Holy War in Europe

[Woodmonkey]

By Reuel Marc Gerecht
AEI.org | April 13, 2004

Excerpt:

At an alarmingly increasing frequency, westernized Muslims and converted Christians in Western Europe are joining radical Islamic organizations to wage jihad against the United States and its allies. These young Muslim males funnel continental anti-Americanism and the alienation of centuries-old Islamic struggle against the Christian West into full-fledged rage that threatens to divide Western allies who together withstood the advance of the Islamic empires during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

On August 26, 1995, a militant Islamic group led by a twenty-four-year-old French Muslim named Khaled Kelkal attempted to blow one of France's high-speed trains off its rails. Luckily, the bomb's detonator, which used an ordinary twelve-volt battery, failed. Later that fall, other bombs would go off in France: two in double-decked metro rail cars in suburban Paris, one in a trash can along the very bourgeois Avenue de Friedland, another in a Parisian open-air market, and one more in a provincial Jewish school. In all there were nine attacks in three months, which killed ten people and wounded 114.

The bombings in 1995 provoked a widespread awareness for the first time in France that the country had a radical-Muslim problem, which was increasingly homegrown and not imported. Kelkal moved to France from Algeria when he was one month old; not known for being religious in his troubled youth, he became an Islamic militant in a French jail, as have hundreds of highly westernized French Muslims. Many more thoroughly secularized French Muslims, who did not have crime-filled youths, have become Islamic radicals, culturally at war with the society that made them. Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker" of 9/11, is the most notorious example of a religious Frenchman who became intoxicated with the holy-war ideology preached in many radical mosques throughout Western Europe.

European-Grown Jihad

This phenomenon of highly westernized Muslims and converted Christians becoming radicalized believers has happened throughout Western Europe. Relatively few Turks have joined radical Islamic organizations allied with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, even though Turkish fundamentalists are numerous and often hardcore. At home and abroad, they are perhaps more numerous and better organized than are fundamentalists of any other nationality. But the Turks who have been arrested for association with al Qaeda usually share one bond: they were either born or raised in Germany and are culturally more German than they are Turkish Muslim. These young men are part of what the Iranian-French scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar has called the néo-umma guerrière--"the new holy-war community of believers" that recognizes neither national nor ethnic identity nor traditional Islamic values. Their Islam is "a new type of Nietzscheanism" where suicide and murder become sacred acts of an elite, self-made race of believers who want to bring on a purifying apocalypse.

A small cadre of European scholars, mirrored by a small group of European internal-security and intelligence officials, have followed the growth of Islamic radicalism in Europe for nearly twenty years. They know, even if European politicians do not, that Europe's most fearsome Muslim true believers are not products of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, or the First Gulf War, or the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia after 1990, or the Algerian civil war, or the Bosnian war, or the strife in Chechnya, or the Hindu pillaging of mosques, or the war in Afghanistan, or the second American war against Saddam Hussein, or the globalization of American culture. These events are banners that men who are already converted to jihad wave as they march to give battle. The holy warriors in Europe do not want to see peace in Palestine any more than Osama bin Laden or Iran's clerical guide Ali Khamenei wants to see Israelis and Palestinians solve their problems in two separate, peacefully coexisting states or Hamas's spiritual chief Ahmad Yassin wanted to. They do not care about Israeli settlements.

Europe's jihadists are born from their imperfect assimilation into Western European societies, from the particular alienation that young Muslim males experience in Europe's post-Christian, devoutly secular societies. The phenomenon is vastly more common among Arabs than among African or Asian Muslims. The reasons why these young, predominantly Arab males are drawn to the most militant expressions of Islam are complex and always personal. But their journey--which they usually begin as highly westernized, modern-educated youths of little Islamic faith and end as practitioners of bin Ladenism--is a thoroughly European experience.

The jihadists of Europe have drunk deeply from the virulently anti-American left-wing currents of continental thought and mixed it with the Islamic emotions of 1,400 years of competition with the Christian West. It is a Molotov cocktail of the third-world socialist Frantz Fanon and the Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb. Muslims elsewhere have gone through similar conversions--the United States, too, has had its Muslim jihadists and will, no doubt, produce more. And the globalization of this virulent strain of fundamentalist, usually Saudi-financed, Islam is real and probably getting worse. But the modern European experience seems much more likely to produce violent young Muslims than the American one. Europe may be competitive with the worst breeding grounds in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

For Americans, after 9/11, this is obviously not just of academic interest. For the future of al Qaeda--if al Qaeda is to have a future where killing Americans en masse remains its transcendent raison d'être--it is in Western Europe. September 11 could not have happened without a European base of operations.

Though the State Department was not particularly discriminating in issuing visas to Saudis before 9/11, it does a much better job now. The security review of visas granted to Middle Eastern men will only become more stringent with time, doing enormous injustice to the innocent and greatly complicating the operational lives of the guilty. Western European travel documents--which still allow easy access to the United States--are essential for al Qaeda and its allied organizations. But obtaining travel-worthy false European passports for non-state-supported terrorist organizations is becoming harder and harder (this is particularly true since the European Union forced the Belgians to implement better control of their passports, which had been routinely "disappearing" in large numbers). Thus, Islamic holy-warrior terrorist organizations need European Muslims who can lawfully obtain Western European passports.

Al Qaeda knew this a long time ago, which is why the recruitment of Muslims who could travel and operate in the West was a high priority. If al Qaeda or allied holy-warrior organizations cannot operationally enlist and train American Muslims to strike within the United States--and the evidence before and after 9/11 suggests that al Qaeda has done a poor job of finding American Muslims who need to kill non-Muslim Americans to express their love of God--then they must enlist European Muslims or risk compromising the most important element in their recruitment call to holy war. French-born holy warriors could perhaps spiritually survive bombing France, but it is not the same as attacking the United States. America is the cutting edge of Western civilization--not France--and modern Muslim holy warriors want ideally to terrify and humble their enemy's advance guard, not the more lightly armed, less threatening troops behind.

Effects of the Bombings in Spain

Which brings us to Spain...

For the rest of the story, go to: *http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles...e.asp?ID=12961

[Carnage_59]

Katie,

Good one. I hope this wakes up the Sheeple and gets them to know what Islam is really up to. There are those who blindly defend it and say that it is peaceful, but from the non-Koranic sources now being translated to English it is easy to see that Mohammed was anything but peaceful.

There's going to be a war soon. It will be a knock-down, drag-out fight between the West and the Islamic radialists. The moderate Muslims, if they exist at all, will be silent. Robert Spencer, author of "Islam Unveiled" and "Onward Muslim Soldiers," notes that al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims to force so-called moderate Muslims to be silent.

[Angelus]

Woodmonkey, I can see the arguement being promoted, however, there is another arguement that believes that Jihad, and other attacks on the West are working against the spread of Islam.

For a number of decades now, there has been a steady growth of Muslim immigrants into European countries, from North Africa and the Middle East into Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans, etc, up through Holland, Germany, and into Britain, where we now have third and fourth generations, all well established in their countries of residence.

This demographic increase in European Muslim populations was done very stealthily, not a shot fired. This decrease in christianity, which can be blamed on the middle-class, academic, politically correct, non-believers, who were in the ascendancy. Islam has also spread it tentacles southward, through Africa, and has followers all across a great part of that continent. Then not least eastward, through Pakistan, and down through Malaysia and Indonesia. Again, without a shot being fired.

It is only since the Middle East crisis began, that we have had the Bin Laden's, and the atrocities that have came from his organisations, the Taliban, Hammas in Palestine, plus Pakistan, Phillipines, Indonesia, etc.

Islam has been winning the battle for people's hearts and minds for many years, but now, these attrocities have awakened a sleeping giant, apathetic Christians. Particularly since 9/11, people are starting to notice the number of Muslims in each of their communities. It was very quite, we didn't see it till now.

I do believe there are good honest Muslims, who want to work for, and live in their country of origin. But they are being marginalised on both sides, both sides are saying, "Your either with us or against us", it is difficult for them to be both. So they can be driven into the arms of terrorists, which in turn, makes people in western countries even more suspicious of all Muslims. A 'catch 22'.

My arguement is, that if there had not been a shot fired, every country throughout the world, could eventually, have become a Muslim state, due to apathetic Christianity. So, in effect, the terrorists have worked against the expansion of Islam, by bringing the expansion to the attention of the Western World.

[Woodmonkey]

Originally Posted by Carnage_59

Katie,
Good one. I hope this wakes up the Sheeple and gets them to know what Islam is really up to. There are those who blindly defend it and say that it is peaceful, but from the non-Koranic sources now being translated to English it is easy to see that Mohammed was anything but peaceful.

That's the PC among us who fear that saying what things really are like will offend someone. Remember public schools in NYC after 9-11 who didn't allow the use of Arabs or Muslims when describing the terrorists who killed thousands in their city alone? That, even though all of the hijackers were Arabs and Muslims. Peaceful my heinie!

Robert Spencer, author of "Islam Unveiled" and "Onward Muslim Soldiers," notes that al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims to force so-called moderate Muslims to be silent.

Those so-called moderate Muslims had better get some balls and stand up to the radicals. This meekness of theirs is ridiculous. Because they are so sheep-like, they can be pushed around.

[Woodmonkey]

Originally Posted by Angelus

For a number of decades now, there has been a steady growth of Muslim immigrants into European countries, from North Africa and the Middle East into Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans, etc, up through Holland, Germany, and into Britain, where we now have third and fourth generations, all well established in their countries of residence.

This demographic increase in European Muslim populations was done very stealthily, not a shot fired. This decrease in christianity, which can be blamed on the middle-class, academic, politically correct, non-believers, who were in the ascendancy. Islam has also spread it tentacles southward, through Africa, and has followers all across a great part of that continent. Then not least eastward, through Pakistan, and down through Malaysia and Indonesia. Again, without a shot being fired.

You've got an a good point here. Apathetic Christians left a void, and voids will always be filled by something. These apathetic, pc, non-believers wouldn't be allowed to function as such under Islam. They would/will lose everything.

Islam has been winning the battle for people's hearts and minds for many years, but now, these attrocities have awakened a sleeping giant, apathetic Christians. Particularly since 9/11, people are starting to notice the number of Muslims in each of their communities. It was very quite, we didn't see it till now.

I hope you're right and I hope they will do more than wring their hands and whine. Action needs to be taken, not talk.

I do believe there are good honest Muslims, who want to work for, and live in their country of origin. But they are being marginalised on both sides, both sides are saying, "Your either with us or against us", it is difficult for them to be both. So they can be driven into the arms of terrorists, which in turn, makes people in western countries even more suspicious of all Muslims. A 'catch 22'.

See my post above about the necessity of these good honest Muslims needing to get some balls and throw off the control of the radicals among them. They need to listen to the other side (us) telling them that we do not want to be taken over and forced to be Islamic and that we will not allow the terrorists to kill us off. There are times when people must make a choice.

My arguement is, that if there had not been a shot fired, every country throughout the world, could eventually, have become a Muslim state, due to apathetic Christianity. So, in effect, the terrorists have worked against the expansion of Islam, by bringing the expansion to the attention of the Western World.

Got ya! You have a very good argument. People were horrified by the 9-11 attacks, the Bali bombings, the suicide/homicide bombers, the discrimination they show to all other religions in countries they control, the recent incidence of a woman being sentenced to be stoned to death (Nicaragua?), the riots during the Miss World contest, the honor killings etc etc etc.

The terrorists are certainly giving the lie to the "peaceful" religion.

[sergej]

My arguement is, that if there had not been a shot fired, every country throughout the world, could eventually, have become a Muslim state, due to apathetic Christianity. So, in effect, the terrorists have worked against the expansion of Islam, by bringing the expansion to the attention of the Western World.[/quote]


Very good post Angelus!!!

[kruser79]

Good posts.

Now here's a scary thought. If they hadn't shot themselves in the foot (there's that proverbial single shot, lol) and tipped their hand, how terrible would that knock down, drag out fight have been? Can you imagine miliions upon million