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Attack, Travel Warning, Expose Depth of Netherlands' Terror Threat
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
October 22, 2018
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first of your friends to like this.
 Mention the
Netherlands, and most people think of brightly-colored tulips,
gently-flowing canals, legal marijuana, and Rembrandt.
But there is an underside.
The U.S. State Department issued a travel warning Sept. 28, cautioning tourists
about a potential terrorist threat in the country. The announcement came
largely in response to an August attack at Amsterdam's Central Station, in
which two Americans were stabbed by a German Muslim extremist.
True, the Amsterdam attacker was not Dutch. But Europe's permeable
borders mean that nationality rarely matters; several of those involved in
the November, 2015 Paris attacks, for instance, were Belgian.
Moreover, the country's intelligence officials have been warning
of an impending incident for some time, noting the sizable number of
extremists throughout the country, along with 55 returnees from the Islamic
State.
Indeed, just prior to the U.S. warning, Dutch police arrested seven men suspected of planning a large-scale
attack. In the wake of those arrests, Dutch authorities further revealed they had
their eyes on as many as 160 radicalized Muslims – 59 in Amsterdam alone.
If that number seems small in the context of Holland's overall Muslim
population of just over 1 million (.016 percent), consider that it is
equivalent to the number of Americans diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
each year – a danger no one simply waves away. And unlike cancer,
radicalism is contagious.
That contagion has had intelligence and law enforcement agents
throughout Europe concerned for more than a decade. And yet despite
numerous warnings and efforts at containing the threat, radical Islamic
ideologies like Salafism are spreading, also in the Netherlands, according to a 2015 report from the Dutch intelligence
agency AIVD. This is in part thanks to the missionary zeal and crafty
methods of Salafist leaders. "The movement is professional in its
communication activities," the report states. "A large proportion
of the information about Islam available to the Dutch public, especially
online, reflects a Salafist world view. This helps to explain the
popularity of Salafi ideas among young Dutch Muslims and converts, in
particular."
What's more, "radical" is a relative term. The 160 people
targeted by law enforcement in the Netherlands are those suspected of
having violent intent. They do not include those with anti-Western ideas.
Nor do they include people like Moroccan-Dutch Yasmina Haifi, who, while
employed by the Ministry of Justice in 2014, tweeted that ISIS had nothing to do with Islam. Rather,
she said, it is "a plan created by Zionists deliberately to make Islam
look bad."
In a recent interview with Dutch newspaper NRC
Handelsblad, Haifi refused to apologize for that statement, insisting
that her words were misunderstood. She said she didn't mean Jews created
ISIS, but that those who support Israel did.
These days, Haifi volunteers for the pro-Islam party, DENK, while
overseeing the organization she founded in 2017, the Dutch Moroccans United network, which seeks the
"empowerment" and "emancipation" of Dutch-Moroccans,
according to its Facebook page.
What is meant by "emancipation" is anybody's guess. Moroccans
are not enslaved in the Netherlands, nor are Dutch-Moroccan women forced to
wear burqas, or other oppressive garments.
Haifi continues to claim that ISIS "is directed and financed by the
US, among others, as an ally of Israel." Others who have peddled that
notion include Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and the pro-Russian "Centre
for Research on Globalization," an organization that has promoted the Clinton pedophile ring hoax, and
claims the U.S. plans to implant "RFID chips ...in all people
diagnosed with autism and dementia."
The State Department warnings had nothing to do with Yasmine Haifi,
however. She broke no laws, and she certainly did not engage in violence.
But it is the continual stirring of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, and
anti-American sentiment by Muslims who, like Haifi, have a strong public
platform, that helps to push so many Dutch and other European Muslims into
the hands of Salafist missionaries – and from there, to jihadist recruiters
and jihadists. It is all food for the beast.
None of this is new. Although Americans traveling to Europe have steered
clear of cities like Paris and Brussels in recent years, concerned about the number of
terrorist attacks there, few have expressed concern about Amsterdam and
other Dutch cities. To the contrary, American tourism to the Netherlands has increased by 22 percent since 2006.
Yet the Dutch have been dealing with a radicalizing Muslim population
since shortly after 9/11. In 2004, writer and filmmaker Theo van Gogh was shot and stabbed by Muslim extremist, Mohammed Bouyeri,
as he bicycled to work. Bouyeri, who happens to be Dutch-Moroccan, was a
leader of the Hofstadgroep, a terror group based in The Hague, which was
also planning several larger-scale attacks at the time.
Several ex-Muslims, including the Iranian-born writer and scholar Afshin Ellian, have been forced for years to live with
full-time bodyguards because of various allegedly anti-Islam statements
they have made, or positions they have taken on religion.
On a larger scale, numerous Dutch mosques are financed by foreign governments– Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and by the Muslim Brotherhood. In April, the NRC published a "secret list" of the sponsors of
Dutch mosques. Held as a government secret since at least 2010, according
to the NRC, the list tracks millions of euros that have poured from the
Gulf states to Dutch Muslim communities. And it only seems to be growing:
the NRC points out that in four years, the number of Salafist mosques has
more than doubled – from 13 to 27 – while the number of Salafist preachers
has risen from 50 to 110.
This has not been without consequences. In addition to the Amsterdam
Central Station attack, in May a Muslim man attacked passersby with a knife
near a train station in The Hague. As Dutch commentators noted at the time, such attacks are "the new
normal."
Still, the networks in Holland are not quite as radical as those in
France, Belgium and England, said Carel Brendel, a Dutch journalist who
specializes in terrorism. But Holland has also been "lucky."
"The AIVD does good work," he wrote in an e-mail, "But I
think the Netherlands are likely to experience something soon as
well."
The jihadist scene is actually getting stronger in the Netherlands,
Leiden University professor of terrorism and counterterrorism Edwin Bakker, agreed in an e-mail. "The awareness
of the threat is now higher than a couple of months ago, 'thanks' to the
attacks in Amsterdam and The Hague, and the recent arrests of the seven
jihadists."
But that awareness, and even the "good work" of the AIVD,
Bakker said, are no reasons to sit back and relax. "Personally I am
worried about the size of the jihadist scene, the fact that it is better
connected to the international scene, aware of the fact that it is closely
monitored, that it includes persons who might be very frustrated and angry
after returning from prison (the prison returnees), and possibly simply waiting
for 'better times' when we lower our guard or when a new conflict in the
Middle East offers them new possibilities to join the violent jihad
abroad," he cautioned. "Add to that the fact that it includes
many women and children, making this a threat that is here to stay for
quite a while."
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. Follow her at @radicalstates.
Related Topics: Abigail
R. Esman, Netherlands
terror threat, State
Department, travel
warnings, knife
attacks, AIVD,
Yasmina
Haifi, DENK
party, Afshin
Ellian, Carel
Brendel, Edwin
Bakker, Hofstadgroep
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