Monday, July 04, 2005
Poverty is not the only thing that begets jihadists
Altruism wasn't the only thing in the minds of a lot of the people who watched Live 8. Drying up poverty, a popular mantra dictates, will dry up the recruiting ground of terrorists.
But it ain't necessarily so. A fascinating and detailed treatment by Robert S. Leiken on the Real Clear Politics web site (Europe's Angry Muslims) pinpoints comfortable Europe as a burgeoning terrorist haven.
The item is long, and I have paraphrased excerpts as follows:
(T)he growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies ...The cell in Hamburg that was connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by Moroccan immigrants. But...a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe ... murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November.
...(I)t is estimated that between 15 and 20 million Muslims now call Europe home and make up four to five percent of its total population. ... (which) will double by 2025
...(M)ost Muslim newcomers to western Europe started arriving only after World War II, crowding into small, culturally homogenous nations....Europe's Muslims gather in bleak enclaves with their compatriots: Algerians in France, Moroccans in Spain, Turks in Germany, and Pakistanis in the United Kingdom.
...(M)any younger Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. .... the very isolation of these diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few Muslim countries.
... Dutch youth are now embracing the fundamentalist line. Much the same can be said about angry young Muslims in Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, and Milan.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of jihadists in western Europe: call them "outsiders" and "insiders." The outsiders are aliens ...(M)any of these first-generation outsiders have migrated to Europe expressly to carry out jihad.
Insiders ... were born and bred under European liberalism. Some are unemployed youth from hardscrabble suburbs of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris or former mill towns such as Bradford and Leicester....another paradigmatic second-generation recruit (is) the upwardly mobile young adult, such as the university-educated Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, or Omar Khyam, the computer student and soccer captain from Sussex, England, who dreamed of playing for his country but was detained in April 2004 for holding, with eight accomplices, half a ton of explosives aimed at London.
Al Qaeda's drives focus on the second generation. And if jihad recruiters sometimes find sympathetic ears underground, among gangs or in jails, today they are more likely to score at university campuses, prep schools, and even junior high schools
Several hundred European militants -- including dozens of second-generation Dutch immigrants ...　have also struck out for Iraq's Sunni Triangle. In turn, western Europe serves as a way station for mujahideen wounded in Iraq.
...(T)he Iraq network, which procures weapons in Germany from Balkan gangs, parallels those for the conflicts in Chechnya and Kashmir. Thanks to its state-of-the-art document-forging industry, Italy has become a base for dispatching volunteers. And Spain forms a trunk line with North Africa
Terrorism　(in Europe) is still seen as a crime problem, not an occasion for war. Moreover, some European officials believe that acquiescent policies toward the Middle East can offer protection. ... bin Laden ... has offered a truce to those European states that have stayed out of the conflict.
Contrary to what many Americans concluded ... France is the exception to general European complacency. ...during the 1990s the energetic French state denied asylum to radical Islamists even while they were being welcomed by its neighbors. Fearing, ..., that contagion would turn "the social malaise felt by Muslims in the suburbs ..." into extremism ... the French government ...detaining suspects for as long as four days without charging them or allowing them access to a lawyer. Today no place of worship is off limits to the police in secular France. Hate speech is rewarded with a visit from the police, blacklisting, and the prospect of deportation. These practices are consistent with the strict Gallic assimilationist model that bars religion from the public sphere (hence the headscarf dispute).
French youth could still tune into jihadist messages on satellite television and the Internet, but in the United Kingdom open radical preaching spawned terrorist cells.
Fragmentation and rivalry among Europe's security systems and other institutions continue to hamper counterterrorism efforts.
The new mujahideen are not only testing traditional counterterrorist practices; their emergence is also challenging the mentality prevailing in western Europe since the end of World War II. Revulsion against Nazism and colonialism translated into compassion toward religious minorities, of whatever stripe.
To strike at the United States, al Qaeda counts less on domestic sleeper cells than on foreign infiltration
The members of the Hamburg cell that captained the September 11 attacks came by air from Europe
