Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of the first uses of the word “terrorism” was by Thomas Jefferson in 1795, says Steven Johnson in Enemy of all Mankind . He used it in for what was happening in Paris several years after the French Revolution, the so called Reign of Terror. “Robespierre’s terror took the state’s legal monopoly on violence to devastating extremes.”   Today, the meaning of the term has flipped on one significant aspect: “(Modern terrorism) grants a disproportionate power to small bands of insurgents and shadow networks.” And who were the first practitioners in its modern form? Pirates! “Extreme violence carried out by non-state actors, creating disproportionate effects through media dissemination.”   Media dissemination? Yes, even back then, the tabloid culture had begun to flourish – across “pamphlets, newspapers, magazines and books”.   “Dead men tell no tales” – it’s the pirate mantra we’ve all heard. We associate it with ruthlessness. But pirates also took that sta...

The recent terror attack on the London tube made me wonder: how can the same Western capital be hit by terrorists over and over again, just in 2017? On the other hand, you don’t see Delhi or Mumbai getting hit (touchwood) with such ease, do you? Even when an attack does happen, security gets ramped up such that the next attack doesn’t happen for a long time. At least not in the same city. The same holds for Israel. How is it that India and Israel can protect their major cities while the Brits can’t seem to protect even their capital? I ran into a few examples of terrorist attacks that didn’t go through in India and Israel: 1)       Ashish Kulkarni wrote about the time a planned terrorist attack on IIM, Bangalore, timed to coincide with a seminar didn’t happen because the attacker “got caught in a traffic jam, and the seminar he was supposed to attack ended before he could get there”!! 2)      In the same article, Kulkarni says ...

And so we have yet another terrorist attack in France, this time in Nice. As Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi wrote : “This time, they chose to attack on Bastille Day, the very symbol of freedom, liberality and democracy, abhorred by the extremist Islamist outfits and their Salafist ideologues.” So will the reaction be any different this time? Of course not. It will be the usual meaningless statements of solidarity by world leaders, the changing of profile pics on Facebook to have French colors, and, what Sreemoy Talukdar points out : “The prevalent discourse around terrorism is rendered ineffective and ultimately useless by the mind-bending political correctness and an obdurate denial to link it to Islam.” And the best worst part of this denial? “Even when perpetrators repeatedly evoke their unflinching faith in the greatness of god during the very acts of violence — as, for instance, they did during the Charlie Hebdo attacks or the present tragedy in Nice — there is stout insisten...

I’ll start off by pointing out that I sympathize with the regular people who lost family and friends in the Brussels attacks. That said, I do not sympathize in the least with the European government policies that have led to this. Hillary Clinton once told Pakistan that if they kept snakes in their backyard, the snakes would eventually attack them. She could say the same thing to Europe today. Belgium has called out its military on the streets of Brussels, once in November and now again. But what other actions do you see that you’d expect from a country that appears to face a major threat? None whatsoever. Further, most jihadists are Belgian citizens; so constitutional protections apply to them! Thus, Belgium’s hands are tied severely even though it contributes more jihadists relative to its population than any other European country. It can’t do much even about the known returned jihadists, again because they are citizens. Notice how they could attack Brussels internatio...

Many ask if it is fair to ask Muslims to condemn the terrorist acts of ISIS. No, says Dalia Mogahed : “Condoning the killing of civilians is, to me, about the most monstrous thing you can to do. And to be suspected of doing something so monstrous, simply because of your faith, seems very unfair....(But when white, male Christians carry out terrorist attacks in the US) we don't suspect other people who share their faith and ethnicity of condoning them. We assume that these things outrage them just as much as they do anyone else. And we have to afford this same assumption of innocence to Muslims.” But every other terrorist doesn’t cite his religion as the reason for his act. Therein lies the difference. Do the likes of Mogahed really not get that?! Now that New York, London, Barcelona and Paris have joined the list of India and Israel as victims of terrorism, it’s harder for most people to pretend not to see the common denominator everywhere. If the “non-terrorist majority”...

Yesterday , I quoted extensively from Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the “religious roots of today’s era of terrorism ”. Today, he had a follow-up with many good points. He seems to feel that many flinch at the prospect of calling Islamic terrorism what it is because they fear the world may go Nazi on the Muslims. Actually a fear of the world going all George W. Bush on the Muslims is a more valid fear: “I think it’s perfectly possible to agree with that analysis of what is going on, while disagreeing on what to actually do about it. There’s this tendency to conflate a willingness to recognize some core illiberal parts of Islam as the problem with an invade-occupy-and-torture strategy of the last administration. But the two are easily separable. ” An all-military approach won’t work: it’s been tried and not only did it not work; it also added fuel to the terrorist recruiting fire. Reforming them from outside is not possible (how can the hated, lowly kafir point out anything to imp...

In Flirting with Disaster , Marc Gerstein wrote about the (short term) behavioral change due to terrorism and its consequence: “After 9/11, many people were terrified to fly, and they took to the roads instead…the shift of people from commercial airlines (which are extremely safe) to cars (which are less safe when measured on a comparable basis) meant that one thousand more people died in the three months after 9/11 than would have if people had travelled as they usually do.” It’s exactly this kind of behavioral change that Simon Phipps warned about more recently: “Terrorism isn’t just performing a terrifying act. It’s provoking society’s immune system into attacking itself, making its defence systems attack the values and people they are supposed to be defending.” During the recent Sony hack , and the related threats against airing the movie The Interview , David Carr wondered (he wrote this when Sony had yielded to the threats): “Now that cultural discourse has become ...