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Dutch Jihadists in Syria Pose Threat to the Netherlands
by Soeren Kern
May 15, 2014 at 5:00 am
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Many Moroccan youths in the Netherlands have "no education,
no prospects and are barely supervised. They are a ticking time bomb."
Mustapha Abbou, former Labor Party councilor in the city of Eindhoven.
The age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the
number of women in this group is growing.
More than 100 Dutch Muslims travelled to Syria in 2013 with the intention
of taking part in jihadist activities there, and at least 20 battle-hardened
jihadists have since returned to the Netherlands, posing a significant threat
to national security, according to a new report published by the Dutch
intelligence agency AIVD.The AIVD annual report for 2013 was presented by Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk and AIVD head Rob Bertholee in The Hague on April 23. In contrast to previous years, when the main security threat was deemed to be a cyber-attack, the principal concern in this year's report is the mounting threats posed by the returning jihadists, as well as by Muslim hate preachers who are using the Internet to radicalize young Dutch Muslims and incite them to violence. The report warns that the presence of European fighters in Syria provides the jihadist groups active there with an "excellent opportunity to recruit individuals familiar with our region to commit acts of terrorism here." In addition, returnees could "exploit their status as veterans to radicalize others in the Netherlands." Overall, AIVD's primary concern is about the radicalizing influence that Dutch jihadists will exert on Muslim communities in the Netherlands. AIVD says the age of Dutch jihadists is decreasing constantly and the number of women in this group is growing. Most of the fighters are of Moroccan descent, although some are from Bosnia, Somalia and Turkey. Many of the Dutch jihadists are second-generation immigrants who were born in the Netherlands. They mostly come from the Dutch cities of Delft, Rotterdam, Zeist and The Hague. The vast majority of Dutch jihadists in Syria have joined one of two rebel groups, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] or Jabhat al-Nusra [JaN]. AIVD believes that at least ten individuals from the Netherlands were killed in 2013, including two Dutch jihadists who blew themselves up in suicide attacks (one in Syria and one in Iraq). The report says that Al-Qaeda's involvement in the Syrian conflict makes the threat far more acute. AIVD warns: "[Al-Qaeda] still has every intention of carrying out attacks in the West, and the use of fighters from Europe could make that goal easier to achieve. It is conceivable that some will return home with an order to commit or facilitate such acts. There is also a risk that these fighters will form new networks in Europe, pooling their experiences either to perpetrate attacks or to assist new recruits wishing to fight in Syria or other conflict zones." "The presence of jihadist fighters from Europe in the ranks of groups affiliated or associated with Al-Qaeda, such as ISIL and JaN, offers it a chance to deploy battle-hardened operatives in countries like the Netherlands as well as in Syria. Most hold a European passport and have their origins in our region, making them unlikely to attract much attention once they return and so ideal to carry out or facilitate assignments on behalf of the organization." As well as potentially posing a direct threat, returnees from Syria might also have a radicalizing and mobilizing effect upon fellow Muslims. In the Netherlands, they could "act as the catalyst pushing some young people already attracted by a radical strand of Islam into militant activism," the report says. "That could strengthen local radical groups and spread their message to a wider audience." The report also focuses on a new, more activist form of radical Islam that has emerged across Europe over the past several years, spearheaded by groups such as Sharia4Holland, Islam4UK, Hizb ut-Tahrir, Millatu Ibrahim and others. AIVD says these groups "provide an environment in which ideas about violence and jihad are allowed to develop; their supporters make no secret of their sympathy for Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, and have become more and more open in their expression of a jihadist ideology." "Many of the young Muslims attracted to the Syrian conflict come from one of these activist groups. As such, they have crossed the line from rhetoric to action. Effectively, the organizations have thus become actual jihadist networks with their core members fighting in Syria and, at home, a wider group of supporters engaged in ever more fervent propaganda. Social media are used to disseminate stories about 'brothers' on the front line in Al Sham (Syria) and the deaths of their 'martyrs.'" AIVD also says that pro-jihad Muslims in the Netherlands are not the only ones who have been affected by the war in Syria. "Throughout Europe and the Middle East, traditional Salafism has had to decide what stance to take. The proselytizing Salafist "dawah" ("call to Islam") movements active in Europe and the Muslim world are highly anti-democratic and anti-Western by nature, but in recent decades have clearly distanced themselves from international jihad of the kind propagated by Al-Qaeda, particularly against the West. On the other hand, they take a far more positive attitude towards what they regard as defensive jihad against "infidel" dictators in the Islamic world itself, against the supposed advance of Shi'ism and against Western occupation of "Muslim lands." "In the Netherlands, both dawahists and moderate Muslim leaders have spoken out regularly against participation in the struggle in Syria. This has brought them strong rebuttals from the jihadist camp, worded in ever more hostile terms. As a result, the broad resistance to violent jihad observed by the AIVD within the Dutch Muslim community in recent years has been somewhat eroded." The interior ministry has employed various measures to confront the jihadist threat. For example, it revoked the passports of 11 would-be jihadists in 2013 to prevent them from travelling to Syria. It also banned one jihadist of foreign origin but who lived in the Dutch city of Almere from returning to the Netherlands. If he returns, he will be tried for war crimes, the government says. The government has prohibited returning jihadists from collecting social welfare benefits, and in some instances it has frozen their bank accounts. At least four radicalized youth are currently under the supervision of the juvenile delinquency system. AVID has also heightened surveillance of recruitment networks. In July 2013, for example, Dutch police arrested a 19-year-old Muslim woman who goes by the name Oum Usama ("Mother of Osama") for recruiting Dutch Muslims for the war in Syria. Usama, a Dutch national of Somali origin, was arrested in Zoetermeer, a city in the western Netherlands. The arrest came after complaints by several parents of Dutch Muslims who have traveled to Syria. It also led to protests by Muslims outside of Dutch embassies in several European countries. The website "De Ware Religie" [The True Religion] published a letter warning of potential retribution for the arrest, including the abduction of Dutch citizens in Muslim countries. Recruitment for terrorist organizations carries a sentence of up to four years in jail or a fine of €78,000 ($106,000). Nevertheless, such cases are difficult to prove and there have been no successful prosecutions of Muslims on recruitment charges to date. Oum Usama was freed after ten days and eventually surfaced in Syria under the name Oum Usama al Muhajirah. Another suspected recruiter, a Dutch-Turk named Murat Ofkeli (also known as "Ibrahim the Turk," "Abu Jarrah" or "Abu Zer") from the notorious Schilderswijk district in The Hague, has been repeatedly cleared of all charges of recruiting individuals for jihad, due to a lack of evidence. Efforts have also been made on a judicial level to criminalize so-called "jihad travel." A new law, Article 134a of the Dutch Criminal Code, makes it illegal "to furnish oneself or another intentionally the opportunity, resources or intelligence, or to try to do such, in order to commit a terrorist crime or a crime in preparation or facilitation of a terrorist crime, or to acquire knowledge or skills to this end or impart these to another." In what has been called the first trial of its kind in Europe, the District Court of Rotterdam in October 2013 convicted two men who wanted to travel to Syria to join the jihad. But the court did not convict the men based on the new law. The court held that Mohammed G, 24, was guilty of making preparations for murder and Omar H, 22, was found guilty of preparing arson and/or an explosion and of spreading, showing publicly ... a text and/or a picture which incites to committing a terrorist crime. "This is the first time that the Netherlands hands down such a judgment and this helps clarify the fact that it's illegal to go to Syria to fight," a spokesperson for the prosecution, Paul van der Zanden, was reported saying. "Which means that we now have a legal precedent and can prosecute other people wanting to go to Syria or coming back." The light sentences handed down by the court are unlikely to serve as a meaningful deterrent to future would-be jihadists. The court found that Mohammed G had recurrent psychological problems and sent him to a psychiatric hospital. Although the prosecutor had sought three years in prison for Omar H, the court sentenced him to eight months plus four months suspended sentence. Once again, critics say, the ideology of multiculturalism has trumped justice. Some Dutch jihadists say they have no intention of returning to the Netherlands. In January 2014, the Dutch public television program Nieuwsuur broadcast an interview (YouTube video with English subtitles here) with a former Dutch soldier who said he was so angry over the West's failure to intervene in Syria that he quit the Dutch army to join the jihad to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The man—a Dutch-Turkish dual-national named Yilmaz—says he is fighting for an Islamic state and to liberate "the oppressed Syrian people." Yilmaz (he posts his reports from the battlefield here and here) says he has no intention of returning to the Netherlands. "I didn't come to Syria to learn how to make bombs, or this or that and to go back," he says. "That's not the mentality many of these fighters here have. We came here, basically, and I know it sounds harsh, but many of the brothers here, including myself, we came here to die. So, us going back is not part of our perspective here. I mean it's a big sacrifice and there's a lot of work to do, so why should I even think about Holland or Europe? It's a closed chapter for me."
"Knowing Holland, they should be worried about other things, with criminals and pedophiles roaming the streets, but I understand their fear, you know, it's not that I have a wall and I don't understand why these people are afraid. Don't worry about me. I've chosen this path for myself, and even if I would come back I would just eat... maybe some sushi, have some Dr. Pepper and give my mother a big, warm hug, sit with the family. I've never been a violent person towards people who are not violent towards me." Yilmaz's altruism may or may not be genuine, but the fact remains that the Muslim community in the Netherlands is a fertile breeding ground for a new generation of jihadists. Young Dutch Muslims are angry, unassimilated and omnipresent in crime statistics. Forty percent of Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands between the ages of 12 and 24 have been arrested, fined, charged or otherwise accused of committing a crime during the past five years, according to recent research. In Dutch neighborhoods where the majority of residents are Moroccan immigrants, the youth crime rate reaches 50%. Consider one recent incident that reveals the volatile reality facing the Netherlands. Several dozen Moroccan youths took to the streets (YouTube video here) in the Dutch town of Deurne in late March to protest the death of two Moroccan men in their 20s who were shot while trying to rob a jewelry store in the same town. The public prosecutor's office concluded that the owners of the store shot the men in self-defense, but the Muslim protesters—who have portrayed the deceased as martyrs—disagreed. Police moved in quickly to shut down the protest before it spread to other Dutch towns and cities, but the potential for spiraling unrest was clearly real, ominous and foreboding. In an interview with Dutch Public Radio 1, Mustapha Abbou, a former Labor Party councilor in the city of Eindhoven, said many Moroccan youths in the Netherlands have "no education, no prospects and are barely supervised. They are a ticking time bomb." Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.
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Kern
What Kind of Palestinian State?
by Bassam Tawil
May 15, 2014 at 4:00 am
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All that is left is to sit back and watch the establishment of
Hamas's new Islamic emirate in the West Bank.
"The shoulders of men were created only to bear
rifles." — Fatah Facebook page
The Ramallah funeral, authorized by the Palestinian Authority,
was attended by masses of Palestinians waving green Hamas-affiliated flags --
not yellow Fatah flags. Every child knows that if elections were held, Hamas
would win in a landslide.
The final nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian peace was the
speech given about the internal Palestinian reconciliation by the Palestinian
delegate, Azzam al-Ahmed, at the home of Hamas head Ismail Haniyeh in the
Shati refugee camp in Gaza.At the end of April, the internal Palestinian reconciliation was announced, with Fatah leaders posing for the camera with Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Musa Abu Marzouk -- all wreathed in smiles. Until the catastrophic pictures were published there were many Palestinians and Israelis who honestly believed there was a chance for a peace agreement that would lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state coexisting with Israel, but the speeches given by both sides made it clear that the dream of a Palestinian state would finally have to be shelved for the foreseeable future.
Hamas, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and an extremist terrorist organization, has always held that unrealistic position and has never expressed any desire whatsoever for a peace agreement with the Jews. Its aspiration is, and has always been, to destroy Israel by force, slaughter its Jewish inhabitants and establish a Sharia-based Palestine on the ruins. The real disappointment, however, was the speech given by Azzam al-Ahmed, who said the Palestinians would never recognize the State of Israel as the Jewish national homeland and would never waive the Palestinian "right of return" to Palestine. Those speeches summed up the joint position agreed on by both Fatah and Hamas; it means there will not be peace. The Israelis will not agree to sign any agreement that will destroy their state through the influx of the millions of descendants of the 1948 refugees. A few days later Mahmoud Abbas met with Hamas political bureau head, Khaled Mashaal, in Qatar. Apparently the internal Palestinian reconciliation is a done deal. The events made it clear to one and all that this time it is not just more empty rhetoric, and that, as Palestinians, we will have to start recognizing that our lives will change, now and in the future. The first signs came when Mahmoud Abbas and his associates threatened to dismantle the Palestinian Authority and lodged a unilateral appeal with the United Nations to have the "state of Palestine" recognized -- totally in violation of the framework for the peace process set out by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. The Palestinians bluntly told Kerry they would not recognize Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. They based their refusal on the dreamy claim that doing so would damage the historical rights of the Palestinians and the rights of Israeli Arabs. The truth is that Mahmoud Abbas does not have either the support of the Palestinian people or a consensus to lead, and his term of office ended six years ago. He knows that no decision he makes commits either the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip or the Palestinians around the world. Many people claim that because he has no legal governmental status, his decisions are not accepted as valid even in the West Bank. For that reason, Fatah leader Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Fatah delegation, made a speech in which he claimed that the objective of the reconciliation had been to provide Mahmoud Abbas with a consensual status in the Gaza Strip as well as the West Bank, until the upcoming elections are held (if, in fact, they ever are held). Barghouti's claim was made in response to Israel's claims that Mahmoud Abbas did not actually represent anybody. However, every West Bank child knows that Mahmoud Abbas's regime exists only by the grace of Israeli security services and that if elections were held tomorrow, or in six months as noted in the reconciliation agreement, Hamas would win in a landslide and take over the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas is currently at a dead end -- and why he chose to join Hamas, through the "reconciliation," of his own free will. He can control how he hands over the keys to the West Bank to Hamas and can step into the wings without fear of a Hamas putsch or a humiliating defeat in the elections. More importantly for him, he and his associates can ward off, at least for the time being, attempts to assassinate them and appropriate the assets they have amassed over the years, and avoid the bitter fates of their Fatah compatriots in the Gaza Strip, who were divested of their assets, often kneecapped and hurled off the roofs of high-rise buildings. The Palestinian leadership understands that it will not be able to agree to the conditions for peace set out by John Kerry. These conditions do not provide a solution for the millions of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original 1948 refugees, who wish to "return" to Palestine. They will come covertly accompanied by jihad fighters who gained their experience in the killing fields of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, who will accuse Mahmoud Abbas of treason, and, sooner rather than later, assassinate him and his associates and hang their bodies in the main square in Ramallah. The new mujahideen who enter "Palestine" from Jordan will immediately join Hamas, demand a redistribution of lands and resources, wage a new terrorist campaign against Israel and turn the West Bank into a Gaza-like Islamic emirate ruled according to the Shariah. Clearly, Mahmoud Abbas and his associates cannot recognize Israel as a Jewish state because they understand it would mean the end of their demand to flood Israel with the refugees' descendants and upset the Jewish majority. Once the political process is completed, the Palestinians would no longer have a basis for more demands and that would end the conflict once and for all. Ever since the Palestinian leaders understood that accepting Israel's conditions would mean their own destruction at either the hands of Hamas extremists or at the hands of the "rejection front," they have manufactured marginal, if creative, excuses to extricate themselves from the negotiations. They have claimed that Israel refused to implement the fourth phase of a prisoner release (a promise made on condition that there was progress in the peace talks). Apparently the Palestinian leaders have come to the inevitable conclusion that their regime will be toppled one way or the other, with peace with Israel or without it. Mahmoud Abbas's attempt to gain time and extort Israel into unilateral concessions by enlisting the United States and the EU, while giving nothing in return, has failed. His attempt to convince Israel that he personally would waive the "right of return" to Safed, the city of his birth, has also failed. He waffled, saying that the right of return was an individual right of every refugee, so that he could not waive everyone's "right" for them. The Israelis immediately countered by saying that the role of a leader was to represent the collective will of all his people. They said that Mahmoud Abbas was evading taking a stand on a critical core issue, and in fact leaving the issue of the demand for the right of return without a solution. Azzam al-Ahmed's declarations only confirmed Israel's evidently justified suspicions that the Palestinians did in fact want to flood their country with millions of refugee descendants and destroy their country's demographics. This accurate conclusion was why Netanyahu insisted that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. Another conspicuous manifestation of the upcoming change in the balance of power in the West Bank was the funeral held for the Awadallah brothers, two senior Hamas terrorists, killed by Israel, who engineered terrorist attacks that killed enormous numbers of Israeli civilians. The funeral was held near Mahmoud Abbas's office in Ramallah after the internal Palestinian reconciliation was signed. The funeral, authorized by the Palestinian Authority, was attended by masses of Palestinians waving green Hamas-affiliated flags -- not yellow Fatah flags. The crowd chanted the familiar "Khaybar, Khaybar, Jew, the army of Muhammad will return," the call for the slaughter of the Jews, just as the army of Muhammad had expelled and slaughtered the Jews of Saudi Arabia in the seventh century. Fatah expressed its satisfaction over the union with the Hamas terrorist organization on its official Facebook page. Fatah called the "reconciliation" a union of two "military organizations." At the end of April Fatah's page featured two masked terrorists holding assault rifles. One wears a yellow headband of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah's military-terrorist wing, and the other a green headband of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' military-terrorist wing. The page also features the slogan, "Yes to unity and the end of the [internal Palestinian] rift," and the caption reads, "The shoulders of men were created only to bear rifles." The site is full of encouragement for attacks on Israeli soldiers and praise for the new union of the Palestinians fighting the Israeli enemy. That includes Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the other terrorist fronts that have spent years in a terrorist campaign trying to destroy Israel. The page also included a list of shaheeds [martyrs], role models for the future struggle. The Israelis are also aware of declarations made by Jibril Rajoub, formerly head of the Palestinian Authority intelligence service and today a government minister, who said that if he had a nuclear weapon he would drop it on Israel. That sort of declaration gives the Israelis an indication into what the real intentions of the Palestinian Authority for them are. Declarations made by Tawfiq al-Tirawi in an interview with the television channel Al-Manar, Hezbollah's mouthpiece, recently clarified the intentions of Fatah as well. Tirawi, who was a senior figure in the Palestinian preventive security force and today is a high-ranking Fatah member, said that "the homeland is all of Palestine, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Haifa, Jaffa, Acre, from the sea to the Jordan River, according to the principles of Fatah adopted in 1968" [the armed campaign]. All that is left is to sit back and watch the establishment of Hamas's new Islamic emirate in the West Bank, an enclave of lepers against whom the whole world will unite. The Israelis and Jordanians will choke off Hamas, enabling Israel to take control of the West Bank for the next million years -- without interference.
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Topics: Bassam Tawil
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