Tag: terror

Voters take note: Thu Nguyen openly defends Hamas

I realize that the title of this post sounds crazy. The idea that a member of the Worcester City Council is defending a terrorist organization that has vowed to wipe out the world’s Jews, an anti-Israel and anti-America organization aligned with Iran, and through them Moscow and Beijing, sounds positively unhinged. Still, facts are facts.

Further, Nguyen’s defense of Hamas did not come out of nowhere; it fits into an escalating pattern of extremism on the part of the city councilor.

Background

On October 17, Nguyen was one of only two city council members to vote against a resolution stating that Worcester would “condemn the recent barbaric and inhuman taking of hostages in Israel, including a number of American citizens, and prays for their immediate and safe release and return to their loved ones.”

Nguyen made a rambling statement before casting their vote against the resolution. While they made a token, sentence-long condemnation of the violence of Hamas, Nguyen repeated uncritically that organization’s propaganda, including that Israel was going to commit “genocide” against Palestinians and that the IDF, Israel’s military, had bombed a hospital, killing 500 people.

Even before Nguyen spoke, details had already emerged showing that it was extremely unlikely that Israel had bombed the medical facility. We now know, as the U.S. intelligence community has asserted with “high confidence,” that the explosion was due to a projectile misfired by the terrorist Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which had been aimed at Israel. While the “fog of war” was still heavy as the council meeting was ongoing, Nguyen doubled down on this false assertion the next day, October 18, the same day the president told the world Israel was not responsible.

The best-case scenario is that they are posting inflammatory rhetoric about something of which they are entirely ignorant. But Nguyen’s pattern of behavior suggests something more sinister.

Next fact.

As mentioned above, Nguyen stood in a public forum and accused Israel of “genocide.” No one who understands the definition of the term really believes that Israel is engaged in this crime against humanity, and we know that Nguyen had been made aware that this false accusation is an anti-Jewish blood libel. On October 16, Nguyen posted an image from a group called “Jewish Voice for Peace,” a non-Jewish organization (in fact, the founder of one of its chapters was a Muslim Palestinian-Jordanian also on the board of a group the U.S. government listed as a non-indicted co-conspirator with Hamas). According Anti-Defamation League, JVP is as an extremist group that uses antisemitic imagery and endangers Jews.

That day, I reached out to Nguyen via social media, as chronicled here, with a link to the ADL statement and, trying to appeal to Nguyen, said that using JVP as token “Jews” to advance such rhetoric was similar to using Candace Owens as the “voice of the Black community.’ It’s certain that Nguyen read the message, because they replied, saying glibly, “More like Angela Davis.” Nguyen therefore knew that they were spreading the views of an extremist organization engaged in antisemitism.

On Oct. 22 and 28, Nguyen published one-sided “free Palesitne” statements. The irony here is that as an excuse for voting against the resolution calling to free the hostages, Nguyen said “we need to grieve the death in both communities.” But Nguyen hasn’t done that: they spared only one throwaway, milquetoast line was given to the 1,400 innocent people who were slaughtered and raped by Hamas, and yet have written post after post on social media about Palestine and are urging people to a “free Palestine” demonstration, spreading Hamas propaganda and blood libel in the meanwhile.

Maybe the reader is asking, “Okay, the above evidence paints a picture of a person who is clearly anti-Israel and doesn’t care about the welfare of Jews, but can you really accuse Nguyen of supporting Hamas based on this?”

Thu Nguyen in support of Hamas

The answer is, of course, no. There are many different types of Israel-haters and antisemites; they don’t all support Hamas. But Nguyen cleared up any confusion we might have had on October 25.

On that day, Nguyen – the supposed defender of women’s rights – posted a defense of the organization whose members on October 7 raped girls so forcefully their pelvic bones were broken.

That’s right: a sitting Worcester city councilor told us via social media that the organization that slaughtered 1,400 people and kidnapped 200, including a six-month-old baby, is really not as bad as people think. Nguyen did this by linking to a video on Instagram showing hostages Hamas released saying that they had been treated well in captivity. The video concluded with a man insinuating that CNN had lied when the hostages said they “went through hell.”

Of course, the same hostage did say she went through hell. Being captured by a murderous group of thugs and brought to a foreign land isn’t pleasant. What Nguyen’s link failed to mention was that the husband of the former hostage is still locked in Gaza, dramatically limiting her ability to speak freely. And even if that weren’t the case, Stockholm Syndrome is extremely well known.

There is no possible reason imaginable that Nguyen would post this to their official campaign page except that they are sympathetic to the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization. And when I pointed this out on social media, they doubled down.

Instead of responding in a normal way – “I regret this terrible oversight, which certainly does not reflect my views,” etc. – Nguyen posted the following:

An aside

Let’s look at what Nguyen thinks, based on this statement. Even if they weren’t an antisemitic Hamas supporter, is this the kind of person who should represent us?

Someone who believes that constituents condemning their representative’s blood libel and support for Hamas on social media is a “stalkerish obsession”?

Someone who believes that, in a democratic system, when your representative comes out in support of terrorists – or, really, anything with which you disagree – you’re supposed to just “leave them alone”?

Someone who thinks “fearmongering” is the same as “look at what this person said”?

Someone who thinks criticizing a politician via social media is “intimidation”?

Anyway, I responded via X.

Nguyen still refuses to denounce Hamas

And Nguyen responded, almost incomprehensibly:

I responded that calling someone a “stalker” is slanderous, and Nguyen immediately removed that post and then blocked me on Facebook (which is not actually legal for municipal representatives to do on non-personal pages).

How can anyone believe Nguyen doesn’t sympathize with Hamas?

Thu Nguyen posted a link defending Hamas from accusations that they made the lives of the people they abducted hell. What other explanation could there be? Nguyen responded to criticism of their defense of the anti-Israeli, anti-American terrorist group that holds the people of Gaza captive by deflecting, by insulting one of their constituents. Why would they do this if they didn’t support Hamas? What possible reason could there be? There’s only one possible answer, unless we hear otherwise.

Thu Nguyen supports Hamas.

Islam and Terror?

The rise of Donald Trump to the presidency has raised, once again, the question of the relationship between Islam and terror. Unfortunately, the conversation in the United States, at least at the popular level, has tended to be highly clichéd.

Anyone who is able to look at the world and form cogent thoughts should be able to see that the planet’s billion or so Muslims are not inherently violent, at least not more so than other humans. The vast majority live in peace, very often with Christian or Jewish neighbors. Still, while “Islam is a religion of peace” is a nice thing to say, and is usually said by the well meaning, the statement falls short. First, there are clearly Muslims, even if a tiny minority, who don’t believe it. Who are non-believers like me to disagree with them? I don’t have any moral standing to say to these people, “You are not truly good Muslims.” My doing so would be akin to a rabbi showing up at a conservative Southern Baptist Church and telling the congregants that they’re bad Christians because they don’t follow the faith as laid down by the world’s billion Catholics.

All of the world’s large religions (and perhaps all of the world’s small cults) have blood on their hands: Indian Hindus, including the current prime minister of India, have had a hand in massacring Muslims, as have Burmese Buddhists; Japan’s Shinto faith helped to justify that nation’s atrocities in China and Korea; and Catholics packed shrapnel into pipe bombs to kill as many civilians as possible in London shopping malls, not to mention its thousands of years of pogroms against Jews. The list goes on, though each of these faiths also has its share of peacemakers and justice lovers as well. While all of them have a majority of faithful adherents who are good people, none has earned the moniker “religion of peace.”

Islam, just like other religions, has faithful members who, because of their religious beliefs, kill innocents. The reverse is true as well: like those of other faiths, Muslims have have given their lives to help others, Muslim or not. Still, the question arises: why does it seem that the majority of religious inspired violence involves a radical version of Islamism (political Islam, a relatively recent invention)? I would argue that there are two reasons, each of which only applies in certain parts of the world, and neither of which can be found in the Koran or the Hadiths.

The first reason involves sections of the Muslim world, most especially the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as well as parts of South Asia. There is true butchery carried out in these regions most of it committed by those professing to be Muslim. Famous examples are ISIL and al-Qaeda, but there are other groups as well: al Shabaab in and around Somalia, Boko Haram in Nigeria, etc. Looking at this section of the world – which represents a huge swath of humanity, as well as a sizable portion of the world’s Muslims – it becomes easy to see how it is that many observers would take from a superficial glance that Islam is the cause of the trouble. But these observers are mistaken; Islam isn’t a cause, but a confounding variable. A more rational answer comes when we step back from viewing Islam as the area’s common feature, and instead focus elsewhere. The more important unifying feature is the region’s lack of strong institutions, the most important of which is the state.

No area wrought by Islamist violence has a strong state. According to Max Weber’s widely accepted definition, a modern state is bureaucratic (meaning that its servants are selected based on qualifications, not familial relationships), and it maintains a monopoly of legitimate violence. All violence should flow from the state for reasons accepted as legitimate, e.g. stopping criminals or defending from foreign invaders; any other should be met with strong sanction. But as Samuel Huntington illustrated in his Political Order in Changing Societies, arguing against those who believe that economic development causes a society and its state to become more orderly and modern, the process of economic development before strong institutions have been introduced causes societies to become more and more disordered, i.e. it starts a process of political decay. Without a state that is able to really impose order and act as the sole arbiter of force, violence stays common and decentralized.

States did not simply spring into being; they arose out of war, as sociologist Charles Tilly noted first in his “War and State Making as Organized Crime”: before states existed, groups plundered and took territory; after they took the territory, they had to govern it; they “taxed” those they’d plundered in exchange for protection from others: the plunderers/governors plundered more land, and so on, until they eventually formed a standing army, and a modern state with bureaucratic institutions was born. (Note: this is an extremely vulgarized explanation of Tilly’s argument; I highly encourage you to read the full article, linked above.) The violence and plunder, then, is a sort of “default” in human history, or at least human history post-hunter-gatherer society, and much of the violence we are seeing in MENA and other areas without strong institutions is of the same variety that produced, quite by accident, the states that later democratized and became the modern Western democracies we now know. This is the process by which states rose in Europe. These “pristine” states were letter recreated through settler colonies in the Americas (especially North America). The rest of the world, however, was colonized before modern states could be built (or, was colonized after modern states had been built and had then collapsed, as in China). The “states” left after decolonization looked like pristine states – with capitals, parliaments, armies, and such – but they never gained the legitimacy (that is, the acceptance by the people they supposedly ruled over) that the European states had been able to build due to their centuries of development. Of course, there are exceptions. Due to historical factors too detailed to go into here, modern states with strong institutions have arisen in other places – South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, to name a few – but suffice it to say that these were exceptions that can be easily explained based on historical facts. And, of course, the former Communist states are in various levels of development.

ISIL is a perfect illustration of the problem: this group even call itself the Islamic State, and they’ve succeeded at building a proto-state in the regions that they have conquered. They use the progressively more extreme and perverted version of the faith to encourage their followers to ever more cruel, yet effective, ends. Social psychology’s group polarization theory offers some explanation for how ISIS has been able to become so extreme in its violence, far more explanation than can be found reading the Koran. Also adding to the mix is the fact that a portion of ISIS’s leadership is composed of ex-Baathists, ousted from Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion, which, due to de-Baathification, destroyed what little institutional stability there was in Iraq to begin with).

Thus, Islam isn’t the reason for the violence, but the mask placed over it as justification. Islam can, and certainly has been, quite comfortable with modernity. In his Being Arab, Samir Kassir, the former Lebanese Communist leader murdered by Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, made much of the fact that the Arab world, for centuries mostly Islamic, was a stronghold of modernity by the 1930s. Cairo was a hotbed of the women’s rights movement at that time, and was only behind Hollywood and Bollywood in film production. This changed in part with the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, long the most backward and fundamentalist of the Arab states. Using oil money, the Saudi kingdom exported their version of Islam, as Kassir noted, around the Arab world. The destruction of colonial institutions (often by the colonizers themselves); constant interference by the world’s two hegemons during the Cold War; the chaos of the Iraq War; and, eventually, even the Arab Spring led to the disintegration of what little institutions there were. (It is worth adding that, with the fall of the Soviet Union; the co-optation of “secularism” by highly repressive regimes in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere; and brutal repression from monarchical governments, the secular left movements were crushed or delegitimized as well, and could no longer provide a vehicle to channel violence and build institutions). Thus, when the inevitable violence began, it was draped in, and bolstered by, Islam, prevalent faith in the region.

Again: Islam has been able to deal well with modernity. Look to the majority Muslim sections of eastern Europe and you find relatively peaceful people. For 70 years, Muslims, Christians, and atheists lived at peace in Yugoslavia, and conflicts arose only when, as could be imagined, the federal state itself collapsed. Further, none of these conflicts were primarily religious; instead they were ethnic and national: Bosnian vs. Croatian vs. Serbian, for example. In Albania, probably a Muslim majority nation (though poll results are widely disparate), there has been no widespread terror or disturbances. The difference between Albania and MENA obviously isn’t religious; instead, the difference is the state. After the Communist regime was overthrown in 1989, the state was transformed, but not destroyed; the bureaucracy continued to function.

All of the explanation above answers the question of violence in Muslim sections of the developing world. But what of the terrorist attacks that have been happening in the West, so-called “homegrown terrorists”? Obviously, America has a strong bureaucracy, as do the European states that have experienced violence. While some incidents have been committed by refugees from areas experiencing violence, a phenomenon far more pronounced in Europe, many of the acts have been committed by those born in the U.S. or in EU states. The explanation for these terrorists is much simpler: they are misfits, social outcasts, who have become violent.

The western world has a long history of violent social outcasts, which we periodically forget. In the 1960s, young westerners joined groups like the Baader-Meinhoff clique (Red Brigade) or the Japanese Red Army or the Weathermen or the Communist Party USA/Provisional, which blew up a townhouse in Greenwich Village. These groups all committed terror, as did the Symbionese Liberation Army and a host of others. At that time, the menace that the West feared was communism, but the official Communist Parties (CPUSA, Japanese Communist Party, DKP, etc.) didn’t advocate a violent revolution, so the more outcast, prone to violence members of society joined or created groups that called themselves communist, but which practiced terror.

As the “communist” terror groups receded, we began to see lone wolf acts of violence. School shootings started in the 1980s, and the trend has continued, with the Newtown massacre of elementary school-aged children being one of the most horrific of the incidents. These instances, perpetuated generally by young males who were isolated from society and (since it came into being) on the internet are the milieu out of which American homegrown Islamist radicals emerge. The brothers who bombed the Boston marathon are not different than the friends who killed high school kids in Columbine. The latter were nihilists, and so were the former. They slapped the label of “Islamic radical,” now one of America’s worst fears, on themselves to seem even more outré, or to emphasize how much they hate the society they were isolated from. This is the case too with the Orlando massacre perpetrator and other “lone wolves.”

The West, and America especially, has a problem with isolated people who become violent, often after immersing themselves in negative, anti-social material. Years ago, it was an extreme variant of the communist movement; now it is an extreme variant of Islam, in short, anything that terrifies Americans. Now, thanks to ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other groupings, there is a whole world of nihilistic death-cult ideology for these people to immerse themselves in.

It is good for Muslims to stand up and speak out against violent acts committed in their name (everyone should speak out against violent acts committed in their name), and by and large they are doing this. When Muslims argue that Islam is a religion of peace, they are arguing for their, peaceful, interpretation of Islam over that of the fanatical sects, including the ideology of death perpetuated by ISIL and others of that ilk. The same is the case with Catholics and other Christians who argue that, for example, the Westborough Baptist Church members are not real Christians.

The real solution to these problems, however, are not uniform: in the West, in addition to punishing violent nihilists, we have to erode the isolation and conditions that lead some people to commit acts of terror, disrupt these people’s networks, online and off. Further, we have to somehow reverse the atomization of our society (as described in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone). Reversing atomization, though, will be harder and requires creativity. In other parts of the world, fighting and killing violent extremists is part of the solution, but only part. The other, harder, part is to build the institutions that can provide political order and monopolize violence.

These are gargantuan tasks, and they won’t be won in the battle of ideas. And they certainly won’t be ridiculous “Muslim bans.”

Image by Edward Muslak under a Creative Commons copyright.

Yesterday’s Terror: Are We Already Starting to Forget?

As I write this, the block where I used to work in Chelsea, New York City, is still an active crime scene, as investigators try to determine who is responsible for yesterday’s terrorist attack on Manhattan. What is most remarkable, however, is how unremarkable much of the public seems to find what happened.

For the record, I am calling yesterday’s attempt at carnage by a thankfully incompetent plotter a terrorist attack, even though Mayor DeBlasio and Hillary Clinton have not done so yet. While they are trying to be prudent, I have to agree with Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who noted that when someone detonates a bomb in New York City, there really is not much else one can label the action. What’s the reason for caution in calling what happened the proper and most descriptive name? If the perpetrators turn out not to be connected to ISIS or some other overseas Islamist entity, the bomber(s) is still a terrorist. It seems that some liberal Democrats have internalized the notion that terror is an Islamic thing, and, in their zeal not to appear Islamophobic, have shown internalized anti-Islam. They should work on that. Indeed, if the perpetrators were anarchists, it was terror. If they were black nationalists, it was terror. If they were 70s-style Maoists, it was terror. If they were supporters of Trump, it was terror. Maybe it was left-wing terror; maybe it was right-wing terror; maybe it was anti-gay terror. Maybe it was Islamist terror.

And the terrorists’ intent wasn’t confined only to 23rd Street, as we now know. A similar device that thankfully failed to detonate was found on 27th Street. The investigators have announced that the devices in Chelsea, as well as the bomb that exploded on the Jersey Shore yesterday, were made using old-fashioned flip phones, suggesting that all the bombs were made by the same group or person.

But let’s look at the whole of yesterday in context. The evening before, six people were shot in Philadelphia by a mad gunman, one of whom, a 25-year-old woman, died of her wounds. Then the bomb went off in New Jersey near a parade, then the Manhattan bombing happened. At just about the same time at a mall in Saint Cloud, Minn., a man dressed as a guard rambling about Allah went on a stabbing rampage, injuring at least eight people. (ISIS has claimed responsibility for that.)

An armed rampage, two bombings, and a stabbing spree. Philadelphia, Minnesota, and New York.

These horrific happenings mix the sorts of things that Americans used to actually notice together: lone gunmen, terrorists, deranged individuals. But already everything is returning to normal; Facebook feeds are back to talk of football games and whether Hillary’s brief coughing fit means she has tuberculosis.

More and more, it seems that there is a new normal, and it sprang upon us so quickly that no one noticed. Even five years ago, people would have been horrified for days by a bomb in NYC (anyone remember when some chemicals caused an explosion in Manhattan about ten years ago, creating ’round the clock coverage in the media for days? Or when the lights going off in much of the country due to poor planning by the utility providers stoked fear that al-Qaeda-induced Armageddon was upon America?) I have always been quick to point out that Americans are sometimes too fearful, and in many ways, we still are. But the new normal, in which people take little note of terror and violent rampages, does not at all bode well. It’s as if we are in a society that’s become numb. Is it worse for Americans to live in fear of the ongoing horrors that started with, perhaps, Columbine? Or is it worse that these things have become so common that people scarcely even take note?

Perhaps people’s seeming apathy is a defense mechanism. After all, the vast majority of the country wanted some slight gun control measures, which wouldn’t have even approached anything close to the level of restrictions in many states, enacted nationally. The president, the most powerful man in the world, pushed hard for these measures after Newtown’s violence. Perhaps when America mourned scores of dead schoolchildren and said, along with their president, “Never again!” only to find out that Congress’s reply was a tacit signal that “again” was far more acceptable than a few meager gun control measures, people decided to turn off their feelings. Or, perhaps, it was the fact that such an evil action, that surely has a complex tapestry of causes – access to guns; poor mental health care nationally; the failure of anyone to notice in advance that the madman was, in fact, mad; such poor security in the school itself despite multiple instances of school shootings; a general spiritual malaise in the national psyche, especially pronounced in the youth – was reduced to bickering about gun control and sloganeering.

Maybe, after Orlando, as it has become apparent that the vast security state the U.S. had built up is not enough to keep a club of young people dancing and enjoying life safe from a local terrorist, people decided it was best to check their feelings.

Add to this new normal the routinization of the type of hateful rhetoric spewed by the Trump campaign and his followers on the right, along with the growing anti-Americanism on the left, and the picture of America that emerges is of a nation on the verge of disintegration, or something far worse.

It might feel good to keep ourselves emotionally unconnected to what’s going on around us. It felt good through much of our history, until we found out – in 2001 – that America is not some isolated land safe from the horrors of the rest of the world. Perhaps it feels good now to believe that the violence we see on TV is so rare that we won’t be affected.

Trouble is brewing across the country. We should meet it face to face before it engulfs everything.