Islamist Wave 2015 - News & Discussion

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Fitz Friday 27 Feb 2015

Attackers in Bangladesh hack to death American blogger



Posted: Feb 27, 2015 7:49 AM MST Updated: Feb 27, 2015 7:57 AM MST

By JULHAS ALAM

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — A prominent Bangladeshi-American blogger known for speaking out against religious extremism was hacked to death as he walked through Bangladesh's capital with his wife, police said Friday.

The attack Thursday night on Avijit Roy, a Bangladesh-born U.S. citizen, occurred on a crowded sidewalk as he and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, were returning from a book fair at Dhaka University. Ahmed, who is also a blogger, was seriously injured. It was the latest in a series of attacks on secular writers in Bangladesh in recent years.

A previously unknown militant group, Ansar Bangla 7, claimed responsibility for the attack, Assistant Police Commissioner S.M. Shibly Noman told the Prothom Alo newspaper.

Roy "was the target because of his crime against Islam," the group said on Twitter.

Roy was a prominent voice against religious intolerance, and his family and friends say he had been threatened for his writings.

About 8:45 p.m. Thursday, a group of men ambushed the couple as they walked toward a roadside tea stall, with at least two of the attackers hitting them with meat cleavers, police Chief Sirajul Islam said. The attackers then ran away, disappearing into the crowds.

Two blood-stained cleavers were found after the attack, he said.

Islamic extremism has made few inroads in Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority nation of 160 million people, but there have been a series of similar attacks in recent years blamed on militants.

A divide has become increasingly visible between secular bloggers and conservative Islamic groups, often covertly connected with Islamist parties, with the secularists urging authorities to ban religion-based politics while the Islamists press for blasphemy laws to protect their faith.

Islam is Bangladesh's state religion but the country is governed by secular laws based on British common law, and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has repeatedly said she will not give in to religious extremism.

Roy had founded a popular Bengali-language blog, Mukto-mona, or Free Mind, which featured articles on scientific reasoning and religion.

The website has apparently been shut down since the attack, but Roy defended atheism in a January posting on Facebook, calling it "a rational concept to oppose any unscientific and irrational belief."

Anujit Roy, his younger brother, said Roy had returned to the country earlier this month from the U.S. and was planning to go back in March.

In 2013, another blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, who also spoke out against religious extremism, was killed by still-unidentified assailants near his Dhaka home. In 2004, Humayun Azad, a prominent writer and teacher at Dhaka University, was seriously injured in an attack when he was returning from the same book fair.

Baki Billah, a friend of Roy and a blogger, told Independent TV that Roy had been threatened earlier by people upset at his writing.

"He was a free thinker. He was a Hindu but he was not only a strong voice against Islamic fanatics but also equally against other religious fanatics," Billah said.

"We are saddened. We don't know what the government will do to find the killers. We want justice," he said.

Angocachi Tuesday 3 Mar 2015

The Economy of the Islamic State

ISIS has married its authoritarian governance with a remarkably successful war economy.

FSA and Islamist groups that controlled oil fields in eastern Syria, for example, did dedicate some of the revenue to run schools and supply electricity, telecommunications, water, food, and other services.

Some villages and towns saw a decline in such services because ISIS distributed oil revenue to other towns under its control in Syria and Iraq, establishing its own pan-territorial patronage system.

As a result, in oil-rich areas, warlordism—a side effect of strictly localized rebel governance— dropped steadily.

ISIS also forced municipality personnel to work, unlike previous groups that had allowed Syrian state employees to continue to re- ceive their salaries (mostly from the regime) while they sat at home and did nothing, no doubt with attendant kickbacks. “The streets are cleaner now; 70 percent of the employees were not working, even though they received salaries,” said a former media activist with the FSA from Deir Ezzor.

“They cancelled the customary day off on Saturday; they’re supposed to make Thursday the day off instead.” Regulations and price control are another area in which ISIS’s governance proved successful. It banned fishermen from using dynamite and electricity to catch fish.

It also prohibited residents in the Jazira from using the chaos of war to stake new land claims, principally in the Syrian desert, where they had tried to build new homes or establish businesses, much to the chagrin of their neighbors. ISIS also limited the profit margins on oil by-products, ice, flour, and other essential commodities.

Before ISIS controlled eastern Syria, an oil well produced around thirty thousand barrels per day, and each barrel sold for two thousand Syrian pounds—eleven dollars at the current exchange rate. Local families that worked in refineries would make two hundred liras (a little more than one dollar) on each barrel they refined primitively. After ISIS took over, a barrel of oil became cheaper because it fixed the price of a liter of oil at fifty pounds (thirty cents).

ISIS also banned families from setting up refineries close to residences under the threat of confiscation, a policy that led some families to quit the oil business altogether. Collectively, price control and regulations balanced the decline in resources and services.

Subsidies from Gulf countries, where many of those who live in ISIS-controlled areas work, also helped some families afford electricity-generating engines and oil by-products.

“Those in the Gulf who used to send once a month now send twice a month because they understand the situation,” said the former FSA media activist. “Also, there is no big difference in value. In 2010 a kilo of chicken was 190 pounds [$1] and is now 470 [$2.60].”

Oil was a major revenue generator for ISIS until the coalition air strikes began. Before that, ISIS was thought to have earned mil- lions of dollars a month from oil in Syria and Iraq—$1 to 2 million a day. The revenue dropped significantly after the air strikes. But oil smuggling to neighboring countries such as Turkey and Jordan, and to other areas in Syria and Iraq, still makes significant revenue for ISIS.

The sharp decline in oil production affected civilians more than it affected ISIS, which could still generate wealth from other sources, but it hampered ISIS’s ability to provide for the local communities, especially much-coveted materials such as gas cylinders. “I estimate that the impact of air strikes was 5 percent,” said the media activist, who still lives in Deir Ezzor. “They affected oil primarily. Food is plenty, and most of it comes from Turkey or Iraq. Borders are open; if you don’t like prices here, you go to Anbar. I see the situation as normal.”

ISIS’s oil market savvy has impressed and shocked many ob- servers, although Derek Harvey isn’t one of them. “I know for a fact that the Saddamists who were smuggling the oil in the ’90s, to evade UN sanctions, are now doing so for ISIS,” he said.

“People are saying that they’re selling it for thirty-five dollars a barrel. What we bombed recently is some of the local refineries. If you’re selling it at that price, it’s fifty to fifty-five dollars off the current market price. But here’s what happens: these middlemen are selling it, and there’s a kickback coming back in to ISIS’s senior leaders. They’re getting another twenty, twenty-five dollars a barrel in kickbacks, but that’s not on the books or being factored in by everybody. It’s going back into the kitty of financiers at the top of the pyramid. The ISIS fighters in Deir Ezzor would not be aware of that.”

Locals in eastern Syria had learned to survive on remittances from the Gulf and local economies even before the uprising.

High oil prices led many to rely less on agricultural products since the energy had to be spent pumping water from the Euphrates or Tigress rivers to their farmlands many miles away.

After the war started, cheaper oil revived the Syrian agribusiness—smuggling and livestock trade markets began booming again.

When ISIS seized control of the Jazira, people were already buying their own oil for irrigation and electricity and didn’t need to rely on subsidized services.

Germany’s foreign intelligence agency,the Bundesnachrichten– dienst (BND), has cautioned against “overblown” speculation about ISIS’s high oil revenue because there is a tendency to discount the massive overhead and spending inside its territories.

But, as per Harvey, ISIS pockets most of this revenue, as it sometimes taxes residents for services supplied by the regime, such as electricity and telecommunication. Unlike Islamist groups that operated regime-established facilities for the local communities gratis, ISIS has developed a surcharge economy to replenish its own coffers.

ISIS also makes millions from zakat (different forms of Islamic alms payable to the state). Zakat is extracted from annual savings or capital assets (2.5 percent), gold (on values exceeding $4,500), livestock (two heads out of 100 heads owned by a farmer), dates, crops (10 percent if irrigated by rain or a nearby stream or river, and 5 percent if irrigation costs money), and profits (2.5 percent).

ISIS also imposes annual taxes on non-Muslims living in its territories, especially Christians (4.25 grams of gold for the rich and half of that for moderate-income individuals). It makes money by stealing dressed up as civil penalties: it confiscates the properties of displaced or wanted individuals or as punishment for fighting ISIS.

This includes, of course, enormous stocks of weapons and ammunition as part of its community disarmament policies. While donations from foreign sponsors constitute a meager percentage of its treasury, deep-pocked individuals, whether foreign donors or members who have joined the group, still contribute to the group.

More significantly, ghanima (war spoils, which in ISIS’s definition encompasses robbery and theft) is one of the group’s largest and most valuable sources of income. ISIS seized millions of dollars worth of American and foreign military equipment after it forced three Iraqi divisions to flee in June 2014, and it has also seized large stockpiles of weapons as well as equipment, facilities, and cash from Syria’s regime and rebel groups.

Artifacts are also lucrative for ISIS—one man interviewed in Turkey said trade in artifacts grew during ISIS rule,with one of his cousins smuggling into Turkey golden statues and coins found in Mari ancient ruins, eleven kilometers away from Albu Kamal.



http://www.businessinsider.com/tafrikinomics-how-isis-funds-its-caliphate-2015-3#ixzz3TJqzTVAJ

Angocachi Tuesday 3 Mar 2015

Angocachi Tuesday 3 Mar 2015

Turkey is becoming more secular, not less

Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, Turkey’s “Islamization” has been a recurrent theme in the media. Over the past two years — during which time Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president and AKP leader, has combined increasingly authoritarian rule and an overtly Islamist narrative — this theme has become more common and assumed greater validity. It is often asked whether Turkey is turning into “another Iran,” and most commentators take it for granted that, at the very least, Turkey is becoming more “conservative.” Turkish academic Volkan Erit, a doctoral candidate focusing on the sociology of religion at Radboud University, in the Netherlands, emphatically argues otherwise.

In his new book, “Anxious Conservatives: The Turkey That Moves Away From Religion” ( Endiseli Muhafazakarlar: Dinden Uzaklaaan Turkiye ), Erit presents ample evidence suggesting that the power of religion is actually declining in Turkish society. To Erit, the “secularization of society” means the decline in the “impact of the individual's faith in the sacred on the actual conduct of life.” In this regard, he thinks Turkey is certainly on a secularization path. If the trend were toward Islamization, he argues, Turkey should have experienced the following:

• Increased religiosity among young generations than in older generations
  
  
• Decline in the visibility of homosexuality
  
  
• Decline in the rate of premarital flirtation
  
  
• Decline in the rated of premarital and extramarital sex
  
  
• Increase in the belief in supernatural beings
  
  
• Greater preference for dress that does not reveal body shapes
  
  
• Greater impact of the “sacred” on daily affairs

What one sees in Turkey, however, Erit says, is the opposite. As documented by a 2008 survey, “Turkish Family and Religion,” for example, 84% of parents believe that the younger generation is less religious. Homosexuality, along with all the other spectrums of the LBGT movement , is much more visible and acceptable than before, as shown by attendance at Istanbul's gay pride parade . Premarital and extramarital relationships are becoming common, as seen in the media and social media . In addition, fewer people are searching for healing through supernatural beings, such as the jinn, and almost all religious conservatives take advantage of modern medicine without hesitation. “Sexy dresses” are seen more often, even among headscarf-wearing young girls, who can be counted as “conservative” but who are quite different from their truly conservative mothers. These “chic hijabis” have their own fashions and style magazines, such as Ala , which basically feature a “Cosmopolitan”-like lifestyle with only a hint of Islam.

Erit’s book presents an abundance of such evidence for the secularization of Turkish society. This does not mean, however, that large segments of Turks are becoming atheists, he notes, although atheists are more vocal than ever. Rather, it means that religion is becoming more personal, relaxed and easygoing. Famous stand-up comedians are publicly poking fun at religion. For example, Cem Yilmaz tells jokes making light of the Islamic notions of heaven and hell and has not received any strong negative reactions. Hell, Yilmaz says, can only make one look “a bit more tanned.”

On television, the most popular theologians are the ones who do not threaten with imminent hellfire, but who offer comfort for distinctly modern tastes . When asked by a young girl whether putting up a poster of the musician Justin Bieber is “haram,” i.e., religiously forbidden, the televangelist Nihat Hatioglu jokingly gave his permission. Such popular theologians, Erit argues, “are not making people more religious. They are rather giving some peace of mind to those people who believe that they have moved away from religion in modern times … They carefully avoid giving answers that will force people to fundamentally alter their daily lives.”

That is precisely the reason why there are “anxious conservatives” in Turkey today. These are older generation Islamists who feel nervous about the more modern and diluted form of the faith that the young generation finds appealing. The reaction by Yeni Akit, one of the most hard-core newspapers in the Islamist camp, to a rock concert where headscarf-wearing female university students danced on the shoulders of their male friends was symbolic: “Have we struggled for years for this! What a shame!” The newspaper displayed the must-see photos below its lamenting headline.

What about the AKP and its increasingly overt Islamism, along with Erdogan’s self-declared objective of raising a “ pious generation ”? Erit does not deny the phenomenon and provides a long list of AKP policies and narratives that promote or impose “conservative” values. He also emphasizes that under the AKP, Turkey’s religious conservatives have become much more visible, powerful and ambitious. As a result, he says, the Turkish state is less “laic” (secular) than before, but an increasingly religious state and an increasingly religious society are two different things. The latter does not exist in Turkey. The society is secularizing not due to the AKP’s will, after all, but because of deeper dynamics, among them the influence of technology, urbanization and capitalism.

As a Turkey observer, I agree with most of Erit’s arguments and his overall assessment. I also believe that the AKP experience, including its dreams of re-Islamizing Turkey, is likely to be counterproductive and will serve to further accelerate secularization. Before the AKP, religion was untested, so the Islamists could persuasively argue that their incumbency would produce a more virtuous social order. Of note, the AKP’s precursor was called the Virtue Party. At the end of 13 years of Islamist rule, however, the result is an unimpressive tableau of corruption, nepotism, hubris and a bitter intra-Islamic ( AKP versus Gulen ) struggle. As Turkey’s top cleric, Mehmet Gormez , head of the Directorate of Religious Affairs, recently noted, the younger generation today can say, “If this is religion, then let’s not take it.” Thus, Turkey may well move further away from religion.


Erdogan's Istanbul

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/03/turkey-is-getting-more-secular.html#ixzz3TJxKX1Ot