Center for Strategic Communication

[ by Charles Cameron — skip straight to the last three sections if you want the meat without the fruit & nuts ]
.

I didn’t know that football hooligans were against salafists when I put together this DoubleQuote in a free moment yesterday — I just remembered the guns with Bible verses on them (upper panel, below) when I saw the rifle with its Al-Qaida inscription (lower panel):

SPEC DQ fighting scriptures

It was only later in the same day that I ran across Anders Breivik‘s inscriptions on his Glock and rifle, Mjolnir, Thor‘s hammer (upper panel) and Gungnir, Odin‘s spear (lower panel), respectively:

SPEC DQ breivik guns

**

My wanderings, however, led me to some other mattters of interest, such as the existence of Hooligans against Salafists — neatly linking together the sort of research Robert Bunker does on gangs in Mexico, my interest in the spill-over between games and war, the seemingly perennial topic of terrorism vs vigilantism, etc..

The upper panel below shows German football hooligans against Salafists — Hooligans gegen Salafisten– and from their quasi-acronym Ho.Ge.Sa to Ra.Ho.Wa, the quasi-acronym for Racial Holy War was a pretty obvious next DoubleQUote:

SPEC DQ HoGeSa RaHoWa

But wait — that Ra.Ho.Wa logo has clearly been superimposed onto a pre-existing photo of Nikki Lane

SPEC DQ RaHoWa Nikki

– and while Nikki clearly loves guns, there’s no reason I know of to suppose she supports Racial Holy War.

**

As it happens, the first place I landed when I was searching cor the original Nikki photo without the Ra.Ho.Wa logo was on the [Georgian] Army magazine FB page, which also led me to this image (upper panel, below), and the Charlie’s Angels logo (lower panel), which I truly hope and trust it wasn’t imitating..

SPEC DQ army angels

**

So the mind permitted itself the Play of Musement which I discussed yesterday in Of Goals and Games, following CS Peirce‘s advice:

Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation.

Along the way I briefly glimpsed the Georgian army, remembered Charlie’s Angels with a mild and wry affection, and encountered the more formidable Ms. Nikki Lane — a pleasant enough excursion.

But what I learned on this occasion that I will take with me as a significant pointer for further investigation is the existence of a vigilante group opposing Salafist incursions into Germany, to set alongside these other indicators:

  • Israel: the No’ar HaGva’ot (Hilltop Youth) of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, on the one hand, and the shabaab of Arab-Israeli and Palestinian towns
  • Mexico: Vigilantes who have driven a quasi-religious drug cartel from a series of towns in western Mexico
  • Nigeria: Local Hunters Recapture Maiha Town in Adamawa from Boko Haram
  • Britain: ‘Muslim Patrol’ jailed for harassing couple holding hands and men drinking in a bid to enforce Sharia law in East London
  • Greece: Golden Dawn recruited a butcher to train its members in the art of using a knife effectively, in order to “neutralize opponents,” Witness E told prosecutors.
  • Burma: Buddhist vigilantes kill 9 Muslims in Myanmar bus attack
  • **

    From the Gatestone Institute‘s site:

  • Germany: Hooligans Declare War on Islamic Radicals

    A group of nearly 5,000 football hooligans from across Germany gathered in the western city of Cologne on October 26 to protest the spread of radical Islam in the country.

    The watershed march was organized by a new initiative called “Hooligans against Salafists,” better known by its German abbreviation, HoGeSa, short for Hooligans gegen Salafisten.

    HoGeSa is a burgeoning alliance between hooligans from rival football clubs who have temporarily set aside their mutual hatred for each other in order to unite against a common enemy: radical Salafists who want to replace Germany’s democratic order with Islamic Sharia law.

    The alliance has its roots in a hidden Internet forum called GnuHoonters (homophone of “New Hunters”) formed in 2012 between 17 different hooligan groups from across Germany. GnuHoonters was established primarily to fight anarchists, Marxist-Leninists and other left-wing extremists in the country.

  • That’s the sort of single data point that’s rich in the number of different terrains it connects — vigilantism, salafists, sharia, anarchists, the police. And I stumbled (wish that word hadn’t been put to commercial use) while wandering, wondering, world wide webbing — in the play of musement.

    **

    hogesa hasta la vista

    And here the Ho.Ge.Sa hooligans go all Schwartzenegger on the salafists… with brass knuckles.

    Share