Social media have played an essential role in the jihadists' operational strategy in Syria and Iraq, and beyond. Twitter in particular has been used to drive communications over other social media ...platforms. Twitter streams from the insurgency may give the illusion of authenticity, as a spontaneous activity of a generation accustomed to using their cell phones for self-publication, but to what extent is access and content controlled? Over a period of three months, from January through March 2014, information was collected from the Twitter accounts of 59 Western-origin fighters known to be in Syria. Using a snowball method, the 59 starter accounts were used to collect data about the most popular accounts in the network-at-large. Social network analysis on the data collated about Twitter users in the Western Syria-based fighters points to the controlling role played by feeder accounts belonging to terrorist organizations in the insurgency zone, and by Europe-based organizational accounts associated with the banned British organization, Al Muhajiroun, and in particular the London-based preacher, Anjem Choudary.
The voices in this book belong to parliamentarians, city councillors, doctors and engineers, a few professors, lawyers and social workers, owners of small businesses, translators, and community ...activists. They are also all Muslims, who have decided to become engaged in political and civic organisations. And for that reason, they constantly have to explain themselves, mostly in order to say who they are not. They are not fundamentalists, not terrorists, and most do not support the introduction of Islamic religious law in Europe—especially not its application to Christians. This book is about who these people are, and what they want. This book is based on three hundred interviews with European Muslim leaders from six European countries: Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Great Britain, France, and Germany. The question of Islam in Europe is not a matter of global war and peace but raises difficult questions about the positions of Christianity and Islam in public life, and about European identities. Europe's Muslim political leaders are not aiming to overthrow liberal democracy and to replace secular law with Islamic religious law. Those are the positions of a minority. There is not one Muslim position on how Islam should develop in Europe but many views, and most Muslims are rather looking for ways to build institutions that will allow European Muslims to practice their religion in a way that is compatible with social integration.
On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaperJyllands-Postenpublished twelve cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Five months later, thousands of Muslims inundated the newspaper with outpourings of anger ...and grief by phone, email, and fax; from Asia to Europe Muslims took to the streets in protest. This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the conflict that aroused impassioned debates around the world on freedom of expression, blasphemy, and the nature of modern Islam.
Jytte Klausen interviewed politicians in the Middle East, Muslim leaders in Europe, the Danish editors and cartoonists, and the Danish imam who started the controversy. Following the winding trail of protests across the world, she deconstructs the arguments and motives that drove the escalation of the increasingly globalized conflict. She concludes that the Muslim reaction to the cartoons was not-as was commonly assumed-a spontaneous emotional reaction arising out of the clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Rather it was orchestrated, first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilize governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria. Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding.
The research aimed to develop and test a new dynamic approach to preventive risk assessment of violent extremists. The well-known New York Police Department four-phase model was used as a starting ...point for the conceptualization of the radicalization process, and time-stamped biographical data collected from court documents and other public sources on American homegrown Salafi-jihadist terrorism offenders were used to test the model. Behavioral sequence patterns that reliably anticipate terrorist-related criminality were identified and the typical timelines for the pathways to criminal actions estimated for different demographic subgroups in the study sample. Finally, a probabilistic simulation model was used to assess the feasibility of the model to identify common high-frequency and high-risk sequential behavioral segment pairs in the offenders' pathways to terrorist criminality.
This article seeks to shed light on the ongoing debate about the extent of Al Qaeda's involvement in homegrown jihadist conspiracies in the West. Focusing on the London-based jihadist movement in the ...1998-2008 decade, the article uses network analysis to test the domestic and transnational integration of Western networks. The evidence stems from an extensive database of individuals involved in jihadist terrorist conspiracies in the West compiled by the authors. Results show that Al Qaeda developed a branch organization in the United Kingdom during that period. A sociogram of U.S.-based networks is indicative of a dispersed topography, and a comparison shows the British model may not be representative of Western networks overall.
After the Madrid and London train-bombings, perceptions of the sources of Islamic terrorism changed. The British response to domestic jihadism was to apply community-policing principles to ...counter-terrorism enforcement. This essay describes the origins and intentions of the community-based policing of terrorism and partnership programmes with Muslim faith organisations. Collaboration with Muslim partners has helped to build confidence within government agencies that Muslim leaders are keen to curb terrorism, but has failed to build trust among the general Muslim public. The application of community-policing principles is, it is argued, an effort to bridge steep trade-offs between effective prevention and the social and political integration of Britain's Muslims.
The large January 2015 demonstration in Paris after the attacks by Islamist extremists on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket makes it easier to accept the core argument of this book--that Danes, ...contrary to their reputation for Islamophobia, are pretty good arbitrators of the application of abstract principles about equity when it comes to judging what civil liberties to grant Muslims. The authors extrapolate their findings to a general argument about what they call "inclusive tolerance" based on a "tough love" covenant: Do as we do, and we are happy to include you. As the title of the book indicates, the study of the Danes has broader implications for how we understand European attitudes to the integration of Muslims.
Online extremists’ use of social media poses a new form of threat to the general public. These extremists range from cyberbullies to terrorist organizations. Social media providers often suspend the ...extremists’ accounts in response to user complaints. However, extremist users can simply create new accounts and continue their activities. In this work we present a new set of operational capabilities to address the threat posed by online extremists in social networks. We use thousands of Twitter accounts related to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to develop behavioral models for these users—in particular, what their accounts look like and with whom they connect. We use these models to track existing extremist users by identifying pairs of accounts belonging to the same user. We then present a model for efficiently searching the social network to find suspended users’ new accounts based on a variant of the classic Pólya’s urn setup. We find a simple characterization of the optimal search policy for this model under fairly general conditions. Our urn model and main theoretical results generalize easily to search problems in other fields.
The electronic companion is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2018.1719
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Objective. This study examines the age-crime relationship among terrorist offenders. Method. This study relies on a data set of over 600 American terrorism offenders inspired by one of three Islamist ...groups: Hamas, Hezbollah, or Al Qaeda. Results. We find that the pattern of violent Islamist crime in the United States departs from the standard age-crime curve in significant ways. Violent action among terrorist offenders peaks at a later age and occurs across a broader age range than is the case for ordinary violent crimes.
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