Analysis & Commentary
Self-Radicalization Chic
The president has described the Boston terrorists as “self-radicalized,” and his voice is but one in a great chorus insisting that we face a major threat from Americans gone bad...
Terrorism Research Has Not Stagnated
We are puzzled by Marc Sageman’s assertion that terrorism research is stagnant. We wholeheartedly agree that several issues regularly hinder progress. While both qualitative...
Radicalization and Political Violence
Rolling Stone has published a new article entitled “Everything You’ve Been Told About Radicalization is Wrong.” It is primarily an attack on the NYPD’s study Radicalization in the West...
State of the Union
FDD's Daveed Gartenstein-Ross joins a discussion on the roots of the Boston bombers radicalization.
Notes on the Tsarnaevs’ Radicalization
The investigation into the radicalization of the Boston Marathon bombing’s Tsarnaev brothers has only just begun. While the picture of the radicalization of the Tsarnaev...
Starting Point
FDD Chairman James Woolsey discusses the radicalization of the Boston bombers and the possibility that intelligence failures prevented their detection.
A Blind Spot
One area of study that has significantly grown over the past decade is that of radicalisation. How do individuals come to believe that violence is a proper response to current political problems or unjust...
Borum’s “Radicalization into Violent Extremism I”
The Journal of Strategic Security recently produced a special issue focusing on radicalization, which should be of immense interest for those of us studying the subject.
First the Ahmadi, Then Everybody Else
Their crime? These Muslims have the temerity to suggest that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, an Indian who died in 1908, was the promised Mahdi — the redeemer of Islam — and not one of the false prophets about whom Mohammed had warned.
Among the Believers
Nearly ten years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many politicians, diplomats, journalists and academics remain reluctant even to name America’s enemies. To take but one example: John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, has argued that America is only “at war...
Google Wants to Fight Extremism, But It Needs to Understand It First
While such motivations are undoubtedly a motivation for extreme behavior, forming a global program to combat radicalization requires some understanding of what you are combating.
The Morning Majority
Rep. King's radical Islam hearing and the latest on Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
In America, a Home-Grown Jihad
“In Europe and elsewhere,” says Daveed Gartenstein Ross, “the Islamist movement is rooted in wider conflicts between Muslim immigrants and the societies they live in. In the U.S., those conditions do not exist in the same way—study after study, after all, has shown that Muslims are...
Review: Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans
Schanzer and Moosa of Duke University and Kurzman of the University of North Carolina have garnered a fair amount of media attention for their study despite its complete methodological failure. Anti-Terror Lessons asks some good questions in assessing the level of radicalization among...
Success in the GWOT has Made Us Unsafe
This week’s radicalization hearings called by Congressman Peter King raise one obvious question: what is there left for Capital Hill and the American public to learn as we approach the tenth anniversary of the 2001? The simple answer is: a great deal.
Dissecting Radical Islam
It’s easy to understand the trepidation that some Muslim Americans express about the upcoming House hearings on Islamic radicalism in the United States. Such hearings are often theater, where legislators and their staff orchestrate tendentious inquiries into the gravest issues. And there...
The Dangerous Myth of ‘Homegrown’ Terrorists
If U.S. officials and the media can be believed, America faces an epidemic of “homegrown” terrorism. Yet from U.S. Army shooter Nidal Hasan to would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad to so-called Christmas tree bomber Mohamed Mohamud, all of these mass murderers or potential mass...
Prominent European Islamic Terrorist Renounces Extremism
57046656.jpgA key figure in one of Europe's most infamous Islamic extremist networks has written a public letter renouncing whole swathes of the ideology that led him to try to murder non-believers. On Saturday a Dutch newspaper published what Jason Walters, an imprisoned member of the...
New HSPI Report on Foreign Fighters
Yesterday I attended the launch event for a new report published by George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute. (Full disclosure: I am a 2010 Senior Fellow at HSPI.) The report, entitled Foreign Fighters: Trends, Trajectories & Conflict Zones, is co-authored by Frank...
The Homegrown Terror Threat
Homegrown terrorism has been much discussed on cable news channels and the op-ed pages of major newspapers in recent months. The attention is unsurprising. After all, 2009 saw more homegrown terrorist activity in the U.S. than any other year since the 9/11 attacks, and the phenomenon...
