Lull
in Terrorism Masks a Deepening Jihadist Threat, Dutch Report Warns
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
March 1, 2019
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It's been a relatively quiet year for jihadists in the West, with only
six attacks in Europe, compared to 20 in 2017. This, combined with the
military fall of the Islamic State, has led politicians and pundits alike to
declare a victory of a sort: ISIS is defeated, they announce, or condemn concerns about potential Islamist
terrorist attacks as racist "Islamophobia."
They are wrong.
A report issued earlier this week by the Dutch National
Coordinator of Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV) confirms that Muslim
extremism, and particularly Salafism, is on the rise across Europe, as are
recruiting efforts to radicalize European Muslims through Salafist schools,
mosques, and social groups. What's more, ISIS continues to be a threat,
largely through the possibility of returnees – Europeans who fought with
ISIS and now are trying to come home – bringing their ideology and training
with them. ISIS, meanwhile, continues to recruit through propaganda, most
of it online. And despite their losses, the Terror Threat Report
Netherlands report (known as the DTN report, for Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme
Nederland) says that both ISIS and al-Qaida are prepared to attack Europe
"at any moment."
The report comes at a crucial moment, as European governments struggle
with the question of whether to accept returnees, or leave them in former
ISIS territory after the United States withdraws most of its troops, as
President Trump is planning.
In fact, "those foreign fighters that are being captured right now
generally belong to the hard core of the jihadi movement," Jason
Walters, of Blue Water Intelligence LINK, a Dutch counterterrorism
organization, said in an e-mail. "There is no known case of anyone
belonging to the hard core of the movement having deradicalized
"through deradicalization programs."
Walters would know. A former member of the Dutch extremist Hofstadgroep
– whose leader, Mohammed Bouyeri, murdered writer and filmmaker Theo van
Gogh in 2004, Walters served nine years of a 15-year prison sentence after
being convicted of terrorism in 2006. During that time, he later told an interviewer, he read the works of philosophers
like Heidegger and Nietzsche, and began asking the questions – "what
is truth? What is knowledge?" – that, as he put it, destroyed his
world view. He soon left not just radicalization, but all of Islam behind.
The same, however, could not be said of his brother, Jermaine, also a
Hofstadgroep member. Unlike Jason, Jermaine joined the Islamic State; he
was killed in battle in Raqqa in June 2015. His brother's death, and his
involvement in ISIS, has made the issue of returnees particularly urgent
for Walters.
Hence he echoes the DTN report's stern warning of the dangers returning
jihadists, especially women, will pose to Western countries – not
just Europe, but Canada and the United States as well. But the report itself goes
further, pointing to developing international networks between returnees
and Salafist ISIS fans both within and outside of Europe.
Moreover, both returnees and Salafist ISIS fans are showing growing
interest in using chemical and biological weapons, as demonstrated by
efforts last year to produce ricin in Germany and poison the drinking water in Sardinia, Italy. However,
such attacks for the most part are too complex to be useful, the report
says, and "there are more than enough possibilities to stage a
successful attack without chemical or biological weapons."
And Salafism, an extremist, violent version of Islam, is on the rise
across the west, and forms a threat far too often overlooked. "Those
who promote Salafism carry a theocratic message based on a strict and
exclusive belief" in Allah, the report explains, and with it, absolute adherence to
Allah's laws, or Sharia. "The message ... works to reject and reverse
the institutions of democracy, both as a political system and as a form of
society. Within the Salafist movement, political Salafists actively strive
for an alternative social structure, which cannot be reconciled with Dutch
democratic principles."
Often, Salafist social groups become meeting places for jihadis and
impressionable youth. And the numbers of such youth are growing with the
establishment of more Salafist-led schools in Europe, and with the
increasing number of European Muslim youth attending university in Medina,
with the goal of spreading the Salafist message.
All of this is part of an agenda among political Salafists throughout
Europe to "organize political resistance and opposition and .... found
a powerful Salafist column against the immorality of society, against
anti-Islam forces, and against oppression," the report states.
For Walters, it is because of such agendas that it is high time for the
public and the media to pay attention. In that regard, he believes, reports
like Terror Threat Report Netherlands are crucial, just as they are
critical to the success of larger counterterrorism efforts. "It's to
be hoped that [the report] also is absorbed by the public debate. We can
have no public discussion that is not based on knowledge," he wrote on Twitter.
In an e-mail, he repeated the sentiments, if more cautiously. "Of
course, it remains to be seen to what degree this will actually trickle
down to the political and public debate," he wrote. "The NCTV has
written some excellent studies in the past, which by and large seem not to
have led to a more informed debate in the media and certain academic
circles. I truly, genuinely hope this time it will."
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 Her next book, on domestic abuse and terrorism,
will be published by Potomac Books. Follow her at @radicalstates.
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