Greece continues to seek its partners around the world to help strengthen its defense on the one hand and to successfully oppose Turkey on the other. Last Thursday [October 29 – ed.], The Greek Foreign Minister held an in-depth and constructive conversation-analysis with his Indian counterpart on this topic.
An attack on Belgium was not a matter of “if” but “when,” experts and officials warned. And still, the tragic events of March 22 came as a shock to us all — the counter-terrorism community included. These were the first large-scale suicide bombings coordinated in our country.
If the children are added to about 400 adults – including militants detained in particular in the Syrian city of Hasaka – there are in total about 1,000 Europeans detained in the Iraqi-Syrian region.
Very few books have tackled the exploitation of Islam by political organizations to achieve wealth and power. As a result, those who ascribe to these ideologies and ways of life are rarely held accountable. However, Mohamed Said Al-Ashmawi’s book Political Islam scrutinizes the phenomenon of Political Islam and exposes the true motives of such organizations. It distinguishes between these groups and the true essence of Islam based on tawhid and its central value of mercy.
The concept of “no-go-zones” has been a hot topic in media discourse in recent years. Sensational claims have been made about the existence of exclusively Muslim neighborhoods where non-Muslims are not allowed to enter. For instance, in 2015, to emphasize the gravity of the situation, Fox News guest and “terrorism expert” Steve Emerson stated that the city of Birmingham in the UK is totally Muslim. The city is in fact only 22% Muslim. The statement led David Cameron to brand Emerson a complete idiot.
The residual threat posed by the banned terrorist group al-Muhajiroun (ALM) group is matched by the enduring public curiosity that it provokes. The symbiotic relationship between the threatening rhetoric that the group employs and the resulting fascination with its activities has played to the group’s strategy of courting attention and transmitting their ideology to a larger audience. For many years the media fed this preoccupation by promoting the provocative exploits of ALM and publishing interviews with its most prominent spokesman, the deceptively outlandish Anjem Choudary.
The Chechen War and the Diaspora
Chechen militants have gained notoriety thanks to their abilities on the battlefield. The two brutal wars in Chechnya produced a large set of hardcore and experienced extremist fighters.
A rift between the Muslim world and France is widening, as leaders and the public in Muslim countries respond to the October 2 speech of President Emmanuel Macron saying Islam was “in crisis” globally. The fallout deepened with renewed Macron support to show caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and anti-France demonstrations on Friday in several Muslim countries.
The murder of French school teacher Samuel Paty by an 18 year old Muslim boy of Russian origin has opened the Pandora’s Box all over. Few days’ later three people were killed in Nice, in France again. There were protests against France in few Muslim majority countries like Bangladesh and there was boycott of French goods in many of them.
