THE GUARDIAN: France has been less obviously affected by Sunni Muslim militancy than many other European nations, for several reasons
Despite ongoing controversies over the veil, halal meat and other issues, France over the last decade has been less obviously affected by the violence of the 9/11 wars and contemporary Sunni Muslim militancy than many other European nations. There have been no mass casualty attacks like those in the UK and Spain, and no high-profile assassination like that of the film-maker Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands.
France was hit by the blowback from the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, and suffered from its own particular brand of "gangster jihad" prior to 2001. A handful of Frenchmen were present in Afghanistan, with at least one killed in fighting at Tora Bora, and a couple of hundred volunteers went to Iraq between 2003 and 2006. But there has been no equivalent of the flow of young British Pakistanis to Pakistan's tribal regions or, more recently, to Somalia.
One reason for this, beyond issues such as language, is the undoubted expertise of the French security services who, in part due to the experience gained in the 1990s, understood the challenge of diffuse, networked and ideologically driven Islamic extremism much faster than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
Another is the origins of the very large French Muslim community. In contrast with the poor, illiterate, deeply conservative communities in Pakistan to which many in the UK trace their origins, many French Muslims have roots in the relatively moderate, relatively prosperous and much better educated Maghreb. French opposition to the war in Iraq also helped. » | Jason Burke | Wednesday, March 21, 2012
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