The terrorist attack that narrowly failed to inflict mass slaughter at Glasgow airport on 30 June 2007 has had a singular impact on Scotland's public life. A universal sense of shock was followed by vigorous official efforts to build bridges to the country's approximately 60,000 Muslims. A week later, on 7 July, the cream of Scotland's establishment gathered in George Square in Glasgow's heart to offer them protection and reassurance. The institutions represented included the ruling Scottish National Party (SNP), the police, the Church of Scotland, the trade unions, and the vocal anti-war movement. Nobody wondered aloud about the religious dimensions of the violent ideology that had evidently motivated the would-be massacre. Indeed, Scotland's health minister and SNP deputy leader Nicola Sturgeon was explicit that "Islam is a religion of peace".

On the internet, in gymnasiums, bookshops and video-clubs, recruitment propaganda is viewed by and debated among prospective Islamist militants. This wide-ranging material contains four recurrent themes; understanding them is the first step to forming an effective counter-narrative to dissuade the next generation of would-be militants from embracing violence, and channelling their energies and ideas into democratic routes of political and religious persuasion.

Johnny Ryan is a senior researcher at the Institute of European Affairs, a policy think-tank in Dublin, with offices in Brussels.

He is the author of Countering Militant Islamist Radicalisation on the Internet: A User Driven Strategy to Recover the Web (Institute of European Affairs, 2007). His blog is here

Canada's military death-toll in Afghanistan increased to sixty-six with the killing of six soldiers by a huge roadside bomb in Panjwali district, southwest of Kandahar, on 4 July 2007. In the forty-five months from 17 April 2002 to 31 December 2005, eight Canadians were killed - four of them by friendly-fire. But in the eighteen months of 2006 and 2007 alone, fifty-eight have given their life.

A British soldier killed in the upper Geresk valley of Helmand province on 12 July brought the number of British military deaths in Afghanistan to sixty-four, of which fifty-three have occurred since July 2006. The country's media reports on 16 July that the casualty-rate is both higher than that of United States forces, and (in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan) approaching that experienced by British troops in the second world war.
Gunnar Heinsohn is the director of the Raphael-Lemkin-Institut at the University of Bremen, Europe's first institute devoted to comparative genocide research. He is the author of Sons and World Power: Terror in the Rise and Fall of Nations (Söhne und Weltmacht; 8th impression, December 2006), a German-language scholarly bestseller. In 2005-07, he lectured on the subject of youth bulges and violence to Germany's secret service (BND), commanders of British armed forces, and Germany's Academy of Security Policy in Berlin

Also by Gunnar Heinsohn:

"Why Gaza is fertile ground for angry young men"
(14 June 2007)
In September 2006, General James L Jones, then Nato's supreme commander for Europe, admitted to his deep surprise about the growing threat of the Taliban (though this is a factor long discussed in Paul Rogers's column in openDemocracy). As in Iraq, western strategists are scrambling to deal with the resurgence of sustained violent opposition on the heels of splendid western victories. True, foreign aid has not been managed well; in many cases it has been squandered and has evaporated. Moreover, centuries-old tribal regional rule that resents the western occupiers and their proxy government has reasserted itself and. But where have all the recent insurgents come from?

On 2 July 2007, British police authorities announced that all eight people tied to the failed terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow on 29-30 June were medical professionals. Doctors? How could that be? The shock was palpable on everyone's lips, in all media outlets, news reports, and blogs. "A surgeon's trajectory takes an unlikely swerve", a New York Times story was titled. Edwin Borman, chairman of the British Medical Association's international committee, told the BBC that the link with NHS doctors "would be a ‘betrayal' of society because of the oath they sign up to promising to do no harm". Abdula Shehu, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's health committee, worried about an eventual backlash: "To generalise about an event like this and think that Muslim doctors generally should have a different kind of treatment or perception in a negative way should not be the issue here", he said.

One of the most remarkable features of the "war on terror" - linguistically, and also politically - has been the warriors' characterisation of their target. They see terrorism as a barbarous attack on civilisation, a manifestation of "evil, the very worst of human nature", according to President Bush; it represents, in the words of two of his former senior colleagues, "no faith, no religion. It is evil, murderous" (Colin Powell) and "a cancer on the human condition" (Donald Rumsfeld).

• Nick Pearce, Institute for Public Policy Research
  

• Sunny Hundal, New Generation Network
  
  
• Nick Johnson, Commission for Racial Equality

An ambiguous rescue