Taxi to the Dark Side

The Boy Who Cried Lone Wolf – By J.M. Berger | Foreign Policy. The Moroccan-American man arrested Friday for attempting to blow up the U.S. Capitol building, Amine El Khalifi, was also far from alone. He was in contact with men he thought were part of al Qaeda, and those men handed him a complete (but inert) suicide vest and an automatic weapon to carry out his attack. The fact that those men were FBI undercover agents is beside the point: If someone claiming to work for al Qaeda hands you a fully assembled bomb for your attack, you are…

Beyond the Clash of Civilizations – NYTimes.com. On the one side were the radicals, who would use more and more demonstrative violence to underline the weakness of the powers-that-be in an attempt to mobilize the masses on their side, and who would finally find themselves isolated and ostracized by those same masses, as the failure of Egyptian and Algerian radicals had proven in the 1990s.  On the other side, a growing amount of Islamists were converting to the creed of pluralism and democracy, as was already then the case in Turkey. That change would not take place without turmoil within…