[continued...]
As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western
Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are its
citizens in name but not culturally or socially. In a fit of
absentmindedness, during which its academics discoursed on the
obsolescence of the nation-state, western Europe acquired not a colonial
empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly
equivalent to the population of Syria. Many of its members are willing to
integrate and try to climb Europe's steep social ladder. But many younger
Muslims reject the minority status to which their parents acquiesced. A
volatile mix of European nativism and immigrant dissidence challenges what
the Danish sociologist Ole Waever calls "societal security," or
national cohesion. To make matters worse, the very isolation of these
diaspora communities obscures their inner workings, allowing mujahideen to
fundraise, prepare, and recruit for jihad with a freedom available in few
Muslim countries.
As these conditions developed in the late 1990s, even liberal segments
of the European public began to have second thoughts about immigration.
Many were galled by their governments' failure to reduce or even identify
the sources of insécurité (a French code word for the combination of
vandalism, delinquency, and hate crimes stemming from Muslim immigrant
enclaves). The state appeared unable to regulate the entry of immigrants,
and society seemed unwilling to integrate them. In some cases, the
backlash was xenophobic and racist; in others, it was a reaction against
policymakers captivated by a multiculturalist dream of diverse communities
living in harmony, offering oppressed nationalities marked compassion and
remedial benefits. By 2002, electoral rebellion over the issue of
immigration was threatening the party systems of Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, France, and the Netherlands. The Dutch were so incensed by the
2002 assassination of Pim Fortuyn, a gay anti-immigration politician, that
mainstream parties adopted much of the victim's program. In the United
Kingdom this spring, the Tories not only joined the ruling Labour Party in
embracing sweeping immigration restrictions, such as tightened procedures
for asylum and family reunification (both regularly abused throughout
Europe) and a computerized exit-entry system like the new U.S. Visitor and
Immigration Status Indicator Technology program; they also campaigned for
numerical caps on immigrants. With the Muslim headscarf controversy raging
in France, talk about the connection between asylum abuse and terrorism
rising in the United Kingdom, an immigration dispute threatening to tear
Belgium apart, and the Dutch outrage over the van Gogh killing, western
Europe may now be reaching a tipping point.
GOING DUTCH
The uncomfortable truth is that disenfranchisement and radicalization
are happening even in countries, such as the Netherlands, that have done
much to accommodate Muslim immigrants. Proud of a legendary tolerance of
minorities, the Netherlands welcomed tens of thousands of Muslim asylum
seekers allegedly escaping persecution. Immigrants availed themselves of
generous welfare and housing benefits, an affirmative-action hiring
policy, and free language courses. Dutch taxpayers funded Muslim religious
schools and mosques, and public television broadcast programs in Moroccan
Arabic. Mohammed Bouyeri was collecting unemployment benefits when he
murdered van Gogh.
The van Gogh slaying rocked the Netherlands and neighboring countries
not only because the victim, a provocative filmmaker, was a descendant of
the painter Vincent, the Dutch's most cherished icon, but also because
Bouyeri was "an average second-generation immigrant," according
to Stef Blok, the chairman of the parliamentary commission reviewing
Bouyeri's immigration record. European counterterrorism authorities saw
the killing as a new phase in the terrorist threat. It raised the specter
of Middle East-style political assassinations as part of the European
jihadist arsenal and it disclosed a new source of danger: unknown
individuals among Europe's own Muslims. The cell in Hamburg that was
connected to the attacks of September 11, 2001, was composed of student
visitors, and the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 were committed by
Moroccan immigrants. But van Gogh's killer and his associates were born
and raised in Europe.
Bouyeri was the child of Moroccan immigrant workers. He grew up in a
proletarian area of Amsterdam sometimes known as Satellite City because of
the many reception dishes that sit on its balconies, tuned to al Jazeera
and Moroccan television. Bouyeri's parents arrived in a wave of
immigration in the 1970s and never learned Dutch. But Bouyeri graduated
from the area's best high school. His transformation from promising
student to jihadist follows a pattern in which groups of thriving, young
European Muslims enlist in jihad to slaughter Westerners.
After graduating from a local college and then taking advanced courses
in accounting and information technology, Bouyeri, who had an unruly
temper, was jailed for seven months on a violence-related crime. He
emerged from jail an Islamist, angry over Palestine and sympathetic to
Hamas. He studied social work and became a community organizer. He wrote
in a community newsletter that "the Netherlands is now our enemy
because they participate in the occupation of Iraq." After he failed
to get funding for a youth center in Satellite City and was unable to ban
the sale of beer or the presence of women at the events he organized, he
moved to downtown Amsterdam. There, he was recruited into the Hofstad
Group, a cell of second-generation Islamic militants.
The cell started meeting every two weeks in Bouyeri's apartment to hear
the sermons of a Syrian preacher known as Abu Khatib. Hofstad was
connected to networks in Spain, Morocco, Italy, and Belgium, and it was
planning a string of assassinations of Dutch politicians, an attack on the
Netherlands' sole nuclear reactor, and other actions around Europe.
European intelligence services have linked the cell to the Moroccan
Islamic Combat Group, which is associated with the Madrid bombings and a
series of attacks in Casablanca in 2003. Its Syrian imam was involved with
mujahideen in Iraq and with an operational chief of al Qaeda.
"Judging by Bouyeri's and the Hofstad network's international
contacts," an analyst for the Norwegian government says, "it
seems safe to conclude that they were part of the numerous terrorist plots
that have been unraveled over the past years in western Europe."
The Hofstad Group should not be compared with marginal European
terrorist groups of the past, such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany,
Action Directe in France, or the Red Brigades in Italy. Like other
jihadist groups today, it enjoys what Marxist terrorists long sought but
always lacked: a social base. And its base is growing rapidly, thanks in
part to the war in Iraq.
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