kurtster wrote: 
The graph did say right-wing terrorists, not white supremacists. So I'd say they also go after government employees and contractors, kids in daycare... Pretty scary IMO. And the government has more tools to investigate jihadists than right wing extremists because they have a position that anyone outside the country can be subject to intelligence gathering including information regarding any contacts within the country.

The jihadi unify society against them rather than being divisive. You should have seen the number of people at Anzac Day services here after a couple of kids were busted for planning an attack on the holiday. A collective FU from the people. 

The problem is that the perception of risk is almost unrelated to the actual risk.  And if the risk falls dominantly on a particular segment of the population it is particularly unjust. 

And another thought: I found the police over-reach after the Boston bombing to be far scarier than the bombing itself. 

 RichardPrins wrote: 
Just to be clear ... to you the number dead means more than total directly involved and physically hurt ?  OK, then let's try this one ...  We know who the white supremacists are going after.  The jihadi ?  They're just going after Americans, so it could be anyone.  Everyone is a target instead of a few.  So which are scarier ?  We are talking about terror aren't we, not freedom fighting, right ?

 kurtster wrote:No, it appears you love oranges and apples. And even fruits that haven't been invented/happened. Fruity math and logic.

 RichardPrins wrote: 
Let's look at the numbers a little closer., Namely the right wing xtremists and the jihadists.  Missing in the jihad are police killed in NY, one by axe and the other picked off while sitting in his squad minding his own business.  Missing are the wounded, such as 170 in the Boston Marathon bombing, the 32 wounded at Ft Hood or a total of 213 wounded in the incidents cited in your report.  For the RRE's there are a total of 20 wounded.

So adding up the numbers we now have the Muslims with 241 ( with the 2 dead NYPD not in your numbers) casualties to the RRE with 68.  So now who is worse ?   What the wounded don't count ?  Tell that to the families.

Oh, and the Times Sq car bomb that never went off and what about the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, whose bomb went off but made him a soprano instead of taking out the whole plane over Detroit.  How many on a 767 ?   We would be looking at a whole different set of numbers and likely not even see this argument made in the first place.

I just love socialist math ...

The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fear-Mongering and Bigotry: Reality - The Intercept/Greenwald

Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings "Terrorism" Again Shows It's a Meaningless Propaganda Term - Greenwald

(...) Ample scholarship proves that the term “terrorism” is empty, definition-free and invariably manipulated. Harvard’s Lisa Stampnitzky has documented “the inability of researchers to establish a suitable definition of the concept of ‘terrorism’ itself.” The concept of “terrorism” is fundamentally plagued by ideological agendas and self-interested manipulation, as Professor Richard Jackson at the the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies in New Zealand has explained: “most of what is accepted as well-founded ‘knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable” and is “biased towards Western state priorities.” Remi Brulin is a scholar who specializes in the discourse of “terrorism” and has long documented that, from the start, it was a highly manipulated term of propaganda more than it was a term of fixed meaning — largely intended to justify violence by the West and Israel while delegitimizing the violence of its enemies.

What is most amazing about all of this is that “terrorism” — a term that is so easily and frequently manipulated and devoid of fixed meaning — has now become central to our political culture and legal framework, a staple of how we are taught to think about the world. It is constantly invoked, as though it is some sort of term of scientific precision, to justify an endless array of radical policies and powers. Everything from the attack on Iraq to torture to endless drone killings to mass surveillance and beyond are justified in its name.

In fact, it is, as I have often argued, a term that justifies everything yet means nothing. Perhaps the only way people will start to see that, or at least be bothered by it, is if it becomes clear that not just marginalized minority groups but also their own group can be swept up by its elasticity and meaninglessness. There is ample resistance to that, which is why repulsive violence committed by white non-Muslims such as yesterday’s church massacre is so rarely described by the term. But that’s all the more reason to insist on something resembling fair and consistent application.

Terrorism is other people

Why are people joining the 'Islamic State'? | Middle East Eye
Ultimately, Western and Muslim violent extremists are merely two sides of the same coin, locked into a spiral of mutual mass murder

How Isis crippled al-Qaida
The inside story of the coup that has brought the world’s most feared terrorist network to the brink of collapse

On 5 February, Jordanian officials confirmed that the intellectual godfather of al-Qaida, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, had been released from prison. Though he is little known in the west, Maqdisi’s importance in the canon of radical Islamic thought is unrivalled by anyone alive. The 56-year-old Palestinian rose to prominence in the 1980s, when he became the first significant radical Islamic scholar to declare the Saudi royal family were apostates, and therefore legitimate targets of jihad. At the time, Maqdisi’s writings were so radical that even Osama bin Laden thought they were too extreme.

Today, Maqdisi counts the leader of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as a personal friend, and he is held in the highest esteem by the rest of al-Qaida’s regional heads, from North Africa to Yemen. His numerous books and pamphlets are required reading for Islamic militants around the world, who eagerly follow the latest proclamations on Maqdisi’s website, the Pulpit of Monotheism and Jihad. But he may be best known for personally mentoring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who founded the organisation that would later become Isis, while the two men were jailed together on terrorism charges in Jordan in the mid-1990s. Zarqawi was released in 1999 and, after swearing allegiance to al-Qaida, went on to become one of the most notorious figures in postwar Iraq, unleashing a brutal campaign of sectarian terror, which led Maqdisi to publicly upbraid his most famous student in a series of devastating public critiques.

Now the man US terrorism analysts call “the most influential living jihadi theorist” has turned his ire toward Isis – and emerged, in the last year, as one of the group’s most powerful critics. Soon after the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the establishment of a caliphate last June, Maqdisi released a long tract castigating Isis as ignorant and misguided, accusing them of subverting the “Islamic project” that he has long nurtured.

Maqdisi’s war of words with Isis is emblematic of the new fratricidal split within violent Islamic radicalism – but it is also a sign that al-Qaida, once the world’s most feared terrorist network, knows it has been surpassed. (...)

CIA Director John Brennan Admits U.S. Foreign Policy Could Spur Terrorism

John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, went on “Face the Nation” last Sunday and did something weird: he acknowledged that U.S. foreign policy might sometimes cause terrorism. Of course, he didn’t word it exactly like that, but close enough:

BRENNAN: I think the president has tried to make sure that we’re able to push the envelope when we can to protect this country. But we have to recognize that sometimes our engagement and direct involvement will stimulate and spur additional threats to our national security interests.

This is notable because the people who run our foreign policy usually tell us that terrorists are like zombies, driven by some incomprehensible force to kill and kill and kill until we take them out with a head shot/drone strike. Brennan himself did this five years ago while “answering” questions from the late reporter Helen Thomas about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian man who tried to blow up a Northwest flight over Detroit:

THOMAS: And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.

BRENNAN: Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents …

THOMAS: Why?

BRENDAN: I think this is a — this is a long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.

The next year Abdulmutallab explained at his sentencing what had motivated him:

I to attack the United States in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel and in retaliation of the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Palestine, especially in the blockade of Gaza, and in retaliation for the killing of innocent and civilian Muslim populations in Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan and beyond, most of them women, children, and noncombatants.

In fact, the government’s own sentencing memorandum for Abdulmutallab cites this statement, and points out that trying “to retaliate against government conduct” is part of the legal definition of terrorism.

So Brennan well understands that our foreign policy causes attacks against Americans. And our legal code specifies that attempting to retaliate against U.S. actions is what makes you a terrorist. Nonetheless, this obvious reality is almost never said out loud by government officials. (...)

Secret Pentagon report reveals West saw ISIS as strategic asset
Anti-ISIS coalition knowingly sponsored violent extremists to ‘isolate’ Assad, rollback ‘Shia expansion’

Seymour M. Hersh · The Killing of Osama bin Laden · LRB 21 May 2015

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

(...)

It began with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.) (...)

'Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins,’ Andrew Cockburn #books

A year ago, just before the Islamic State group took hold of Mosul, Iraq, a Jordanian fighter stated bluntly in a propaganda video: “e are the descendants of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and we are coming to kill you.” Zarqawi, a fellow Jordanian, had been assassinated after landing on one of the United States’ many “kill lists.” With Zarqawi “neutralized,” the mysterious militant Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi rose to take his place. He was no improvement.

As Andrew Cockburn argues in his new book, “Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins,” the U.S. assassination program has done more harm than good. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have sought to kill their political opponents and military targets. Assassination is not only an ugly legal precedent, but it just doesn’t appear to work. Yet when the program’s failures have been raised before foreign policy brass, the leadership has plugged its ears.

U.S. political assassination became formalized as policy (albeit covert) in the Eisenhower era. Stories abound of CIA scientists with briefcases traveling to places like Paris or the Congo during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. The CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald even delivered a poison pen (target: Fidel Castro) in the days and weeks leading up to Kennedy’s own assassination. Documented in books like Evan Thomas’ “The Very Best Men,” these stories are standard CIA lore (Thomas’ was an official history, suggesting that the CIA didn’t mind such stories getting out). (...)

Fighting symptoms/syndromes...

The Terror Strategist: Secret Files Reveal the Structure of Islamic State
An Iraqi officer planned Islamic State's takeover in Syria and SPIEGEL has been given exclusive access to his papers. They portray an organization that, while seemingly driven by religious fanaticism, is actually coldly calculating.

 miamizsun wrote: 
I don't see why it's misleading.

Capitalism is an economic system and a mode of production in which trade, industries, and the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned and operated for profit.^<1><2> Central characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labour and, in many models, competitive markets.^<3> In a capitalist economy, the parties to a transaction typically determine the prices at which assets, goods, and services are exchanged.^<4>

The degree of competition, role of intervention and regulation, and scope of state ownership varies across different models of capitalism. (...)

It depends on the nature of the partnership. Partnership ≠ ownership. (It could be wholly, partially, or not owned at all by the state, while still having a partnership of sorts).

For instance, states (or representative thereof) lobby for the (national or even transnational) business interests in foreign countries (see Wikileaks State Dept. cables).

Those companies are still privately owned. They simply benefit from state power (and sometimes coercion and/or war).

Plenty of those companies (or corporations) pay no taxes whatsoever (by using clever fiscal tricks, loopholes, and offshore accounts to screw those proles).

 RichardPrins wrote: 
there's some great observations in the article

however the headline is or could be misleading

when the state is in a partnership with a corp it isn't really privately owned is it?

it may be for tax purposes but that's where the line fades...

i think corporations are legal entities originated/created by the state to shield individuals from responsibility and transparency

that's not to say that there haven't been some modern corporations (individuals or groups of individuals) that haven't used them in largely beneficial ways

the revolving door between the state, politicians and lobbyists has been fertile soil for corruption

partners in crime

nothing legit about that

regards

Islamic State is the cancer of modern capitalism | Middle East Eye

As much as I hate to see all of the suffering in the Middle East caused by these guys and our cupability in creating the environment (or worse) for their existence, I am afraid it is too late to do anything about it that would not cause more suffering and damage to our already nefarious meddling reputation therefore only further fertilizing the crops of terrorism.

The American fear-mongering machine is about to scare us back into war again

Today al-Qaeda-type movements rule a vast area in northern and western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, several hundred times larger than any territory ever controlled by Osama bin Laden. It is since bin Laden’s death that al-Qaeda affiliates or clones have had their greatest successes, including the capture of Raqqa in the eastern part of Syria, the only provincial capital in that country to fall to the rebels, in March 2013. In January 2014, ISIS took over Fallujah just forty miles west of Baghdad, a city famously besieged and stormed by US Marines ten years earlier. Within a few months they had also captured Mosul and Tikrit. The battle lines may continue to change, but the overall expansion of their power will be difficult to reverse. With their swift and multipronged assault across central and northern Iraq in June 2014, the ISIS militants had superseded al-Qaeda as the most powerful and effective jihadi group in the world.

These developments came as a shock to many in the West, including politicians and specialists whose view of what was happening often seemed outpaced by events. One reason for this was that it was too risky for journalists and outside observers to visit the areas where ISIS was operating, because of the extreme danger of being kidnapped or murdered. “Those who used to protect the foreign media can no longer protect themselves,” one intrepid correspondent told me, explaining why he would not be returning to rebel-held Syria.

This lack of coverage had been convenient for the US and other Western governments because it enabled them to play down the extent to which the “war on terror” had failed so catastrophically in the years since 9/11. This failure is also masked by deceptions and self-deceptions on the part of governments. Speaking at West Point on America’s role in the world on May 28, 2014, President Obama said that the main threat to the US no longer came from al-Qaeda central but from “decentralized al-Qaeda affiliates and extremists, many with agendas focused on the countries where they operate.” He added that “as the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.” This was true enough, but Obama’s solution to the danger was, as he put it, “to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists.” By June he was asking Congress for $500 million to train and equip “appropriately vetted” members of the Syrian opposition. It is here that there was a real intention to deceive, because, as Biden was to admit five months later, the Syrian military opposition is dominated by ISIS and by Jabhat al-Nusra, the official al-Qaeda representative, in addition to other extreme jihadi groups. In reality, there is no dividing wall between them and America’s supposedly moderate opposition allies.

An intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria told me that ISIS members “say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind, because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.” These are not empty boasts. Arms supplied by US allies such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar to anti-Assad forces in Syria have been captured regularly in Iraq. I experienced a small example of the consequences of this inflow of weapons even before the fall of Mosul, when, in the summer of 2014, I tried to book a flight to Baghdad on the same efficient European airline that I had used a year earlier. I was told it had discontinued flights to the Iraqi capital, because it feared that insurgents had obtained shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles originally supplied to anti-Assad forces in Syria and would use them against commercial aircraft flying into Baghdad International Airport. Western support for the Syrian opposition may have failed to overthrow Assad, but it has been successful in destabilizing Iraq, as Iraqi politicians had long predicted. (...)