By M.G. Oprea
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Last week, I wrote about the myriad instabilities in the
Middle East and North Africa, from the civil war in Yemen to the bombings in
Turkey and the ongoing disaster in Syria. What I didn’t touch on, however, is
how these instabilities are reverberating on the European continent. Sadly,
this week another tremor was felt. Today, during the morning commute,
terrorists bombed a train station and the airport in Brussels. So far, more
than 30 are reported dead and more than 150 injured.
These attacks come five months after the Paris attacks
that shocked the world and took the lives of 130 men and women. These
terrorists had pledged their allegiance to ISIS and were carrying out what they
believed to be holy jihad. Although most of the perpetrators were killed during
the attacks or in the days after in a suburb of Paris, one man eluded the
police. That man, Salah Abdeslam, was captured on Friday after a months-long
manhunt.
The city has been on high alert since his arrest. They
knew Abdeslam had a large network in Brussels, and that he had been planning
more attacks. They feared his network of operatives would lash out. They also
discovered detonators in a safe house last week before his arrest. Presumably,
today’s bombings in Brussel were a reaction to Abdeslam’s apprehension, either
out of concern that he would talk or that the police would soon be on to them,
too.
What is shocking the Brussels police, however, is the
scale of Abdeslam’s network and its capacity to help him avoid capture for so
long in a city that authorities were scouring for him. On the night of the
Paris attacks, Abdeslam crossed the border into Belgium with the help of a
friend. Although his name was flagged as a person of interest, the border
guards’ system had not yet been updated with the information that he was one of
the suspects. From there, it’s presumed that he returned home to Brussels,
where he continued planning more attacks.
In the months before the Paris attacks, he and the Syrian
fighters with whom he linked up were helped by Abdeslam’s family, childhood
friends, and other petty criminals to remain concealed. In the months after the
attacks, he was helped by what it seems is a massive network of “friendlies”
who were willing to shelter, hide, and perhaps even work with him on the next
terrorist plot. When Abdeslam was finally apprehended, he was living a few
hundred yards from his family’s home—right under the nose of the police.
Here we come to the crux of the problem. How is it that
in a prosperous European country there can be enough support within the Muslim
community for a man who had pledged his allegiance to ISIS, has already
successfully completed one terrorist attack and is planning others, to be
protected and aided?
The answer is that this is a problem of Europe’s own
creating—and it’s not going away. Beginning in the post-World War II era,
Europe was in need of workers to pad its depleted work force. A natural place
to look was North Africa, in former colonies of Spain and France. While it was
assumed that migration would be short-term, the reality is that the men who
came to work stayed, and later brought over their families. Europe made no plan
for how to house and assimilate these families (see Christopher Caldwell’s
excellent book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe,” for an in-depth
discussion of this topic).
More to the point, Europe was uncomfortable asking its
Muslim communities to assimilate. European leaders felt that would be too
reminiscent of the colonial era. Their guilt and newfound “enlightenment”
guided them to leave these people to their communities, culture, and religion.
At the same time, however, they also ostracized them. What resulted was
tight-knit majority-Muslim enclaves often on the outskirts of major European
cities (like Saint Denis on the outer edge of Paris, where one of the Paris attackers
was found).
These communities are volatile places that are not
dissimilar, in some ways, to certain American inner cities. They remain
close-knit via shared language, Arabic, shared religion, Islam, and a continued
influx of immigration from their countries of origin. This is no longer just
family reunification. It is common, for example, for second- and
third-generation North African immigrants to look to their ancestral home for a
spouse. This is most common among men. They want a woman uncorrupted by
European values. These marriage practices keep a continuous supply of first-generation
mothers having second-generation children.
These problems have now come home to roost. Europe has on
its hands millions of Muslims, many of whom, although certainly not all,
identify first as Muslims and second as Europeans. They are loyal, at best, to
the local Muslim community with whom they share a sense of solidarity, or in
its worst manifestations, to ISIS and its global sense of destiny. This
manifests itself in its most extreme in attacking the great evil that is the
West—even if it has been their home for their entire life. But, as has played
out in the last few months, it is also manifesting itself in a large community
of people willing to aid and abet terrorist networks in Europe.
What makes this situation so unique, and so dangerous, is
the cooperation of foreign and domestic operatives. Syrian fighters, who,
according to the Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens, are coming over
“constantly,” are wholly unfamiliar with Europe. But because they are plugged
into a network of people who are not themselves terrorists but have little
allegiance to Europe and have all the necessary local knowledge, the would-be
terrorists can easily move undetected and successfully execute their attacks.
This latest attack in Brussels would not have been
possible without this network of native-born, disaffected Muslims. For that,
Europe has no one to blame but itself.
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