Global terrorism thread

The Supreme Court heard Matthew James Hutchison was watching the coverage of the deadly attacks in Paris at work last month when he said "this is the best news I have heard all day, all countries should learn to shut their doors".

Justice Peter Flanagan said the butcher told his workmates "I want to book a flight to Europe and walk through all countries with a machete and kill people".

He allegedly said the Paris attacks were "inevitable".

The court heard he also said "you know what, I really hate police" and "when I have some Sudanese people come and try and kill me, I will defend myself".

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A medical assessment found he did not have any underlying psychotic illness.

A 50-million strong Sunni movement in Indonesia just launched a global anti-extremism campaign.

Each time the Islamic State, al Qaeda or another terrorist group commits violence in the name of Islam, a familiar refrain arises: What's the Muslim world doing about it?

In fact, anti-extremism efforts abound in the global Muslim community: Muslim leaders and scholars have denounced the Islamic State group, the U.K.'s Muslim Youth League has declared "ideological holy war" against extremism, and You Tube has even tried to recruit American Muslims to counter extremist content.

And in Indonesia, home of the world's largest Muslim population, a massive anti-extremism movement is underway.

Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, is the largest independent Islamic organization in the world, with 50 million members. Part Sunni religious body, part political party and part charity, it was founded nearly 90 years ago, in 1926, as a response to another Sunni movement, Wahabbism.

Wahhabism is the ultra-conservative reform movement based in Saudi Arabia that advocates for puritanical laws from the time of Islam's origins. It rejects the modern notion of "religion as a purely private activity" and the separation of church and state. The Islamic State is highly committed to Wahhabi principles, using its religious textbooks and embracing its hardline tradition of killing unbelievers.

NU's stated goal is to "to spread messages about a tolerant Islam in their respective countries to curb radicalism, extremism and terrorism," which, it claims, "often spring from a misinterpretation of Islamic teachings." It launched its global anti-extremism initiative in 2014.

Its work was recently magnified by the Paris terror attacks, which Indonesia's Vice President, Jusuf Kalla, who serves on the NU Advisory Board, condemned at a three-day conference last week in Malang, Indonesia. The conference was held by the International Conference of Islamic Scholars, another Indonesian anti-radicalism project that its Foreign Ministry started in 2002, in wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Kalla said, "There is nothing religious about such attacks because Islam never justifies them."

NU is setting its sights globally. In December 2014, it created an American nonprofit called Bayt ar-Rahmah in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to serve as headquarters for its international activities. It is planning "an international conference and cultural event in Washington, D. C." in Spring 2016, NU General Secretary Yahya Cholil Staquf told the Huffington Post.

It is also building a "prevention center" in Indonesia to train Arabic-speaking students to combat jihadist rhetoric, alongside NU theologians. And it's has created a joint program with the University of Vienna in Austria called VORTEX, the Vienna Observatory for Applied Research on Radicalism and Extremism. The project, which is funded by the Ministry of Internal Security, works to "produce counter-narratives against radical ideas and propagate them globally," said Staquf. He said NU is also working on future projects with the Swedish and British governments.

There are domestic concerns about NU's global ambitions, since there's still a need to counter extremism within Indonesia itself. The country has faced a number of deadly terrorist attacks in recent years, including on its beach resorts and luxury hotels. But NU says its campaign applies "equally to local radicals," according to the New York Times. And NU suggests that the specific differences of Indonesian Islam, which it believes is more moderate and tolerant than that of the Middle East, should be both encouraged at home and propagated abroad. "When we learn that the threat of radicalism is global, we need to consolidate globally to challenge it," Staquf told Huff Post.

Indonesia is home to one of the most liberal Muslim populations in the world. On Nov. 14, the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country's top Muslim clerical body, which includes NU, announced a plan to mobilize 50,000 preachers to spread moderate, or "Wasathiyah," Islam within Indonesia.

As suggested in a 2012 article in the Indonesian policy journal Strategic Review, pluralism may be the "big idea" that Indonesian Islam can bring to the world stage. Although Indonesian Muslims are a numerical majority, they live alongside Hindus and Buddhists who predated them on the island, and they share and mix spiritual traditions. Indonesia's national motto is bhinneka tunggal ika, or "unity in diversity,” and that ethos is central to the country's Muslim traditions. It's the backdrop for the school of Islam Nusantara, or “Islam of the Archipelago,” a 500-year-old strain of Sunnism that emphasizes Hindu-Buddhist tenets like nonviolence and religious tolerance.

In a 90-minute film released by NU called "The Divine Grace of Islam Nusantara," Indonesian Islamic scholars systematically criticize and denounce the Islamic State’s interpretations of the Quran and Hadith.

The film underscores the ambition and scope of NU's anti-extremism platform. “At the upstream level, it is the job of clerics to combat embryos of terrorism, while on the downstream side, it is the job of law enforcement institutions to do so,” said Muzadi, who also serves as secretary-general of ICIS.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Jusuf Kalla as NU's VP. He is the Vice President of Indonesia and a member of NU's advisory board.

A French journalist held hostage by Islamic State for 10 months, has made an impassioned plea against bombing Syria, saying it was a trap that would only benefit Isis.

Nicolas Hénin, previously held hostage by Mohammed Emwazi, implored the international community to seek a political solution. Engaging with Syrians, not bombing them, was the surest way to bring about the collapse of Isis, he said. I was held hostage by Isis. They fear our unity more than our airstrikes.

In a five-minute video said to have been recorded in the past few days in Paris and posted on You Tube by the Syria Campaign, Hénin said: “Strikes on Isis are a trap. The winner of this war will not be the parties that have the newest, most expensive, most sophisticated weaponry, but the party that manages to have the people on its side.”

In his message, apparently timed to coincide with Wednesday’s UK parliament debate on joining Syria airstrikes, he said: “At the moment, with the bombings, we are more likely pushing the people into the hands of Isis. What we have to do, and this is really key, we have to engage the local people.

“As soon as the people have hope in the political solution, then Islamic State will just collapse. It will have no ground any more. It will collapse.”

Hénin was released along with other French hostages in April 2014. He had been held captive alongside James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines and Alan Henning, who were all murdered by Emwazi.

“Mohammed Emwazi was one of my captors. He is the one who murdered my friends,” said Hénin. “I can’t prevent myself from thinking for the six murders that he committed, face to camera, murders of westerners, how many Syrians did he kill, and who cares for them?” Mohammed Emwazi killed my friend, but his own death won't affect the war.

He said the jihadis lived in a parallel world and a “different matrix”. They believed in a “mad prophecy” that there would be a global confrontation between a coalition of “80 armies against an army of Muslims coming from all over the world” and were “a bit out of their mind”.

Hénin said: “Why are we making so many mistakes? Why are people so much misunderstanding the region? We are just fuelling our enemies, and fuelling the misery, the disaster for the local people.”

He said the radicalisation was the result of passivity by the international community, who failed to assist Syrian democrats “as they were yelling for their freedom, and the Syrians were living in total despair”.

He said: “For every single Syrian killed since the beginning of this conflict by Islamic State, between seven and 10 have been killed by the Syrian regime. We have to understand that these two parallel disasters for the Syrian people, they depend one on the other, and one cannot fight one without fighting the other.”

Hénin said the summer refugee crisis had been a propaganda blow to Isis. Images of refugees fleeing the Muslim “dreamland” and being welcomed in the lands of “unbelievers” had given a lie to their message of western hatred towards Muslims, he said. “And that is why they probably tried to manipulate the public during the Paris attack, to make us close our borders, and maybe, even more importantly, to close our minds.”

There was an easy way to make Islamic State “lose ground at high speed” he said. “It would be for the international community to take the decision that all the Syrian regions that are held by the opposition are no-fly zones; no-fly zones for everybody. Not the coalition, not the Russians, not the regime. Nobody. So, actually to provide security to the people would be devastating for Isis and this is what the international community should focus on,” he said.

World's largest Muslim organization begins anti-extremism campaign: