scholarly journals Boko Haram Disgrace: Urgency for Renewal and Reform in northern Nigeria Supported by the Muslim Leadership

ICR Journal ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-578
Author(s):  
Daud Abdul-Fattah Batchelor
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Western Education ◽  
State Security ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

The infamous Boko Haram sect erupted on the world stage in 2009 with their aim to establish an Islamic State. Since its subsequent radicalisation resulting from heavy-handed treatment - including torture and murder - at the hands of state security forces, it now targets the army, police, and those associated with propagating western education. It has even degenerated into attacking the weakest participants, innocent civilians, especially school children. The most infamous act of Boko Haram was the abduction of nearly 300 female students in April 2014 from a government-run high school in the Christian town of Chibok. Over 70 percent of the girls were Christian, and reportedly a number were forcibly ‘converted’ to Islam. In February, 58 students mainly teenage boys, were burnt to death, shot or had their throats slit in a school attack. The mayhem continues as security forces seem incapable of containing the violence. 2050 people were killed in the first half of 2014 alone. The Paris Summit held in May led to a renewed military push from neighbouring countries with support from the United States, to contain Boko Haram. The Nigerian ‘ulama have condemned Boko Haram’s violence and language of arms as a fitna and cited it as “corruption on the earth” - one of the most serious crimes in Islam.

Sex Differences in Mass Media Preferences Across Four Asian Countries

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 186-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malini Ratnasingam ◽  
Lee Ellis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sex Differences ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Female Students ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Evolutionary Explanation ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
Media Preferences

Background. Nearly all of the research on sex differences in mass media utilization has been based on samples from the United States and a few other Western countries. Aim. The present study examines sex differences in mass media utilization in four Asian countries (Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and Singapore). Methods. College students self-reported the frequency with which they accessed the following five mass media outlets: television dramas, televised news and documentaries, music, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. Results. Two significant sex differences were found when participants from the four countries were considered as a whole: Women watched television dramas more than did men; and in Japan, female students listened to music more than did their male counterparts. Limitations. A wider array of mass media outlets could have been explored. Conclusions. Findings were largely consistent with results from studies conducted elsewhere in the world, particularly regarding sex differences in television drama viewing. A neurohormonal evolutionary explanation is offered for the basic findings.

The Boko Haram Reader

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cook
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Northern Nigeria ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
The World

Since it erupted onto the world stage in 2009, people have asked, what is Boko Haram, and what does it stand for? Is there a coherent vision or set of beliefs behind it? Despite the growing literature about the group, few if any attempts have been made to answer these questions, even though Boko Haram is but the latest in a long line of millenarian Muslim reform groups to emerge in Northern Nigeria over the last two centuries. The Boko Haram Reader offers an unprecedented collection of essential texts, documents, videos, audio, and nashids (martial hymns), translated into English from Hausa, Arabic and Kanuri, tracing the group's origins, history, and evolution. Its editors, two Nigerian scholars, reveal how Boko Haram's leaders manipulate Islamic theology for the legitimization, radicalization, indoctrination and dissemination of their ideas across West Africa. Mandatory reading for anyone wishing to grasp the underpinnings of Boko Haram's insurgency, particularly how the group strives to delegitimize its rivals and establish its beliefs as a dominant strand of Islamic thought in West Africa's religious marketplace.

II. The United States of Lyncherdom

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 139-150
Author(s):  
Mark Twain
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Single Sample ◽  
Chinese Christians ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

And so Missouri has fallen, that great State! Certain of her children have joined the lynchers, and the smirch is upon the rest of us. That handful of her children have given us a character and labeled us with a name; and to the dwellers in the four quarters of the earth we are “lynchers,” now, and ever shall be. For the world will not stop and think – it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample. It will not say “Those Missourians have been busy eighty years in building an honorable good name for themselves; these hundred lynchers down in the corner of the State are not real Missourians, they are bastards.” No, that truth will not enter its mind; it will generalize from the one or two misleading samples and say “The Missourians are lynchers.” It has no reflection, no logic, no sense of proportion. With it, figures go for nothing; to it, figures reveal nothing, it cannot reason upon them rationally; it is Brother J. J. infinitely multiplied; it would say, with him, that China is being swiftly and surely Christianized, since 9 Chinese Christians are being made every day; and it would fail, with him, to notice that the fact that 33,000 pagans are born there every day, damages the argument. It would J-J Missouri, and say “There are a hundred lynchers there, therefore the Missourians are lynchers;” the considerable fact that there are two and a half million Missourians who are not lynchers would not affect their verdict any more than it would affect Bro. J. J.'s.

Alliances, Military Basing, and Logistics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc C. Vielledent
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
National Security ◽  
The United States ◽  
Security Strategy ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Security Forces ◽  
Fiscal Constraints ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
National Security Strategy ◽  
The World

The United States has long enjoyed an essentially unopposed ability to project power and sustain its security forces dispersed throughout the world. However, the uncertainty facing the global security environment, including tenuous alliances, fiscal constraints, and a decline in overseas basing, has increased tensions in emerging areas of potential conflict. These factors are driving change regarding the United States’ defense posture and access agreements abroad. While the preponderance of overseas capability outweighs the preponderance of U.S. forces, deterrence continues to underpin the overarching national security strategy. However, deterrence options impacted by the lack of resilience and investment in distributed logistics and sustainment are generating an additional range of variables and conditions for operators on the ground to consider in shared and contested domains.

Counterterrorism and the Western Response

2019 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Affective Response ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
The U.S ◽  
United Nation

There has been a neglect on the part of Western governments with focus on the U.S. to take seriously the internet campaign that ISIS has been waging since 2014 and the affective response that still draws citizens from across the world into their promise of a civilized, united nation for Muslims. It is possible that the West, even with a severely increased commitment to fighting the Islamic State, may be too late. This chapter will explore responses by Western governments including the United States to fight internet-enabled terrorism.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Naomi A. Moland
Keyword(s):  
Multicultural Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sesame Street ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Boko Haram ◽  
Western Education ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
Nigerian Children ◽  
Extremist Group

Chapter 1 introduces the book by discussing the key dilemmas that arose during the creation of Sesame Square, the Nigerian version of Sesame Street. It outlines the program’s goals to teach tolerance and peaceful coexistence to Nigerian children and the challenges of promoting these goals in the Nigerian context. This chapter introduces two dilemmas that form the central arguments of the book: first, that multicultural education and celebrating diversity can inadvertently exacerbate stereotypes; and second, that a violent and unjust context can undermine tolerance messages. This chapter reviews historical, political, and cultural aspects of the Nigerian context, including the rise of the extremist group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is forbidden.” It also explores what the United States government (which funds Sesame Square) believes the program might do to build stability, peace, and American goodwill in Nigeria. The chapter closes by previewing the content of the following chapters.

Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Byman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World Trade Center ◽  
Northwest China ◽  
The United States ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
The World ◽  
Osama Bin Laden

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the entire world was introduced to Al Qaeda and its enigmatic leader, Osama bin Laden. But the organization that changed the face of terrorism forever and unleashed a whirlwind of counterterrorism activity and two major wars had been on the scene long before that eventful morning. In Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know, Daniel L. Byman, an eminent scholar of Middle East terrorism and international security who served on the 9/11 Commission, provides a sharp and concise overview of Al Qaeda, from its humble origins in the mountains of Afghanistan to the present, explaining its perseverance and adaptation since 9/11 and the limits of U.S. and allied counterterrorism efforts. The organization that would come to be known as Al Qaeda traces its roots to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Founded as the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda achieved a degree of international notoriety with a series of spectacular attacks in the 1990s; however, it was the dramatic assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 that truly launched Al Qaeda onto the global stage. The attacks endowed the organization with world-historical importance and provoked an overwhelming counterattack by the United States and other western countries. Within a year of 9/11, the core of Al Qaeda had been chased out of Afghanistan and into a variety of refuges across the Muslim world. Splinter groups and franchised offshoots were active in the 2000s in countries like Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen, but by early 2011, after more than a decade of relentless counterterrorism efforts by the United States and other Western military and intelligence services, most felt that Al Qaeda's moment had passed. With the death of Osama bin Laden in May of that year, many predicted that Al Qaeda was in its death throes. Shockingly, Al Qaeda has staged a remarkable comeback in the last few years. In almost every conflict in the Muslim world, from portions of the Xanjing region in northwest China to the African subcontinent, Al Qaeda franchises or like-minded groups have played a role. Al Qaeda's extreme Salafist ideology continues to appeal to radicalized Sunni Muslims throughout the world, and it has successfully altered its organizational structure so that it can both weather America's enduring full-spectrum assault and tailor its message to specific audiences. Authoritative and highly readable, Byman's account offers readers insightful and penetrating answers to the fundamental questions about Al Qaeda: who they are, where they came from, where they're going-and, perhaps most critically-what we can do about it.

Taiwan’s profile rises amid China-US tensions

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Health ◽  
International Organisations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
World Health Assembly ◽  
State Security ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time

Subject The outlook for China-Taiwan relations. Significance Taiwan’s China-sceptic government is benefiting from its spectacular success against COVID-19, Western support for its participation in the World Health Assembly against Beijing’s wishes and China's recent decision to let state security agents operate openly in Hong Kong for the first time -- a move that undermines the city’s promised autonomy. Impacts Taiwan’s international aid for battling COVID-19 will build support from key partners, especially the United States and European countries. China will block Taiwan’s participation in international organisations at any level during Tsai’s second term. As Taiwan focuses on unofficial relationships with major democracies, China will continue to whittle away at Taiwan’s official allies.

scholarly journals Al-Qaeda’s New Orientation After the Death of Osama bin Laden

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-145
Author(s):  
Siti Fatimah ◽  
Yanuardi Syukur
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Al Qaeda ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Osama Bin Laden

After the death of Osama Bin Laden and the declaration of the establishment of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Al-Qaeda movement changed from being aggressive to being passive. The aggressiveness of the Al-Qaeda movement, for instance, was seen during the spectacular terror of 9/11, which was then followed by various actions carried out by followers in various parts of the world. However, Bin Laden's death and the rise of the ISIS group made Al-Qaeda look passive. This paper seeks to see the history of the Al-Qaeda movement to the dynamics that influence the movement’s choices. The author found that changing Al-Qaeda's orientation from aggressive to passive did not deny the existence of a consolidated movement that deliberately distanced itself from the anti-terrorism campaign carried out by the United States.

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