert surveillance of its own citizens. Drake, as Mayer puts it, is effectively being charged with being ‘an enemy of the state’. But it’s a state […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: anti-terror laws, cia, jane mayer, liberties, privacy, usa, war on terror

TORTURE WORKS? SO OPPOSE IT.

May 6, 2011 by Kenan Malik

There is a growing debate about whether the use of torture played a critical role in allowing America to obtain information about Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Stories in the New York Times, Time, Haaretz, AP and elsewhere have suggested that it may have. And this in turn has emboldened those who see the use of what is euphemistically called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as an essential tool in the war against terror. According to the AP report: The revelation that intelligence gleaned […]

Categories: Justice & Liberties, War on terror • Tags: ethics, jane mayer, liberties, osama bin laden, torture, usa, war on terror

BIN LADEN, THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE ARAB SPRING

May 2, 2011 by Kenan Malik

For much of this morning, as the media pored over the news of Osama bin Laden’s death, BBC newscasters seemed intent on asking one question to any US official they happened to be interviewing. ‘Are you not disturbed’, they wanted to know, ‘by the jubilation shown by the American public at bin Laden’s death?’ How else, one might wonder, did they expect Americans to respond to the death of the man who engineered the wanton slaughter of 9/11, and whom […]

Categories: War on terror • Tags: al-qaeda, arab spring, islamism, jihadism, liberties, muslims, osama bin laden, war on terror