Read on Twitter
Re-creating my tweets here so as not to hijack the original thread. This guy's take is a disaster 
https://twitter.com/Viking_Sec/status/1356370869023612930
https://twitter.com/Viking_Sec/status/1356370869023612930
Ok, so his first mistake is in saying that "there is no right-wing extremism in Islamic countries".
He's doing that thing where analysts view "the Muslims" as a monolith that have no politics of their own. It's shallow and not something that reflects a depth of understanding.
He's doing that thing where analysts view "the Muslims" as a monolith that have no politics of their own. It's shallow and not something that reflects a depth of understanding.
Particularly for someone bearing the credentials he claims to. Different terrorism groups act for different reasons. Even ISIS and Al-Quaeda parted ways when Au Bakr Al-Baghdadi rejected AQ's authority (as is discussed here: https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/comparing-al-qaeda-and-isis-different-goals-different-targets/)
The missions of these two groups, which are largely regarded by the west as being two major organizational sources of Islamic terrorism have very different political goals.
Religion plays a role, but UBL *always* claimed 9/11 was justified by US support of Israel. That's geopolitical, as is Daesh's goal of creating an Islamic theocracy. Both are political goals that can be mapped to a contextual right/left political map.
The next claim this guy makes is that "on a global scale, the vast majority of terrorist attacks were carried about by Islamist terrorists".
Again, we're making a huge oversight by failing to recognize the political nature of "Islamist terror attacks"
Again, we're making a huge oversight by failing to recognize the political nature of "Islamist terror attacks"
That's my first criticism of his conclusion. This oversight leads to intelligence failures, plain and simple.
The second criticism is that as an intelligence professional, you constantly have to be able to see around the curve.His own literature betrays him here.
The second criticism is that as an intelligence professional, you constantly have to be able to see around the curve.His own literature betrays him here.
Page 60 - the overview statement on the section on right wing extremism notes a decline of ISIL attacks in the mid-east, and a rise in far-right terrorism in the West. It's like he didn't even read the intro statement on the antithesis to his conclusion.
You can find his source material here if you want to peruse it and come to your own conclusions. Suffice to say, you do have to at least skim it if you want to make any of your own conclusions.
https://visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GTI-2020-web-1.pdf
https://visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/GTI-2020-web-1.pdf
This criticism of not taking into account political reasons for "worldwide Islamist terrorism" is such an egregiously lazy categorization that it essentially invalidates any conclusion you could make from global data, so refuting it based on his own evidence is nearly impossible.
