Outside the court, at most twenty people could be counted as being there to support Höcke at some point during the morning. In their conversations, they complained that the procedure against Höcke was politically motivated. This had been Höcke’s message from the very beginning. Meanwhile, around 600 demonstrators had protested against the radical right politician earlier on the morning, before the start of the judicial process. There will be hearings until mid-May, but it is already clear that the most severe punishment for Höcke would be the payment of a fine. 

Höcke, who rivals Donald Trump in his mastery of self-victimization, failed to explain in his initial “X” post why he had to appear before a court in Halle. The AfD politician, who can be openly described as a fascist according to a German court, had to answer for his use, on at least two occasions, of the slogan “Alles für Deutschland” (Everything for Germany). The phrase was employed by the paramilitary National Socialist group SA (“Sturmabteilung”, or Storm Division). Using National Socialist slogans and symbols is a punishable crime in Germany. 

Höcke, a former history teacher, promised he did not know the origins of the slogan. His repeated use of expressions with strong National Socialist connotations, such as “entartet” (degenerate) or “Volkstod” (death of the nation) in public speeches and his 2018 book, belie this claim. Furthermore, the German sociologist Andreas Kemper has long established that there are striking parallels between Höcke’s public statements and different articles that appeared under the pseudonym Landolf Ladig in neo-Nazi publications more than a decade ago. One of these articles argued that Germany had been forced into a “preventive war” in 1939. 

The lack of open support for Höcke in front of the court in Halle was all the more embarrassing because the radical right politician had been given an incredibly powerful loudspeaker by Elon Musk, the billionaire and owner of Twitter/ “X”  since October 2022. Musk reacted to Höcke’s “X” post denouncing what in his eyes was a restriction on freedom of speech and asked him, “What did you say?”. After Höcke explained he had said “Everything for Germany”, Musk asked why the phrase was illegal. “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi, as Germany has legal texts in its criminal code not found in any other democracy,” replied Höcke. He forgot to add that no other democracy is the successor state of a regime that killed 6 million Jewish people and set the European continent on fire, with up to 20 million deaths in six years in Europe alone. 

Al Jazeera English Video: “German far-right politician on trial for alleged use of banned Nazi slogan”

Höcke has made abundantly clear in public statements how he understands Germany’s National Socialist past. He has referred to the monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin as a “monument of shame” and said that history is not black-and-white when asked to comment about Nazism. Elon Musk’s apparent support for Höcke should not come as a surprise given their shared antisemitic and Islamophobic views. The South African businessman has launched antisemitic tropes against Hungarian-American billionaire and philanthropist George Soros. According to Musk, Soros “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization. Soros hates humanity.” The AfD, like so many other far-right movements around the world, has also targeted Soros. Furthermore, Musk recently espoused the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish communities push “hatred against Whites.” Musk’s Islamophobia does certainly not lag behind. The “X” owner agreed with a far-right blogger who said France has been conquered by Islam. Again, Musk’s Islamophobia is a perfect fit for the AfD. The party was accurately described as having “a manifestly anti-Muslim program” by an independent commission established after a right-wing terrorist killed nine people, who had originally come as migrants, in Hanau in February 2020. 

Musk and the AfD have supported each other in the past. In September 2023, the billionaire criticized the German government’s funding of NGOs rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean and called people to vote for the AfD. Three months later, the co-leader of the AfD, Alice Weidel, said Musk’s takeover of Twitter was good for “freedom of opinion in Germany.” One of the deputy leaders of the AfD group in the German parliament, Beatrix von Storch, has supported Musk in his ongoing confrontation with the Brazilian Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The judge is demanding that “X” close accounts spreading fake news in Brazil. Since then, Musk has become a hero for the Brazilian far-right backing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. 

The mutual sympathies between Musk and German-speaking far-right radicals also extend to the Austrian political scene. According to Harald Vilimsky, a member of the European Parliament for the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Musk’s overtake of Twitter represented an end to censorship. The FPÖ, founded in 1955, has a far longer history than the AfD, established in 2013. Their political programs, however, defend similar far-right positions and both parties are members of the Identity and Democracy Party group in the European Parliament, one of the two far-right groups at the European level.

Meanwhile, in March 2024, Martin Sellner, the leader of the radical right group Identitarian Movement in Austria, was interrupted by the local police while delivering one of his racist speeches in the small Swiss municipality of Tegerfelden, close to Germany. When Sellner posted about the police action against him, Musk replied by asking whether this was legal. Sellner, taking a page from Höcke’s self-victimization, said that “challenging illegal immigration is becoming increasingly riskier than immigrating illegally.” The local police were simply enforcing a legal provision that allows them to force people out of the region if they “behave in a prohibited manner.” Sadly enough, Sellner is used to spreading his racist propaganda with impunity.

Martin Sellner and the Identitarian Movement’s hatred against migrants knows no limits. This transnational group of radicals hired a ship in 2017 to prevent NGOs in the Mediterranean from assisting boats in distress. Once they ran into technical problems, the Identitarians were helped by Sea Eye, a German NGO that normally rescues migrants instead of radical racists. The Identitarians have directly benefited from Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. After Musk bought the company, Sellner’s account on the social platform, and also that of his Identitarian Movement, were reinstated. Twitter had blocked the accounts in 2020 as they violated the rules to prevent the promotion of terrorism and violent extremism that the social platform had in place back then. In his first post after his Twitter account was reinstated, Sellner explicitly thanked Musk for “making the platform more open again.” Sellner was denied entry to the United States in 2019 because he had a $1,700 donation from the right-wing terrorist who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, also in 2019. 

In January 2024, the independent German investigative platform Correctiv reported that Sellner had presented his proposals for the deportation of millions of migrants with foreign citizenship and Germans with a migration background in a secret meeting in November 2023. The encounter in Potsdam, organized by two German businessmen, counted with the participation of Roland Hartwig (who at the time was the personal aide of the AfD co-leader Alice Weidel) and Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD parliamentary leader in Saxony-Anhalt. Some members of the “Werteunion” (Values Union), an ultra-conservative group within the center-right CDU, were also in attendance. The findings by Correctiv finally led the CDU to cut its ties to the “Werteunion”. 

The lack of open displays of support for Höcke in Halle last week was comforting. Even more positive were the mass protests against the far-right politician and the AfD in front of the court. However, recent polls in both Germany and Austria are reason for great concern. The AfD would currently receive around 18% of the votes and finish second in an election to the German parliament. Meanwhile, its Austrian counterpart, the FPÖ, would be close to 30% of the national vote and emerge as the strongest party. Austria will vote this autumn, whereas elections in Germany should take place at the end of 2025. 

In both Germany and Austria, as well as in other countries such as the United States and Brazil, the far-right is benefiting from Musk’s support and open-door policy to radicals on “X.” Needless to say, though, Musk is just offering a new platform to very old ideas. The far-right’s threat would hardly be less serious if the billionaire had a sudden political conversion. What to do, then? One of the banners at the demonstration against Höcke in Halle pointed to the holistic approach that will be needed to counter the far-right. The banner read “AfD Stoppen! Juristisch, Politisch, Gesellschaftlich.” In English: “Stopping AfD! Judicially, Politically, Socially.” 

( Clean Energy Wire ) The year 2023 was the windiest in Germany in more than 15 years, providing excellent conditions for wind electricity generation, said Germany’s National Meteorological Service (DWD).

In 2023, the average wind speed across Germany at a height of 100 metres [yards] – a typical hub height for wind turbines in this country – was just under 6 metres [yards] per second (m/s), DWD said. Wind speeds were significantly higher than the long-term average, particularly in the winter months of January, November and December and reached the highest level since 2007.

Will renewables stop the climate crisis? | DW Documentary Video

Last year was also a good one for solar PV, but not a record year like 2022, DWD added. “From a meteorological perspective, 2023 was a successful year for the use of renewable energies in Germany,” DWD vice president Renate Hagedorn commented.

The expansion of onshore wind power in Germany is picking up again and it appears that a “politically caused” dent in newly installed capacity between 2019 and 2021 has been overcome, industry lobby group BWE said earlier this month.

Preliminary data by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen (AGEB) showed that onshore wind turbines produced a record 114.2 terawatt hours (TWh) in Germany in 2023, while solar PV produced a record 61.1 TWh.

In January, the DWD had said that 2023 also marked Germany’s hottest year since records began in 1881, warning that the country had to “take intensive action to protect the climate and adapt to the damage caused by extreme weather events.”

Via Clean Energy Wire

Published under a “Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0)” .

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – The three major wars or conflicts that are ongoing today demonstrate the volatility of the intersection between the local and the global.

In the Hamas-Israeli conflict, we see how the maintenance of the Israeli settler-colonial state is intertwined with the preservation of the global hegemony of the United States.

In the war in Ukraine, a bloody war of attrition between two countries was provoked by Washington’s push to expand NATO to a country of the former Soviet Union.

In the South China Sea, we are witnessing how disputes over territory and natural resources have been elevated to a global conflict by the U.S. effort to maintain its global hegemony against China, to which it is losing the geoeconomic competition but over which it continues to enjoy absolute military superiority.

In short, the main cause of global instability today lies in the fusion of the local and the global, geopolitics and geoeconomics, empire and capitalism.

Balance of Power, Balance of Terror

What makes current conflicts especially volatile is that they are occurring amidst the absence of any effective multilateral coercive authority to impose a peaceful settlement. In Ukraine, it is the balance of military might that will determine the outcome of the war, and here Russia seems to be prevailing over the Ukraine-NATO-U.S. axis.

In the Middle East, there is no effective coercive power to oppose the Israeli-U.S. military behemoth—which makes it all the more remarkable that despite a genocidal campaign that has been going on for nearly four months now, Israel has not achieved its principal war aim of destroying Hamas.

In the South China Sea, what determines the course of events is the balance of power between China and the United States. There are no “rules of the game,” so that there is always a possibility  that American and Chinese ships playing “chicken”–or heading for each other, then swerving at the last minute–can accidentally collide, and this collision can escalate to a higher form of conflict such as a conventional war.

Without effective coercive constraints imposed by a multilateral organization on the hegemon and its allies, the latter can easily descend into genocide and mass murder. Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Gaza, the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Genocide, have been shown to be mere pieces of paper.

The Right of Self Defense

Given the absence of a multilateral referee that can impose its will, it is only the development of political, diplomatic, and military counterpower that can restrain the hegemon. This is the lesson that national liberation wars in Algeria and Vietnam taught the world. This is the lesson that the Palestinian resistance today teaches us.

This is why even as we condemn wars of empire waged by the hegemon, we must defend the right of people to resort to armed self-defense.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Overnight attacks hit central Gaza”

This does not mean that efforts at peacemaking by global civil society have no role to play. They do. I still remember how shortly before the invasion of Iraq, The New York Times came out with an article on February 17, 2003, in response to massive mobilizations against the planned invasion of Iraq, that said that there were only two superpowers left in the world, and they were the United States and global public opinion, and that then President George W. Bush ignored this outpouring of global resistance at his peril.

Global civil society did contribute to the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by eroding the legitimacy of those wars among the U.S. public, making them so unpopular that even Donald Trump denounced them–in retrospect that is–as did many personalities that had voted for war in the U.S. Congress.

The recent decision of the International Court of Justice that has ordered Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza is likely to have a similar impact as global civil society’s resistance to Bush, Jr’s, invasion of Iraq. The ICJ decision may not have an immediate impact on the ongoing war, but it will erode the legitimacy of the project of settler colonialism and apartheid in the long run, deepening the isolation of Israel in the long run.

A Just Peace

We often see peace as an ideal state. But the peace of the graveyard is not peace. A peace bought at the price of fascist repression not only is not desirable but it will not last.

Oppressed peoples like the Palestinians will refuse peace at any price, peace that is obtained at the price of humiliation. As they have shown in the 76 years since the Nakba, their massive expulsion from their lands and homes, the Palestinians will not settle for anything less than peace with justice, one that enables them to recover their lands seized by Israelis, establish a sovereign state “from the river to the sea,” and allow them to hold their heads up in pride.

The rest of the world owes them its wholehearted support to realize such a just peace through all possible means, even as we work to oppose wars of empire waged by hegemons in other parts of the world.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The Irish cabinet will begin to frame a Declaration of Intervention to be submitted after South Africa sends in its own memorial case in a few months. The center-right coalition government had been under pressure by the opposition to join the complaint since January. Deputy Prime Minister (Tánaiste) and Foreign Minister Micheál Martin said on Thursday of Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient food into Goza,

“It is criminal. It is absolutely a scandal that children are malnourished, that half a population is facing famine and others in terms of food insecurity. There is no need for this. There’s excessive checking at the borders. I spoke [on Thursday] morning to Ayman Safadi, the Foreign Minister in Jordan, spoke to Egyptian [Foreign Minister] Sameh Shoukry and I spoke to the Palestinian Prime Minister [on Wednesday] also. They’re telling me the situation is dire. Absolutely catastrophic.

I will appeal to Israel to show humanity in terms of enabling the essentials of life to get into Gaza for the civilian population.”

On Wednesday Martin had slammed Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack, but many of his critiques addressed the disproportionate Israeli response.

He said, “The taking of hostages. The purposeful withholding of humanitarian assistance to civilians. The targeting of civilians and of civilian infrastructure. The indiscriminate use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The use of civilian objects for military purposes. The collective punishment of an entire population. The list goes on. It has to stop. The view of the international community is clear. Enough is enough. The UN Security Council has demanded an immediate ceasefire, the unconditional release of hostages and the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale. The European Council has echoed this call.”

Martin admitted, “intervention as a third party in a case before the International Court of Justice is a complex matter and is relatively rare. It is for the Court to determine whether genocide is being committed.”

Hindustan Times Video: “After UNSC, More Trouble For Israel At ICJ? Ireland Declares It’s Entering ‘Gaza Genocide’ Case ”

On Thursday, the International Court of Justice issued “additional provisional measures” regarding the Israel campaign against Gaza.

These further measures were as follows:

“The State of Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation:

– 2 –

(a) Unanimously,

Take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary;

(b) By fifteen votes to one,

Ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance . . .

(3) By fifteen votes to one,

Decides that the State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order, within one month as from the date of this Order.”

Since the court’s judgment, which this decision confirms, Israel actually cut in half the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza each day. UN and NGO workers on the ground in Gaza warn of catastrophic famine that could begin any time from now through May unless more food is allowed in. The Israeli officials routinely lie and maintain that they are letting in all the aid that is needed (apparently they take the world for fools).

The office of outgoing Irish Prime Minister (Taoseach) Leo Varadkar warmly endorsed the new court order, saying:

“Given the very serious conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza, the additional provisional measures announced today by the International Court of Justice are welcome. They require the unhindered provision at scale of humanitarian assistance, including food, water and medicine into Gaza. They also require Israel to ensure that its military does not prevent, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed aid. Israel must immediately comply.”

Irish President Michael D Higgins issued in a statement on Thursday evening concerning the ICJ decree: “Today’s new order by the International Court of Justice that Israel ensure the unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance – including food, water and medicine – and open more land crossings in order to prevent the spread of famine and starvation cannot be ignored.

“It is now not morally acceptable that a single voice would be silent in the European Union or international community, all countries must do all that they can to ensure the immediate delivery of aid, a ceasefire and the release of all hostages in line with this week’s UN Security Council resolution.”

It should be noted that these strong sentiments are being expressed by politicians from Ireland’s center-right coalition government, individuals who have often refused to take a harsh stand against Israel or to boycott it. Some have opposed a bill to ban the importation of goods from Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian land.

Now they are talking about Israel as “criminal” and “a scandal” and pleading with Tel Aviv to “show some humanity.” And they are weighing in against Netanyahu at the ICJ as a genocidaire.

Does their nationality have anything to do with their alleged terrorism? Many Russians probably think so.

Tajikistan, a landlocked country of 10 million sandwiched between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China, is the most impoverished of the former Soviet republics. Known for its corruption and political repression, it has chafed under the iron-fisted rule of President Emomali Rahmon since 1994.

There are estimated to be well over three million Tajiks living in Russia, about one-third of the total Tajik population. Most of them hold the precarious status of “guest workers,” holding low-paying jobs in construction, produce markets or even cleaning public toilets.

While Russia’s declining population has led to increasing reliance on foreign workers to fill such needs within its labour force, the attitude of Russians towards natives of Central Asia and the Caucasus region is generally negative.

It’s similar to the American stereotype about Mexicans so infamously expressed by Donald Trump in 2015: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

CBC News Video: “Why would ISIS-K attack Russia? | Front Burner

Non-Slavs are systematically discriminated against in Russia, and since 2022 they have been disproportionately conscripted and sent to Ukraine to serve as cannon fodder at the front.

Tajik exclusion

As I have described in a recent book, few nations in history have seen their standing so dramatically reduced as the Tajiks have over the past 100 years.

For more than a millennium, the Tajiks — Persian-speaking descendants of the ancient Sogdians who dominated the Silk Road — were Central Asia’s cultural elite.

Beginning with what’s known as the New Persian Renaissance of the 10th century when their capital, Bukhara, came to rival Baghdad as a centre of Islamic learning and high culture, Tajiks were the principal scholars and bureaucrats of Central Asia’s major cities right up to the time of the Russian Revolution.

The famous medieval polymath Avicenna was an ethnic Tajik, as were the hadith collector Bukhari, the Sufi poet Rumi, and many others.

But as the most significant purveyors of Central Asia’s Islamic civilization, Tajiks were seen by the Bolsheviks as representing an obsolete legacy that socialism aimed to overcome.

The Tajiks were virtually excluded from the massive social and political restructuring imposed on Central Asia during the early years of the Soviet Union, with most of their historical territory, including the fabled cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, being awarded to the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks who were seen as being more malleable.

Only as late as 1929 were the Tajiks given their own republic, consisting mostly of marginal, mountainous territory and deprived of any major urban centres.

Impoverished

Throughout the 20th century, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was the most impoverished and underdeveloped region of the former Soviet Union, and it has retained that unfortunate status since independence in 1991.

From 1992-1997, the country was plunged into a devastating civil war that destroyed what infrastructure remained from the Soviet period. Since that time, Rahmon has used the threat of renewed civil conflict to vindicate his absolute rule.

The spectre of radical Islam emanating from neighbouring Afghanistan — where the Tajik population considerably outnumbers that of Tajikistan — has provided additional justification for Rahmon’s repressive policies.

In today’s Tajikistan even those with a university education find it almost impossible to earn a salary that would enable them to build a normal family life.

Disempowered and humiliated by the system, they are easy prey for radical Islamic preachers who give them a sense of value and purpose.

The added backdrop of financial desperation makes for an explosive cocktail: one of the suspects in the recent Moscow attacks reportedly told his Russian interrogators that he was promised a cash reward of half a million Russian rubles (about US$5,300) to carry out his alleged atrocities..

Terrorism as desperation?

Normal, sane human beings everywhere are horrified by terrorist acts regardless of how they are justified by their perpetrators, and the long-suffering people of Tajikistan are no exception.

But unfortunately, the conditions under which a small number of extremists can perceive the psychopathic murder of innocent civilians for cash or ideology as an attractive option show no signs of abating.

Russia’s laughable attempt to somehow link the Moscow attacks to Ukraine is a clumsy diversion from the consequences of its relations with Central Asia.

Richard Foltz, Professor of Religions and Cultures, Concordia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Russia is reeling from the worst terror strike on its soil in a generation following an attack on March 22, 2024, that killed at least 137 concertgoers in Moscow.

The attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group. And despite Russian authorities expressing doubt over the claim, U.S. officials told The Associated Press that they believed ISIL-K, a South and Central Asian affiliate of the terrorist organization, was behind the assault.

It comes amid heightened concern over the scope of ISIL-K activities following recent terrorist operations in countries including Iran and Pakistan. The Conversation turned to Clemson University’s Amira Jadoon and Sara Harmouch of American University – terrorism experts who have tracked the activities of ISIL-K – to explain what this latest deadly attack tells us about the organization’s strengths and agenda.

What is ISIL-K?

ISIL-K, short for Islamic State Khorasan Province, is a regional affiliate of the larger Islamic State group.

The affiliate group operates primarily in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, although it has presence throughout the historical “Khorasan” – a region that includes parts of the modern-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, along with other Central Asian countries.

Established in 2015, ISIL-K aims to establish a physical “caliphate” – a system of governing a society under strict Islamic Sharia law and under religious leadership – in the South and Central Asian region.

What to know about ISIS-K, the group that claimed the Moscow attack • FRANCE 24 English Video

ISIL-K’s beliefs follow the ideology of its parent organization, the Islamic State group, which promotes an extreme interpretation of Islam and sees secular government actors, as well as non-Muslim and Muslim minority civilian populations, as legitimate targets.

The group is known for its extreme brutality and for targeting both government institutions and civilians, including mosques, educational institutions and public spaces.

Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ISIL-K’s key objectives have been to diminish the now-ruling Taliban’s legitimacy in the war-ravaged nation, assert itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim community and emerge as the principal regional adversary to regimes it deems oppressive.

Moreover, the Taliban’s transition from an insurgency group to a governing entity left numerous militant factions in Afghanistan without a unifying force – a gap that ISIL-K has aimed to fill.

Why was Russia targeted by ISIL-K?

ISIL-K has long framed Russia as one of its main adversaries. It has heavily featured anti-Russian rhetoric in its propaganda and has attacked Russia’s presence within Afghanistan. This includes a suicide attack on Russia’s embassy in Kabul in 2022 that left two Russian Embassy staff and six Afghans dead.

The broader Islamic State group has targeted Russia for several reasons.

They include long-standing grievances relating to Moscow’s historical interventions in Muslim-majority regions like Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Russia’s partnerships with regimes opposed by the Islamic State group, notably Syria and Iran, have positioned Russia as a primary adversary in the eyes of the terrorist organization and its affiliates.

In particular, Russia has been a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011, providing military support to the Assad regime against various opposition groups, including the Islamic State group.

This direct opposition to the terrorist group and its caliphate ambitions has rendered Russia as a prime target for retaliation.

Moreover, Russia’s cooperation with the Taliban – ISIL-K’s key nemesis in Afghanistan – adds another layer of animosity. The Islamic State group views countries and groups that oppose its ideology or military objectives as enemies of Islam, including actors who seek to establish relations with the Taliban.

By attacking Russian targets, ISIL-K in part seeks to deter further Russian involvement in the Middle East. But also, such attacks provide high publicity for its cause and aim to inspire its supporters worldwide.

As such, for the Islamic State brand, the Moscow attack serves as retribution for perceived grievances held against Russia, while also projecting global reach. This approach can provide significant dividends, especially for its South and Central Asian affiliate, in the form of increased recruitment, funding and influence across the jihadist spectrum.

What does the attack tell us about ISIL-K capabilities?

The mere association of ISIL-K with this attack, whether it was directly or indirectly involved, bolsters the group’s reputation.

Overall, the attack signals ISIL-K’s growing influence and its determination to make its presence felt on the global stage.

Being linked to a high-profile attack in a major city far from its base in Afghanistan indicates that ISIL-K can extend its operational reach either directly or through collaboration with like-minded militant factions.

The scale and sophistication of the attack reflect advanced planning, coordination and execution capabilities. This only reaffirms unequivocally ISIL-K’s intent, adaptability and determination to internationalize its agenda.

Similar to ISIL-K’s attack in Iran in January 2024 that left over 100 dead, this latest atrocity serves to reinforce ISIL-K’s stated commitment to the broader global jihadist agenda of the Islamic State group, and helps broaden the appeal of its ideology and recruitment campaign.

How does this fit ISIL-K’s strategy?

The attack in Moscow serves as a powerful recruitment and propaganda tool by attracting international media attention to the group. This allows it to remain politically relevant to its audiences across South and Central Asia, and beyond.

But it also helps divert attention from local setbacks for ISIL-K. Like its parent organization Islamic State group, ISIL-K has been confronted with military defeats, loss of territory and leadership and diminishing resources.

In the face of such challenges, ISIL-K’s potential links to the attack in Moscow remind observers of its persistent threat and adaptability.

By targeting a major power like Russia, ISIL-K aims to project a broader message of intimidation aimed at other states involved in anti-Islamic State group operations and undermine the public’s sense of security.

Additionally, operations such as the Moscow attack seek to solidify ISIL-K’s position within the broader Islamic State group network, potentially securing more support and resources.

More broadly, the strategy follows a process of “internationalizing” ISIL-K’s agenda – something it has pursued with renewed vigor since 2021 by targeting the countries with a presence in Afghanistan, including Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and Russia, marking a deliberate expansion of its operational focus beyond local borders.

The Moscow attack, following the January assault in Iran, suggests that ISIL-K is intensifying efforts to export its ideological fight directly to the territories of sovereign nations.

It is a calculated strategy and, as the Moscow attack has exemplified, one that has the potential to strike fear in capitals far beyond ISIL-K’s traditional base.

Sara Harmouch, PhD Candidate, School of Public Affairs, American University and Amira Jadoon, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clemson University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Terrorism is inexcusable and horrific. It does not, however, occur in a vacuum. The attack likely came in revenge for two of Vladimir Putin’s most important projects. The first was the crushing of separatist Chechens in 1999-2009 and after. In recent years Putin’s government has continued to fight a low-intensity counter-insurgency in south Caucasian territories such as Ingushetia. CNN reports that earlier this month Russian forces killed 6 ISIL guerrillas in the city of Karabulak in Ingushetia, an almost entirely Muslim republic within the Russian Federation.

Al Jazeera English: “ISIL claims responsibility for Moscow concert attack”

The second relevant Putin project is his intervention in the Syrian Civil War to flatten the opposition to the dynasty of Bashar al-Assad. Although the civil war began with demands from a range of Syrian opposition forces for more civil liberties, that initial movement was repressed by the regime using military force on civilians. Many in the opposition turned to the Gulf for funding, and the price of admission was growing beards and adopting Muslim fundamentalist rhetoric. They could not get funding from most liberal democracies. Putin was alarmed that Muslim fundamentalists might sweep into Damascus and take the capital. Syria isn’t that far from Chechnya, and some Russian Muslims from Chechnya and Ingushetia had volunteered to go off to Syria and fight the al-Assad regime.

The Syrian army was unable to defeat the rebels, having shrunk through desertion. In 2015 Putin started flying fighter jets against the rebels, giving air support to the Syrian Arab Army and to the Shiite militias from Lebanon (Hezbollah) and Iraq that were fighting the Sunni rebels. The latter were defeated in much of the country and their remnants were bottled up on the northern province of Idlib. With the effective end of the insurgency, some of the Chechens and Muslims from Ingushetia began returning home. Unless they were known to and could be proved to have committed war crimes, these returnees were allowed to reintegrate into Caucasian society according to the Central Asia- Caucasus Analyst.

The exact identity of the ISIL operatives who committed the atrocity on Friday is not clear. But it is likely that this act of terror is blowback from the Russian leveling of Grozny, Chechnya, in the early years of this century and the Russian leveling of East Aleppo. It isn’t right, and it isn’t fair to the innocent concert-goers who lost their lives or those of their friends and family. It is cowardly to attack soft targets and noncombatants. And like most ISIL operations, it is terminally stupid, since it won’t cause Russia to back off any policies in the Caucasus or Syria and has the potential to make life miserable for the 9% of the Russian population that consists of Muslims. But it did not happen with no context.

Ironically, Russian officials initially intimated that Ukraine was behind the attack. That shows a bad conscience over their indiscriminate bombing of civilians in that country, which is also terrorism.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

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Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

Copyright 2024 Alfred W. McCoy

Via Tomdispatch.com

Both were 22-year-olds. Their deaths in 2023 serve as a reminder on International Women’s Day that the tragedies of femicide and gender-based violence (GBV) will continue into 2024. “Honor killings” need to be recognized as problems that are not only confined to the global south and developing world.

 While governments often react to direct violence, this problem will not end unless both state and society recognize endemic structural and cultural violence that enable femicide. The failure to act on these problems becomes a form of “necropolitics,” where the states allow women to succumb to the fate of femicide.

Direct Violence

Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung’s Triangle of Violence begins with “direct violence,” which often gets the most attention.

The father of Tiba Al-Ali projected direct violence against his daughter by strangling her. The last thing Tiba saw was the eyes of her father before she died.

Turetta projected direct violence against Giulia, a video camera capturing him beating her, and then later stabbing her 20 times to the neck and head. The last thing Giulia saw was the eyes of her ex-partner.

Tiba chose to defy her father.  Giulia chose to leave Filippo and she was graduating before him, which he could not accept.

Structural Violence

Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe defines “necropolitics” as how political actors allow certain demographics to die. When states fail to prevent femicide that is a form of necropolitics, or what Galtung would call “structural violence.”

Ali’s murder is part of the rise of GBV due to a revival of tribal culture that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein encouraged after the 1991 Gulf War to maintain domestic order, as his security forces were diminished. Iraq’s gendered insecurity continued unabated as the security sector collapsed after the 2003 invasion.  The US touted post-Saddam Iraq as a model state that would inspire a wave of democratization in the region. Yet Articles 41 and 409 of the Iraqi Penal Code, to this day, permits males to “punish” female members of a household. Those codes are a form of structural violence and necropolitics, enabling “honor killings.” It allows “practices of patriarchy” at the state level.

Women’s rights in Iraq • FRANCE 24 English Video

Structural violence and state patriarchy is evident by the security sector failing to address this issue, as the police allegedly knew beforehand that Al-Ali’s life was at risk and failed to take action.

Let us turn to Europe. Surprisingly, the Italian state engages in necropolitics by not legally recognizing “femicide” as a separate crime. Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, referred to this problem when said, “Femicide is a murder committed by the state because the state doesn’t protect us.” The state’s failure in this case to prevent direct violence is itself a form of violence. In the absence of the state Elena refers to the need for Italian civil society and NGOs to step in: “We need to fund anti-violence centres and give the possibility to those who need to ask for help.”

After the murder, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said she would increase funds to women’s shelters and anti-violence centers. However, Meloni was also part of the problem, since her misogynistic right-wing politics and “Brothers of Italy”(Fratelli d’Italia) party enabled gendered cultural violence in Italy.   

Cultural Violence

After the murder in Iraq, a twitter user, Ali Bey, wrote that women should “behave or face the same fate as Tiba Al-Ali,” along with a series of other voices in the Iraqi cybersphere condoning, if not celebrating the murder. These outbursts are examples of cultural violence or societal patriarchy that enables such crimes.

Elena links the murder of her younger sister to the patriarchal culture of violence that pervades Italy, a form of cultural necropolitics, which normalises the toxic behaviour of men like Turetta and eventually commits femicide. She said “Turetta is often described as a monster, but he’s not a monster.”  She then addresses cultural elements: “A monster is an exception, a person who’s outside society, a person for whom society doesn’t need to take responsibility. But there’s a responsibility. Monsters aren’t sick, they’re healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.” 

Meloni promised promised a new educational campaign in schools to eradicate “the toxic culture of violence” in the country. While Meloni had condemned sexual violence in the past, it was usually when a migrant committed GBV, to support the anti-immigrant politics of her party.

In 2023 I conducted two digital autopsies on Tiba’s YouTube account and Giulia’s Instagram account. Both were beautiful souls that made the earth a better place. Tiba’s vibrant videos described her new life in Istanbul, to pursue her education. Guilia loved her mom, had a collection of beer bottle tops, and apparently had a fear of going to the hospital alone, but overcame her fear.  That fear apparently had to do with the fact that she was taking care of her mom who eventually died of cancer.

The triangle of violence and necropolitics offers a nuanced means of analyzing the agents of patriarchy.  But a simple linguistic exercise can also achieve this goal, using patriarchy as a verb instead of an abstract noun. We must each ask ourselves “Who or what has patriarched me or others in the past, present, and future?” and “Who or what have I patriarched?” Difficult questions, yes, but by bringing them into focus we can begin to identify the active agents and institutions that have patriarched and continue to patriarch in Iraq, Italy and the world.  On this International Women’s Day, Iraq and Italy have failed to ensure gendered security.