Such cases of European-born Muslims who choose to embrace radical Islam despite their enviable success at economic and social integra tion into the larger society show that terrorism cannot be attributed to poverty and segregation alone. To be sure, Europe must change how it deals with the masses of immigrants that it has attracted over the past thirty years, but it is not solely responsible for the rise of Islamist terrorism on its soil: terrorism is the by-product of a vicious ideology that can appeal to rich and poor alike. Nevertheless, Europe needs to find solutions rapidly, as the rise in the number of its sons who are choosing to espouse radical Islam could be fatal to its security and its social fabric.
THE HOME-BREWED THREAT
"When I arrived in Germany in 1992, I was a man who loved the joys of life and was very happy ... I had no relationship to religion and lived in the European style: alcohol, women and hashish."" So an Algerian man convicted of terrorism in Germany described his life before his conversion to radical Islam. After some years of indulgence in "the European style," he was shocked into a transformation when a fellow Algerian showed him images of civilians killed by the Algerian army: "I was very shaken and decided to change my life, which had previously been devoted on my own well-being, to focus on my own country.... I began praying and seeking the truth."" A few months later, the man left Europe, first attending a Taliban-run religious school and then an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan; he returned to the Continent to plan an attack on French territory.
As challenging to Europe's security as the sizable proportion of its young native Muslim population that is turning to militant Islam are the discontented among its immigrant population. Each year, Europe receives hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men seeking their fortunes in the West. Most of them simply experience the typical life of an immigrant, with its struggles, problems, and its occasional successes. But many of them lose their way, unable to adapt to a new culture or to win financial security.
The story of Shadi Abdallah, a Jordanian who moved to Germany as a teenager, provides a telling example. He explained to German authori ties: "My family is very poor. I wanted to come to Germany to start a new life. Another reason was the opportunity to live a freer life in Germany. This involves my sexual tendencies toward men. I had expected problems and disadvantages in relation to this in Jordan. So I traveled with Abu Ali to Germany."73 But Germany was not the paradise Abdallah was expecting: "My life became very empty. I was entangled in drugs and spent all my money. For this reason I accepted the offer of food from a mosque. It was cheap and I could pay at the end of the month. The condition was that I would have to engage myself in Islam."74 In the mosque, the young and confused Abdallah met radicals who began teaching him their interpretation of Islam. Within months he was in Saudi Arabia, where he accepted the offer of an al Qaeda recruiter to go to Afghanistan.
By his own account, in Afghanistan Abdallah met with Abu Musab al Zarqawi and even briefly served as a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.71 Once back in Germany, Abdallah became part of a cell of Jordanians and Palestinians who, at al Zarqawi's direction, were planning to attack Jewish and Israeli targets inside Germany.76 The stories of other members of the cell were similar. The leader of the group, a Palestinian named Ashraf al Dagma, had spent years in Berlin selling cocaine and heroin near the city's zoo. Arrested and jailed, he rediscovered his Islamic roots: "I have decided to stop what I have been doing up to now," al Dagma explained to German authorities.77
Why should young Muslim men come to embrace views in the Christian and secular West for which they have shown little interest or sympathy while living in their home countries? In many cases, radical Islam provides disillusioned individuals with guidance, strict rules that take them away from their lives of drugs and crime. It offers them a muchneeded sense of finally being part of something meaningful, comforting them with the camaraderie among religious brothers. But it would be a mistake to think that only poor and marginalized Muslim immigrants convert to Islamism while in Europe and to attribute the troubling phenomenon to Europe's failure to economically integrate its large foreign population. Just like European-born Muslims, immigrants from every level of society have turned to fundamentalism.
In fact, European sociologists who study immigration and integration were shocked, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, to learn that some of the perpetrators were young Muslim students from the upper classes of their countries of origin who had discovered radical Islam while in Germany. These ambitious and gifted Middle Eastern students had come to the West to further their educations and careers. Most of them came from stable families with wealthy parents who paid for their expenses. Religion was not part of their life in their home countries, and, initially, they conducted themselves much like Westerners. On their way to success, something happened.
Perhaps the most striking transformation was displayed by Ziad Jarrah, the only son of a wealthy Lebanese family that owned a condominium in Beirut and a second house in the countryside.78 His parents were secularized Sunni Muslims, and they sent him to a private Christian school.79 Reportedly, Jarrah lived the life of a playboy, cruising up and down Beirut's trendy seafront in his parents' Mercedes looking for girls. Jarrah knew all the hip clubs in town and nobody remembers seeing him in the mosque. Pictures of his days in Lebanon show a handsome young man sporting sunglasses and fancy shirts. In 1996, after graduating from high school (with difficulty), Jarrah traveled to the small German city of Greifswald, where his cousin was enrolled in college. There the partying continued. "Once we drank so much beer we couldn't ride straight on a bike," Jarrah's cousin recalled.80 Relying on the generous allowance his parents were sending him from Lebanon, the carefree Jarrah smoked marijuana and dated a university student.
But, in Greifswald, Jarrah also met Abulrahman Makhadi, an encounter that changed his life. Makhadi, a Yemeni in his forties who had been trying to earn a degree in dentistry in Greifswald for more than ten years, was the imam of the local mosque, which served as a meeting point for the small community of Muslim students attending the university.81 Makhadi aided Muslim students as they settled in Greifswald, finding them an apartment or helping them to obtain a residency permit. But Makhadi was also a religious fundamentalist, monitored by authorities because of his fiery sermons and his contacts with known terrorists operating in Germany.82 After a few months under Makhadi's influence, Jarrah was changing his view of the world and of his life; by the end of 1996, he was a different man. Though he continued to date his girlfriend, Jarrah reportedly began reading religious books and radical Islamist publications. A friend of his girlfriend's told investigators that Jarrah had said that he was "dissatisfied with his life up to till now" and "didn't want to leave Earth in a natural way."83 In the spring of 1997, Jarrah moved to Hamburg, where he enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences. It was in Hamburg that Jarrah's transformation became complete, as he began to befriend a group of Moroccan students that worshiped at the city's radical al Quds mosque.84 At the mosque, Jarrah met other extremists-among them, Mohammed Atta and Marwan al Shehhi. Three years later, Jarrah, Atta, and al Shehhi would pilot three of the four planes hijacked on September 11.
The reasons that young immigrants turn to fundamentalist Islam while in Europe are many. In most cases, radical mosques played a key role in their conversion. Some, like Shadi Abdallah, turned to the mosque simply because it offered the cheapest meals. Once there, they become fascinated with radical sermons and caught up in terrorist activities. Others begin going to the mosque out of homesickness. Even secular Muslims living in European cities are drawn to the mosque as it is often the only place where they can speak their native language and eat food that reminds them of home. Many consider it more a social center than a place of worship. Nevertheless, after hearing the fiery words of local radicals, some change. And recruiters seek out young Muslims wherever they congregate-coffeehouses, restaurants, falafel shops, gyms, soccer fields-to persuade them to go to the mosque. Khaled Kalkel remembered: "The on
ly meeting place we heard about was the mosque. They came from the mosque into our neighborhood and said: `Instead of staying here, come to the mosque. It will only be good for you."'85 Attending the mosque is often the first step in the radicalization process.
In these mosques, which may be little more than garages or basements turned into places of worship, imams preach about the evils of the West and the need for the faithful to defend fellow Muslims who are under attack throughout the world. Playing on the sympathy that most Muslims have for the plight of Palestinians, Chechens, or, most recently, Iraqis, skilled preachers convince young worshipers that the West is at war against Islam and that Muslims have a sacred duty to defend it. Itinerant imams, self-proclaimed religious authorities who come from the most remote and backwards areas of Egypt, Morocco, or Pakistan, tour from mosque to mosque like rock stars and spread their message of hate across the Continent. Local imams often promote an even more virulent strain of Islam.
Italian authorities received a stunning firsthand account of the metamorphosis undergone by young Muslim immigrants once they fall under the spell of radical imams from X, a former low-level al Qaeda operative who decided to cooperate with authorities. "When I first moved to Italy, I lived in an apartment in Buccinasco with other North African immigrants," he said. His roommates' strange behavior-they ordered him to stay inside, told him to keep the windows closed, and regularly woke up late and left the apartment dressed very elegantly-led X to believe that they were probably small-scale drug dealers and therefore X moved out.86 But when, after a few months, X revisited his former roommates, he was shocked:
We thought we went to the wrong apartment. There were no more pictures, photos, Western movies, tapes with music, but only prayer rugs, the Quran, books for the interpretation of the Quran, and other books bought at the mosque. And the clothes were only white. Sami, with a long beard, serious, told us that he had to go to the other room for the Asr prayer and told us that, from that moment on, nobody could smoke in the apartment, nobody could smoke or drink alcohol and then visit the apartment, and that when we were with him we could not greet any Italian. Then he took a tape shot in Afghanistan and told us about these people that had left everything behind and had reached this country to pursue the goal that we should all have: to die as martyrs and fight these pigs.87
A few months later, X began his own journey into Islamic fundamentalism. He started attending Friday worships at the mosque of the infamous Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, where he found the fiery sermons of the local imam, Abu Imad, "very convincing." And there, X also became involved with a terrorist cell. To test his loyalty, the leaders of the cell assigned him simple tasks, but he was ready for more. "For a short time," he confessed to Italian authorities, "about two months, I would have accepted to be a kamikaze. I was not well psychologically, I wanted to die. ... I was convinced that the only way to go to Paradise without being questioned was martyrdom. It was the opportunity to be genuinely happy."88
X was arrested before he could carry out any attack, but he is just one of the many weak, disillusioned, and lost Muslim immigrants who have found their identity in radical Islam. According to a Dutch intelligence report released in 2002, new adherents to fundamentalism find in it "a sense of self-respect, involvement, brotherhood and identity. They feel that they are involved in a fight between good and bad, which guides them into a certain direction and provides answers to existential questions they are dealing with."89 Europeans are astonished to learn of these secular Muslim immigrants who become radicalized while living on the Continent. Their growing numbers present an enormous potential security threat. Immediate steps are possible and necessary. European countries must crack down on radical preachers, shut down fundamentalist mosques, and promote more moderate interpretations of Islam. But the task is monumental. Laws that protect free speech and religious rights complicate the authorities' work. And when mosques are closed or imams deported, the extremists go underground, meeting in basements and listening to radical sermons circulated on tape. One European extremist commented sarcastically, "If the Beatles cannot go on any tours any more, then their records can go on trips."90 Europe needs to stop both the Beatles and their tapes.
THE IMPORTED THREAT
"I live here but I still think America and Britain are enemies of the Afghanistan people and Muslim people." With these words, published by the Telegraph in February 2003, Wali Khan Ahmadzai expressed his gratitude to Great Britain for granting him political asylum. But the twentythree-year-old Afghan was no ordinary refugee: he was a member of the Taliban who had admitted to battling American and British forces in Afghanistan before fleeing in a convoy paid for by bin Laden. Ahmadzai was only one of the beneficiaries of the generous British asylum system. In January 2002, while British forces were still engaged with Taliban and al Qaeda remnants on the ground in Afghanistan, British immigration authorities shocked the public by announcing that political asylum had been granted to some Taliban fighters. Ahmadzai openly told his story: "When I came to Britain 13 months ago I didn't have any documentation at all to show who I was. I told them the truth, that I fought for the Taliban and was scared of what the new government would do to me. The Home Office gave me exceptional leave to remain here for four years." Ahmadzai also admitted knowing of at least one former comrade who had been granted asylum in the United Kingdom and was "potentially dangerous."91
Paradoxical as it might look, Wali Khan Ahmadzai's was not an isolated case; over the past forty years, European countries have knowingly and voluntarily hosted hundreds of Islamic fundamentalists. Acting on humanitarian motives, for decades countries such as Britain, Sweden, Holland, and Germany have made it their official policy to welcome political refugees from all over the world. But, blinded by their laudable intentions of protecting all individuals suffering political persecutions, most European countries rarely distinguished between democracy-supporting opponents of autocratic regimes and Islamic fundamentalists who had bloodied their hands in their home countries with heinous terrorist acts. As a consequence, some of the world's most radical Islamists with a legitimate fear of prosecutions in the Middle East found a new, convenient base of operation in Europe.
The influx began in the 1950s, when the regimes in Egypt and Syria began a crackdown on members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an international Islamist movement seeking to replace existing Middle Eastern governments with an Islamic theocracy. Hundreds of young members of the Muslim Brotherhood fled the Middle East and took refuge in Europe. The exodus reached its peak between the end of the 1980s and the first years of the 1990s, as the war in Afghanistan ended. Thousands of Arab mujahideen who had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan realized they could not return to their home countries, where they were generally perceived as a threat to political stability and would have been killed or imprisoned. Many of them were allowed to settle in Europe, as European governments viewed them simply as freedom fighters suffering unjust persecution by dictatorial regimes.
What the European governments failed to understand was that they were inviting a monster into their own backyard. Many thought that once in peaceful, secular Europe, these committed Islamic fundamentalists would stop their violent activities and live a quiet life. Europeans also naively believed that by giving the mujahideen asylum, they would spare themselves the radicals' murderous wrath. These assumptions were completely false. Most of the relocated Islamic radicals continued their efforts to fight Middle Eastern regimes, by raising money, supplying weapons and false documents, and forging new alliances with Islamic terrorist groups already operating in Europe. And within a few years, as bin Laden's message of "global jihad" took hold, they turned on their hosts.
Less than a month after 9/11, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak assailed the West's naive policies: "Political asylum should be granted to a person who faces political injustice. But to give political asylum to a killer, or leave him alone and say `human rights.' What human rights? Human rights should be for the weak and innoc
ent who is killed together with members of his family. But a criminal killer? What human rights? This means that terrorism is encouraged and then a terrorist operation is committed against these countries (which grant killers asylum). This happened in England and in America also."92 Mubarak has good reasons to be angry with European governments, which Egypt has long been fighting in order to obtain the extraditions of dozens of Egyptian Islamic fundamentalists who have been given political asylum.
Among the most intense of these diplomatic battles has been that waged over the granting of political asylum to several high-ranking members of one of Egypt's most radical and violent terrorist organizations. In the early 1990s, while the Gamaa Islamiya was carrying out a brutal terrorist campaign against the Egyptian regime and targeting Western tourists vacationing in the country, many of the group's leaders fled to Europe, where they obtained political asylum in various countries. There they continued their operations undisturbed, planning new attacks in Europe as well as Egypt.
In 1993 Denmark granted political asylum to Abu Talal al Qassimi, the Gamaa's spokesman. After being repeatedly imprisoned in Egypt for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat and his role as the Gamaa's official representative in the city of Minya, al Qassimi traveled to Afghanistan in the mid1980s to join the jihad against the Soviets.93 While directly participating in military activities, al Qassimi also teamed up with an Egyptian senior aide to Osama bin Laden and began publishing the Gamaa's official magazine, Al Murabitun. As the war against the Soviets ended and civil war engulfed Afghanistan, al Qassimi decided to leave the country. Realizing that he undoubtedly would have been imprisoned on his return to Egypt, al Qassimi decided to go to Europe and seek political asylum, which was generously granted by Danish authorities.94
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