Showing results for "Violences" in War & Crisis

The Middle East today is characterized by an astonishingly bloody civil war in Syria, a highly racialized and militarized approach to the concept of a Jewish state in Israel and the Palestinian territories, an Iraqi state paralyzed by the emergence of class- and region-inflected sectarian identifications, a Lebanon teetering on the edge of collapse from the pressures of its huge numbers of refugees and its sect-bound political system, and the rise of a wide variety of Islamist paramilitary organizations seeking to operate outside all these states.

In the wake of the Paris, Beirut, and San Bernardino terrorist attacks, fears over "homegrown terrorism" have surfaced to a degree not seen since September 11, 2001 - especially following the news that all of the perpetrators in Paris were European citizens. A sought-after commentator in France and a widely respected international scholar of radical Islam, Farhad Khosrokhavar has spent years studying the path towards radicalization, focusing particularly on the key role of prisons.

In 2007, three Muslim university students left the Canadian Prairies, seemingly without a trace. In the ensuing months, their disappearance raised fears that the men had become "radicalized," posing a grave threat to national security. From presidential briefings and targeted drone assassinations to a politically charged trial, the men's story sheds new light not only on the figure of the "radical," but also on the "moderate" Muslim, represented by a community forever changed by the men's departure.

Despite over a hundred deadly acts by far-right militants since the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the far right's attempts to obstruct transfer of power to a duly elected president on January 6, the FBI continues to deprioritize investigations into white supremacist violence, instead targeting marginalized groups. Noting that the FBI does not even compile accurate national data on white supremacist violence, German also exposes the continuing tolerance of overt racism in law enforcement, and police membership in white supremacist organizations.