Just Don't Call It Islamic Jihad
"You can bomb Raqqa, and you may consider that to be war, but you're not going to bomb Molenbeek or Schaerbeek or St.-Denis, unless you're ready for civil war."
"It starts with Raqqa and can end up with the Algerian civil war, and that could be the ultimate victory of Daesh. They want to divide our societies against ourselves."
"Talking of war dignifies Daesh, which wants to be seen as having a state and an army of warriors and martyrs."
"[The presence of those smouldering ghettos is a disaster for counterterrorism. [These] no-go areas for the authorities, who have found it very difficult to get informants and human intelligence [places the ability to monitor the psychopaths and their plans for jihad in jeopardy]."
Francois Heisbourg, president, International Institute for Strategic Studies
"We need a dual response. There is a realization that this is not a war you can bomb or shoot your way out of, but you have to deal with individuals who are radicalized at home, to examine the reasons that they are exploring this other identity."
Raffaello Pantucci, director, international security studies, Royal United Services Institute
"There are parts of Europe, especially in France and Belgium, where over the past two decades you've seen the emergence of essentially ungoverned spaces, nearly akin to Yemen or Libya."
"Mollenbeek is one of them, a place where local authorities and even mainstream Muslim groups abandoned them, with an informal pact, that 'as long as we don't see you, we won't bother you'."
Peter R. Neumann, director, International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, King's College, London
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| Soldiers patrol in central Brussels (Photo: Getty) |
Europe has been well and truly infiltrated. Europe felt, doubtless, that it was exercising its open minded reception of the 'other', not discriminating against the presence of a religion, culture, heritage and values so unlike those of the receiving countries that it would simply add diversity, pluralism and endless charm to the prevailing culture. And then the prevailing cultural norms and the values that accompanied them began feeling the pressure of an interloper feeling entitled to change the kind of heritage that didn't appeal.
The urban landscape and infrastructure of Europe has indeed become difficult to recognize. The presence of mosques, the sound of prayers in the streets emanating from prostrate worshippers are indeed colourful, but Europeans began to miss what had been so dear and familiar to them, overlaid by the presence of a culture and a religion that challenged its own. The prevalence of social unrest, of persistent and growing racist disharmony was not a one-way street; it too entered Europe as a virulent pathology disturbing the peace of far earlier migrations of people who had integrated.
Now, the world is beginning to realize that the threats emanating from jihadist terrorist groups in the Middle East and North Africa have also been imported into Europe. When terrorist attacks were first mounted in the United States, Britain, Spain, France and Belgium, retaliatory strikes to wipe out the vipers' nests of Islamist jihadists took place abroad, in Libya, in Mali, in Somalia and Afghanistan. Now that the threats emanate from closer to home, at the determined hands of native-born Islamists that option to bomb no longer exists.
Bombing the Taliban hosting al-Qaeda in Yemen and Afghanistan was one thing; bombing the infiltrated towns, cities and suburbs of Europe where the Muslim ghettos breed jihad while mosques and madrassas preach the imperative of the faithful to become involved in martyrdom for the cause of the caliphate is quite another. Even though the safety and sanctity of civilian lives informs the bombing missions of the West in their raids abroad, the horror of sacrificing non-jihadist Muslims in their European ghettos remains improbably far-fetched.
Even while political analysts and intelligence sources identify the problems assailing Europe as those requiring governments to develop strategies internally to meet the challenge of dealing with the threats posed by jihadists in Europe, the social abhorrence of racism matched with radicalism equalling security reminds them that assaults against their own values around surveillance, justice and civil liberties may require to be sacrificed or viewed through a different lens, that of the jihadis who manipulate them.
Europe continues to excuse the violence that is bred in the Muslim ghettos as a natural outcome of what they claim to be exculpatory; disenfranchised and isolated communities existing in most countries of Europe. Belgium has become a prime example of that alienation transformed to belligerent, violent action. The self-isolation of ethnic and religious groups was traditionally given official blessing as symbols of multiculturalism and peace. But they have bred instead, anger, resentment, hatred and violence against the host.
And each and every one of the leaders of the countries under huge stress remains tenderly careful not to implicate Islam itself for any of this monumental and deadly dysfunction. For to do so would be tantamount to shouting from the rooftops that they are 'Islamophobic'. A fate, evidently, worse than mere death, though that too can be arranged.
Labels: Europe, Immigration, Intelligence, Jihad, Muslims, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 06, 2016
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