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THE TRAGIC IRONIES OF BREIVIK’S TERROR
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...
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JASON BURKE ON ISLAMIC MILITANCY
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...
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MYTHS AND REALITIES OF 9/11
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...
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THE TERRORISTS THAT ARE AND THE TERRORISTS THAT AREN’T
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...
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AMERICA IS NOT BOTSWANA
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...
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TO RENDITION JUSTICE
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...
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ANDERS BREIVIK AND THE CULTURE OF DELUSION
‘We want to create a European version of al-Qaeda’, the ‘most successful revolutionary movement in the world’. So claimed Anders Behring Breivik at his trial in Oslo last week. In his sick, twisted,...
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FAREWELL, FIRST AMENDMENT?
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...
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ON THE POETRY OF THE TALIBAN
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....
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REASONING ABOUT TERROR
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...
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REFLECTIONS ON WOOLWICH
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...
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MYTHS OF RADICALISATION
How do we stop young Muslims becoming radicalized? That has been the question posed by many politicians, policy makers, analysts and journalists in the aftermath of the killing of Lee Rigby in Woolwich...
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THE MAKING OF A BRITISH JIHADI
As a follow-up to my earlier post on ‘Myths of radicalisation’, which questioned the conventional narrative about how some Muslims get drawn to jihadism, here is an extract from my book From Fatwa to...
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THE MONSTER THAT ISRAEL HELPED CREATE
There is a terrible irony in Israel’s current assault on Gaza. More than 200 Palestinians have died in an onslaught supposedly aimed at weakening Hamas and degrading its capacity to fire rockets into...
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RADICAL ISLAM, NIHILIST RAGE
My latest column for the New York Times is on radical Islam and about what acts such as the massacre of school children in Peshawar by the Taliban tell us about Islam and about radicalism. Here are the...
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RADICAL ISLAM AND THE RAGE AGAINST MODERNITY
This is the full version of the article on ‘Radical Islam, Nihilist Rage’ published last month in the New York Times. Faced with a horror such as the slaughter of 148 schoolchildren and staff by the...
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THE MAKING OF WANNABE JIHADIS IN THE WEST
This essay was published in the Observer, 1 March 2015, under the headline ‘The search for identity draws jihadis to the horrors of Isis’. First it was Shamima Begum, Amira Abase and Kadiza Sultana,...
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BRITAIN’S DANGEROUS TRIBALISM
From ‘Britain’s Dangerous New Tribalism’, my latest column for the International New York Times: This exodus to Syria has led non-Muslims to point an accusing finger at Muslim communities. Last month,...
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BEYOND THE CLICHES ABOUT RADICALISATION
Another week, another major speech about the threat of radical Islam and of jihadism, another set of policies to deal with the problem. On Monday, David Cameron gave his latest high profile speech...
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TRIBALISM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
This is the full version of the article I wrote for the New York Times last month reflecting on the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London (I cannot publish my New York Times articles in full...
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