Jihad In Europe

And here’s a – literally – dissertation on Islamist terrorists in Europe [pdf], courtesy of ‘Secular Blasphemy‘ – it’s work sponsored by Petter Nesser at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.

The dissertation, however, lays out the sociology and ideology of the part-Westernized Islamists in frightening detail. While this is much more Dan’s territory, I’m going to be reading and digesting this for a while.

The four conspiracies analyzed below involve transnational contacts and cooperation between Islamist radicals in several European countries and also between Europe-based Islamists and local Islamist insurgents in the Middle East, North Africa and Chechnya. The militants have traveled extensively both inside and outside Europe. Some of the conspiracies seem to have been initiated outside Europe, but planned, financed and prepared in several European countries. The first case, the “Strasbourg plot” was, for example, planned and financed from the U.K., prepared in Germany, and the attack was going to be launched in France.

The cases show the relevance of combining “levels of analysis” when studying Islamist terrorism in Europe. The militants originated from the Middle East and North Africa, they were situated in the European diaspora prior to their arrests, and the vast majority of them had been influenced by “global mujahidin” when training in Afghanistan. The militants’ actions and statements strongly suggest that they have been influenced by the Salafi-Jihadi doctrine. There is available information on the backgrounds and organizational affiliations of the militants, the nationality and type of target they selected for terrorist attacks, and their justifications and excuses for taking part in terrorism inside Europe.

The sources gathered for this report suggest the extremist milieu in Europe is relatively small and the most fanatic and violent Islamists probably can be counted as hundreds, rather than thousands.The case-studies show that there have been multiple links and contacts between militants involved in the different conspiracies. Although the Europe-based Islamist radicals surveyed here belong to movements that in theory emphasize the “local jihad” more than the “global jihad” or the vice-versa, it is important to note that despite differences in their emphasis, the movements’ ideologies are largely compatible. In training camps run by al-Qaida and like-minded groups in Afghanistan, personal relationships were established between members of different movements. These personal contacts seem to have lived on in Europe, in the sense that Islamists belonging to different movements supported each other on an operational level. For example, Islamists perceived as mainly committed to the “local jihad” have supported operations against targets typically associated with the “global mujahidin”.

7 thoughts on “Jihad In Europe”

Thanks for the link. I’ll have to read the report in chunks, but today I got through the first 25 or so pages and want to urge your other readers to at least read section 4.1, wherein is discussed the ideological motivations for the Islamist radicals in Europe and elsewhere.

Pay particular attention to the discussion (I believe it starts on p. 21) of the concept of taqiyya or dissimulation (i.e. lying to outsiders). I have waited since 9/11 for this concept to receive more attention in the press (in vain). As a one-time student of Islamic history I can tell you for a fact that this practice (originally adopted by persecuted Shias but since modified and embraced by hard-core Sunni radicals) has been at the core of every modern Islamist uprising (and yeah, there’ve been a lot of them in the past few hundred years).

When your enemy feels he has religious justification for lying about his deepest beliefs, acting contrary to them on a frequent and long-term basis, and in every other way conning his neighbors into seeing him as a peaceful, law-abiding man, it makes it nearly impossible for his enemies to identify and apprehend him before he acts. That is why these guys are so much scarier than most of the other religious or political extremist groups we’ve dealt with over the centuries here in the West.

Worth reading in detail.

The raw number of jihadis and their ties to the international movement is important, but at the end of the day it pales in comparison to the amount of support and tolerance their movements have among their populations. The only way such cells can survive is with the consent of their communities on some level. The more sympathetic the Islamic communities are to violent speech and violent acts, the more dangerous the jihadis are. That is the critical weakness in our western systems, we tolerate the toleration of violence in the name of tolerance 😉
Even in America, we just dont see the vocal opposition to violence we should demand from our Muslim citizens. We must change that. Personally I have family (not Muslim actually, but Zorastrian Persian) and the conversations we have our startling on some level. While they claim to abhor violence and consider jihadis bad people, there is always a ‘yes, but..’ That is dangerous and a symptom of toleration.