Excerpt: "There are an average of 50 police shootings of civilians every year in Chicago, and no one is ever charged. Without the video of Laquan McDonald's shooting, his death would have been just one more of 50 such incidents, where the police blotter defines the narrative and nothing changes."
t was just about a year ago that a city whistleblower came to journalist Jamie Kalven and attorney Craig Futterman out of concern that Laquan McDonald’s shooting a few weeks earlier “wasn’t being vigorously investigated,” as Kalven recalls. The source told them “that there was a video and that it was horrific,” he said.
Without that whistleblower—and without that video—it’s highly unlikely that Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke would be facing first-degree murder charges today.
“When it was first reported it was a typical police shooting story,” Kalven said, where police claim self-defense and announce an investigation, and “at that point the story disappears.” And, typically, a year or 18 months later, the Independent Police Review Authority confirms the self-defense claim, and “by then no one remembers the initial incident.”
“There are an average of 50 police shootings of civilians every year in Chicago, and no one is ever charged,” said Futterman. “Without the video, this would have been just one more of 50 such incidents, where the police blotter defines the narrative and nothing changes.”
Last December, Kalven and Futterman issued a statement revealing the existence of a dash-cam video and calling for its release. Kalven tracked down a witness to the shooting, who said he and other witnesses had been “shooed away” from the scene with no statements or contact information taken.
In February, Kalven obtained a copy of McDonald’s autopsy, which contradicted the official story that McDonald had died of a single gunshot to the chest. In fact, he’d been shot 16 times—as Van Dyke unloaded his service revolver, execution style—while McDonald lay on the ground.
The next month, the City Council approved a $5 million settlement with McDonald’s family, whose attorneys had obtained the video. They said it showed McDonald walking away from police at the time of the shooting, contradicting the police story that he was threatening or had “lunged at” cops. The settlement included a provision keeping the video confidential.
“The real issue here is, this terrible thing happened, how did our governmental institutions respond?” Kalven said. “And from everything we’ve learned, compulsively at every level, from the cops on the scene to the highest levels of government, they responded by circling the wagons and by fabricating a narrative that they knew was completely false.” To him this response is “part of a systemic problem” and preserves “the underlying conditions that allow abuse and shield abuse.”
“This case shows the operation of the code of silence in the Chicago Police Department,” said Futterman. “From the very start you have officers and detectives conspiring to cover up the story. The question is, why are they not being charged?”
Van Dyke’s history “also shows what happens when the police department consistently chooses not to look at patterns of abuse complaints when investigating misconduct charges,” he adds. This failure “is one of the reasons an officer like Van Dyke has an opportunity to execute a 17-year-old kid.”
Kalven calls Emanuel’s “reframing” of the narrative “essentially false.” He points out that “everything we know now, the city knew from Day One. They had the officers on the scene. They knew there were witnesses. They had the autopsy, they had the video.... They maintained a false narrative about those events, and they did it for a year, when it could have been corrected almost immediately....They spent a year stonewalling any calls for transparency, any information about the case.”
He points to Cincinnati, where last summer a university officer was indicted for murder and video from his body camera was released within days following the shooting of an unarmed African-American man in a traffic stop.
“The policy in Cincinnati is that you should release within 24 hours unless there are compelling investigatory reasons to hold on longer,” said Kalven. “The policy should be that the presumption is that this is public information and it is released as quickly as can reasonably be done, except in cases where there is a genuine and very specific investigatory need to withhold it.”
That’s not the same as waiting until an investigation is concluded. Friday’s ruling that the McDonald video must be released—and the absence of any affidavit from investigators about the need to withhold it—showed that “there was absolutely no legal or investigatory impediment to releasing this” long ago.
“This was an incredible test of leadership, a major challenge to [Emanuel’s] leadership,” Kalven said. “Think how different the situation would be right now if the city had acknowledged the reality of what happened in the days or weeks after it happened. That would have built confidence.”
And instead of vague and politically self-serving calls for “healing,” it could have begun a real process of accountability of the kind necessary to start addressing the extreme alienation between police and wide segments of our communities.
Instead, with only Van Dyke indicted, it looks like he’s being sacrificed in order to protect the system that created him.
Cassidy writes: "Putting an end to terrorism, or even containing it, means treating the conditions that give rise to it."
A woman walks past soldiers at a checkpoint in Gwoza, Nigeria, in April, 2015, shortly after the town was liberated from Boko Haram. (photo: Lekan Oyekanmi/AP)
The Facts About Terrorism
By John Cassidy, The New Yorker
25 November 15
n Monday, I posted a long piece about how we perceive acts of terrorism in the age of social media. Today, prompted by the publication of a new report by the London-based Institute for Economics and Peace (and by a post on the report by Richard Florida), I’d like to focus on the facts about global terrorism.
If you have a sense that the problem is growing, you’re right. Last year, the number of people killed by terrorist attacks rose by about eighty per cent, reaching an all-time high of close to thirty-three thousand. Since 2000, the annual death toll from terrorism has increased ninefold. Not only that, but terrorist attacks are becoming more focussed on civilians and less focussed on military, political, and religious targets. Thanks largely to the deadly activities of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham and of Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group based in northeastern Nigeria, the number of civilians killed in terrorist attacks jumped a hundred and seventy-two per cent in 2014, to more than fifteen thousand.
Relative to other causes of premature death, terrorism is still a minor phenomenon. For every person killed in a terrorist attack, roughly forty people die in traffic accidents and roughly eighty die of alcoholism. Still, violent attacks on civilians have great salience, psychologically, and, according to the I.E.P. report, they are getting more common, especially in non-Western parts of the world. In 2014, five countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria—accounted for almost eighty per cent of the deaths caused by terrorists. Twelve years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq remains at the top of list, with close to ten thousand lives lost. Nigeria was the second most affected country, with more than seven thousand five hundred deaths.
Globally, the two leading purveyors of death and destruction are ISIS and Boko Haram. Last year, in fact, Boko Haram overtook ISIS to “become the most deadly terrorist group in the world,” the report says. The authors attribute six thousand six hundred and forty-four deaths to Boko Haram last year, and six thousand and seventy-three deaths to ISIS. The vast majority of these fatalities resulted from attacks carried out in Nigeria and Iraq. In Nigeria, Boko Haram killed an estimated six thousand one hundred and eighteen people; in Iraq, ISIS killed five thousand four hundred and thirty-six people.
The report doesn’t dwell on this, but few of these deaths attracted much attention from the Western news media. Sadly, that’s hardly surprising. In Iraq, kidnappings and suicide bombings are daily occurrences. In Nigeria, the deadliest massacres are often carried out with firearms, but suicide bombings are increasingly common. Just this past weekend, according to media reports, a girl detonated explosives at a military checkpoint in the city of Maiduguri, killing herself and seven others.
The I.E.P. report doesn’t include the recent attacks in Paris, or the ones carried out there in January, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket; the authors drew on data collected by the Global Terrorism Database, an open-source project maintained by researchers at the University of Maryland. Since the database is updated annually, it doesn’t yet account for the attacks in France. But the longer-term trends that the report describes regarding Western countries are still worth looking at.
In 2014, terrorist attacks caused just thirty-seven deaths in Western countries, 0.11 per cent of the global tally. Relative to this year, last year was a peaceful one, but it wasn’t a complete outlier. During the fifteen years from 2000 to 2014, there were three thousand six hundred and fifty-nine terrorism-related deaths in Western countries, and they accounted for 2.6 per cent of the over-all total around the world. The vast majority of these deaths resulted from four incidents: the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the 2004 train bombings in Madrid, the transit bombings in London in 2005, and the 2011 gun massacre and bombing in Norway. As I noted in my previous post, spectacular attacks on Western targets are a reality that we have to deal with. Mercifully, however, they are still pretty rare.
The report also has a section on the United States. In 2014, it says, nineteen incidents classed as terrorist attacks took place here, resulting in eighteen deaths. Most of these attacks were carried out by individuals. “Four out of the 19 attacks in the US had a jihadist element,” the report says. Three of the four were shootings believed to have been carried out by Ali Muhammad Brown, a Seattle man who claimed that he was responding to U.S. foreign policy. The other incident came when Zale Thompson, a Muslim convert, attacked some police officers in Queens with a hatchet. (The police shot Thompson dead; there were no other fatalities.)
In 2014, at least, violent attacks associated with Islamist extremism in the U.S. were outnumbered by attacks involving right-wing individuals and groups. The report notes that eight attacks last year were undertaken by “individuals or people with an affiliation to Sovereign Citizens, which is a network of individuals that have antigovernment views.” The authors identified a similar pattern throughout the West. “Lone wolf attackers are the main perpetrators of terrorist activity in the West, causing 70% of all deaths over the past 10 years,” the report notes. “Islamic fundamentalism was not the main driver of terrorism in Western countries: 80% of lone wolf deaths were by political extremists, nationalists, racial and religious supremacists.”
What is the message of these figures? Clearly, they don’t imply that there is no threat whatsoever of a large-scale attack in the United States by Islamist extremists. If ISIS and its supporters could find a way to carry out such a strike, doubtless they would do it. The two attacks in Paris are a reminder of the group’s deadly ambitions outside the Levant. Al Qaeda still represents a potential threat, too. But the figures do demonstrate that terrorism isn’t exclusively an Islamist phenomenon, and that most of its victims are located in troubled countries. The figures also suggest that, at the global level, large-scale terrorist attacks are associated with civil wars, failed states, and big flows of displaced people. “Ten of the eleven countries most affected by terrorism also have the highest rates of refugees and internal displacement,” Steve Killelea, the executive chairman of the I.E.P, said in a press release accompanying the report’s release. “This highlights the strong inter-connectedness between the current refugee crisis, terrorism and conflict.”
If we want to reduce the level of terrorism, or even contain it, we will have to deal with both its immediate manifestations and its underlying causes. This certainly involves coming to terms with ISIS, which the report depicts as an organization that is growing in strength and focussed on killing civilians. It points to an attack on the Iraqi city of Badush in June, 2014, when ISIS forces killed six hundred and seventy prisoners, and an attack on Sinjar, also in Iraq, in August, 2014, when five hundred people were killed. (Other sources say that the number of fatalities in Sinjar was much higher.) In the first half of 2015, the report estimates, at least seven thousand more foreign fighters joined ISIS.
But dealing with ISIS is far from the only task. Putting an end to terrorism, or even containing it, means treating the conditions that give rise to it. In the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, that involves ending civil wars, resolving ethnic and religious differences, strengthening state structures in ways that don’t discriminate against minorities, and providing economic opportunities for youthful populations. In many Western countries, it means tracking and marginalizing groups that advocate violence, and finding ways to prevent young people, particularly young Muslim men, from becoming radicalized.
If these challenges seem huge, that’s because they are. But in treating any problem, the first step is to gather all the facts.
Krugman writes: "Conventional wisdom on the politics of terror seems to be faring just as badly as conventional wisdom on the politics of everything. Donald Trump went up, not down, in the polls after Paris."
Paul Krugman. (photo: NYT)
Terror Politics
By Paul Krugman, The New York Times
24 November 15
onventional wisdom on the politics of terror seems to be faring just as badly as conventional wisdom on the politics of everything. Donald Trump went up, not down, in the polls after Paris — Republican voters somehow didn’t decide to rally around “serious” candidates. And as Greg Sargent notes, polls suggest that the public trusts Hillary Clinton as much if not more than Republicans to fight terror.
May I suggest that these are related?
After all, where did the notion that Republicans are effective on terror come from? Mainly from a rally-around-the-flag effect after 9/11. But if you think about it, Bush became America’s champion against terror because, um, the nation suffered from a big terrorist attack on his watch. It never made much sense.
Savali writes: "If a mad scientist locked himself in a laboratory and threw racism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, imperialism, classism, elitism and delusions of grandeur into a boiling cauldron, the result would be Donald John Trump."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty Images)
Donald Trump Is as American as the KKK
By Kirsten West Savali, The Root
24 November 15
If Trump is a joke, then the joke is on us—and the punch line is far from funny.
f a mad scientist locked himself in a laboratory and threw racism, sexism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, imperialism, classism, elitism and delusions of grandeur into a boiling cauldron, the result would be Donald John Trump.
Donald Trump is America.
In so many ways, he is what this white supremacist nation clings to with slippery fingers in last-ditch efforts to hold on to its dreams of so-called exceptionalism.
This is a man who, in 2015, is on the national stage seriously talking about banning mosques, while his right-wing propaganda machine legitimizes his insanity with a dedication that is nothing short of alarming. If the United States were Animal Farm, Fox News would be Squealer’s Network.
Deceitful, manipulative, determined.
During a conversation with a friend, he said to me that Trump “stands against absolutely every single thing this country was founded on. No exceptions.” And I had to disagree, because Donald Trump stands firmly in the tradition of a country for whom all (white) men are created equal—and no one else. Unless, of course, that white man is trans, gay or disabled. If that is the case, his privilege doesn’t carry quite as much weight.
Still, no politician would dare stand in front of throngs of supporters and say white people need to be deported because “they are rapists and criminals”—as Trump has said of Latino immigrants—even if those white people being identified were, in fact, rapists and criminals.
No politician would dare say that white protesters deserve to be “roughed up,” as Trump said of a black man who was attacked by his rabid, racist supporters in Birmingham, Ala.
No politician would dare say that white people—despite white, male supremacists (such as himself) being the primary perpetrators of terrorist acts in this country—need special identification cards, as Trump has said of Muslim Americans.
Trump is America because he feels entitled, righteous even, in standing against allowing freedom, justice and opportunity for marginalized groups. Racism and exclusion are foundational pillars of this country—and, in that, Donald Trump is on solid ground.
When some observers said he’d never be a serious contender, I said we’d better analyze his chances critically.
Not so sure. High cabinet positions for most on stage with Trump pres. He's for sale. Low pol-IQ folks love him. https://t.co/c4ZEZTuPiV
And here we are, on the precipice of the next presidential election, and no one is laughing anymore.
This is killing season for black and brown Americans. We are living during a time period when the rate of police killings rivals the rate of lynchings at the turn of the 20th century.
As racial and political tensions continue to escalate, Donald Trump—and those who follow him—smells blood in the water and he feeds off the frenzy his racist rhetoric incites in his supporters. He lusts after it, growing taller and stronger as he takes the wheel of his metaphorical DeLorean and attempts to transport this country back to a time when “whites only” wasn’t just an unspoken agenda, but the written law.
The following clip could alternatively be titled “Trump’s Dream for America”:
We’re talking about whiteness as a system. Whiteness as the default for humanity. Whiteness that makes room for a token of color here and there in transparent attempts at claiming diversity, as Trump has done with his new, Sarah Palin-endorsed spokeswoman Katrina Pierson.
Whiteness that dares to hold itself exempt from contempt when the worst terrorist organization this country has ever seen is comprised of Christian, white men wearing sheets.
Trump is Strom Thurmond. He is David Duke. He is Woodrow Wilson. If the Ku Klux Klan had lobbying power, he would be its favored candidate. I’m sure he still is.
He is unbowed in his bigoted ways, relishes the controversy and thrives on being cast as a “politically incorrect” rebel, knowing that he is in perfect alignment with a political machine that thrives on racism, cronyism and corporate capitalism.
Trump is the United States of America embodied, a perfect example of a system that is not broken, but functioning exactly as intended. If he is a joke, then the joke is on us—and the punch line is far from funny.
Remnick writes: "On Saturday night, five young Syrians slouched into a dive bar in New York and ordered drinks. When the bartender asked if off-brand vodka was O.K., they had to smile. They were all exiles from Raqqa, the provincial city in northern Syria that ISIS has made its operational center and the de-facto capital of the Islamic State. No one needed the good stuff. Just a drink would do."
The group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently faces unceasing peril from ISIS as its members smuggle out information about what's happening in their city. (photo: Stringer/Reuters/Landov)
Telling the Truth About ISIS and Raqqa
By David Remnick, The New Yorker
24 November 15
n Saturday night, five young Syrians slouched into a dive bar in New York and ordered drinks. When the bartender asked if off-brand vodka was O.K., they had to smile. They were all exiles from Raqqa, the provincial city in northern Syria that ISIS has made its operational center and the de-facto capital of the Islamic State. No one needed the good stuff. Just a drink would do.
Everyone in the group works for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (R.B.S.S.), a kind of underground journalistic-activist enterprise that, under the threat of grisly execution, smuggles images and reports on ISIS from Raqqa to its allies abroad. The group’s comrades, in turn, post them on social media and its Web site. ISIS has controlled Raqqa for nearly two years and much of the foreign press looks to R.B.S.S. for first-hand reports about the daily life—and depredations—in Raqqa. And because they have dared to post reports of crucifixions, beheadings, sexual abuse, and other crimes, members of R.B.S.S., both inside the city and abroad, have been murdered by ISIS for their work.
Abdel Aziz al-Hamza, a slender man of twenty-four, acts as spokesperson. As recently as a few years ago, he was a biology student at Raqqa University who dreamed of studying pharmacology in Jordan or Turkey and returning home to start his career and a family.
“I was a normal guy,” he said, after taking a first sip of his vodka-and-Sprite. “I hung out with friends at cafés and bars. None of us were political. In Syria, before the revolution, it was a crime to be political in any way.” Raqqa was a relatively prosperous city with energy resources and an agricultural base. Major dams in the area are an important source of power in Syria.
When anti-regime demonstrations broke out in March, 2011, in Dara’a, a city in the south, and reports spread throughout Syria that Bashar al-Assad’s security forces were firing on civilians, Hamza and many others joined in protests, in Raqqa. “We wanted to be free,” he said. “It seemed simple.”
As the uprising against Assad spread throughout Syria and the casualty counts rose, tens of thousands of people left Aleppo, Homs, Idlib, and other embattled cities and towns and arrived in Raqqa, which is on the northern bank of the Euphrates River. The city swelled and became known for a while as “the hotel of the revolution.”
By March, 2013, Free Syrian Army (F.S.A.) troops, as well as Islamist rebel forces, including al-Nusra, controlled the city and tore down a statue of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, to celebrate. “Raqqa was the first liberated city in Syria,” Hamza said.
But at around the same time, members of ISIS, or the Islamic State, bearing black flags, began accumulating in the nearby town of Slouk. “At first, there were only around fifteen people,” Hamza said. “None of us knew about it” until fighters from al-Nusra began switching over to ISIS, which had its origin in Iraq. “Over time, around ninety per cent of the Nusra fighters in the area became ISIS, and only ten per cent of them refused,” Hamza said.
In May, 2013, ISIS fighters started making kidnapping runs and attacking F.S.A. leaders, and, by late summer, there were full-scale battles with F.S.A. troops. As the F.S.A. began to suffer defeats, car bombings, kidnappings, and executions, one of the journalists at the table said, some F.S.A. soldiers “out of complete fear” also joined ISIS. People in Raqqa could see that ISIS was growing stronger, as they brought in heavy weapons from Iraq and seasoned soldiers who had fought in the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein. By the beginning of 2014, ISIS had absolute control of the city. They now overran the mosques, drove out Christians from the city, and turned major municipal buildings into their various headquarters. The propaganda campaign that ISIS mustered following the capture of Raqqa brought on a wave of foreigners.
“No one thought about the caliphate until 2014 when they declared Raqqa the capital of the caliphate and then these guys started coming in from all around the world,” one of the R.B.S.S. journalists told me. “It was like New York! A second New York! People from Australia! From Belgium! From Germany! From France! A global tide!”
“Maybe the next World Cup will be in Raqqa!” another of the journalists said, sarcastically.
The young foreign fighters were, and remain, privileged characters in the city. There are thousands of them in Raqqa, one of the R.B.S.S. journalists said: “When you are on the street you see them everywhere. They love fast-food places and Internet cafés. They love Nutella and they’ve got cans of Red Bull. Chocolates! Cheesecake! People are poor and see these expensive things! But ISIS wants to keep these Western recruits happy.”
The first crucifixion came early that spring—a horrific event to recall even now. Everyone at the table remembered the shock of it. Then came more: two people, shot in the head by ISIS executioners, crucified, and left for days for all to witness in the city’s main traffic roundabout.
“This was something new that we had never seen, this kind of violence,” Hamza said. “They started cutting heads off, crucifixions. They spread panic everywhere.” There were edicts against drinking and smoking. Enforced by an all-female morality police called the Khansaa Brigade, women were made to wear the veil and, eventually, black shoes only. They are beaten if their niqab is somehow too revealing, a veil too flimsy, or if they are caught walking on the street alone.
“I can say that women are the people suffering the most under ISIS,” one R.B.S.S. member said. “They can’t show their faces. ISIS bothers them a lot. They take sticks and slash them on the street if the veil shows the eyes. They say, ‘Hey, hey, do you want to marry me?’ People have become so poor, the families so weak, that some give up their daughters to ISIS. They accept it. Sometimes ISIS forces them to do this. The Yazidis—ISIS says these people believe in Satan. And because of that their women are just traded from man to man in ISIS, sold, raped, abandoned.”
Schools were closed down. ISIS’s imams dominated the mosques. Many children were sent off to ISIS’s religious institutions, where they were taught the most fanatical form of the faith, and then to military camps, the R.B.S.S. activists said.
“Not everyone who joined ISIS did it because they believe the ideology,” Hamza said. “I have a friend who is with ISIS but doesn’t like ISIS at all. … I called him and said, ‘Why did you join? You hate them!’ He said, ‘I am a doctor and they did not let me work. They told me, ‘If you wanted to work, you have to join us.’ I couldn’t live otherwise. I have children…’ ”
In their recruiting, ISIS targets the local youth, according to members of R.B.S.S. With schools closed down, kids play aimlessly in the street. ISIS members befriend them, give them gifts, sometimes candy, sometimes a mobile phone. They ask the kids to join ISIS, one R.B.S.S. member said, “But they say, ‘Don’t tell your parents.’ I know about one child who went missing for months. His parents looked and looked. Thirteen years old, a boy. Finally, the father said to an ISIS leader, ‘Where is my son, I’ll give you money.’ Turns out the child was in a training camp for ISIS. They kidnap these children. They are sent to a mosque for education, so they are brainwashed with an extremist form of Islam. After this, they are sent to army camp to teach them how to fight, how to make and carry bombs. At their graduation, they have orders to execute someone––sometimes a beheading, sometimes they just cut off the head of a sheep.”
There is no easy way to check every assertion made by R.B.S.S., but the accounts of extreme cruelty that they provided consistently square with the reporting done by such journalists as Rukmini Callimachi and Azadeh Moaveni, in the Times, Ben Taub in The New Yorker, and many others who have extensively interviewed ISIS members and victims in Iraq, in Europe, and along the Turkish-Syrian border.
The most powerful instrument of indoctrination for ISIS is the Internet. ISIS glorifies both the sanctity of its moral, historical, and political goals and its acts of vengeance against all whom it brands infidels. And it advertises it all without shame. “If you Googled ‘Raqqa’ in those early days you got their material first and only,” one of the R.B.S.S. members told me. “So that was one reason why a lot of foreign fighters emigrated. And this is why we began.”
In mid-April, 2014, just a month after the first crucifixions in the city, a group of six like-minded young people started to talk to each other on Facebook. The group expanded only a little before ISIS discovered it. Within two or three weeks a local imam declared that anyone who worked with R.B.S.S. would be tracked down and executed. Some civilians were arrested simply because they “liked” a post on social media.
Undaunted, R.B.S.S. activists posted on social-media sites photographs and reports of daily life in Raqqa; the whole idea was to fight ISIS propaganda on the digital battlefield.
In May, 2014, R.B.S.S. suffered its first casualty. One of the men at the bar told me: “One of our reporters was stopped at a checkpoint and his equipment was confiscated and searched.” He was held for three weeks, then executed in a public square in Raqqa.
“In the beginning we didn’t think it was that dangerous,” Hamza said. “We didn’t think they would execute us. All of us had been arrested by the Assad regime more than once during the revolution. But after this execution we met and started to talk that we don’t want to lose anyone more and we started to think about whether we should stop. But in the end we decided that our lives were not more important than the life of our friend who had been killed.”
Some of the R.B.S.S. activists devised what they hoped would be a safer, less traceable means of communication. Some left the city, and Syria itself, to help “from the other side.” Hamza, for one, took a bus out of Raqqa and headed for Turkey; he now lives, as do most of the others at the table, in Europe. Others left after the first execution of their comrade. They remained active, receiving photographs, video, and reports from their undercover comrades in Raqqa that they post on social media.
The members of R.B.S.S. are utterly frustrated with the efforts of the West to defeat both Assad, who has fended off the opposition so far, and ISIS, which has suffered recent losses in Iraq and Syria, but which has proved capable of exacting suffering from Sinai to Beirut to Paris.
“The problem the Syrian people have with the United States is that we are suffering for five years with barrel bombs,” one R.B.S.S. journalist said. “Assad has killed so many innocents, and many people have lost hope. After Assad’s chemical attack, when he crossed the so-called ‘red line,’ the U.S. just took the weapons. It made America look like a liar and weak.
“When you say ‘Raqqa,’ the first thing people think of is ISIS,” he continued. “They forget hundreds of thousands of civilians, normal people like us. I am not a terrorist. There are so many people, normal people, who want to live in a free, democratic Syria. We want to rebuild Syria, and the only way we can do it is through our civil-society group and others like it. If the United States government and other governments want to fight ISIS on social media, their Twitter accounts are seen as propaganda. But when real life is shown through us, and you see what life is like, normal people believe it.”
Talking over the jukebox din and the raucous Saturday night conversations at the bar, Hamza asked that Americans try to imagine a city in which “the 9/11s keep happening month after month, year after year.”
“Daily life is twenty-four-seven warplanes over your head,” another member said. “People now feel more afraid about the idea that all over the world they want to bomb this small city. People are afraid. The city of Kubani is completely destroyed. The people of Raqqa don’t want that. We love our city. The West says, ‘Let’s get the people out and bomb ISIS.’ They can’t. It’s a big prison. Women under forty-five can’t leave without special permission. It’s a tribal area, and females can’t leave without men. ISIS uses the people of Raqqa as a human shield.”
The R.B.S.S. members said the American fighter planes have dropped most of their bombs on targets on the outskirts of the city or they use drones to target leaders of ISIS. They claim that Russian planes, however, have hit a hospital, two critical bridges, and a university. “The problem we have with the air strikes,” one said, “is that their planes are very stupid. They’re not smart bombs.”
The peril for the group is unceasing. When ISIS arrests or executes a member of R.B.S.S.—or someone that they believe might be sympathetic to the group—they make a show of it on social media. One video, a member told me, showed “two friends of ours accused of working for us. And they don’t. ISIS tied them to a tree and shot them. A second video shows the execution of another friend of ours accused of working for us. They strung them up in a tree in an abandoned place and shot them in the head; they made the video to say they died ‘silently.’ They are sending us messages like this all the time.”
Hamza will soon accept an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists in the name of his comrades, living and dead. (I’m on the board of C.P.J., which arranged our meeting.) He will dedicate the award “to our martyrs,” to the “anonymous heroes” of the campaign, and to the people of Raqqa.
“All of us get several threats daily,” Hamza said, finishing his drink. “The last threat against me was from someone in Germany. He said I would be the next one killed. But when I think about our reporters inside Raqqa, and I am outside … I live a normal life, doing normal things. Somehow, I don’t care what will happen to me. Compared to them, I am doing nothing.”
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t was just about a year ago that a city whistleblower came to journalist Jamie Kalven and attorney Craig Futterman out of concern that Laquan McDonald’s shooting a few weeks earlier “wasn’t being vigorously investigated,” as Kalven recalls. The source told them “that there was a video and that it was horrific,” he said.
n Monday, I posted a long piece about 
onventional wisdom on the politics of terror seems to be faring just as badly as conventional wisdom on the politics of everything. Donald Trump went up, not down, in the polls after Paris — Republican voters somehow didn’t decide to rally around “serious” candidates. And as Greg Sargent notes, polls suggest that the public trusts Hillary Clinton as much if not more than Republicans to fight terror.
