Some European Views on TerrorINTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND SECURITY NETWORK, ETH, ZÜRICH:
The gradual emergence of an Islamic counterculture in Europe risks widening the already huge gap between East and West."History" crops up a lot in our conflicts with violent jihadists. A war on terror was proclaimed, and then rejected, because the term was belatedly deemed as descriptively meaningless as a "war on Blitzkrieg" and as futile as a "war on drugs." Among alternatives that have been put forward are "the long war," "the first global terrorist war," the counter campaign against the "global jihadist insurgency," and an "anti-Islamic extremism" battle.
Commentators and politicians seek to give our opponents a historically familiar face by substituting steel helmets for the checkered keffiyahs and turbans. We have heard about "Islamofascism" and "Islamobolshevism," both of which terms risk boxing our thinking into the past even as they give needless offense to Muslims by claiming that they are latter-day Nazis.
Since we are also engaged in a "war of hearts and minds," there has been much talk of a Cold War, running parallel to three wars - in Afghanistan, Iraq and against the "global jihadist insurgency." As an American commentator recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, if we take 9/11 as the equivalent of 1947, we are only six years into a struggle that may abate in 2043 if our descendants are fortunate.
Jonathan Evans, the director of MI5, claims that "culture" will play a significant role in this generation's conflicts with jihadists without spelling out what that means. These claims would be more credible if there was more money for public diplomacy, which in the US receives a significant percent of the vast defense budget. But the West need not be concerned how it represents itself, if that merely means dispatching the Boston Symphony Orchestra once more, to prove that there is more to us than MTV or Baywatch. If the problems are primarily in the Muslim world, then we need to be doing things like supporting an Arabic Booker Prize and gradually expanding a liberal artistic and media culture in the Arab world. A large cosmopolitan bourgeoisie constituency exists in Cairo; our task is to discreetly help organize them, perhaps along the lines of Freedom House's role in the "color revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine. For they will be one of the building blocks from which a more pluralistic greater Middle East will emerge.
During the Cold War, great enterprises like the Congress for Cultural Freedom confronted state propagandists in the eastern bloc. Now we have international media like al-Manar, as-Sahab, and al-Jazeera, plus 6,000 or so jihadist websites, along with chat rooms and social networks, often the real sites of auto-radicalization among young Muslims. Given the confusions in our own culture, how do we project a single view of Western society's values? What do we do about the growing number of people who inhabit a virtual world where, as in The X-Files, everything is a hidden conspiracy?
No significant section of Western elite opinion is sympathetic to the jihadists, as many were to Marxist-Leninism in the 1930s, but throughout Europe and even in the US there are left-liberals whose hatred of the US is so ingrained that they have become apologists for the most reactionary elements within Islam. Think of the activist human rights lawyers who are prepared to believe every crime ascribed to the US or UK governments and their collusive involvements with terrorists. British lawyer Madassur Arani has an entire West London practice dedicated to frustrating attempts by UK security services to recruit agents from within the British Muslim community. Her website gives step-by-step advice on how to resist recruitment.
There is also a larger penumbra of people who have migrated from the extreme Left to supporting parties that are halfway houses to the Islamists, e.g. George Galloway's Respect Party. In 2006 we had the spectacle of middle-class demonstrators bearing placards reading "We are all Hizbollah now," and more recently of the Archbishop of Canterbury seeking to make common cause with Muslim clerics by contemplating the licensing of enclaves of "soft" sharia law, a concession that would wholly undermine the Common Law of England while paving the way to "hard" sharia law in future.
Islam in Europe is a proselytizing religion which asserts its presence - most recently with demands for amplified muezzin in a predominantly non-Muslim suburb of Oxford or a 12,000 capacity mega-mosque to be situated next to London's 2012 Olympic complex. There are also quotidian acts of minority-within-a-minority self-assertion, ranging from schoolgirls insisting on wearing the hijab and jilbab to imams petitioning National Health Service hospitals insisting that patients' beds be turned to Mecca five times a day, to female Muslim NHS surgeons refusing to scrub their bare arms.
Throughout Europe, we are witnessing the gradual emergence of Muslim no-go areas, of enclaves based around nodal mosques and community centers, and public housing projects or rows of private terraced housing from which the indigenous population is decamping. Lax immigration policies, cheap flights and phone calls, and satellite TV mean that many immigrants do not make the mental break with "home." They simply transplant their home village to British cities.
So far, governments, notably in Britain and the Netherlands, have responded with state programs to inculcate local values through such things as formal citizenship tests. In these countries in particular, there has been a rapid abandonment of multiculturalism, but no commensurate attempt to uproot its massive bureaucratic expression in education, the media, and local government.
Cultures of terrorism >>> By Michael Burleigh for FPRI | June 2, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Paperback - UK)
The Dawning of a New Dark Age (Hardback - UK)
