Manchester, London Bridge, and the New Terrorist Threat to Britain

Since the bloody bombing at a Manchester concert on May 22, a great deal of information has come to light about the perpetrator, Salman Abedi, some of which may suggest parallels to the case of the most recent attacks in London. Dominic Green writes:

Abedi was not a “lone wolf” who had “self-radicalized” on the Internet or been “inspired” by Islamic State (IS). . . . France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, announced that Abedi had “proven” links to IS, and that British and French intelligence services had information that he had been in Syria in 2015. . . Just after the bombing, one of Abedi’s friends told the Times of London that Abedi had left for Libya “three weeks ago” and returned “recently, like three days ago.” . . .

In some respects, Abedi has the background of a typical Euro-jihadist. The son of immigrants, he dropped out of college and into adolescent criminality before sinking further into the redemptive fantasies of Islamist violence. . . . [But] Abedi grew up with Islamic “radicalism” and was always known to the authorities. He was born in Manchester in 1994, to parents who had sought asylum from [Muammar] Qaddafi’s Libya. His father Ramadan Abedi . . . sought sanctuary in Britain because he was an Islamist, and thus an enemy of Qaddafi. The British authorities granted asylum because Qaddafi [at the time] was Britain’s enemy too. . . . [The elder Abedi] was also a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The LIFG was founded in 1995 by Abdelhakim Belhadj and other Libyan mujahedeen who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and wanted to overthrow Qaddafi and create an Islamic state in Libya. Its personnel and ideology overlapped with those of other Sunni Islamist groups, notably the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and latterly the group Ansar al-Sharia, which took part in the deadly 2012 sacking of the U.S. installation in Benghazi.

Similarly, Green writes elsewhere, Saturday night’s assault, perpetrated as it was by three people, “cannot be the work of a ‘lone wolf’ or a ‘misfit’” but must be that of “an organized, collaborative unit.” How, asks Green, did the cell avoid detection and “what if, as in the case of Salman Abedi (the Manchester bomber) the trail leads abroad”?

Read more at Weekly Standard

More about: ISIS, Libya, Radical Islam, Terrorism, United Kingdom

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society