on profiling

I normally blog about religion on Fridays, since religious studies is one of my fields of interest. In this case, though, I'm going to provide a link to a long conversation between atheist thinker Sam Harris and security expert Bruce Schneier. When it comes to national security, Harris is pro-profiling; his belief is that it's ridiculous for US airline security to waste its time "randomly" plucking, say, 80-year-old white grandmothers from the line for a pat-down (or four-year-old East Asian kids, for that matter) when the demographic from which suicide bombers come is known to all. Schneier rejects Harris's view and defends the current approach to airline security. Harris responds that the type of profiling he advocates is not based on a correlation between a certain demographic and terrorism, but is, rather, based on a causal relationship, in which religion is the basic cause. (See why I want to link to this exchange?) Specifically, Harris writes:

And I am not proposing a mere correlation between extremist Islam and suicidal terrorism. I am claiming that the relationship is causal. There are many ways to see this, and not too many ways to credibly deny it (though Robert Pape keeps at it by skewing his data with the Tamil Tigers).

The first sign of a religious cause comes from what the terrorists say of themselves: al Qaeda and its sympathizers have not been shy about discussing their motives in public. The second indication is what they say when they think no one is listening. As you know, we now have a trove of private communications among jihadists. The fine points of theology are never far from their thoughts and regularly constrain their actions. The 19 hijackers were under surveillance by German police for months before September 11, 2001 (read Perfect Soldiers). Islam was all that these men appeared to care about.

And we should recall how other people behave when subjected to military occupation or political abuse. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? They have the suicide part down, because they are now practicing a campaign of self-immolation—which, being the incendiary equivalent of a hunger strike, is about as far from suicide bombing as can be conceived. And where is that long list of Palestinian Christian suicide bombers you’ve been keeping in your desk? Now would be a good time to produce it. As you know, Palestinian Christians suffer the same Israeli occupation. How many have blown themselves up on a bus in Tel Aviv? One? Two? Where, for that matter, are the Pakistani, Iraqi, or Egyptian suicide bombers killing for the glory of Christ? These Christian communities are regularly attacked by suicidal jihadists—why don’t they respond with the same sort of violence? This is practically a science experiment: We’ve got the same people, speaking the same language, living in the same places, eating the same food—and one group forms a death cult of aspiring martyrs and the other does not.

I'm still going through the exchange. It's been a fascinating read thus far, and I encourage you to read the whole thing.


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tueur "djihadiste" cerné: qui est Mohamed Merah?exploration de l'homme et de sa mouvance

Extrait d'un article sur Mohamed Merah, le tueur de sept personnes (dont des militaires, un rabbin, et des écoliers juifs) à Montauban et à Toulouse, et sur "la mouvance djihadiste en France":

(REUTERS)

Le tueur de Toulouse et de Montauban, toujours cerné par le Raid ce mercredi, avait séjourné en Afghanistan et au Pakistan dans des camps d'entrainements djihadistes. L'Express revient sur les ramifications de la mouvance djihadiste en France.

Mohamed Merah, le présumé tueur de Toulouse et de Montauban, avait séjourné en Afghanistan et au Pakistan dans des camps d'entrainements djihadistes, selon le ministre de l'intérieur Claude Guéant. Ce Français d'origine algérienne dit "être un moudjahidine", et "appartenir à Al-Qaïda". Que sait-on de la mouvance djihadiste en France?

Mohamed Merah, le parcours d'un djihadiste

Ce que l'on sait jusqu'à présent de Mohamed Merah correspond au parcours type du djihadiste, selon Samir Amghar, auteur de Salafisme d'aujourd'hui. Mouvements sectaires en Occident. D'origine algérienne, donc véhiculant un certain contentieux historique avec la France. Comme lui, ces jeunes proviennent souvent de familles déstructurées (parents divorcés): ils choisissent une "famille d'adoption" qui leur offre une autorité retrouvée, explique le sociologue. Il ont souvent un contentieux à régler avec la société: Mohamed Merah, passé par la prison pour de petits faits de délinquance, aurait essayé de s'engager dans l'armée mais son dossier a été rejeté.

Il serait passé par des camps d'entrainement en Afghanistan et au Pakistan. Plusieurs cas similaires ont été de nombreuses fois décrits, comme ces deux "apprentis du djihad", en route pour l'Irak, dont L'Express dressait le portrait en 2007: "les deux hommes se rencontrent en 2002, dans une mosquée toulousaine. Très vite, ils se radicalisent et rejoignent une petite communauté de fidèles. Divers jeunes gens se retrouvent régulièrement au sein de ce groupe dirigé par un "gourou" d'origine syrienne".

Ce type de "jeune radicalisé, fait son stage dans un camp d'Al-Qaïda ou pas, mais en tous cas dans les zones tribales du Pakistan, entre en contact avec des gens d'Al-Qaïda et ce contact est maintenu" avec des groupes qui l'imprégnent de l'idée suivante:" 'le moment venu, passe à l'action' au nom des valeurs que nous t'avons inculqué ici", explique Jean-Pierre Filiu, professeur à l'Institut d'études politiques de Paris.

"Nous connaissons bien ce type de profil de jeunes délinquants qui se radicalisent. Ils peuvent entrer dans une forme de discours et d'action violente avec une cohérence toute relative. Ils se nourrissent d'un peu tout: la présence française en Afghanistan, au Sahel, le vote contre la burka... Dans les dix dernières années, plusieurs individus de ce genre ont été arrêtés", explique de son côté Louis Caprioli, ancien sous-directeur chargé de la lutte contre le terrorisme à la Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST), interrogé par FranceTV info. "Le suspect de Toulouse était fiché, repéré mais rien n'indiquait qu'il pouvait ainsi passer à l'acte, observe Louis Caprioli. Et c'est bien toute la difficulté dans le suivi de ces gens qui peuvent à tout moment devenir extrêmement dangereux".

Lisez le reste.


MISE A JOUR: Mohamed Merah est mort.


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Sam Harris on Islam and Western liberalism

From here:

The ferocious response to my discussion with [Joe] Rogan about the war on terror has, once again, caused me to worry about the future of liberalism. It is one thing to think that the war in Afghanistan has been an excruciating failure (which I believe), but it is another to think that we had no moral right to attack al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the first place. A significant percentage of liberals seem to hold the latter view, and consider President Obama to be nothing more than a neocon stooge and Islam to be an unfairly maligned religion of peace. I regularly hear from such people, and their beliefs genuinely trouble me. It doesn’t take many emails containing sentences like “The United States and Israel are the greatest terrorist states on earth” to make me feel that liberalism is simply doomed.

[...]

As I tried to make clear on Rogan’s podcast, we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist” groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far more incensed when a copy of the Qur’an gets defaced than when their own children are accidentally killed by our bombs—or intentionally murdered. I doubt there is a more ominous skewing of priorities to be found in this world.

Should people be free to draw cartoons of the Prophet? There must be at least 300 million Muslims spread over a hundred countries who think that a person should be put to death for doing so. (This is based on every poll assessing Muslim opinion I have seen over the past ten years.) Should Ayaan Hirsi Ali be killed for her apostasy? Millions of Muslim women would applaud her murder (to say nothing of Muslim men). These attitudes must change. The moral high ground here is clear, and we are standing on it.

Your thoughts?


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