Author: Martin Kramer

It starts with the Jews

On By Martin Kramer

This past week, eleven years after the event, Argentina has accepted formal responsibility for failing to solve the 1994 bombing of the Jewish communal headquarters (AMIA) in Buenos Aires. In that attack, an explosives-laden vehicle (now known to have been driven by a Lebanese Shiite suicide bomber) brought down the entire building, killing 85 people. The investigation was a travesty of cover-up and corruption, and Argentina remains the only Western country not to have solved a major terrorist attack.

I wrote an article on the context of that attack in the October 1994 issue of Commentary, where I made this point:

There is now a great backwash of extreme fundamentalists into the West, the result of crackdowns in the Middle East and North Africa. They are gaining shelter, visas, and even political asylum. While some respect the laws of their host countries, some do not. There are fundamentalists who look upon the West as one more arena for the conduct of their jihad against Western governments, their own governments, Israel, and the Jews.

If they are to be stopped, Western governments will have to show an absolute determination to keep their ground free of the violence that characterizes conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. This can best be done by preventing the entry of more fundamentalist standard bearers; by regarding those already in the West as potentially violent; and by employing every legal means of surveillance against them.

This was before Al-Qaeda, before the spread of Islamist suicide attacks, before the collapse of the Oslo process. But a handful of analysts saw the omen in Argentina, and saw worse things coming. Alas, each government in the West has required an individual wake-up call in the form of an attack, and it’s taken a decade for all of North America and Europe to get it. At the time of the AMIA bombing, people thought it was the kind of thing fanatics did only to Jews. That’s what people thought in 1933, too.

Inspector Cole on London assignment

On By Martin Kramer

One of my missions is to save readers of Juan Cole’s weblog from his errors. (This has the potential of becoming a full-time job.) The latest one comes in today’s posting about Shehzad Tanweer, 22, one of the British-born suicide bombers from Leeds. Cole first announces that his investigation is in full swing: “I have been trying to trace the influences on and organizational contacts of the July 7 bombers in London.” This intensive Ann Arbor-based Google sleuthing produces the following:

His family is originally from a Punjabi village near Faisalabad, Kottan (Chak number 477). When he first visited his ancestral village with his father in 2002, aged 18 or 19, Tanweer was working with Tablighi Jamaat. This organization is peaceful and devotes itself to recovering lapsed Muslims for a fundamentalist version of Islam. [Cole’s links–MK]

Cole then goes on to speculate that Tanweer probably was recruited by a leading member of Jaish-e Muhammad, which is connected with Al-Qaeda. Cole: “The evidence [!] I can find is that Tanweer’s passage into terrorism began with Jaish-e Muhammad and its allies, one of which is al-Qaeda.”

But what if Tanweer’s “passage” began even earlier, with the “peaceful” Tablighi Jamaat in London? In fact, no serious terror analyst today accepts Cole’s simple characterization of the Tablighi Jamaat, which is spread through Europe and America. Two full years ago, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the Tablighis: “A Muslim Missionary Group Draws New Scrutiny in U.S.” It offered this quote from the deputy chief of the FBI’s international terrorism section: “We have a significant presence of Tablighi Jamaat in the United States, and we have found that Al Qaeda used them for recruiting, now and in the past.” Six months back, the Middle East Quarterly ran an article assembling a mass of evidence on the involvement of Tablighi Jamaat activists and alumni in a stunning range of terrorist groups and operations. (Most famously, the Tablighi Jamaat looms large in the saga of John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban.”) According to the MEQ piece, “Tablighis preach a creed that is hardly distinguishable from the radical Wahhabi-Salafi jihadist ideology.”

So anyone intent on tracing the beginning of Tanweer’s “passage into terrorism” would have to begin with the Tablighi Jamaat–an organization with a pervasive presence right under our noses. What does Cole know about it? His link, on mentioning it, leads to… the thinnest possible Wikipedia entry! (I’ve just now added a reference to the MEQ article to that entry, but it will stand only until some Tablighi deletes it.)

So error compounds error in the Cole-mine. Two weeks ago, while Britain’s top forensics experts were just setting to work, Cole offered this: “Britain’s South Asian Muslim community is almost certainly not the origin of this attack.” In this latest posting, the professor again sends us to the wrong starting gate. The clueless Cole is the Inspector Clouseau of Middle Eastern studies.

Further reading: For deeper background, I recommend Marc Gaborieau’s incisive entry on the Tablighi Jamaat in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. The tone is one of ominous forboding. Gaborieau (Professor of Islamic studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) ends thus: the Tablighis’ secrecy “raises the question of the ultimate political motivation” of the movement. “It exercises considerable worldwide power, with its dynamic proselytising, which it conceives as a form of djihad enabling it to mobilise millions of persons on a global scale. It may be wondered whether one day it will reveal political ambitions which are for the time being disguised.”

Still more reading: Here’s another article (pdf) by Gaborieau, dating from 1999, available on-line (scroll to p. 21). The Tablighi Jamaat “aims to build on Muslim solidarity across borders, ignoring the nation-states,” and “it is closely linked with the Deobandi school, which has always been highly politicized and which currently backs the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.”

More reading: Here’s a report from earlier this year on the interest shown by the FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the activities of the Tablighis. According to a DIA report, extremists have infiltrated the movement, turning it into a cover. A former FBI agent who investigated the Tablighis offered this: “If al-Qaida needed a fresh set of bodies in order to pull an operation, one of the places that they would go to for that fresh set of bodies would be Tablighi Jamaat, whether it’s in the United States or not.”

Still more: Yoginder Sikand, author of a book on the Tablighi Jamaat, criticizes the notion that all Tablighis are potential terrorists. Yet even he is compelled to admit the organization’s role as an incubator of extremism:

One sympathizer writes that the TJ is silently preparing Muslims all over the world for a goal that he sees it as sharing with Islamist groups–to engage in the “lesser jihad” or physical warfare against the “enemies of Islam…if occasion arises and if the policy is changed….” Similarly, another TJ supporter writes that the TJ has been “merely laying the groundwork for a much greater mission,” which includes physical jihad, if necessary, and the struggle for the establishment of an Islamic polity. In both tabligh and jihad, he says, one can “perceive a congruence of aims and objectives,” both being “manifestations of the same impulse.”

And Sikand adds this, about actual connections:

Some Muslims associated with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which, like the TJ, has its roots in the Deobandi reformist tradition, see the TJ as playing a complimentary role….Reports speak of involvement in the work of the TJ of the militant Pakistan-based Islamist Harkat ul-Mujahidin [a listed terrorist group]. A spokesman of the latter claims that “[o]ur people are mostly impressed by the TJ. Most of our workers come from the TJ.”

Cole-or blind

On By Martin Kramer

I’ve promised to track Juan Cole’s deletions, and here’s a fine one. Yesterday he threw up a post with this title: “Israeli Brown Shirts Protest, Threaten Violence.” (He wrote this: “To the lexicon of brown shirts and black shirts of the European far right can now be added the phrase ‘Orange Shirts,’ the color favored by the pro-colonialism demonstrators.”)

A while later, he deleted “Israeli Brown Shirts” from the title of the post, and replaced it with “Israeli Orange Shirts.” (That also changed the url of the entry, so any links to it went dead.) As it happens, Feedster still shows the dead entry with the original title. This is how the entry looks now.

What can one say about the phrase “Israeli Brown Shirts” that tripped off Cole’s slippery keyboard? It belongs to a class of comparisons that crosses the line between criticism and hate speech. I’m glad he took it down. I’m astonished he put it up in the first place.