With
The Terror Threat Growing, Europe Changes Course
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
August 31, 2016
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 Sixteen years ago,
when Dutch commentator Paul Scheffer published his "Multicultural Drama" declaring that
multiculturalism in the Netherlands had failed, the response was swift and
angry. Critics across Europe called him racist, bigoted, nationalistic.
Others dismissed his views as mere rants and ramblings of a Leftist in
search of a cause.
Not anymore.
With over 275 people killed in 10 Islamic terrorist attacks since January
2015, Europeans harbor no more illusions about the multiculturalist vision:
where immigrants from Muslim countries are concerned, that idealist vision
has more than just failed. It has produced a culture of hatred, fear, and
unrelenting danger. Now, with European Muslim youth radicalizing at an
unprecedented rate and the threat of new terrorist attacks, Europe is
reassessing its handling of Muslim communities and its counterterrorism
strategies and laws.
Among the changes being considered are a reversal of laws that allow
radical Muslims to receive handouts from the very governments they seek to
destroy; restricting foreign funding of mosques; and stronger surveillance
on private citizens.
Chief among the new counterterrorism approaches is a program to
coordinate intelligence data among European Union countries – a tactic that
has not been pursued with any regularity or such depth before now. But
following the November attacks in Paris, the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD
initiated weekly meetings among intel agencies from all EU countries,
Switzerland, and Norway, with the objective of sharing information, exchanging
new clues, insights, and suspect alerts, and discussing improvements to a
Europe-wide system of counterterrorism and intelligence.
Through these meetings and the improved shared database, it is now
possible for each country to contextualize its intelligence and understand
links between individuals and various groups from one city to another – and
so, between radicals and radical groups as they pass through a borderless
EU.
Concurrently, EU members are now beginning to share information about
web sites and even details about private citizens where needed. Most
countries had been reluctant to make such exchanges, citing both privacy
concerns and the need to protect their sources. Other cooperative efforts
include an EU initiative begun in February 2015 to counteract Islamic
extremist propaganda. The project received a major €400 million boost in
June, indicating the high priority Europe now places on fighting
recruitment.
Earlier this month, Europol began a new effort to screen refugees still
awaiting placement in Greek asylum centers. According to a report from Europa Nu, an initiative between the
European parliament and the University of Leiden, Europol agents
"specifically trained to unmask and dismantle terrorists and terror
networks" will be dispatched to the camps to try to prevent terrorists
from infiltrating the flood of refugees to Europe.
Some EU measures, however, have been based more in politics than
counterterrorism, including efforts to crack down on the ability of radical
Muslims to benefit from welfare programs. British citizens, for instance,
reacted with outrage when it was discovered that the family of "Jihadi
John" had received over £400,000 in taxpayer support over the course
of 20 years. In Belgium, Salah Abdeslam, the terrorist accused of
participating in the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, pulled in nearly €19,000 in welfare benefits from
January 2014 and October 2015, according to Elsevier. And Gatestone reports
that more than 30 Danish jihadists received a total of €51,000 in
unemployment benefits all while battling alongside the Islamic State in
Syria.
Such concerns have also spread to the United States. Earlier this year,
U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, R-Maine, introduced the "No Welfare For
Terrorists Act."
"Terrorist victims and their families should never be forced to
fund those who harmed them," he said in a statement. "This bill guarantees this will never
happen."
But not all of Europe's new approaches to the terror threat are being
coordinated out of Brussels. Many more, in fact, are country-specific, such
as England's decision to follow an example set earlier by
the Netherlands and Spain, separating jailed terrorists and terror suspects
from other prisoners. The measures follow others the country adopted after
the July 7, 2005 bombings of a London underground and buses, to criminalize
"those who glorify terrorism, those involved in acts preparatory to
terrorism, and those who advocate it without being directly involved,"
the New York Times reported.
In fact, prisons worldwide, including in the U.S., have long been viewed as warm
breeding grounds for radicals and potential terrorists. Ahmed Coulibaly,
the gunman at the Porte de Vincennes siege in January 2015, was serving
time for a bank robbery, for instance, when he met Cherif Koauachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo
attackers. Both converted to Islam there. It was in that same prison that
the two encountered Djamel Beghal, an al-Qaida operative who attempted to
blow up the American Embassy in Paris in 2001.
Hence many experts now argue in favor of isolating those held on
terrorism-related charges as a way to stop them from radicalizing their
fellow inmates.
Yet British officials have until now resisted creating separate wings
for terror suspects, arguing that doing so gives them
"credibility" and makes it harder to rehabilitate them. But a
recent government report on Islamist extremism in British
prisons forced a change in thinking, in part by noting that "other
prisoners – both Muslim and non-Muslim – serving sentences for crimes
unrelated to terrorism are nonetheless vulnerable to radicalization by
Islamist Extremists [sic]."
Similarly, France, the site of the worst attacks of the past two years,
also balked at first at the idea of separating terrorists from other
prisoners, arguing that doing so "forms a terrorist cell
within a prison." But the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015
changed all that. Now, officials are even going
further, looking at other potential sources of radicalization: the mosques.
Shortly after the Bastille Day attack in Nice, Prime Minister Manuel
Valls announced plans to ban foreign financing for French
mosques as part of an effort to establish a "French Islam," led
by imams trained only in France. France hosts dozens of foreign-financed
mosques – many sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Morocco – which preach
Salafism, an extreme version of Islam practiced in the Saudi Kingdom and
the root of much radical Islamist ideology. And according to a
new report on counter-radicalization, about 300 imams come from outside
France.
That same report also calls for "regular surveys" of France's
4-5 million Muslims, according to France 24, in order "to acquire a
better understanding of this population in a country where statistics based
on religious, ethnic, or racial criteria are banned."
Both proposed measures have been met with resistance. The
"surveys," as even the report itself notes, are a means of
circumventing laws against gathering information on the basis of religious
criteria – and so, go against democratic principles. And many French
officials also oppose the ban on foreign funding for mosques, arguing that
French government intervention in places of worship contradicts separation
between church and state. Besides, they claim, radicalization doesn't take
place there anyway.
But Dutch authorities and counter-extremism experts are not so sure. The
announcement earlier this month that Qatar would finance an Islamic center
in Rotterdam, for instance, set off alarms even among Muslim moderates,
including Rotterdam's Moroccan-born mayor Ahmed Marcouch. There are good
reasons for this. The Salafist Eid Charity, which sponsors the project, has
been on Israel's terror list since 2008, according to Dutch
daily NRC Handelsblad. Moreover, in 2013 the U.S. Treasury
Department accused the charity's founder, Abd al-Rahman al-Nu'aymi, of providing funding for al-Qaida and its affiliates, and
named him a "specially designated global terrorist."
Plans for the center sound much like those of the now-abandoned plans
for New York's "Ground Zero mosque," with sports facilities,
prayer space, tutoring for students, Islamic child care, and, reports Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, imam
training.
Yet the center's prospective director, Arnoud van Doorn, a convert to
Islam and former member of the far-right, anti-Islam political party PVV,
insists that any fears about the project are unfounded. "Our
organization has nothing to do with extremism," he told the NRC.
"We want only to provide a positive contribution to Dutch
society."
Notably, though, France's proposal to ban foreign mosque funding and the
Qatari backing of the Rotterdam center point to some of the deepest roots
of Europe's radical Islam problem, and, despite all the new initiatives now
underway, the greatest challenges to ending it. When Muslim immigrants came
to Europe in the 1970s, they carved prayer spaces wherever they could: the
backs of community grocery stores, in restaurants and tea rooms. But these
soon became too small to handle the growing Muslim population. Mosques –
real mosques – would have to be built.
But by whom? The Muslim communities themselves were too poor. Western
governments, wedded to the separation of church and state, could not
subsidize them with taxpayer funds. And so the door was opened to foreign –
mostly Saudi – investment, and the placement of Saudi-trained and
Saudi-backed imams in European mosques. Europe had, in essence, rolled out
the welcome mat for Salafism.
Now they want to roll it in again. But is it too late? Even as Western
intelligence is now uniting to fight radical Islam, Islamic countries are
pooling together in Europe to expand it. The result, as Manuel Valls told French daily Le Monde, is that,
"What's at stake is the republic. And our shield is democracy."
Hence as the number attacks against Western targets increase, many
Europeans are coming to understand that preserving the core of that
democracy may mean disrupting some of the tenets on which it's built, like
certain elements of privacy, for instance, and religious principles that
violate the freedom that we stand for . It is, as it were, a matter of
destroying even healthy trees to save the forest. But in this tug-of-war
between the Islamic world's efforts to shape the West, and Western efforts
to save itself, only our commitment to the very heart of our ideals will define
who wins this fight.
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.
Related Topics: Abigail
R. Esman, homegrown
terror, multiculturalism,
European
Union, AIVD,
Europol,
Salah
Abdeslam, Bruce
Poliquin, government
assistance, No
Welfare for Terrorists Act, prison
radicalization, foreign
mosque funding, Saudi
Arabia, Manuel
Valls
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