By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 13 June 2022
Muslim protesters outside the Cineworld in Birmingham demand ‘The Lady of Heaven’ film is banned, 5 June 2022 [image source]
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 March 2021
Almost exactly a year ago, the British government announced the first lockdown to counter the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and around the same time such measures were adopted in almost every other country. With Britain having now vaccinated nearly half the country, including all of the most vulnerable, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson having set out a timetable for the lifting of restrictions, it is possible to think of the post-COVID 19 situation and to wonder about how or if it will be different to what came before. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 21 February 2021
Execution of Jan Beuckelszoon // Illustration in a book by Lambertus Hortensius
In 1534, shortly after the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a radical sect from this new movement, the Anabaptists, seized the city of Munster in Germany and governed it for sixteen months as a millenarian cult in a manner so alarming it managed to bring together Catholic and Lutheran forces to put it down. The experience had a profound influence not only on the development of Anabaptism thereafter, but on the manner in which the Reformation more generally unfolded. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 29 June 2020
Al-Qaeda’s General Command released a statement on 29 June 2020 through its As-Sahab Media, entitled, “A Message For The Oppressed Masses In The West”, which seeks to capitalise on the recent unrest in the United States by offering Islam as the solution to racial divisions. Al-Qaeda, of course, diagnoses the root cause of America’s problems in its greed “Jewish overlords”, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that is common to most jihadists. The text of this message is reproduced below. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 26 May 2020
Early in his new book, Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad, The Washington Institute’s Aaron Zelin quotes a pair of sociologists who note that ‘where theories are plentiful … ideas are vacuous’. The book is in many ways the antithesis of this approach. It is not without theoretical content; where social movement theory arises as a means of understanding jihadism, say, the author gives an overview of the literature to contextualise it for the reader. But the general approach is historical, empirical, and detail-rich, so that by the time Zelin summarises his findings in the various sections there can be no doubt about the evidentiary basis. Continue reading
Book Review: Carter Malkasian, ‘Illusions of Victory’, Oxford University Press, 2017. pp. 280.
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 July 2018
Carter Malkasian sets out in Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic State to upend the conventional understanding of the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) movement, known at the time as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), in Anbar province of western Iraq. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 June 2018
Al-Qaeda-linked Telegram channels circulated a surreal statement on 26 June 2018, an “open letter” inviting Roger Federer, the famous Swiss tennis player, to embrace Islam. The text of that statement is reproduced below. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 February 2018
Review of ‘Jefferson’s War: America’s First War on Terror, 1801-1805’, by Joseph Wheelan
“The Terror,” raids by pirates who believed themselves to be on a holy mission, were “an accepted hazard of conducting foreign trade, much like hurricanes”. So notes Joseph Wheelan in his 2004 book, Jefferson’s War. That changed after a naval expedition by the United States put down the trade in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Continue reading
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 4 December 2017
Al-Naba 108, page 7
The latest edition of the Islamic State’s newsletter, Al-Naba 108, released on 1 December 2017, has a profile on page 7 of a fighter named Abu Sulayman al-Libi, a Libyan jihadist who came to Syria soon after the caliphate declaration in June 2014 and became the senior religious official in Homs. Abu Sulayman was killed in the fighting between IS and the pro-Asad coalition in the deserts of eastern Homs Province, near the T3 oil pumping station. This probably means Abu Sulayman was killed in the last days of September or the first few days of October during the IS counter-attack to the regime coalition’s push into Deir Ezzor. A rough translation of the Naba obituary is published below. Continue reading
