Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism
Professor Jessica Stern, Boston University and author of Terror in the Name of God Buy Watching Murder at Amazon
The aim of this report is to identify and critically scrutinise our understanding of terrorist radicalisation.
Norman Geras, who died 10 years ago today, was an unusual figure on the Western Left: he was a Marxist who steadfastly and unequivocally opposed militant Islamism and jihadi terrorism. As a free-thinking political theorist, he was as strident in his opposition to the abuses of Western imperial power as he was in his support for individual human rights, especially free speech. But he was also a formidable critic of the worst tendencies of his own side, often making him a pariah in that quarter.
It is hard to know exactly when it happened, but, at some point over the last three years, the word “jihad” vanished from the news. Did anyone notice? There was a time, not so long ago, when jihadists seemed to be everywhere, seizing territory abroad and sowing terror at home. We were even on first-name terms with them: “Jihadi John”, “Jihadi Jane”, “Jihadi Jack”.
In Christopher Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, the conservative writer and professional shit-stirrer argues that a malevolent woke ideology, promoted by misguided Left-wing activists, has taken over America’s core institutions, “effectuating a wholesale moral reversal” under the rule of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.
Former Rio Claro resident Emraan Ali has been sentenced to 20 years in prison in the US for his involvement with the ISIS terrorist group from 2015-2019.
In 1948, Sayyid Qutb went to America, where he stayed for almost two years. It was a formative experience for the devout, uptight, disgust-prone Egyptian, who is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Islamist ideology. To say that Qutb didn’t take to the place is an understatement: He thought it was soulless, materialistic, crass, haughty, and sexually permissive.
‘Stochastic terrorism’ has become a fashionable term in recent months. I first came across it in May after a midwit terrorism scholar used the expression in relation to the racially-motivated rampage shooting in Buffalo, New York, an attack which killed ten people.
There is something horribly seductive about the spectacle of extreme violence: it’s disgusting, gut-wrenching, appalling. It’s also impossibly compelling in its extremity and strangeness: just look at it.
I’ll never forget the moment I uncovered Umm Muthanna Al-Britannia’s real name. Back in early 2015, she was a brazen British propagandist and recruiter for the Islamic State. I’d been tracking her for months, almost marvelling at her shamelessness: she had posted pictures of herself brandishing an AK-47 on social media; she had justified the beheading of Western aid-workers; she had celebrated the 2015 Paris attacks; and she had scolded other Muslim women for not covering their faces (and eyes). She was terrifying, tormented and terrible. But who was she really?
Our national conversation on Shamima Begum, which ebbs and flows according to the imperatives of Begum’s legal team and a simultaneously cynical and naïve mass media, is saturated in bullshit. For her detractors, the 23-year-old East-London runaway is a danger to national security and must never be allowed back into the UK. For her supporters, she is a victim of grooming by terrorist recruiters and must be returned to Britain.
“He’s a truly spiritual person,” Fuad Abu Bakr told me. He was referring to his father, Yasin, the notorious Trinidadian militant who led the first and only Islamist insurrection ever attempted in a Western democracy. We were standing in front of the mosque his father built at 1 Murcarapo Road on the outskirts of Trinidad and Tobago’s capital city, Port of Spain.
On July 27, 1990, 114 self-styled jihadis tried to overthrow the government of Trinidad and Tobago.
It was the only Islamist coup ever attempted in a western democracy. Bernard Blache, who fought on the side
of the Muslimeen, recorded the events of 1990 in his prison diaries.
In the immediate aftermath of a mass atrocity, there’s an all-too-human urge to know who did it, how they did and why they did it. We loathe and fear the killer, but love the mystery and intrigue surrounding them.
'The Caribbean does not immediately come to mind when we think about ISIS and yet, in 2017, Trinidad and Tobago ranked first place in the list of western countries with the highest rates of foreign-fighter radicalization, with over 240 nationals travelling to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS caliphate. Simon Cottee investigates how ISIS came to gain such an unlikely, yet significant foothold in Trinidad.'
‘Easily the most original book on the ISIS phenomenon to date. A riveting detective story with deep insights on human behavior, this is social science at its best." --Thomas Hegghammer, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and the author of The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad (2020)
'ISIS and the Pornography of Violence' is a collection of iconoclastic essays on ISIS, spanning the four-year period from its ascendancy in late 2014 to its demise in early 2018. From a trenchant critique of the infantilisation of jihadists to a probing examination of the parallels between gonzo porn and ISIS beheading videos, the pieces collected in this volume challenge conventional ways of thinking about ISIS and the roots of its appeal. Simon Cottee's core argument is that Western ISIS recruits, far from being brainwashed or 'vulnerable' dupes, actively responded to the group's promise of redemptive violence and self-sacrifice to a total cause.
The Apostates is the first major study of apostasy from Islam in the western secular context. Drawing on life-history interviews with ex-Muslims from the UK and Canada, Simon Cottee explores how and with what consequences Muslims leave Islam and become irreligious.
‘Free people should be able to abandon their religion without being punished. Simon Cottee brings us the stories of British and Canadian ex-Muslims who live in the shadow of stigma and with the threat of ostracism. Wider society has ignored them, and the most disgraceful elements of the Left have denounced them, but here they can speak for themselves. Books are too often described as “important” or “original” when they are neither. The Apostates is both.’ — Nick Cohen, columnist and author of You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom
Christopher Hitchens—political journalist, cultural critic, public intellectual and self-described contrarian—is one of the most controversial and prolific writers of his generation. Whatever readers might think about Hitchens, he remains an intellectual force to be reckoned with. And there is no better place to encounter his current thinking than in this provocative volume.
“The controversial pundit dishes out and takes punishment in this anthology of rancorous essays by him and the leftist comrades he abandoned to embrace the invasion of Iraq. . . .There'’s red meat aplenty for pro- and anti-Hitchens readers.” - Publishers Weekly