Guest
Column: Radicalization of Europe's Muslims Hits a Crisis Point
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
March 23, 2015
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 With every
new atrocity, Western leaders and political commentators collectively
assure themselves and the public that the Islamic State's power will
suffer, that its PR machine is failing, and that the flow of Western
Muslims to the Caliphate will stop.
It doesn't.
European Muslim radicals have shown no hint that they are reconsidering
their hero worship of IS (or ISIS), not even in the aftermath of the
widely-condemned killing of Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, who was
caged and burned alive in February. While Muslim moderates around the world
decried the killing, teens from England, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France
and even the United States continue to cross into Syrian territory, eager
to join the jihad.
This news shouldn't be all that surprising. In 2013, Ruud Koopmans
published the results of a pan-European study, based on interviews with 9,000
European Muslims, which showed large numbers of European Muslims
believe in many of the ideas championed by the Islamic State: a return to
the roots of Islam, the conviction that religious (Koranic) law stands
above all secular laws; a hatred of Jews and homosexuals; and a view of the
West as the enemy of Islam.
Among the findings, "[a]lmost 60 percent of the Muslim respondents
reject homosexuals as friends; 45 percent think that Jews cannot be
trusted; and an equally large group believes that the West is out to
destroy Islam."
More recently, in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre,
the BBC surveyed 1,000 British Muslims, and found that 24
percent consider "violence against those who publish images of the
Prophet" is justified. Asked whether "Muslim clerics preaching
that violence against the West can be justified are out of touch with
mainstream Muslim opinion," 45 percent disagreed.
Put another way, nearly half of British Muslims stand comfortably by
those clerics who justify violence against the West.
Equally disturbing was the finding that 11 percent of British Muslims questioned
said they "feel sympathetic towards people who want to fight against
western interests." With a Muslim population of more than 2.7 million in 2011
(the most recent date for which such figures are available; by now the
number would be higher), that makes for approximately 297,000 people. While
likely not even a majority of those 297,000 are seeking to make hijrah
– join the Islamic State and its jihad – these numbers represent an
international terror threat of astronomical proportions.
And that's just in the U.K.
Sadly, one can no longer pass these views off as those of a "small
minority" of Europe's Muslims. Across Western Europe, Koopmans' study
determined, "Two thirds of the Muslims interviewed say that religious
rules are more important to them than the laws of the country in which they
live. Three quarters of the respondents hold the opinion that there is only
one legitimate interpretation of the Koran."
While these figures reflect the responses to interviews conducted in
2008, little would suggest a massive re-evaluation of their views and
religious beliefs on the part of significant numbers of Western Muslims, as
the BBC survey makes clear.
Moreover, 56 percent of Belgian and 64 percent of Austrian Muslims
responding to Koopmans' survey in 2008 agreed that "Jews cannot be
trusted," and indications are strong that Muslim attitudes towards
Jews have only worsened. Indeed, with the targeted killings of Jews in
Brussels, Paris, and Copenhagen over the past year, Muslim hate towards
Jews in Europe has now reached a crisis.
Clearly, we are watching trends that stretch across all of Europe. The
issue here is one of trends, and these trends, which involve hundreds of
thousands of radical, fundamentalist Muslims, paint a deeply disturbing
picture.
Just how disturbing can be seen in a report from the International Center for the Study of
Radicalization and Political Violence, which suggests that those who
"sympathize with" IS and al-Qaida can be some of the terrorist
groups' most potent weapons. Such sympathizers – private individuals in the
West – "possess significant influence over how the conflict is
perceived by those who are actively involved in it." In addition, new
spiritual leaders have emerged who, while not actively "facilitating
the flow of foreign fighters to Syria or coordinating with jihadists,"
play the role of cheerleaders. "Their statements and interactions can
be seen as providing encouragement, justification, and religious legitimacy
for fighting," the report's authors say.
Koopmans clearly agrees. Though he did not respond to an interview
request from IPT, he cautioned last month in Belgian newspaper de Morgen
that because of such influences, "in addressing radicalization,
leaders have to look beyond the small group that just uses violence. The
roots of this problem sit in the Muslim community itself."
This radicalization challenge poses more than a danger for us. It also
creates a tragedy for that same Muslim community Koopmans pinpoints as its
cause: for the young girls who, running off to Syria with dreams of
marrying heroes find themselves wed, instead, to strangers, forced into
sex at 14 and 15 years old; for boys like the 18-year-old Australian Jake
Bilardi, aka "Jihad Jake," who blew himself up earlier this
month in Baghdad; for the girls and women growing up in fundamentalist
communities hidden in European cities, with their medieval, often barbaric
views on women.
Yet astoundingly, none of this seems to be enough to bring the moderate
Muslims in the same communities to their feet, to defend equality and
freedom, to demand a world of possibility and reason. That fight still
remains our own.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands.
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