Category Archives: Islamism

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has started an opt-out programme for Islamists trying to leave extremist groups.

Participants and their family or friends can now find help via email or telephone with the new “HATIF” service, which stands for Heraus Aus Terrorismus und Islamistischem Fanatismus, or “Leaving terrorism and Islamist fanaticism.”

“Hatif” is also the Arabic word for telephone.

“The main goal of HATIF is to prevent violence in the name of Islam,“ the intelligence agency the Verfassungsschutz said.

The service, offered in both Turkish and Arabic, will not try to lead people from the religion of Islam, but instead provide safe options for those hoping to extract themselves from extremist circles, the agency said.

Candidates and their families will receive help changing locations, seeking occupational qualifications and deflecting threats.

The report concludes:

Cllr Lutfur Rahman, the previous Labour leader of Tower Hamlets Council lost his job after he was directly linked to the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE) and Jamaat-e-Islam (JI) in Andrew Gilligan’s Dispatches programme.

He was subsequently struck off the Labour shortlist of candidates for the seat of directly elected Mayor of Tower Hamlets.

The JI-linked Rahman has now launched a “legal challenge” to the selection process . ‘Cutting your noses to spite your face’ is a euphemism that comes to mind in trying to understand this surprising decision by Lutfur Rahman. The legal complaint has sent the entire proceedings into chaos. Ted Jeory quotes a senior Labour member:

“Lutfur’s lot are trying to make out that this is some kind of grass roots uprising against the selection process. Don’t believe a word of it. Actually, it’s a group of businessmen looking for influence and they are promising to back any challenge with money. They’re also saying they’re dong this on behalf of the black and minority ethnic community. Again….wrong. This is about self-interest.”

Paul Berman is very good at getting under the skin of Islamism’s white liberal cognoscenti. His latest book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, has irked almost everyone in that esteemed group. Particularly those who would like to sell us the notion that Islamism is a force for good, or that Isaiah Berlin, and not Sayyid Qutb, is a precursor to Tariq Ramadan.

He also pulls the rug out from under Islamists who are working hard to dress up clerical fascism as a “liberal” antidote to western capitalism and US imperialism. In other words, Berman has a lot of detractors, but he knows how to deal with them.

And how. This came out originally in the WSJ. But you can get past the paywall and read Berman at GayandRight and here:

A book for any self-respecting Spittoon reader’s bedtime book list, I should think. And here’s a review from the THE:

How could jihadi violence break out in a country seen as the historical heartland of Islam and ruled by a state that boasts about its many Islamic credentials? Here, Thomas Hegghammer unpacks the paradox of jihadi militancy in an Islamic state.

The book is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, and draws on an impressive collection of biographies and written sources from al-Qaeda websites. Its 10 chapters trace the evolution of militant Islamism and its later containment by Saudi authorities.

Since 9/11, scholars and security specialists have searched for plausible explanations to account for jihadi militancy at local and global levels. Wahhabi radical theology, Western foreign policies, socio-economic deprivation, dictatorships in the Muslim world and, more recently, the rise of the internet, are often cited as causal factors. In a global world, it has become difficult to isolate local conditions from global contexts.

This is a guest post by Abu Wannabe Arab

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The global Islamist group Hizb ut Tahrir recently held an annual conference in Sydney Australia. The speakers at the conference, many of whom were British, spouted all the usual nonsense about western conspiracies and an Islamic state taking over the world. However, in the run up to the conference they produced a propaganda video that has to be seen for entertainment value alone. The video is followed by an interview with a truly clueless member of HT who does so badly that you end up feeling sorry for him. But putting the pathetic interview to one side, I want to look at some of the points raised in the propaganda video.

The HT members doing the talking mention how there is a new brand of ‘secular Islam’ being promoted by western governments, that encourages Muslims to adopt a ‘western reading of history’. I’m not sure what a ‘western reading of history’ is, it’s perhaps history without all the mad and baseless conspiracy theories that characterise Nabhani’s (HT’s founder) reading of history in which no reference or footnotes are supplied. I’m not sure a secular understanding of Islam is new either. I am quite certain that Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Abduh and Ali Abd al-Raziq were not western stooges nor were they recent. In fact, modern secularism owes much to the works of great Muslim scholars such as Ibn Rushd, Al-Farabi and others.