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[ by Charles Cameron — headlines, McVeigh, mea culpa, Breivik, media, guessing games and blame, puns, great tweet ]
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That’s yesterday’s Charlotte Observer‘s headline and opening paras for an article they reposted from Slate, which had more cautiously titled it What’s on a Ku Klux Klan Membership Application?

We’ll come back to that headline later.

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Okay, seriously.

Educated guesses can prove wrong in retrospect. Educated guesses can lay considerable blame. Educated guesses can have pernicious side effects.

When a bomb ripped through the Federal building in Oklahoma City, many people’s first reaction — including my own — was that it was probably the work of Al-Qaida “Muslim terrorists”.

The media initially broadcast the “Islamist” theory of the bombing quite extensively, and one of the results, according to Penny Bender Fuchs in an American Journalism Review piece titled Jumping to Conclusions in Oklahoma City? was:

A Muslim woman who suffered a miscarriage in her Oklahoma City home said she was afraid to seek medical attention because a crowd of people was throwing stones at her house.

Two more clips from that article:

Within hours of the bombing, most network news reports featured comments from experts on Middle Eastern terrorism who said the blast was similar to the World Trade Center explosion two years earlier. Newspapers relied on many of those same experts and stressed the possibility of a Middle East connection.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, called it a “Beirut-style car bombing” in the first sentence of its story. The New York Post quoted Israeli terrorism experts in its opening paragraph, saying the explosion “mimicked three recent attacks on targets abroad.”

“We were, as usual, following the lead of public officials, assuming that public officials are telling us the truth,” says John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s magazine and author of a book on coverage of the Persian Gulf War. He believes the media overemphasized the possible Middle Eastern link and ignored domestic suspects because initially the police were not giving that angle much thought.

“Reporters can’t think without a cop telling them what to think,” MacArthur says. “If you are going to speculate wildly, why not say this is the anniversary of the Waco siege? Why isn’t that as plausible as bearded Arabs fleeing the scene?”

Most news organizations did mention other possible culprits. They noted the bombing took place on the second anniversary of the government raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, suggesting that homegrown terrorists might be responsible. But that angle was buried in most stories.

And:

Jim Lobe, bureau chief for Inter Press Service, says tying the bombing solely to the Middle East “was in a sense a comforting story for Americans.”

Inter Press, a small wire service for papers in the Third World and development agencies in Europe and Canada, was perhaps the first news outlet to raise the possibility that domestic paramilitary fanatics carried out the bombing.

“Of course the Middle East has to be considered,” Lobe says. “But when you considered the weight of all the evidence, it takes you a different direction.”

Lobe, who is familar with militia groups, says many news organizations failed to notice a big clue: traffic on the Internet detailing bomb recipes and talking about the need to avenge the government’s attack on the Branch Davidians. He says the bombing coverage offers “a major lesson for the profession.”

Will that lesson be heeded? MacArthur doesn’t think so. The media are doing a poor job covering Timothy McVeigh and the militia groups around the country, he says. “They are going to turn them into oddball crazies, caricaturing McVeigh as a trailer park terrorist, which is no better than the caricature of the Arabs.”

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Something similar happened in the immediate aftermath of the Oslo bombing, as this account from the media watch-dog group FAIR details:

On news of the first round of attacks–the bombs in Oslo–CNN’s Tom Lister (7/22/11) didn’t know who did it, but knew they were Muslims: “It could be a whole range of groups. But the point is that Al-Qaeda is not so much an organization now. It’s more a spirit for these people. It’s a mobilizing factor.” And he speculated confidently about their motives:

You’ve only got to look at the target–prime minister’s office, the headquarters of the major newspaper group next door. Why would that be relevant? Because the Norwegian newspapers republished the cartoons of Prophet Mohammad that caused such offense in the Muslim world…. That is an issue that still rankles amongst Islamist militants the world over.

CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank (7/22/11) took to the airwaves to declare that “Norway has been in Al-Qaeda’s crosshairs for quite some time.” He added that the bombing “bears all the hallmarks of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization at the moment,” before adding, almost as an afterthought, that “we don’t know at this point who was responsible.”

On Fox News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor (7/22/11), guest host Laura Ingraham declared, “Deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists.” Even after Norwegian authorities arrested Breivik, former Bush administration U.N. ambassador John Bolton was in disbelief. “There is a kind of political correctness that comes up when these tragic events occur,” he explained on Fox’s On the Record (7/22/11). “This kind of behavior is very un-Norwegian. The speculation that it is part of right-wing extremism, I think that has less of a foundation at this point than the concern that there’s a broader political threat here.”

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Peter Bergen, who wrote the book more than once on Bin Laden and his demise, recently discusses the topic, Right-wing extremist terrorism as deadly a threat as al Qaeda? for CNN — some key findings for perspective:

The word “terrorism” in the United States usually brings to mind plots linked in some way to al Qaeda, while the danger posed to the public by white supremacists, anti-abortion extremists and other right-wing militants is often overlooked.

Militants linked to al Qaeda or inspired by jihadist ideology have carried out four terrorist attacks in the United States since September 11, which have resulted in 17 deaths. Thirteen of them were in a shooting incident at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

By contrast, right-wing extremists have committed at least eight lethal terrorist attacks in the United States that have resulted in the deaths of nine people since 9/11, according to data compiled by the New America Foundation.

And if, after investigation, Sunday’s attack on the Sikh temple in Wisconsin is included in this count, the death toll from right-wing terrorism in the U.S. over the past decade rises to 15.

The shooting suspect, Wade Michael Page, posed with a Nazi flag on his Facebook page and has played a prominent role in “white power” music groups. The FBI is investigating the case as a “domestic terrorist-type incident.”

Here’s a link to the SPLC’s updated roster: Terror From the Right: Plots, Conspiracies and Racist Rampages Since Oklahoma City.

And there are no doubt other threats, some from potential left wing sources — and some from other half-crazed wingless entities who roam among us on two legs.

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I said we’d come back to that Charlotte Observer headline later. Here we are:

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That tweet from friend JM Berger — think about it, “veil” suggests “Muslim”, doesn’t it? — and “hood” means “KKK”? — that’s really quite a double-barreled pun — and, given the context, it makes so much more sense!

JM gets my Tweet of the Month award.

[ by Charles Cameron — my original SWJ post featuring my attempt at interpreting Nidal Hasan’s powerpoint slide show when it was first published, plus more recent links ]
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At Zen‘s suggestion, and since it’s no longer accessible on the revamped SWJ site, I’m posting here a link to my 2009 piece, The Hasan Slide Presentation: A Preliminary Commentary, as it originally appeared in .pdf in the Small Wars Journal.

My attempt then was to avoid, if possible, back-reading the facts of the Ft Hood shooting into the Hasan slide presentation — noting that at the time we lacked a clear sense of the verbal commentary with which Hasan had presented the slides.

Avoiding “projective hindsight” remains an interest of mine.

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More recently, I raised a related question about Maj. Hasan here on Zenpundit, and received first rate answers from:

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Lauren Morgan, Nidal Hasan’s “Fairly Benign” Correspondence with Anwar al Awlaki
JM Berger, The Content and Context of Anwar Awlaki’s emails with Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

with indirect follow-ups from:

emptywheel, It’s Not Just Whether Nidal Hasan’s Emails Stuck Out, It’s Whether Abdulmutallab’s Did, and
Bernard Finel, Was Ft. Hood (or Aurora) Preventable?

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I’m still in the relatively early throes of learning my new job at UrbIm, but hope to respond to these good folks once I’m a bit more settled in…

But I’ve noticed, I don’t always manage to get to everything… : (

[ by Charles “told you so” Cameron — Pew figures for Mahdist expectation, also the Second Coming, Israel, and the potential influence of apocalyptic ideation on foreign policy ]
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The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity, p. 65

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I am Qualit, not Quant by nature, really much more interested in the workings of the imagination that in the aggregates of poll responses, so it’s a bit like pulling teeth for me to report on a Pew report — but in this case I can legitimately say “I told you so”, which massively outweighs the reluctance I might otherwise feel…

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Recently, Pew has been including questions about the expectation of the Mahdi in some of its reports, and even Tim Furnish — who wrote the book on Mahdist movements and has long been saying we neglect them at our peril — even Tim was surprised at how widespread Mahdist expectation is, as reported in their just released The World’s Muslims: Unity and Diversity. In a post aptly titled Don’t Leave a Live (or Occulted) Mahdi Out of Your Calculations, Tim says the report contains “The most notable — indeed, strikingly important — news” in the form of “fascinating — and disturbing — data on belief in the Mahdi’s imminent (in one’s lifetime) return.”

See graphic above.

I recommend you read Tim’s analysis for the full range of his points — I won’t, for instance, be touching on what he says about Turkey — here I am going to select a couple of his key issues, and make just a point or two of my own.

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Furnish:

Of the 23 countries whose Muslim citizens were polled, nine have majorities which expect the Mahdi in their lifetimes, with the overall average percentage at 41.8% … it is safe to extrapolate this percentage to Islam as a whole; ergo, 42% of 1.6 billion = 672 million Muslims who believe in the Mahdi’s imminent return! This is FAR greater than I had supposed.

Furnish also notes that Iran, the world’s most intensely Shi’ite nation and the one whose President has been speaking openly of Mahdist expectation, is not even included among the 23 countries Pew sampled.

Simply put, we have been blind to a very real phenomenon, and now we have a statistical alarm call to wake us up.

More subtly: there’s a difference between answering yes to the question “do you expect the Coming of X in your lifetime” and being on the edge of your seat, viewing every week as threshhold. Damian Thompson is very good on this in his book, Waiting for the Antichrist, and Stephen O’Leary in Arguing the Apocalypse suggests there’s an optimal “arousal” period — if you believe the Coming is too far away, you won’t be motivated to prepare for it quite yet, and if it’s too close it may be too late for you to do much to spread the word…

So, Pew — next time, ask a question with the opinions “in the next five to ten years” and “in my lifetime” — okay? The distinction is important, and a shift towards the shorter time-span would be highly significant.

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Furnish again:

Despite the conventional wisdom (repeated even by Pew, in the face of their own data) that Mahdism is primarily the province of Shi`is, note that three of the four countries with the highest percentage expecting the Mahdi are majority-Sunni ones: Afghanistan (83%), Turkey (68%) and Tunisia (67%). This has ramifications, respectively, for: US policy in a country we are currently occupying; the only NATO Muslim-majority nation; and the vanguard state of the “Arab Spring.”

In his Conclusions, Furnish says:

The usual State/Defense departments’ “rational actor” approach to international relations might be quite simply irrelevant, if almost half the world’s Muslims expect the imminent return of their eschatological deliverer.

So there you have it. I discussed the “rational actor” versus Scott Atran‘s “devoted actor” in a recent post. And yes indeed, there are “ramifications for U.S. policy”…

Notably with regard to Afghanistan …

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Here’s Furnish again:

Afghanistan is so rife with Islamic messianism because the 80% of the population that is Sunni and the 20% that is Shi`i (albeit Sevener/Isma’ili, as well as Twelver) both are in the middle of a war and occupation by a “Christian” power — which tends to ratchet up such expectations …

And again, in his Conclusions:

Afghanistan is a lost cause: over eight in ten of its people expect the Mahdi in their lifetime, and no amount of roads and clinics and girls’ schools built by the infidels will change that.

I don’t want to argue that second point in detail, although I think there’s a great deal more to life that Mahdist expectation for many who would answer “yes” to Pew’s question about expecting the Mahdi in one’s lifetime — see my comment on Damian’s book above. But how can I put it? A background Mahdist expectation can become a passionate involvement in a Mahdist movement if the right trigger comes along.

But what I find most striking here is that Afghanistan should be the country with the strongest Mahdist current out of all those Pew selected. And I’m struck not because Afghanistan has been a battlefield for so much of recent history — indeed, for so much of its history, period. I am struck because, in Al-Qaida’s recruitment narrative, supported by a number of ahadith, Afghanistan as Khorasan is the very locus from which the Mahdi’s victorious army will sweep out to conquer (finally) Jerusalem. And this too I have been posting about, eg in my discussions of Ali Soufan‘s The Black Banners and Syed Saleem Shahzad‘s Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

So the highest level of Mahdist expectation also happens to be found in an area with a potentially major role to play in an end times scenario…

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There’s at least one earlier report in which Pew raised the question of Mahdist expectation — this time tied in with both the expectation of the Caliphate, and Christian hope of the Second Coming — their 2010 report Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Here, for instance, we learn:

Both Christians and Muslims believe they are living in a time that will undergo momentous religious events. For example, at least half of Christians in every country with large enough samples of Christians to analyze believe that Jesus will return to earth during their lifetime, including nearly seven-in-ten Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (69%).

And at least half of Muslims in 10 of the 15 countries with large enough Muslim populations to analyze say they believe that the caliphate, the golden era of Islamic rule, will be re-established in their lifetime; this belief is most common among respondents in Mozambique (69%). And in 12 of these 15 countries, roughly six-in-ten or more Muslims believe in the return of the Mahdi, the guided one who will initiate the final period before the day of resurrection and judgment, though the survey did not ask respondents whether they expect this to occur during their lifetime.

And here is the relevant data on sub-Saharan Mahdist belief. In Q51 of this poll, Muslims were asked whether they believe “in the return of the Mahdi, the guided one who will initiate the final period before the Day of Resurrection and Judgment? Here’s the table of responses:

Given the “religious fault line” of mixed conflict and amicable coexistence between Christians and Muslims running across Africa from (so to speak) Nigeria to Somalia, with Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab among the less delightful participants, keeping an eye out for signs of Mahdist “semiotic arousal” would be important here, too.

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And “semiotic arousal” — that reminds me. Richard Landes, who coined the term, has the definitive, encyclopedic book out about all the many forms of apocalyptic, and why they’re important: Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience Essential reading, if you ask me, on a hugely neglected and no less critically important subject.

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Finally, here’s yet another Pew graphic —

— to be viewed in conjunction with this one, illustrating the ways in which belief in the Second Coming of Christ correlate with opinions about scriptures and the State of Israel:

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Prophecy has impact, both on public opinion and on believing leaders. Jews with an expectation of the Messianic era, Christians expecting the soon Coming of Christ, and Muslims with Mahdist expectations each have their own apocalyptic scenarios, and in each case those scenarios exert some influence on policies relating to the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian situation in particular.

The bottom line?

Scriptural interpretation — and prophetic eschatology in particular — can no longer be assumed to be a quiet backwater topic for rabbinic students, seminarians and future mullahs to study, each in terms of their own tradition. It is now a series of conflicting drivers of current affairs — of war and peace.

[ by Charles Cameron — slaughters of Sikhs and Christians and questions of nomenclature: second addendum to my post responding to Scott Atran ]
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Scott Atran recently argued that it is imperative that we understand religions, and in my post Landmines in Paradise Garden I agreed, while differing with Atran on what kinds of people are best suited to the task.

Here I would like to offer a second addendum to that post of mine, this time inviting ZP’s readers to compare and contrast the two quotes above, and likewise the two tweets below:

using them as, in effect, verbal Rorschach blots — allowing each of us individually to see something of our own ways of comparing and contrasting the two situations, their respective contexts and the ways in which we feel they have been treated by the media — and the two ways of “accurately” describing the tragic event in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.

We can see religion — we can see politics — we can see our own — we can see the other — the possible views and manners of relating to these events are many and varied, but the untimely deaths remain.

It is imperative for us to begin to get a better understanding of religion, in all its shadows and its lights. A little discussion might help.

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Sources:

Shooting at the Wisconsin Gurudwara
Shooting at the Nigerian Church

Accuracy Org tweet
Chip Berlet tweet

For a chilling account of the Nigerian shooting, see this Christian Science Monitor piece (h/t Daveed Gartenstein-Ross)

[ by Charles Cameron — revisiting the question of Maj. Nidal Hasan ]
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... above: Daveed's tweet today, Awlaki's email from Intelwire

I was struck by one curious aspect to the question of what Maj. Nidal Hasan was up to at what point in his trajectory: the fact that as a psychiatrist, he was dealing with soldier patients returning from the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan who had doubts as to the religious legitimacy of killing fellow-Muslims in those wars.

On the face of it, that’s a topic a psychiatrist who didn’t feel himself expert in his religion (“am a novice at this and would like reassurance“) might wish to consult with clergy about, and the fact that “clergy” in this case was al-Awlaki shouldn’t be read back into the situation as confirming jihadist intent on Hasan’s part – Awlaki had been the imam of a Falls Church mosque where, according to one AP report:

Opinions varied on what kind of preacher al-Awlaki was when he served in Virginia. Most said they did not find him to be overtly political or radical.

As another report mentioned:

“Because the content of the communications was explainable by his research and nothing else derogatory was found, the [investigators] concluded that Major Hasan was not involved in terrorist activities or terrorist planning,” the FBI said in a statement issued days after the Ft. Hood shooting.

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I mentioned this issue of Hasan’s (potentially) legitimate professional concern for his patients in my commentary on Hasan’s slide show in Small Wars Journal, but I haven’t been following news reports closely and have no access in any case to what’s known in restricted intel circles — so my issue may already have been addressed with clarity somewhere “open source”, in which case I’d welcome a pointer or pointers, and closure.

In the meantime, I do feel a little like someone going for a rollercoaster ride on a Moebius strip: as I read it, the same evidence that reads prospectively as suggesting a concern to be able to counsel patients in distress reads retrospectively as suggesting the conflict is in Hasan’s own mind – and that he has in effect already resolved it and is turning to Awlaki as someone he is sure will confirm his intent.

I understand that many of Hasan’s colleagues were dismayed at the time of his slide-point lecture and discussed their concerns that he was an extremist – but then there are not a few who imagine Huma Abedin is a closet Sayyid Qutb on far more slender grounds. Hasan was clearly discussing a potential clash between Islamic and military duties, and his final slide was undoubtedly phrased to be provocative – but I still don’t know what his comments on it were, and how much different members of his audience may have read into it.

It still seems plausible to me that the way Hasan’s mind turned involved three separable “colorations” of a developing line of thought, the first of them benign, the last fatal – from a concern with his patients, via a concern regarding his own position as a Muslim and a soldier, to his identification with Awlaki’s position and decision to take action resulting in the Ft Hood massacre.

And as you know, mapping, gaming or simulating mental processes at the level of thoughts, persuasions and decisions is a matter of keen interest to me.

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My question — for Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, JM Berger and others who have a better sense of the timeline and documentation that I – is whether this remains a plausible understanding, or whether it has long been conclusively disproven by more recently available evidence.