Entries Tagged 'al Qaeda' ↓

There’s a new meme in town: namely, that things are improving in Iraq and in the GWOT.

WaPo:

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Funny, but I just wrote about the fact that things seem to be looking up in Iraq! I guess others have noticed—but not the MSM, as Engram notes repeatedly in this post.

Of course Engram has been bird-dogging events in Iraq for a long time, creating graphs and explaining over and over in painstakingly that the reduction in casualties (both Iraqi and American) means that the tide is turning. Admirably and stubbornly, he has continued to make this unpopular case. How he ties it all together:

It seems that we may have already won this unwinnable war. In so doing, we have disconfirmed the world’s most dangerous theory. That theory, which was shared by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alike, was that America’s powerful military was not a force to be feared because the will of the American public could be easily broken with just a bit of bloodshed. That was the lesson these tyrants learned from Vietnam, and the actions of Barack Obama and Harry Reid seemed to confirm that 9/11 did not change anything. The lesson I have learned is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were, to my great surprise, mostly correct. As they thought, most Americans do not have the will to sustain a bloody fight. But I’ve also learned that if the president alone does show that resolve, then that’s all that matters. Now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been crushed, I suspect that they have learned this new lesson as well (well, bin Laden has).

As it turns out, it was al Qaeda, not America, that launched a misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Their great mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan was to think that even George Bush’s will could be broken once the will of the American people began to flag. It was a monumental error on their part. Now, they have lost in Iraq, and they destroyed their reputation throughout the Muslim world because of the strategy they used in their unsuccessful effort to evict American forces. That strategy was to slaughter other Muslims (Shiites) to break the will of the American people instead of directly taking on the U.S. military. It almost worked, but the gamble appears to have failed.

There’s more: because of Al Qaeda’s abhorrent massacres of Muslims, jihadism is losing favor among the world’s Muslims. Newsweek is the latest to report:

Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

As Peter Wehner notes, this jihadism-is-on-the-wane meme has been building recently:

CIA Director Michael Hayden gave a noteworthy interview to the Washington Post this week.

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership. …

…  Hayden’s assessment comes on the heels of important essays by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic arguing that the tide within the Islamic world is turning strongly against al Qaeda and jihadism.

Wisely, Wehner cautions against excessive optimism [e.a.]:

Progress, like setbacks, can be reversed. Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is surely right when he says “Al-Qaeda’s obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory. I agree that there has been progress. But we’re indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy.” And Hayden’s right to warn us that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training, and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents.

Indeed. This would be the “malign influence” that Iran casts over the entire region, according to Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress last week—a claim that was challenged by Sen Jim Webb, who apparently thinks we should go so easy on Iran that we should avoid using displeasing words like “malign. Petraeus disagreed [e.a.]:

WEBB: General Petraeus, there’s some language in response to questions that were submitted to you for the record that go to Iran that I would like to get some clarifcation or give you the opportunity to clarify. You use the word malign as an adjective, as someone who’s written nine books, I’m trying to struggle with how this fits in to what you’re saying here. You say ["]we will continue to expose you the extent of Iran’s malign activity in Iraq,” and then you say on the next page, “our efforts in regard to Iran must involve generating international cooperation and building consensus to counter malign Iranian influence,” and then you speak about its…”there are consequences for its illegitimate influence in the region.” Can you clarify for us…how are you using those words?
PETRAEUS: I can, Senator. What I’m talking about there I am characterizing that influence, it is malign and it is lethal and it is illegitimate. The arming, training, funding, and directing of militia extremists who have killed our soldiers…is very malign indeed it’s the same situation with what they’re doing…

But rather than get all caught up in Iran and other issues in the Middle East—Olmert’s extraordinary meltdown, anybody?—I’d like to reprint at length Peter Wehner’s conclusions about these extraordinary shifts in the geopolitics of the day, and the lesson we should all draw from them:

It’s worth recalling how widely the pendulum has swung in just the last two years. In 2005 and 2006, Iraq, it was said in many quarters, was lost; we either had to beat a hasty retreat or, as Joe Biden and Les Gelb counseled, we needed to separate Iraq into three largely autonomous regions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd). For a time the Biden-Gelb plan was the “hot” one among commentators — the “third way” between leaving Iraq precipitously and foolishly attempting to repair a hopelessly broken and divided society. In fact, we are now seeing precisely the reconciliation and progress that many analysts believed was impossible to achieve.

It was also said by many analysts that as a result of the President’s misguided policies, al Qaeda was growing more popular, terrorist recruitment was up, al Qaeda had been handed great gifts by the Bush administration, and that America was less safe than prior to 9/11. The conventional wisdom was that the “Bush legacy” would be that al Qaeda was much stronger and America was much weaker than before the Iraq war.

Today the pendulum is swinging very much the other way. The reality is that things are much better now then they were at the mid-point of this decade. The cautionary tale in all this may be that we need to resist the temptation to take a snapshot in time and assuming that those things will stay as they are. Two years ago there were reasons for deep concern — but there were not reasons, it turns out, for despair or hopelessness. Events are fluid and can be shaped by human action and human will. While commentators were busy writing obituaries on Iraq, Bush, in the face of gale-force political winds, changed strategies –and Petraeus and company took on the hard task of redeeming Iraq.

Recent events are reminders, too, that equanimity and the capacity for some degree of detachment are important qualities to possess–qualities which are often lacking among those of us who inhabit the world of politics and government and comment on events on a daily or weekly basis.

Indeed.

But detachment and equanimity are, of course, the opposite of what sells on television—which is why cable “news” is 24/7 hysteria.

The Flack passes along the news (from Newsweek) that al Qaeda’s main spokesman, Zawahiri, feeling burned by the media, is trying another tack—he’s now making himself available for long-distance interviews by journalists, via email questions submitted to al Qaeda’s media arm, As-Sahaab (The Cloud).

Newsweek rightly labels this a publicity tactic, and it’s a shrewd one, because it garners al Qaeda a different kind of global media attention from what they’re used to [e.a.]:

This is the first time Al Qaeda has made a formal call to journalists, although it will not be the first time the radical Islamic group has granted interviews to Western media. Counterterrorism experts believe that the posting is genuine and that it is part of Al Qaeda’s evolving tactics to use the Web as part of its propaganda arsenal. “This is a continuation of the efforts by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership to push themselves forward in the public viewpoint,” says Maj. Reid Sawyer, editor of “Terrorism and Counterterrorism” and a lecturer of terrorism studies at Columbia University

Zawahiri hopes to put himself on equal footing with world leaders by doing an “Al Qaeda Press Avail,” as the Flack calls it. As a PR pro, he’s calling bullshit on it [e.a.].

By feigning media access, the organization cultivates an image of civilized engagement among the unsuspecting masses, all the while perpetrating or planning unspeakable actions.

“Jarret Brachman, a former CIA analyst now in the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point describes this as playing to the YouTube generation. ‘It completely fits Al Qaeda’s communications strategy over the past two years, which is how to get people more invested in the movement.’”

And Zawahiri is not alone in gaming the court of public opinion by playing the “freedom of the press” card. A free media today seems more of a propaganda tool and less of a requirement to qualify as a modern society.

The Flack is certainly right to note that all kinds of international players are now gaming the court of public opinion. I wouldn’t characterize our free media as a propaganda tool, though, but rather as a rich propaganda outlet or channel-–one that the world’s most mischievous and/or bad actors (dictators and/or theocratic totalitarians) are very savvy about exploiting via PRopaganda^TM (PR-fueled “dramatic narratives”) because they are so savvy about actual propaganda in their own autocracies, dictatorships, and/or totalitarian theocracies.

Influencing public opinion is a black art in totalitarian societies and dictatorships. It is often subtle. (Even autocrats and theocrats find that it is much more effective to persuade the people to come around to their point of view than it is to have to police them and punish them all the time. Understandably, people get impatient and upset with that kind of violence and will try to revolt. So if you want to suppress them and keep them pacified, you have to be less obvious about your control over them, more refined, more convincing. Dictatorships that want to last need the silent consent of their people, so they spend an inordinate amount of time building theories and revisionist histories and other narratives that “justify” their existence. These narratives are constantly “streamed” through their societies—via textbooks, classrooms, party conference papers, academia, and of course the media, which is controlled by the state.)

Of course the world’s bad guys are going to have superlative media skills.

The Flack writes:

Think Putin, Ahmadinejad, Assad and all the other despots who’ve gutted their nation’s free media, without any real retribution.

Well, not quite. These men haven’t gutted their nations’ free media. What free media? Iran has no free media. Syria has no free media. Russia has only a nominally free media since Putin took power.

The absence of freedom (of the press, among other things) in these countries—and the (dictatorial, theocratic, autocratic, or totalitarian) mode of power their leaders hold over their people—is exactly the problem with them.

It’s important that American media organizations and media-related professionals understand how easy it is for them to be used as propaganda outlets by the world’s bad actors.

But if execs like CNN’s Jonathan Klein, for example, are any indication, our media conglomerates are so uninterested in the content of what they air (as long as it brings in plenty of dough) that they notoriously turn a blind eye to the beyond-the-news-cycle impact of glorifying, say, Vladimir Putin:

Platon for TIME

An Al Qaeda “theologian” has changed his mind about jihad, reports the New York Sun:

One of Al Qaeda’s senior theologians is calling on his followers to end their military jihad and saying the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a “catastrophe for all Muslims.”

In a serialized manifesto written from prison in Egypt, Sayyed Imam al-Sharif is blasting Osama bin Laden for deceiving the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and for insulting the Prophet Muhammad by comparing the September 11 attacks to the early raids of the Ansar warriors. The lapsed jihadist even calls for the formation of a special Islamic court to try Osama bin Laden and his old comrade Ayman al-Zawahri.

Andrew Sullivan links to this same article and advises his readers to “know hope.”

It seems like a big deal to me and hugely encouraging in the effort to expose and defang the credibility of al Qaeda among many Muslims. …

There are times when the best strategy is to give the Jihadists enough rope to hang themselves in the Arab-Muslim world. Know hope.

I must assume that Sullivan didn’t actually read the article to find out how this miraculous conversion of an Al Qaeda “theologian” came about—namely, through torture:

Last month, in a video produced by Al Qaeda’s production company, Mr. Zawahri said the latest recantations from his one time friend were the result of torture …

On Monday, an American intelligence official familiar with the interrogation of Mr. Sharif said that in 2004 the Al Qaeda cleric was tortured. “All I am saying is that screw drivers were involved,” this official, who asked to be anonymous, said.

n.b.: I am not supporting the use of torture. I am saying that Andrew Sullivan is incoherent on this subject.

Al Qaeda’s number 2 is complaining about the MSM [e.a.]:

Al-Zawahiri accused the global media of manipulating Osama bin Laden’s most recent recording, by omitting its most important parts and by misinterpreting bin Laden’s statements. Al-Zawahiri said that bin Laden’s criticism was not directed against the ISI alone, but against all jihad fighters in Iraq, and that the jihad had shattered the monopoly held by the government and media that pretended to be independent, such as the BBC, and that the jihad was today directing “the most important media battle against the Crusader-Zionist enemy” and exposing the world to facts to which it had not previously been exposed. He added that the jihad had triumphed in this ideological battle just as it had triumphed in the battle over the Internet websites.

Imagine that—the “global media” can’t even get Osama bin Laden’s message out. What’s the world coming to?

Well, Zawahiri will have to get in line behind everybody else who’s been maligned and misrepresented by the mendacious media.

Not having been subjected to his rule—and thus to the notorious spinning that came out of his office—I have the luxury of considering Tony Blair’s comments and arguments on their merits. He hasn’t moved an inch on Iraq:

In my view if it wasn’t clear that the whole nature of the way Saddam was dealing with this [WMD] issue had changed I was in favour of military action. And, I am afraid, in one sense it is worse than people think in so far as my position is concerned. I believed in it. I believed in it then, I believe in it now.” But did he feel remorse about a war and an occupation that left 4,000 Americans dead, 150 British dead, 75,000 Iraqis dead by the most conservative estimate and more than 3 million refugees?

“There’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t, or an acute sense of responsibility which I . . . will have for the rest of my life,” Blair said. “But I can’t say what I don’t believe about this; whatever it began as, it is part of this wider struggle today and . . . if there’s anything I regret. . . it is . . . not having laid out for people in a clearer way what I saw as the profound nature of this struggle and the fact that it was going to go on for a generation.”

And for once his conclusion was, very uncharacteristically, gloomy. “The enemy that we are fighting I am afraid has learnt . . . that our stomach for this fight is limited and I believe they think they can wait us out. Our determination has got to match theirs and our will has got to be stronger than theirs and at the moment I think it is probably not.”

Read the whole thing.

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

… to embrace Islam by OBL (who has taken to dyeing his beard):

“I invite you to embrace Islam,” bin Laden said, according to a transcript posted by ABC News on its website.

“It will also achieve your desire to stop the war as a consequence, because as soon as the warmongering owners of the major corporations realize that you have lost confidence in your democratic system and have begun to look for an alternative, and this alternative is Islam, they will run after you to please you and achieve what you want to steer you away from Islam,” he said.

This is one confused dude. It sounds like he’s been reading the comments at Daily Kos, HuffPo, and Comment is Free.

I first posted about BBC correspondent Alan Johnston in mid-March, when he was kidnapped in the streets of Gaza. I had expected his abduction to catch the attention of the MSM, since he was one of their own. Instead, except for many, prolonged protests held by Palestinian and British journalists, there has been a troubling silence. (You can follow all my posts about Johnston here. You can read a few posts about kidnapping as the terrorist tactic du jour here, here, and here.)
Until today. The group holding Johnston released a propaganda video:

He is wearing a red sweatshirt and reading out what appears to be Palestinian propaganda denouncing Israel and the Middle East policies of Britain and America. He appears calm and without any visible injuries.

His voice, familiar to many BBC listeners and viewers from his 16-year career with the corporation, is measured. He says he is “in Gaza”. …

During a three-minute speech, Mr Johnston accuses Britain and the US of causing suffering in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, and for “occupying Muslim lands against the will of the people in those places”.

He starts to give a message to his family but is cut off. Subtitles then appear on the video, saying: “The BBC refused to take this message to his family”.

Naturally, the family is relieved to have this sign of life from Johnston, although no one can say when the video was shot. But this isn’t anything like relief for the family—it’s extended agony:

Norman Kember, 76, a British peace campaigner held hostage for more than four months in Baghdad in 2005, said the video was designed to cause “maximum stress” to Mr Johnston’s family and the Government.

He drew comparisons between the orange suit he was given to wear during videos and Mr Johnston’s red sweatshirt. He said: “I think the idea was to show the parallel to Guantanamo Bay and put the maximum stress on the Government and relatives.”

The British government is well aware of that:

The video was condemned by the Foreign Office for the distress it caused the family and Tony Blair used a press conference at the end of his African tour to call for the kidnappers to release Mr Johnston, who passed his 45th birthday in captivity.

Also calling for the release of Johnston is Ismail Haniyeh, the Palestinian “prime minister” of Chaos and In-fighting.

“We are renewing our demands of the men, the abductors of the British journalist, to protect him and not to harm his life and to immediately release the journalist,” Haniyeh said after Friday prayers in Gaza City.

“This is an action that does not serve Islam, does not serve the Palestinian cause, and does not serve those who have abducted him.”

Johnston’s kidnappers would surely disagree. It serves them just fine as a recruitment tool for the wretched, dispirited youth of Gaza, who have been failed by two successive generations of their “leaders” (and failed, too, by two successive generations of Israelis, who have been unable to collectively rise above the massive hatred and violence engendered by their reclaiming the Jews’ ancestral homeland). These young men were once ripe for the picking by Hamas. Now that Hamas has also failed them, they’re ripe for the picking of by Qaeda.

You can read all about it here in the NYT. Read it and weep.

This recent wave of abductions of Westerners in the region began with the June 2006 kidnapping by Palestinians of the Israel soldier Gilad Shalit. (At the time, I held Hamas responsible for an act of war; now we know it was this shady Army of Islam group that was responsible, and that they’re not under Hamas’s, or Fatah’s, control—which is part of the problem in Gaza) It was followed a month later by the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah—they’re not Palestinians, they’re Lebanese, and this happened in a different region: in the north of Israel. Second Lebanon War followed in August.

And now I feel like I belong on the Daily Show. Still with me? Good.

Anyway: The same Palestinian group (the al Qaeda-inspired Army of Islam) that snatched the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit last June snatched the BBC correspondent Alan Johnston this March.

In between, there was the abduction and release (after a forced conversion to Islam) of two Fox journalists in August 2006.

I think you get the picture: there’s chaos in Gaza—so much chaos that Hamas begins to look moderate compared to the al Qaeda-inspired nihilist thugs doing these freelance operations, from kidnapping to setting fire to Internet cafes. And the prospect of anyone on the Palestinian side following a “road map” to peace with the Israelis is brought into relief as the deeply cynical and totally ludicrous political theater it is. What negotiated agreements could hold up under chaos, and when no one group among the Palestinians has the monopoly on the use of force?

Also: remember that there have been no Western journalists in Gaza since Johnston was abducted. The Palestinian journalists operating there must be under tremendous pressure and risk in this deeply uncertain political climate. Freedom of the press is the last thing that al Qaeda-type thinking tolerates. These journalists are very brave people, but we cannot know the extent of what is happening.

Keep your eye on this situation. It’s very dangerous indeed.

And spare a thought not just for Alan Johnston but also for the American hostages being held in Iran.

… to bring you a special announcement; Or, “Al Qaeda’s Hot Tips for How to Get on TV,”*** from the Washington Post:

Mohamad al-Janabi, a reputed al-Qaeda member in the nearby city of Salman Pak, said in a telephone interview that he was unable to contact his comrades in Mahmudiyah to determine whether they were responsible for the attack [in Iraq in which 5 Americans were killed and three were abducted].

But he added: “I can assure you that we will start pressuring Bush in a new way at the same time he is facing pressures from the Democrats and the American people. And there will be no problem to sacrifice 10 soldiers in order to abduct a single American soldier and get him on television screens begging for us to release him.”

Let’s bring the boys home—that’ll fix things right up. Right, guys? ‘Cause it’s all about the political process and the Iraqis  meeting benchmarks, and not at all about al Qaeda. As if. From The Times (London):

A RADICAL plan by Al-Qaeda to take over the Sunni heartland of Iraq and turn it into a militant Islamic state once American troops have withdrawn is causing alarm among US intelligence officials.

A power struggle has emerged between the self-styled Islamic State of Iraq, an organisation with ambitions to become a state which has been set up by Al-Qaeda, and more moderate Sunni groups. They are battling for the long-term control of central and western areas which they believe could break away from Kurdish and Shi’ite-dominated provinces once the coalition forces depart.

According to an analysis compiled by US intelligence agencies, the Islamic State has ambitions to create a terrorist enclave in the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, Salah al-Din, Nineveh and parts of Babil.

“Al-Qaeda are on the way to establish their first stronghold in the Middle East,” warned an American official. “If they succeed, it will be a catastrophe and an imminent danger to Saudi Arabia and Jordan.”

——————-

*** The first love of the nihilist terrorist thugs is blowing shit up.

Second-best is kidnapping people. They do it because they can hijack the attention of the worldwide audience with a storyline that sucks in everybody. We humans are narrative seekers. We thirst for stories, and given an abduction, we stay tuned to find out what happens next. Even to an all-too-real Reality TV show produced by nihilists.

I’ve directed you to this study about counterterrorism before; I’ll do it again:

While the Western media once covered every car bombing in Iraq, explosions which claim several dozen lives now seldom get more than a brief mention on television or a couple lines of newspaper print.

Kidnapping allows terrorists to bypass this dynamic. Hostage-taking extends media attention and allows reporters to humanize the victim. For journalists, an assassination or bombing is anti-climatic; the press only begins its coverage after the operation has ended. But uncertainty about whether a hostage remains alive creates the suspense necessary for a good story. Terrorists have repeatedly used videos of hostages pleading for their lives in order to seize headlines. The plight of freelance journalist Jill Carroll captivated audiences as each video is released and deadline passed.

There’s an argument to be made, of course, that our hearts have become so hardened that even hostage-taking has become old hat. Witness the lack of interest in the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, abducted nine weeks ago today. I’ve been folliowing the story since then, but often it feels like I’m the only one.

While everyone in Israel is angling for position now that Olmert has gotten a 0% popularity rating and Nasrallah is singing nyeh nyeh nyeh boo boo, I’m watching Gaza to see what’s going on among Israel’s putative partners for peace.

Here’s what’s going on: al Qaeda (or someone affliated with it, or involved in al Qaeda-type thinking) is pressuring Hamas, as evidenced by a Guardian story about abducted BBC journalist Alan Johnston. Apparently Haniyeh is in negotiations with Johnston’s kidnappers [e.a.]:

 The letters from Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh have sought to “clarify to these people [the kidnappers] that this issue doesn’t serve the interest of our people, and the Muslims,” said the aide, Ahmed Youssef. …

Youssef said the kidnappers had not demanded any ransom and suggested they were a militant Muslim group.

“Money is not the issue. The issue is an incorrect understanding of Islam, how to deal with foreigners in general, an incorrect understanding of Islam among some,” he said.

Youssef declined to discuss the kidnappers’ identities or ideology. “Any discussions about it will harm this issue,” he said.

 For what it’s worth, Abbas also released a quote:

“We know where the journalist is, and we want to preserve his life and we want to save him, and this needs time,” Abbas was quoted as saying by the official Wafa news agency.

They seem to be afraid to say anything more for fear that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers.

You’ll note that just a couple of days ago, al Qaeda was publicly provoking and goading Hamas. From a story published in the L.A. Times:

An Al Qaeda leader called on the Palestinian group Hamas to fight Israel with “bombs and fire.”

“Where is revenge, where are the bombs, where is the fire?” Abu Yahya al-Libi asked members of the military wing of Hamas in a video posted on a website used by Islamist militant groups.

Al Qaeda views Hamas as a moderate group that has compromised the rights of Palestinians for political gains.

A war of words between Hamas and al Qaeda has been going on for a while. Here’s one story from mid-March:

Hamas to al-Qaeda: Stop baseless accusations

 

Fury in Hamas after al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahri ‘eulogizes’ the movement, saying it has surrendered and betrayed its principles. Hamas: ‘We will not forsake a single grain of the sand of Palestine’

Here’s another story from mid-April:

‘Al-Qaeda operating in Gaza’

 

PA security officials say global jihad group targeting Palestinian leaders, secular Muslims

Al-Qaeda is operating in the Gaza Strip and previously attempted to assassinate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other top leaders from Abbas’ Fatah party, according to Palestinian security officials.

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda is operating with total impunity in Gaza, where there are currently no Western reporters?

Can it be any more obvious that al Qaeda took Johnston hostage as leverage against Hamas, which has been deemed to be not sufficiently Islamic to suit al Qaeda? that al Qaeda is now trying to hijack the Palestinian cause, for its own ends?

I last wrote about “al Qaeda-type thinking” in Gaza a few weeks ago. That phrase ran in both the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune on April 16.

No one has picked up on it since. Because they’re afraid that Johnston will be killed by his kidnappers. That’s how terrorism works: it’s extortion.

I’m sorry to be back to blogging. It was so much nicer to lose myself in the sights of downtown Manhattan for my impromptu photo project.

But no one else is writing about this—there’s a virtual news blackout—so it falls to me to document what I’ve been able to put together.