http://www.h-alali.net

It’s not so much a forum as a religious leader taking questions. Hegghammer describes him like so:

Hamid al-‘Ali is a Kuwaiti scholar and former leader of one of the two main moderate Islamist parties in Kuwait. His discourse turned noticeably more radical in 2002. Al-‘Ali has emerged as the most important mufti for jihadist groups operating in Iraq. He was put under house arrest in the summer of 2004, and imprisoned in May 2005.

You can use Google’s translator to actually navigate the site in English, at least enough to get the gist of the questions and answers.

So long as Anon is Anon, there’s a better chance of the idea being discussed rather than the person.

Not everything in the study is correct, but the methodology is interesting. And how it breaks down the enemy, would be of interest to people who are interested in analyzing enemy action patterns.,

I don’t take counterparts as anything negative or hostile. It’s just ironic that only the nameless have no counter parts, because there is no way to correlate the data in any fashion whatsoever.

Maybe you should contact him and tell him to brush up on it. You can reach him through the info I posted in an earlier comment.

Islamist extremists aren’t our counterparts

You’re picking a fight, right? In some dimensions you are (preoccupied with the topic, informed, discuss it online, see one another as the enemy, etc. etc.). That’s all I meant. Move on.

Well, it wasn’t to start a fight, that’s for sure.

This was just a case of finding something unique, interesting, politically neutral, and posting a relevant bit. Is Hegghammer right about the decapitations? Probably not, considering that there’s fresh news this morning of 17 Shiite laborers being kidnapped and beheaded.

His footnote to the beheading thing:

The Shi’ite Islamist group Hizbullah carried out many high-profile kidnappings of Western citizens in Lebanon in the 1980s. Some of the hostages were killed, though not by decapitation. The Algerian group GIA kidnapped and decapitated seven French monks in Algeria in the spring of 1996. In January 2002, the American journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted and beheaded by Sunni militants in Pakistan.

I’m not interested in defending it.

What’s valuable about Hegghammer’s article is his granular approach to the radicals. He breaks the “Islamic Jihadist movement” down into factions and five dominant roles, and he charts trends in their online forums. He quantified trends by sampling all the messages left on one radical site, al-Qal’a, on the 15th of every month from October 2003 to January 2005 and then he charted the results. For instance, there used to be debate about the need to wage the jihad on several fronts, but a consensus was reached in 2004 to focus on Iraq.

please, just pick some moniker for convenience sake

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Our counterparts? Counterparts defined as “one remarkably similar to another b : one having the same function or characteristics as another”

Islamist extremists aren’t our counterparts – their “culture” is based on a system of apartheid and violence that is brutal when compared to every other political/social system on the planet. A pack of hyenas would be insulted to be labelled as their “counterparts”.

Hegghammer obviously knows nothing about the history of the Middle East, which is pretty amazing considering the amount of information that’s been published on the subject.

You seem to have even fewer reading skills than Hegghammer. Why would you assume that someone named mary-at-exit-zero is a man. Is English your first language?

Oh, and if you think I’m riding a strawman, take this Muslims word for it (but read VERY carefully between the lines, remembering that if it’s not forbidden, it’s permitted, and what someone is or isn’t can be explained many ways to suit your situation).

Once again …

Thomas Hegghammer, The Middle East Journal, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 11-32, Winter 2006