[continued...]
The Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) says that
radical Islam in the Netherlands encompasses "a multitude of
movements, organizations and groups." Some are nonviolent and share
only religious dogma and a loathing for the West. But AIVD stresses that
others, including al Qaeda, are also "stealthily taking root in Dutch
society" by recruiting estranged Dutch-born Muslim youths. An AIVD
report portrays such recruits watching jihadist videos, discussing
martyrdom in Internet chat rooms, and attending Islamist readings,
congresses, and summer camps. Radical Islam has become "an autonomous
phenomenon," the AIVD affirms, so that even without direct influence
from abroad, Dutch youth are now embracing the fundamentalist line. Much
the same can be said about angry young Muslims in Brussels, London, Paris,
Madrid, and Milan.
THE RANK AND FILE
Broadly speaking, there are two types of jihadists in western Europe:
call them "outsiders" and "insiders." The outsiders
are aliens, typically asylum seekers or students, who gained refuge in
liberal Europe from crackdowns against Islamists in the Middle East. Among
them are radical imams, often on stipends from Saudi Arabia, who open
their mosques to terrorist recruiters and serve as messengers for or
spiritual fathers to jihadist networks. Once these aliens secure entry
into one EU country, they have the run of them all. They may be assisted
by legal or illegal residents, such as the storekeepers, merchants, and
petty criminals who carried out the Madrid bombings.
Many of these first-generation outsiders have migrated to Europe
expressly to carry out jihad. In Islamist mythology, migration is
archetypically linked to conquest. Facing persecution in idolatrous Mecca,
in AD 622 the Prophet Muhammad pronounced an anathema on the city's
leaders and took his followers to Medina. From there, he built an army
that conquered Mecca in AD 630, establishing Muslim rule. Today, in the
minds of mujahideen in Europe, it is the Middle East at large that figures
as an idolatrous Mecca because several governments in the region
suppressed Islamist takeovers in the 1990s. Europe could even be viewed as
a kind of Medina, where troops are recruited for the reconquest of the
holy land, starting with Iraq.
The insiders, on the other hand, are a group of alienated citizens,
second- or third-generation children of immigrants, like Bouyeri, who were
born and bred under European liberalism. Some are unemployed youth from
hardscrabble suburbs of Marseilles, Lyon, and Paris or former mill towns
such as Bradford and Leicester. They are the latest, most dangerous
incarnation of that staple of immigration literature, the revolt of the
second generation. They are also dramatic instances of what could be
called adversarial assimilation -- integration into the host country's
adversarial culture. But this sort of anti-West westernization is
illustrated more typically by another paradigmatic second-generation
recruit: the upwardly mobile young adult, such as the university-educated
Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, or Omar Khyam, the
computer student and soccer captain from Sussex, England, who dreamed of
playing for his country but was detained in April 2004 for holding, with
eight accomplices, half a ton of explosives aimed at London.
These downwardly mobile slum dwellers and upwardly mobile achievers
replicate in western Europe the two social types that formed the base of
Islamist movements in developing countries such as Algeria, Egypt, and
Malaysia: the residents of shantytowns and the devout bourgeoisie. As in
the September 11 attacks, the educated tend to form the leadership cadre,
with the plebeians providing the muscle. No Chinese wall separates
first-generation outsiders from second-generation insiders; indeed, the
former typically find their recruits among the latter. Hofstad's Syrian
imam mentored Bouyeri; the notorious one-eyed imam Abu Hamza al-Masri
coached Moussaoui in London. A decade ago in France, the Algerian Armed
Islamic Group proselytized beurs (the French-born children of North
African immigrants) and turned them into the jihadists who terrorized
train passengers during the 1990s. But post-September 11 recruitment
appears more systematic and strategic. Al Qaeda's drives focus on the
second generation. And if jihad recruiters sometimes find sympathetic ears
underground, among gangs or in jails, today they are more likely to score
at university campuses, prep schools, and even junior high schools.
THE IRAQ EFFECT
According to senior counterintelligence officials, classified
intelligence briefings, and wiretaps, jihadists extended their European
operations after the roundups that followed September 11 and then again,
with fresh energy, after the invasion of Iraq. Osama bin Laden now
provides encouragement and strategic orientation to scores of relatively
autonomous European jihadist networks that assemble for specific missions,
draw operatives from a pool of professionals and apprentices, strike, and
then dissolve, only to regroup later.
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