Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  I was flummoxed: What on earth was he talking about? At last, after discharging a great deal more spleen, he suffered himself to pass me to the mayor’s spokeswoman, Marie-Noëlle Mivielle. She, too, was in a lather about my impertinent question. “It’s not the mayor who refuses to speak to Zerfaoui!” she insisted, hysteria creeping into her voice. “It’s Zerfaoui who will not return his calls!” She stressed to me that the mayor had done so much for Marseille’s Islamic community, had made such efforts to organize planning for the construction of a central mosque, had lent such support to the enlargement of existing mosques, had even made available a multipurpose room for Muslim cultural activities! Of course, I said soothingly, of course. Of course he cares. I would never dream of suggesting otherwise.

  At that point, I just wanted to get off the phone alive.

  This bizarre incident, I suspect, signifies the degree to which communitarian politics have come to dominate Marseille’s civic life. The mayor so fears the appearance of excluding anyone that I managed to violate six thousand kinds of protocol just by suggesting that he might be. I have never before witnessed such defensiveness about an official’s commitment to ethnic outreach—not even on an American university campus. And that’s saying something.

  CO-OPTING THE MODERATES: EUROPE’S ONLY HOPE

  I stopped in the Internet café below my hotel each morning to check my e-mail. Ads in the window advertised cheap long-distance rates to Algeria, Morocco, the Comoros. When I entered the address of my e-mail server, I looked at the sites checked by patrons before me: www.aljazeera.com. The home page of the Islamic Association for Palestine. These addresses were intermingled with pornography: www.swapyourwife.com. No one looked at anything else. This vivid illustration of the chief concerns of Marseille’s exogenous population made the city’s harmony seem all the more striking to me. It could so easily be otherwise.

  Of course, Marseille is not some kind of pluralistic utopia. While there is less anti-Semitic tension in Marseille than in comparable French cities, there is tension nonetheless. Yet the fact remains that in Marseille, unlike other French cities, the worst of the tension has been dampened. A show of force from the cops, a few calming words from the local mufti, a symbolic meeting of the local religious leaders, and Marseille returned to its usual preoccupations—the football team, the sun, the sea, panthers on the loose. However tempting it is to ridicule the exaggerated political correctness emanating from the mayor’s office, it is only honest to concede that they are doing something right, at least for now.

  Could these solutions be applied elsewhere? The curious case of Marseille raises important questions for the rest of France, and indeed for much of Europe. As Europe’s demography changes, ethnic conflict in its cities will continue to grow. What can be done? Marseille’s success in coping with such conflict is, obviously, an advertisement for strong police work—a strategy combining New York–style zero tolerance with personal relationships between police and ethnic community leaders. Marseille is a rebuke to a housing policy that in the rest of France has shunted immigrants to the city periphery. It is an endorsement of social programs that give kids something benign and inexpensive to do.

  But most significant, Marseille suggests that the French republican ideal is dying. It was a noble experiment. But its days are over. Marseille functions in large part because its constituent ethnicities, particularly its Arab immigrants, are recognized, organized, courted, and given voice in a formal system. Although everyone in France extols the principle of republicanism, Marseille, by compromising that principle, is the only city in France that has kept the French Intifada at bay.

  Now let me make one thing clear: In admiring this achievement, I am in no way endorsing the kind of freewheeling multiculturalism that is, in effect, a moral relativism that often shades into nihilism. Nor am I applauding the self-extinguishing form of tolerance that results in state sponsorship of radical mosques. There is a difference between observing that it is good idea to give ethnic groups a vehicle by which to express themselves politically and declaring that anything these ethnic groups want or do is acceptable. But perhaps there is a compromise— one rooted in pragmatism, not ideology. An absolutely uncompromising attitude toward ethnicity, it would seem, disheartens moderates and encourages extremists. When certain groups are given a formal means to express a reasonable and moderate ethnic agenda, the violent and immoderate elements of that group may more readily be contained by the moderate ones, who have been co-opted into the system.

  Indeed, France’s innovative interior minister has already happened upon this idea: Sarkozy has negotiated with France’s moderate Muslim leaders to create the French Muslim Council, the first representative body of French Muslims to be formally recognized by the government. The council will, among other things, secure chaplaincies in the army and prisons, acquire Muslim burial sites, deliver halal meat certificates and build—with the government’s financial support—new mosques and prayer halls. “What we should be afraid of,” Sarkozy has said, “is Islam gone astray, garage Islam, basement Islam, underground Islam.” His implication, obviously, is that there is another kind of Islam, one that can be domesticated, Westernized, co-opted. I hope he is right.

  A tradition of corrupt politics is certainly not a necessary precondition for the establishment of systems like Marseille’s in other cities. All that is required is civic leaders committed to creating and strengthening the city’s relationships with ethnic community leaders. Organizations modeled on Marseille Espérance could be created and maintained, with relatively small investment, in any European city. They might work. They might not. They are certainly worth trying.

  Anything is worth trying. If immigrants cannot be assimilated and they cannot be sent back—and they can’t—Europe must find some way to make its peace with them. If not, as Villepin remarked, the worst is not behind them. It is ahead of them.

  CHAPTER 5

  WE SURRENDER!

  THE REJECTION OF ALL MORAL ABSOLUTES, Chantal Delsol argues, is the source of the profound risk aversion of the modern European. “In general,” she writes, “our contemporary cannot imagine for what cause he would sacrifice his life because he does not know what his life means.” 1 Though Delsol does not explicitly say so, this is as good an explanation as we are apt to find for the willingness of the Spanish people instantly and obediently to capitulate to the demands of the terrorists who last year slaughtered some 200 of their countrymen.

  On March 11, 2004, three days before Spain’s legislative elections—exactly six months after the anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—terrorists linked to al Qaeda bombed four commuter trains in Madrid, killing nearly 200 men, women, and children and injuring 1,600 more. The bombs had been timed to detonate during the morning rush hour. They exploded with such force that severed limbs were thrown through the windows of nearby apartment buildings.

  On the following day, authorities retrieved a videotape from a trash basket near a Madrid mosque. “We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid,” said the man on the video, who claimed to be issuing a statement from the military spokesman for al Qaeda in Europe. “This is a response to the crimes that you caused in the world, and specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there will be more if God wills it.” He added the obvious: “You love life, and we love death.”

  Hours before the polls opened on Sunday, demonstrators filled the streets of Spain. The focus of their outrage was not al Qaeda but Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, who had committed Spanish troops to Iraq and had, the demonstrators believed, obfuscated evidence that the bombings had been committed by Islamic radicals, not Basque terrorists. The prime minister had been expected to win reelection with a large majority, but the voters responded to the massacre by voting into office the opposition candidate, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq immediately.

  This was precisely what the perpetrators of the massacre int
ended. Four months before, an entity with ties to al Qaeda called the Media Committee for the Victory of the Iraqi People had used the Internet to publish a document titled Jihadi Iraq: Hopes and Dangers. The premise of the document was that the United States could not be defeated by direct military action. Its allies, however, could be pared away, leaving the United States isolated. The committee recommended attacks on the less resolute coalition partners—specifically, “painful strikes” against Spain before its election.

  The document was notable for the sophistication of its analysis of Spanish domestic politics. “We think,” wrote the author, “that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program.” If Spain was forced out of Iraq, the committee theorized, pressure on the other coalition partners would mount, “and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly.” The use of the phrase “domino tiles” suggests that the author was a student not only of contemporary European political culture but also of American foreign policy and its history: It was President Eisenhower who advanced the Domino Theory to justify American support for South Vietnam. It is odd that even in excoriating the United States, militant Islam looked to America for analytic inspiration. It suggests that the author studied at an American or European university.

  The following Monday, the prime minister–elect vowed to withdraw Spain’s 1,300 troops from Iraq. The Spanish forces there had not been cosmetic; they had been playing an important role in the flashpoint Shia holy city of Najaf and could not readily be replaced. In a statement that passed nearly unnoticed, Zapatero added that he hoped to nurture closer ties between Spain and Morocco. Three of the five men arrested in connection with the bombings were Moroccan. Imagine how the American people would have responded had President Bush announced, following the September 11 attacks, that he hoped to strengthen U.S. ties to regimes that harbored terrorists.

  By capitulating to the terrorists’ demands, the Spanish electorate proved that a well-timed bloodletting could achieve better results than the perpetrators of the slaughter had dared to hope. In doing so, they condemned many more of us to death. Why wouldn’t the murderers repeat such a successful experiment? Is it any surprise that they did, in London, in July 2005?

  It is painfully obvious that the people of Spain either fundamentally misunderstand—or do not care about—the nature of the threat posed to Western civilization by Islamic radicalism. They are not alone, obviously. Shortly after the bombings, Romano Prodi, then president of the European Commission, declared that “using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists.” In a joint press conference with French president Jacques Chirac, German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said of terrorism, “Military force is not the only solution. One needs to look at the roots of it, including lack of development in the developing world.”

  This is an extraordinary thing to say in the aftermath of such an event. For one thing, it’s nonsense: The world’s fifty least-developed nations rarely produce terrorists. Who has ever died at the hands of a terrorist from Upper Volta? Samoa? Equatorial Guinea? Consider UNESCO’s list of the world’s forty-nine least-developed countries: So little are they known for exporting terrorism that one might with equal logic conclude that the remedy for terrorism is lack of development.22 The nineteen hijackers who took 3,000 human lives on September 11 were mostly educated, upper-middle-class Saudis, citizens of one of the most developed countries in the Middle East. The terrorists who attacked London came from Britain.

  But more important, what the Spanish voters and European leaders seem unwilling to comprehend—surely not unable, for the concepts are not complex—is that this, like the battles against fascism and communism, is an ideological conflict, not an economic one, and it is a conflict against a pitiless enemy that seeks the destruction of modernity and nothing less. This point may readily be confirmed by consulting Osama bin Laden’s multiple fatwas to this effect, which conspicuously lack clauses offering an end to the unpleasantness in exchange for an infusion of development aid. These documents, much like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, tell the world exactly what the author has in mind and how he plans to achieve it. One need only read them to understand the terrorists’ program completely; they are available on the Internet. The goal is the worldwide establishment of a medieval caliphate—a global Taliban regime. No one can say we were not warned.

  WHETTING THE ALLIGATOR’S APPETITE

  If the Spanish believe their conflict with Islamism to have been resolved by their withdrawal from Iraq, they are living in a fantasy. The terrorists themselves explicitly placed their attack in the larger context of Islam’s expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the videotape discovered after the bombing, one of the terrorists can be heard referring to Spain as “the land of Tarik ibn-Ziyad,” the first Arab leader to cross the Strait of Gibraltar in 711. Another said, “You know the Spanish crusade against Muslims, the expulsion from al-Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisitions, that was not so long ago.” These are not isolated statements. The corpus of Islamist doctrine is clear on this point: The expulsion from Spain was the most bitter of historic grievances visited upon Islam. This is a living memory, one that vitalizes the terrorists’ quest for vengeance, a humiliation they fully intend to reverse.

  Given the choice between war and dishonor, the Spanish chose dishonor. They would have war as well. Two weeks after the election, another massive bomb was discovered on Spain’s high-speed train line, forty miles south of Madrid. Had it detonated, the carnage would have considerably exceeded that of the previous bombings. The promise to withdraw from Iraq predictably did no more than whet the alligator’s appetite. Clint Eastwood’s creation, Dirty Harry, was asked why he was so sure the freed murderer of a little girl would continue to kill. “Because he likes it,” he replied. Exactly so. They like it.

  In the succeeding months, Spanish security services narrowly foiled plots to blow up the Spanish High Court and the Madrid soccer stadium. In September 2004, Spanish police arrested a cell of Pakistani drug dealers and extortionists with links to al Qaeda. The cell had been sending money to the group of Islamic radicals who killed journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan. Their video collection suggested their keen interest in the architecture of unusually large buildings in Barcelona. From this alone, it would seem that Spain’s new Iraq policy has not worked as planned.

  It is possible for reasonable men to argue that the war in Iraq was a misguided step in the battle against Islamic fundamentalism. It is not possible, however, for reasonable men to believe that the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq at that moment and in that context, coupled with comments like Prodi’s and Schroeder’s, would not thrill and embolden terrorists around the world, confirming to them their belief in the decadence and pusillanimity of the West, bringing even graver jeopardy upon Europe, the United States, and their allies. Again, this point can readily be confirmed at the source: Bin Laden himself has spoken, often, of the delirious exhilaration and inspiration he derives from each instance of Western capitulation to terror. In this 1996 fatwa, for example, he considers the American withdrawal from Somalia:

  When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American Pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you. Clinton appeared in front of the whole world threatening and promising revenge, but these threats were merely a preparation for withdrawal. You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew; the extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the “heart” of every Muslim and a remedy to the “chests” of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.

  Can there really be any doubt abou
t how the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq would have been perceived by Bin Laden and those who share his ideology? Can there be much doubt about how they understood Prodi’s and Schroeder’s comments?

  Of course it is true that military force is not the only solution. Overwhelming military force is the only solution. If Prodi does not believe force to be the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists, how does he propose combating terrorists who believe force to be the answer to resolving their conflict with us? They have demonstrated their willingness to kill us by the thousands and have clearly stated their ambitious plans to kill as many more of us as possible, preferably with chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. One of the Madrid bombing suspects, not incidentally, was found with floor plans to Grand Central Station on his computer. Why would Europe’s leaders seek to diminish this dreadful truth while the blood of their compatriots was not yet dry, rather than morally and psychologically preparing their citizens for a long military conflict against a depraved enemy—a conflict brought to European soil only days before?

  Schroeder’s comments were not merely an abdication of leadership, they were astonishingly insensitive to historic resonance. Confronting in the Nazis a similarly murderous, anti-Semitic, and expansionist ideology, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain happened upon the identical response. “We should seek,” he said, “by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will.” The consequences of his posture have now passed into infamy. Yes, yes, I do keep bringing up the Nazis. Those who would argue that this is not the correct historical analogy are challenged to find one single relevant place where the analogy fails.