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Copenhagen and the European jihad

The shooting spree in Copenhagen combines the old and the new of European jihadist phenomenon.

Like virtually all European Holy Warriors, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein is not an immigrant, but the son of immigrants, Palestinians who settled in Denmark before his birth. He is thus but one of the “second generation” Muslims who have terrorized Europe, like Mohammed Siddique Khan and his collaborators who attacked the London transit system in July 2005.

The Muslim post-migrant faces a baffling clash of civilizations — the values and expectations of his hearth have been formed in a pre-modern village, but the street outside is drug infested. He encounters an alluring yet forbidden mass culture that encourages sexual liberation and economic ambition, even as the economy shrinks.

To whom does the troubled young Muslim, who is certainly not in the majority, turn in his identity crisis? Not to the family’s imam — imported from the home country. Instead he often turns to Saudi-financed Salafi preachers ranting that the folk Islam of his immigrant parents is mere “superstition” and “innovation” (bida). They stress that traditional Islam is what sanctions clan customs, such as the parental injunction to wed your distant cousin, unable to speak the language of her new home.

Salafi-Jihadis (such as the late Saudi Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda and ISIS disciples) denounce the elders’ Islam — with its rituals of dance and song, its ornamented mosques, and its saints and holy men seeking to mediate between worshipper and Allah.

In_front_of_the_Copenhagen_Synagogue_-cphshootings_(15915641124) (1)
Flowers in front of the Great Synagogue, Copenhagen, 15 February 2015 by Kim Bach. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Like the first European jihadi who bombed French trains in 1993, El-Hussein was radicalized in jail. El-Hussein also shares traits with at least two of the militants responsible for the Paris violence — not only homicidal anti-Semitism, but a criminal record, jail time, and an abrupt transition to militancy. The connection between criminal gangs and Islamic extremism is closer in Denmark than in most other European countries. But, though that nexus exists elsewhere in Europe, we should not draw the conclusion that most jihadis are former gangsters. The London bomber was not; neither were those who planned to attack American air bases in Germany, or those who sought to crash transatlantic flights leaving for the US from London’s Heathrow airport.

Research has uncovered no single profile for European jihadis, quite the contrary. They may be idealists, indigents, privileged, drop-outs, university graduates, psychopathic, or completely sane; former drug addicts or straights, men or women. He or she may come from a ghetto or a wealthy suburb, be born Muslim or a convert; may have traveled to Syria or Pakistan or simply been inspired by social media. Most European Muslims emigrated from Sunni countries like Algeria, Pakistan, Morocco, and Turkey, and therefore Europe’s jihadis are mainly Sunni. If he is Sunni, Shias are number one on his hit list (and vice versa if Shia), followed by Jews, homosexuals, and Westerners, not to mention cartoonists who publish images of Mohammed.

What they hold in common is a synthesis of revivalism and anti-imperialism. That Islam needs to return to the days of Mohammed and his companions (Salafs) the “corruption” of their parents’ traditional Islam. They long have blamed the West for the perceived degeneracy of their culture and armed interventions in Muslim lands. And their anti-Semitism, while hardly new, has been intensified by events in Gaza and by growing echoes from other European quarters.

But there is something really new here. The atrocities in Paris and Copenhagen mark an evolution in strategy. What used to distinguish Islamic from past terrorism (e.g. in Ireland) was spectacular mass murder of civilians. Now, after many foiled such efforts to reproduce 9/11 or the London bombings, Europe’s jihadis have grasped that they do not need mass murder to be spectacular. Moreover, social media has afforded a means to motivate a lone wolf or wolf packs (the latter seem to be the case in Paris and Copenhagen) to produce acts attracting enormous international attention and accomplishing the aim of terrorism — to terrorize the public and provoke authorities into thoughtless blunders like the Iraq intervention.

In jail, El-Hussein, according to the Danish press, spoke openly of his intention to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State. ISIS is another new element of attraction to Europe’s would-be Holy Warriors. Its effective, unspeakable homicide videos, expansion from Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon into Libya and Afghanistan, and its methodical use of social media and claim to a Caliphate, have energized European extremists.

What should the West do to cope? Our most urgent need is for information, which requires informants. And the most effective informants are Muslims. It is politically correct to attack so-called “Islamophobia,” but holding responsible Islam itself for jihadism is not only illiberal, illiterate, and intolerant, it is strategic idiocy. Our journalists and pundits need to recall that Islamic jihadis are not the first Holy Warriors. Let them try reading from the Book of Joshua or recalling the Christian conquest of Latin America, or, if memory will not serve that far back, North Ireland of the 20th century. If it does, they should explain that in Europe’s Dark Age, the Islam civilizations in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cordova literally preserved Western culture in the Europe’s Dark Ages and brought us mathematics and modern numbering from India.

The solidarity shown in Raleigh, North Carolina after the murder of three Muslim professionals should be exemplary. Failing that, exposing ignorant bigotry would be helpful. Beyond sympathetic informants, our intelligence and surveillance should focus on returning Western jihadis and current wannabees instead of scaring our citizens into imagining Big Brother is watching us and we live in Orwell’s 1984.

Secondly, we must avoid the trap of terrorist provocation. The current Salafist revival has spread to Mali and Nigeria, to India and Central Asia. We should be prepared to see this atrocious war (which is predominantly an intra-Islam, Sunni-Shia, war much like the Catholic-Protestant wars of the 16th and 17th centuries) to last far more than 30 years. We need a long-term strategy to prevent our being continuously bogged down, drained of our treasure, sacrificing the lives and limbs of our “volunteer” soldiers, and politically distracted by a conflict we cannot resolve. Our television stations should follow the precedent hopefully established by the current banning of ISIS video of a Jordanian pilot being burned alive. Television channels might supplement that step with clear and deep reporting instead of chorusing the identical, sensational, redundant, repeated coverage of a single transitory event. Our politicians and pundits should refrain from calling that essentially regional conflict a “threat to our freedom.” Terrorism has never been an existential threat, not even to small, isolated Israel, but certainly not to a country as wealthy and powerful as the United States, or to a region as rich and resourceful as Europe.

Finally we must not allow jihadism to distract us from the real existential threat could is brewing in the Pacific as China’s long-range geopolitical strategy reveals itself. So to combat jihadism, we need not only information, surveillance, and historical consciousness, but patience, self-restraint, and a view of the big picture.

Heading image: A danish flag in Hillerød by hjalmarGD. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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