Word: westernness
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...educated at a private school, Sheikh exemplifies another kind of motivation. "They view themselves as warriors willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of building a better world," Sageman explains, "and this gives meaning to their lives." They are also younger and less visible, blending in with the Western societies they grew up in. Because of security crackdowns, they are unable to reach out to al-Qaeda's original leadership but they can access jihadi Internet forums for guidance and bombmaking expertise. The Madrid train bombings of 2004, which killed 191 commuters, are an example of an atrocity committed...
...Beijing's repression, eagerly await the Olympics. Across China, nearly everyone I have met is proud of the Beijing Games, and a boycott will only turn them against the West. Without a doubt, China's state-controlled press would play up this angle, using a boycott to demonize Western nations and to fuel Chinese nationalism, the country's most potent, and dangerous, political force. In January, the People's Daily previewed this strategy, writing that China suffers "accusations from all over the world, including misunderstandings, sarcasm and very harsh criticism" over the Games. Shortly after Spielberg's withdrawal, Chinese bloggers...
...government knew "from day one," says a senior Western diplomat, that "a successful bid for the Games would bring an unprecedented - and in some cases very harsh - spotlight" on China and how it is governed. On the other side, everyone from human-rights activists to independence-seeking dissidents in Tibet and Xinjiang - "splittists" in the vernacular of Chinese officialdom - knew that they would have an opportunity to push their agendas with the world watching. "Though the specific trigger for this in Tibet is still unclear, that it intensified so quickly is probably not just an accident," the Western diplomat says...
...China's leadership, the senior Western diplomat says, appreciates that the world is carefully gauging how it responds to the unrest. He notes that initial reports out of Lhasa had the People's Armed Police, an antiriot squad, responding to the demonstrations - not the potentially much more lethal People's Liberation Army. The government's dilemma is obvious: if Beijing insists publicly (and actually believes) it has been relatively restrained in its response to the unrest so far, what happens if the trouble in Tibet continues, or if something boils up somewhere else? A lot can happen between...
...every day. Lhasa, sometimes known as an "abode of the gods," has turned from the small traditional settlement I first saw in 1985 into an Eastern Las Vegas, with a population of 300,000 (two out of every three of them Chinese). On the main streets alone, by one Western scholar's count, there are 238 dance halls and karaoke parlors and 658 brothels, and the Potala Palace-for centuries a symbol of a culture whose people were ruled by a monk and home to nine Dalai Lamas-is now mockingly surrounded by an amusement park...