A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.
A French scholar delineates the attractions of violent extremism, specifically jihadi Islam.
In this concise translation from the French, Khosrokhavar (Director of Studies/School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris) moves from general notions of radicalization, which have historically involved pockets of marginalized and ghettoized minorities from the 11th-century Assassins to the Europeans terrorists in the “years of lead,” to the specific current ideological radicalism in the Muslim world. What has changed? The author emphasizes that this newest crop of radicals involves a phenomenon that is “more intense” than previous eras: larger in scope, more widespread, enduring over a longer period of time, and involving more random violence and a troubling “capacity to adapt to extreme situations through reorganization”—e.g., the adaptability of al-Qaida. Khosrokhavar finds that radicalization takes different paths in the Muslim world and in the European theater. In the former, the radicals tend to be young people from the middle classes who feel disenfranchised against corrupt and authoritative regimes and are bent on establishing “a transnational Islamic regime.” In the latter, young radicals emerge from the lower social strata in tough neighborhoods and are often children of immigrants, such as the young people of North African descent in France. The author looks at the small but growing numbers of women joining radical jihadism, often acting to avenge the death of a husband, brother, or father or acting out (in a severely repressed Muslim society) from an “antipatriarchal, even feminist dimension.” Living in France, Khosrokhavar is particularly attuned to the radicalization that occurs among the young immigrants living in the banlieues of Lyon and elsewhere, fraught by ghetto conditions and “intense dehumanization,” and he offers insight into the radicalization that occurs in prisons, when vulnerable criminals are converted by a charismatic “radicalizer.”
A timely, systematic breakdown of thee reasons for radicalization.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-268-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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