European Perspectives On Terrorism

by Michael Burleigh

Copyright Foreign Policy Research Institute

HISTORY AND POLICY
“History” crops  up a  lot in  our  conflicts  with  violent jihadists.  A   war  on  terror  was  proclaimed,  and  then rejected,  because   the  term   was  belatedly   deemed  as
descriptively meaningless  as a  “war on  Blitzkrieg” and as futile as  a “war  on drugs.”  Among alternatives  that have been put  forward are  “the long  war,”  “the  first  global
terrorist war,”  the counter  campaign against  the  “global jihadist  insurgency,”   and  an   “anti-Islamic  extremism” battle.

Commentators and  politicians seek  to give  our opponents a historically familiar face by substituting steel helmets for the chequered  keffiyahs and  turbans. We  have heard  about “Islamofascism” and  “Islamobolshevism,” both of which terms risk boxing  our thinking  into the  past even  as they give needless offense  to  Muslims  by  claiming  that  they  are latter-day Nazis.

Since we  are also  engaged in  a “war of hearts and minds,” there has  been much talk of a Cold War, running parallel to three wars–in  Afghanistan, Iraq  and against  the  “global
jihadist insurgency.”  As an  American commentator  recently wrote in  Foreign Affairs, if we take 9/11 as the equivalent of 1947,  we are  only six  years into  a struggle  that may
abate in 2043 if our descendants are fortunate.

Jonathan Evans,  the director  of MI5, claims that “culture” will play  a significant role in this generation’s conflicts with jihadists  without spelling  out what that means. These
claims would  be more  credible if  there was more money for public diplomacy,  which in  the U.S. receives a significant percent of the vast Defense budget. But the West need not be concerned how  it represents  itself, if  that merely  means dispatching the  Boston Symphony  Orchestra  once  more,  to prove that  there is more to us than MTV or Baywatch. If the problems are  primarily in the Muslim world, then we need to be doing  things like  supporting an Arabic Booker Prize and gradually expanding  a liberal artistic and media culture in the   Arab   world.   A   large   cosmopolitan   bourgeoisie constituency exists in Cairo; our task is to discreetly help organize them,  perhaps along  the lines  of Freedom House’s role in  the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine. For they will  be one  of the  building blocks from which a more pluralistic greater Middle East will emerge.

During the Cold War, great enterprises like the Congress for Cultural  Freedom confronted  state  propagandists  in  the eastern bloc. Now we have international media like al-Manar, as-Sahab,  and   al-Jazeera,  plus   6,000  or  so  jihadist websites, along  with chat  rooms and social networks, often the real  sites of  auto-radicalization among young Muslims. Given the confusions in our own culture, how do we project a single view of Western society’s values? What do we do about the growing  number of  people who  inhabit a  virtual world where, as in the X-files, everything is a hidden conspiracy?

No  significant   section  of   Western  elite   opinion  is sympathetic to  the jihadists,  as  many  were  to  Marxist-Leninism in the 1930s, but throughout Europe and even in the
U.S. there  are left-liberals whose hatred of the U.S. is so ingrained that  they have  become apologists  for  the  most reactionary elements  within Islam.  Think of  the  activist human rights lawyers who are prepared to believe every crime ascribed to  the U.S.  or UK governments and their collusive involvements with  terrorists. British lawyer Madassur Arani has an  entire West London practice dedicated to frustrating attempts by  UK security  services to  recruit  agents  from within the British Muslim community. Her website gives step-by-step advice on how to resist recruitment.

There is  also a larger penumbra of people who have migrated from the extreme Left to supporting parties that are halfway houses to  the Islamists,  e.g.  George  Galloway’s  Respect Party.  In   2006  we  had  the  spectacle  of  middle-class demonstrators bearing placards reading “We are all Hizbollah now,” and  more recently  of the  Archbishop  of  Canterbury seeking  to   make  common  cause  with  Muslim  clerics  by contemplating the  licensing of  enclaves of  “soft”  sharia law, a concession that would wholly undermine the Common Law of England  while paving  the way  to “hard”  sharia law  in future.

Islam in  Europe is  a proselytising  religion which asserts its  presence–most  recently  with  demands  for  amplified muezzin in  a predominantly non-Muslim suburb of Oxford or a 12,000 capacity  mega-mosque to be situated next to London’s 2012 Olympic  complex. There  are  also  quotidian  acts  of minority-within-a-minority  self-assertion,   ranging   from schoolgirls insisting  on wearing  the hijab  and jilbab  to imams  petitioning   National   Health   Service   hospitals insisting that  patients’ beds be turned to Mecca five times a day, to female Muslim NHS surgeons refusing to scrub their bare arms.

Throughout Europe,  we are  witnessing the gradual emergence of Muslim  no-go  areas,  of  enclaves  based  around  nodal mosques and  community centres,  and public housing projects or  rows   of  private   terraced  housing  from  which  the indigenous  population   is   decamping.   Lax   immigration policies, cheap  flights and  phone calls,  and satellite TV
mean that  many immigrants do not make the mental break with “home.” They simply transplant their home village to British cities.

So far, governments, notably in Britain and the Netherlands, have responded with state programs to inculcate local values through such  things as  formal citizenship  tests. In these countries in  particular, there has been a rapid abandonment of multiculturalism,  but no  commensurate attempt to uproot its massive bureaucratic expression in education, the media, and local government.

CULTURES OF TERRORISM
Amid the incessant debate about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, we have lost sight of the fact that terrorists are the problem. Their culture  and way  of life  invariably result in chaos,
death and,  when they  succeed, the  hardwiring of political violence into  the resulting political system, as we can see in Hamas’s  reign of  terror  in  Gaza.  Unfortunately,  the
glamour extends  far beyond  the small numbers of youths who with bewildering  speed  auto-radicalize  to  the  point  of becoming active jihadis.

Two great  novels, Fydor  Dostoevsky’s Possessed  (1872) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), highlight the moral squalor in  which terrorists operate and the murderous chaos they inflict  on those  around them. Their subscription to a “higher” cause  serves to  camouflage the  congruence of the psychopathological and the political.

Like the  Irish loyalists  before them, the jihadists have a culture in  a limited,  fashionable sense.  The  (Christian) Lebanese  singer  Julia  Boutros  has  raised  millions  for Hizbollah  with   songs  that  set  the  sermons  of  Hassan Nasrallah to  music. Both Hamas and Hizbollah have developed visual cultures–colorful  posters of  the leaders and their
martyrs, plastered  all  over  Gaza  or  South  Beirut,  the suicide bombing  videos; Al-Qaeda  inspired jihadists have a common  iconography   involving  lions,  stallions,  certain
flowers, mountains,  trees,  as  well  as  masked  men  with swords. The  jihadists have  developed  computer  games  for youth that  usually involve  killing President  Bush or U.S. soldiers, and they are currently exploring 3-D programs with a  view   to  lessening   the  risks   of  bomb-making   and reconnaissance. The  primary role  of the  internet in these circles is  to forge a surrogate sense of Islamic nationhood by showing  Western “Crusader-Zionist”  aggression  and  the “defensive” jihadi  response of suicide bombings and cutting people’s heads off.

According to Marc Sageman, Internet chat rooms are  especially dangerous  in sealing off participants in a  partisan reality  where emotions  are  unmediated  and especially intense–as  one can see from Japanese sites that have been responsible for teenagers killing themselves.

“Culture” in the deeper sense encompasses the rationales for terrorist  violence   as  well   as   the   individual   and organizational   sociology   of   terrorist   groups.   Many terrorists act  out of  a frustrated  desire to  “do good”–physician terrorists  include  Egyptian  surgeon  Ayman  al-Zawahiri and  the NHS  doctors  who  incinerated  themselves
trying to  blow up  Glasgow airport  in 2007.  Most European jihadis come  from technical  education  backgrounds  rather than the  arts and  have a  very limited  grasp  of  Islamic
theology.

The backgrounds  of some  prominent  inciters  of  jihad  in Europe  suggest   that terrorism   may  be  a  compensatory mechanism for  a life  of dissolution.  Abu Hamza, currently awaiting extradition  to the  U.S., worked as a bouncer at a London strip  joint. In  Paris, Omar Saiki “went to bars and frequented prostitutes  more  often  than  he  attended  the mosque or went to listen to Abu Qatada’s sermons_. Saiki was typical of those who have landed in the Islamist movement by ‘accident’  and   whose  zeal   redoubles  when   they  find themselves in  terrorist cells  which provide  them  with  a
remedy for  the frustrations  felt by a whole group of North African men.”

Low-level  European   jihadists  are  not  people  of  great sophistication. Take  Parviz Khan,  the  Birmingham  welfare recipient recently  convicted in  England of  conspiring  to
kidnap and  behead a British Muslim soldier. As a young man, Khan had  shown no  interest in  religion. He drank, smoked, went clubbing and supported a local soccer team. All changed when he  went to  Pakistan, after  which he  began  shipping night-vision goggles  and camouflage gear. Conversations MI5 bugged in  his home  show his  efforts to beat his worldview into his  five-year-old son Abrar, who like his siblings was living in  a mock  mujahadeen camp  in the  family’s  living room:

  Abrar: ‘I  love Sheik  OBL. Khan:  ‘Allah and?’  Abrar:
  Sheikh Abu  Hamza. Khan:  ‘And who  else do  you kill?’
  Abrar: ‘Bush  I kill’.  Khan:  And  who  else?’  Abrar:
  Blair- I  kill’. Khan:  ‘And?’ Abrar:  ‘Both, I  kill’.
  Khan: ‘I  speak, my  son. Who  else you  kill? Kuffar.’
  Abrar: ‘Yeah, kuffar’. Khan: ‘What do you do with these
  people?’ Abrar:  ‘Shoot them’.  Khan: ‘How  do you kill
  them? Cut their neck. Show me. Good.’

This brings  us to  the role  of  excitement,  most  crisply expressed by  the nineteenth-century  Russian  nihilist  who dreaded a  life of  endless suppers of grilled lamb cutlets.
Despite their  leaden New  Left ideology, the Baader-Meinhof group that  plagued West  Germany consisted  of dissatisfied middle-class kids  bored with  the country’s stolid consumer culture. Certainly  they felt  guilt about  the Nazi era and about  the  Palestinians  or  Vietnam,  but  their  crimes–including  bombing   Jewish  cultural   centres–were  often committed in  a drug-induced  haze as  they sped  along  the
Autobahns in  stolen BMWs  reverberating with  the music  of Eric Clapton or Ten Years After.

In Europe,  most terrorists  are products  of  the  expanded higher education sector who are disappointed when their low-level  qualifications   do  not   translate  into  rewarding
careers, let  alone the  capacity  to  dictate  our  foreign policy.  They   are  also   recruited  from   the  expanding underclass,  with  its  subculture  of  absent  fathers  and prolific mothers.  Richard  Reid,  the  Afro-Caribbean  shoe bomber  currently  incarcerated  at  a  supermax  prison  in Colorado, converted  to Islam  while  serving  one  of  many
sentences for  petty offenses.  The Brotherhood provided the warmth and  purpose his  life had not known, the entry stage on a  trajectory that  finished when  he was  prevented from exploding the bomb concealed in his shoes.

The frisson  of conspiracy  and life  in  the  revolutionary underground is  often joined  by another  powerful motive: a burning  resentment   against  the   affluent.  The   Jemaah
Islamiyah team  who killed more than 200 people in 2002 when they bombed  Paddy’s Bar  on Bali were strongly motivated by the desire  to incinerate  what they called “white meat.” In Britain, the Islamist terrorists recently jailed in the wake of “Operation  Crevice” were  similarly driven by the desire to visit carnage on what they called “dancing slags” out and about in  a South  London discotheque.  It is  not enough to inhibit human  behavior with  disapprobation, as supremacist Islamists do  when they are dominant; they must seek out and obliterate the offenders.

But there  is more  involved in killing people. A former Red Brigade terrorist  admits that  “arms have  a fascination of their own,  it is  a fascination that makes you feel in some
way more  virile.” German or Italian leftwing terrorists did not pore  over Marxist-Leninist  tracts, but preferred Alain Delon  gangster   flicks  or   Sam  Pekinpah’s   existential splatter-movie “The  Wild Bunch.”  Apparently, after  a hard day’s training in Afghan camps, Al Qaeda recruits were shown Arnold Schwarzenegger  movies. Worryingly, European security agencies think  that the  continual replaying  of scenes  of
violence on  24-hour news  channels is  in  itself  all  the incitement some people need.

There is  a terrible  narcissism in  these circles–the idea that they  are chosen to give History a huge jolt–and if we are intent  on deglamorizing  terrorism, History  is a  good
place to start.

GLOBAL JIHAD AND EUROPE
Terrorist groups can be based on a military-style hierarchy, or a  loose franchised network. As with Al Qaeda, terrorist groups can  evolve from  the first  structure to  the second under pressure  of external  necessity, only  to reestablish the hierarchy  and the  training camps  again, as  Al  Qaeda seems to  be doing  in North-Western  Pakistan. It  can also exaggerate its  global reach  through  regional  affiliates: hence Al  Qaeda in  the Land  of the Two Rivers, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic  Maghreb, and, if it is to be believed, Al Qaeda in Britain. It is seeking to appropriate local conflicts, to reorient  these   fighters  against   Western   targets   by redirecting the alleged source of local ills.

Clearly, a  prime aim of Western policy should be to reverse this process–to  disaggregate local causes from attempts to incorporate them into a globalised Islamist insurgency. This
is why  it is  necessary  to  resist  all  efforts  by,  for example, the  Russian or  Chinese governments  to lump their problems with the Chechens or the Uighurs under “our” global war on terror.

Another response  to external  pressure has  been  to  shift fronts, so that if the organization is suppressed in Algeria or Morocco,  it will  soon bob  up in the Sahel. A series of shady  deals   seem  to   have  allowed   the  jihadists  to reestablish some  sort of  presence in  Yemen. That strategy will change  again should Al Qaeda regain a territorial base in some  collapsed state–this  is one  of the reasons it is imperative to  continue fighting the Taliban and to maintain operations in and around Somalia and Yemen.

In some  respects Al  Qaeda is  beginning  to  resemble  the (ineffectual) Black International founded in London in 1881, which claimed  to be  behind worldwide  anarchist activities which  were   unrelated  except   in  the   type  of  person responsible. Even  the Internet  had its  forerunners in the form  of   newspapers  (the   Dynamite  Press)  and  posters  explaining bomb manufacture. British security services speak
of “Al  Qaeda-inspired” violence,  since the group’s primary function  is  to  exhort  Muslims  everywhere  to  undertake violence. British  intelligence calculates  that some  2,000 individuals are  currently engaged  in conspiracies  of  one kind or  another; similar  figures probably  exist in  other western European countries.

Terrorist groups  have internal  structures and hierarchies. Most revolve  around a charismatic leader, whether bin Laden or merely  the most  charismatically emphatic  in a  smaller cell.  Different  risks  and  legal  punishments  attach  to raising funds,  laundering money,  or planting a bomb, which is a  potential weakness  in an  organization like Al Qaeda, where only  Egyptians or  Libyans are the strategists, while Moroccans and Yemenis do the dirty work. That is why we need to encourage a process of reversion from the global jihad to the local conflicts from which the jihadis originally came.

Although Europe undoubtedly hosts some professional Al Qaeda terrorists, in  practice we are witnessing auto-radicalising groups who  seek to fight in Afghanistan or Pakistan but are deemed all  but useless  on a  foreign battlefield.  At that point their  contacts in  Afghanistan or Pakistan stress the necessity of  bringing chaos  to the tax-paying/voting enemy on the  home front–a  process of  “green-lighting”  attacks that have  mercifully  been  frustrated.  The  latest  major conspiracy, frustrated  in January  2008, was that of eleven Spanish-based Pakistanis  and Indians  who were  plotting to blow up Barcelona on March 11.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE U.S.
The current condition of Europe has triggered much alarmism, with talk  of  a  neutralized  “Eurabia,”  a  future  Muslim Holocaust, or  “Last  Days.”  The  overheated  transatlantic
rhetoric can  only give  our enemies  cause for hope. I hope the  rhetoric   will  tone   down  under   the   next   U.S. administration, although I can’t vouchsafe for those who get
into government in Berlin or Brussels.

Terrorists offer no hope, only a dead end, as can be seen by the air  of decay  that surrounds earlier views held with no less passionate  intensity. We need a much more universalist approach to the chaos and suffering jihadists have inflicted around the  world, most notably on their fellow Muslims. Not only do  the jihadists  spread chaos  and death, but in some peculiar way  this is  their element.  We need to pick up on the revulsion often expressed in the Arab world to, say, the 2005 bombing  of the  Amman wedding  that wiped  out  entire families. We  need to  publicize the ways in which otherwise anti-coalition Sunni  insurgents have  mutinied against  the reign of  terror which  foreign jihadists inflicted on parts of central Iraq, and which the Taliban is seeking to restore
in Afghanistan.

We should  be countering  the jihadist  grand  narrative  of universal Muslim  victimhood with a broader message of hope. Until we  can offer a more positive vision of the future for
the societies  concerned (especially young males age 15-35), we will  see no  end to  this conflict. The Pentagon chiefs’ current interest in “global branding” is in this sense fully
justified.

Less attention  should be  paid to  Islamic studies  and the vain expectation of a Euro-Islamic “reformation,” while more emphasis should  go into  stimulating  and  expanding  other forms of  cultural activity, from literature to pop music as well as small-cap business ventures of the sort the Egyptian and Saudi  governments are using to wean former jihadis from their wrong turn in life.

We tend  to allow  the noise emanating from the Islamists to drown  out  the  substantial  numbers  of  people  in  these societies who are not unlike ourselves. We need to encourage the Muslim  world to  speak through  other voices  than  its clerics. We  should not  avert our  eyes from  these  people because we  are reliant  on the  Bouteflikas,  Mubaraks  and Musharrafs in the war on terror or as dams against the tidal flood of  Islamists who we imagine would win fair elections. Likewise, Western  oil and  gas companies  could play a much greater role  than they  do in  ensuring that  revenues from
these resources are shared out more equitably or invested in new sectors  that could give work and purpose to millions of unemployed males in these societies.

The educated cosmopolitan bourgeoisie are one element in the block of  people who  may eventually replace the autocracies and absolutist  monarchies of the greater Middle East. Other elements may  be moderate  Islamists or  those of the ruling elites who  realize the  game is up. We need to know whether support for fundamentalist parties is a form of protest vote against widespread  corruption in such societies. Judging by the lack  of success  of  Islamist  parties  in  the  recent Pakistani elections,  this  subject  needs  to  be  urgently investigated. Of course, this is not Eastern Europe or Spain making  a   transition  to   democracy.  The   institutional framework for civil society is virtually nonexistent. Nor is it Indonesia,  Turkey, or Pakistan where powerful militaries can stabilize  the transition process. Iran after 1979 shows the worst-case  scenario. That  is the  outcome we  need  to
avoid when massive change sweeps those regions.

The majority of the world’s Muslims are in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Pakistan  and Turkey, where, with the exception of Pakistan, the nation distinguishes itself from the purported global ummah  of the  radical Islamists. Recent developments in Indonesia and Turkey are encouraging–notably the Turkish Ministry of  Religious Affairs’ attempts to drop sections of the Hadith  better suited  to medieval times. Paradoxically, while Europe  should be witnessing the growth of a similarly modernized Euro-Islam, Gulf money is ensuring a sort of Arab recolonization  through   the  dissemination   of  the  most
retrograde forms  of Islam.  We should therefore insist that the Saudis  stop clerics  on their  payroll from propagating doctrines which are inimical to Western interests and demand the complete  cessation  of  Saudi  monies  being  put  into mosques, madrassas and Middle Eastern studies departments in the West  until we  are persuaded  that this  money does not represent a subversion of our values. The more authoritarian French have  put in place mechanisms to monitor what is said in Friday  sermons, with  the withdrawal of funding–and the right of foreign imams to remain in France–as the penalties for noncooperation.

I do  not foresee any resurgence of cultural Christianity in Europe in the near future. Christianity has been so squeezed from our school curricula that soon it will be as mysterious as ancient  Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Compared to  the  noise generated by aggressive atheism and secularism, Christianity is  pretty   timorous  in   Europe.  I  cannot  foresee  any circumstances  where   churches  hopelessly   suffused  with
secular liberalism  are going  to make  a defensive  Western ideology, a  neo Christendom,  part of their pitch to refill empty pews,  no matter  how many  mosques  appear  on  their
doorsteps. Europe  lacks the  sort of muscular lay Christian intellectual that  America has  in the  shape  of  a  George Weigel and many others; we have muscular atheist scientists.

Nor do  I  foresee  either  a  strong,  confident  political identity at  the European  federal level,  when citizens  of major states  have voted  so negatively against it. Nor do I see that  countries which  are  themselves  mostly  federal, composite, mini-empires,  are going  to have  any success in rebuilding core  national identities.  When  our  government
essayed this  recently, the Scots and Welsh were immediately on their  feet protesting  their separateness. Much the same might happen in Belgium, Italy or Spain.

One response  to terrorism  is obviously  that of the police and security  services. As  in the  U.S.  it  took  time  to introduce coordinated  thinking and  structures, MI5 and MI6
have been  encouraged to  cooperate; MI5  has established  8 regional sub-offices; and the Special Branch has been merged into a  single Anti-Terrorism  Branch. There are also cross-bureaucratic    organizations    working    at    countering radicalization, and intra-European intelligence efforts seem to have gone past the stage of regular meetings. In Britain, prevention of  terrorism legislation derived from the thirty years war  against the  Provos has  been  tightened  by  the Blair/Brown governments,  although on  every  occasion  such measures have  been contested  by the  civil liberties lobby and liberal  senior judges  in the  House of  Lords, some of whom seem  to imagine  they are  living in  Nazi Germany  or apartheid South Africa.

Judging by  the amount  of  restiveness  indigenous  peoples (including Chinese,  African, Afro-Caribbean, Hindu and Sikh immigrants) are  expressing at  the incremental  demands  of assertive Islamists,  it will be a rash politician who fails to accommodate  such sentiments in making policy. Indeed, we are likely  to sound  more Australian  in  the  future-i.e., politicians of  all party  persuasions  will  sound  like  a united front  in making it clear that there are lines in the sand  regarding   the  liberal   democratic  nature  of  our
societies. Interestingly, liberal Protestant clerics seem to provoke the clearest responses. It was made abundantly clear to the Dutch bishop “Tiny” Mertens when he suggested calling God  “Allah”   and  to   Rowan  Williams  with  his  donnish enthusiasm for  licensing sharia  law that  these were steps too far.

Across Europe,  conservative parties  have found  an anodyne way of  talking about  immigration as “population movements” that neuters  charges of racism that in themselves no longer work with  the debate-silencing  effects  they  had  even  a
decade ago,  especially since  it is  older  immigrants  who often lead the way in calling for restrictions. Borders will be policed  by dedicated  policemen, there  will be stronger
efforts to  ensure that immigrants master the relevant local language,  and   a  more   graduated,  extended  process  of achieving citizenship  after fulfilling  various  reciprocal
requirements. In  other words,  citizenship is  going to  be conditional  or   probationary.  We   could  go  further  in restricting access to state benefits, it being striking that so many  of those  plotting to  kill us  accept  substantial welfare entitlements.

Of  course,   actions  by  the  state  are  nothing  besides stealthier secular  processes that  are just  as apparent in urban middle-class  Tehran as  they are in Madrid, Munich or
London. Economics  may result  in the  adjustment of  Muslim families to  European nuclear  norms, just  as education and social mobility  will mean  that future  generations seek to escape what  are tantamount  to ghettos.  Let’s all hope so, for the sake of all our countries.

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Copyright     Foreign      Policy     Research     Institute (http://www.fpri.org/).

This entry was posted on 23. May 2008 at 00:36 and is filed under Foreign Policy, Europe, al-Qaeda, Gloabl War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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