Europe faces ‘jihadist’ threat

Source Pakistan Daily Times

* Experts believe al Qaeda’s new strategy is to stop acting like network

BERLIN: With France’s deadly attacks, terrorism has apparently struck once more in the heart of Europe – and authorities say there’s a dangerous twist: the emergence of homegrown extremists operating independent of any known networks, making them hard to track and stop.

“We have a different kind of jihadist threat emerging and it’s getting stronger,” Europol chief Rob Wainwright told The Associated Press in an exclusive telephone interview from The Hague. “It is much more decentralised and harder to track.”

France’s motorcycle gunman traumatised a nation heading into presidential elections and spread fears across the continent that the specter of al Qaeda was once again threatening daily life.

Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent, sowed his terror over the course of a week, killing paratroopers, Jewish children and a rabbi. He died on Thursday in a shootout after police raided the Toulouse apartment where he had been holed up.

Wainwright warned that Europe faces a tough challenge ahead.

Other European terror authorities echoed that view, saying that apprehending suspicious individuals with no clear connections to terrorist networks is legally problematic.

German officials expressed the same frustration in the case of Arid Uka, a Kosovo Albanian who gunned down two American airmen and wounded two others last year at the Frankfurt airport before being captured. Aside from illegally acquiring a handgun, the 22-year-old, who was convicted last month, had committed no crime until he shot his first victim in the back of the head.

Some experts believe that al Qaeda’s new strategy is, in fact, to stop acting like a network.

Encouraging individuals to carry out terrorist attacks, without organising them in cells, has become integral to the terrorist organisation’s modus operandi, said Noman Benotman, a former extremist with links to al Qaeda and who now works for the London-based Quilliam Foundation.

“They are part of the overall al Qaeda strategy, and they are part of the instructions – or suggestions, if you will – for groups and individuals seeking guidance or inspiration,” he said.

A British security official said the key to targeting this brand of individualised terror was figuring out whether people were simply thinking extremist thoughts or would truly turn violent.

Authorities are trying to determine whether Merah’s 29-year-old brother, Abdelkader, was involved, and are searching for accomplices who might have encouraged Merah to kill or furnished the means to do so.

Merah told negotiators he killed to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and to protest the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan as well as France ‘law against the burqa.

French authorities have acknowledged that Merah had been under surveillance for years and that his travels to Afghanistan and Pakistan were known to French intelligence, raising the question of whether security services might have been able to act against him before he was able to carry out his attacks .

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told German media that there were striking similarities between the Uka and Merah attacks, and that it drives home the need for a “security partnership” between intelligence services and extremist groups and communities.

Netherlands Sliding into the Abyss

Source Link: FrontPageMag

By Bruce Bawer

In a new interview in the Dutch magazine Panorama, Geert Wilders talks about a variety of things, including his forthcoming book about Islam, which will be published in the U.S. in April.  In it, he says, he’ll document the fact that “Islam is a dangerous ideology” and that “Muhammed really is one of the big bad guys” of history, whose negative influence continues to be felt today.  Yes, Wilders acknowledges, there are genuinely moderate people who call themselves Muslims, and if they want to call themselves Muslims that’s fine with him – but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

What, asks the interviewer, is his great fear?  Answer: that “if we don’t put an end to Islamization, it will slowly but surely insinuate itself into our society, at the cost of our freedom.  And bit by bit things will go the wrong way.  That’s why I’m extending this warning.  Otherwise someday our children and grandchildren won’t have freedom any more.”  To which the interviewer replies: “And if people say: come on, Geert, it’s not really so bad, is it?…What do you say then?”  “I say: it’s worse than you think.”

It’s hard to believe that in the year 2011 there exist Dutchmen – outside of the perennially clueless cultural elite, that is – who are still able to believe that things aren’t “really so bad.”  But, alas, there are.  There are.

To be sure, thanks largely to pressure from Wilders and his Freedom Party, the last few years have seen reforms in Dutch immigration and integration policies.  But has it been too little, too late?   For the unfortunate fact is that one set of indicators after another continues to head south.  Take a new report (PDF Copy below article) commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and produced by Risbo, a research institute at Erasmus University.  It shows that of males in the Netherlands’ “Moroccan community” between the ages of 12 and 24, no fewer than 38.7 percent have come to the attention of the police at least once during the last five years in connection with some offense – mostly violent crimes and thefts.

The winner in this dubious sweepstakes is the historic city of Den Bosch, about fifty miles south of Amsterdam.  In Den Bosch, just under half of young Moroccan males between 12 and 24 – 47.7 percent, to be exact – have police records.  (That’s up from 45 percent last year.)  In a long list of other cities – Zeist, Gouda, Veenendaal, Amersfoort, Maassluis, Oosterhout, Schiedam, Nijmegen, Utrecht, Ede, Leiden, and The Hague – the figure also topped 40 percent.  In every municipality that was studied, incidentally, the scores for Moroccan youths far outstripped those for ethnic Dutch kids, among whom an average of 13 percent of boys in the same age cohort had come in for similar police attention during the same period.

One person who knows a good deal about the Dutch Moroccan youth milieu is filmmaker Roy Dames, who spent eight years – imagine! – working on Mocros, a documentary about young Moroccans in Rotterdam.  (The film opened on November 10 in Amsterdam and Nijmegen, and will be aired on Dutch TV early next year.)  In an interview with the Dutch edition of Metro, Dames, whose previous work includes documentaries about criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics, and homeless people, says that he “wanted to make a documentary about the Moroccan boys in the street, the street kids that you see everywhere.  In 2002, when I started Mocros, Moroccan boys had a poor image. They still do.  Many Moroccan boys are kicked out of school, cause trouble in the streets, and are in danger of leading a life of crime.”

The ones he’s been following around all these years with his camera now average about twenty-three years old.  They’re on welfare and get “an occasional job.”  One of them has spent some time in prison.  It’s not easy to get them to open up, he says, because they “live in a culture of silence and shame” in which pressure from family, friends, and community “is enormous.”

Spending all these years in the company of these youths hasn’t exactly protected Dames from their not-so-chummy side.  At one point he was filming a (shall we say) uncongenial encounter between thirty of his young subjects and some hapless “youth workers” when suddenly the boys “turned on me” aggressively.  Dames jumped in his car and sped off just in time – and had to put the project on hold for six months.  (Apparently it took that long for the kids to cool down.)

One gathers that while Dames has a certain degree of sympathy for at least some of these kids, he also doesn’t pull any punches, and shows things how they are – which is not pretty.  (A snotty little review in De Telegraaf gripes that the film, intentionally or not, will confirm all the prejudices of ethnic Dutch viewers – and the reviewer ends with that line, as if to make it clear that the last thing he wants to do is to explore the disturbing implications of this observation.)

It seems significant that the profile of Dames appeared in the Dutch edition of Metro, of all places.  Metro is a chain of urban newspapers that can be picked up for free in subway stations and other such places (the Dutch trains are always full of discarded copies), and over the years I’ve noticed that the Dutch and Swedish editions of Metro are – scandalously – often the only places you’ll find news stories that are too politically incorrect for those countries’ “real” media to touch.  Apparently Dames’s documentary falls into that category.  Mocros has received “little attention in the media,” he laments, because “the Dutch press is politically correct” and would prefer not to have a “real debate” about the issues raised by films like his.

Well, we knew that already – heaven knows Geert Wilders does.  But after the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, the hounding of Ayaan Hirsi Ali out of the country, and the prosecution of Wilders – all because they dared to express their opinions about Islam – and given the increasingly out-of-this-world statistics such as those included in the Risbo report, one wonders exactly what it would take to persuade the Dutch media that it’s time, at long last, to permit a truly wide-open, no-holds-barred discussion of Islam in the Netherlands.  One fears that by the time some of the media moguls realize it’s time to let ‘er rip, it’ll already be much too late.

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Europe: “You Are Entering a Sharia Controlled Zone”

Source Article Hudson NY

Europe: “You Are Entering a Sharia Controlled Zone”
Hezbollah Pitches Tent in Denmark

by Soeren Kern

A Muslim group in Denmark has launched a campaign to turn parts of Copenhagen and other Danish cities into “Sharia Law Zones” that would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic law.

The Danish Islamist group Kaldet til Islam (Call to Islam) says the Tingbjerg suburb of Copenhagen will be the first part of Denmark to be subject to Sharia law, followed by the Nørrebro district of the capital and then other parts of the country, the center-right Jyllands-Posten newspaper reported on October 17.

Call to Islam says it will dispatch 24-hour Islamic ‘morals police’ to enforce Sharia law in those enclaves. The patrols will confront anyone caught drinking alcohol, gambling, going to discothèques or engaging in other activities the group views as running contrary to Islam.

Integration Minister Karen Haekkerup told Jyllands-Posten “I consider this to be very serious. Anything that attempts to undermine our democracy, we must crack down on it and consistently so.”

The Call to Islam group promotes Salafism, a fundamentalist sect within Sunni Islam that espouses a literalist reading of Islamic scriptures and adheres to a conservative and highly regulated puritan lifestyle.

Salafism also seeks the destruction of Western democracy, which is to be replaced by a Universal Islamic Caliphate, a worldwide Islamic theocracy regulated by Sharia law.

In a statement on its website, Call to Islam asks: “How can we [Muslims] claim to be followers of the Sunnah [principles established by the Islamic prophet Mohammed] and defend the best Deen [doctrines of Allah], when we prefer to live among the infidels, be subject to their laws, emulate them and fail to differentiate ourselves from their kufr [camp of unbelievers]? How can we claim to love Allah and His Messenger when we are embarrassed to call for Sharia? How can we be indifferent to the establishment of Allah’s rule on Earth, which is a duty for every Muslim?”

The statement continues: “To work to establish the Caliphate is one of the biggest tasks of our time. And this task cannot be achieved unless we work collectively under an Emir [commander, general or prince]. Moreover, it is known that it is a duty to fight the evil that is prevalent everywhere around us. Man-made laws and rules are present today and it has now become a mandatory obligation for all Muslims to work collectively to rid the world of this great munkar [evil], democracy.”

Denmark’s TV2 public television recently filmed members of Call to Islam in downtown Copenhagen openly campaigning for the abolishment of democracy and calling on people not to vote in parliamentary elections that were held on September 15.

A video posted on the Call to Islam website asks: “Do you want to take part in establishing Sharia in Denmark? Or do you want to stand by? The choice is yours!”

Call to Islam in Denmark is emulating similar movements in other parts of Europe.

In Britain, for example, a Muslim group called Muslims Against the Crusades has launched a campaign to turn twelve British cities – including what it calls “Londonistan” – into independent Islamic states. The so-called Islamic Emirates would function as autonomous enclaves ruled by Islamic Sharia law and operate entirely outside British jurisprudence.

The Islamic Emirates Project names the British cities of Birmingham, Bradford, Derby, Dewsbury, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Sheffield, as well as Waltham Forest in northeast London and Tower Hamlets in East London as territories to be targeted for blanket Sharia rule.

In the Tower Hamlets area of East London (also known as the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets), for example, extremist Muslim preachers, called the Tower Hamlets Taliban, regularly issue death threats to women who refuse to wear Islamic veils. Neighborhood streets have been plastered with posters declaring “You are entering a Sharia controlled zone: Islamic rules enforced.” And street advertising deemed offensive to Muslims is regularly vandalized or blacked out with spray paint.

In Belgium, a radical Muslim group called Sharia4Belgium recently established an Islamic Sharia law court in Antwerp, the country’s second-largest city. Leaders of the group say the purpose of the court is to create a parallel Islamic legal system in Belgium in order to challenge the state’s authority as enforcer of the civil law protections guaranteed by the Belgian constitution.

The Sharia court, which is located in Antwerp’s Borgerhout district, is “mediating” family law disputes for Muslim immigrants in Belgium. The self-appointed Muslim judges running the court are applying Islamic law, rather than the secular Belgian Family Law system, to resolve disputes involving questions of marriage and divorce, child custody and child support, as well as all inheritance-related matters.

Unlike Belgian civil law, Islamic Sharia law does not guarantee equal rights for men and women; critics of the Sharia court say it will undermine the rights of Muslim women in marriage and education. Legal experts say the Islamic court will also undercut the Belgian state’s ability to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of so-called honor crimes.

Sharia4Belgium says the court in Antwerp will eventually expand its remit and handle criminal cases as well.

In Germany, the spread of Islamic Sharia law is far more advanced than previously thought, and German authorities are “powerless” to do anything about it, according to a new book about the Muslim shadow justice system in Germany.

The 236-page book titled “Judges Without Law: Islamic Parallel Justice Endangers Our Constitutional State,” which was authored by Joachim Wagner, a German legal expert and former investigative journalist for ARD German public television, says Islamic Sharia courts are now operating in all of Germany’s big cities.

This “parallel justice system” is undermining the rule of law in Germany, Wagner says, because Muslim arbiters-cum-imams are settling criminal cases out of court without the involvement of German prosecutors or lawyers before law enforcement can bring the cases to a German court.

In France, Islamic Sharia law is rapidly displacing French civil law in many parts of suburban Paris. The 2,200-page report, “Banlieue de la République” (Suburbs of the Republic) says France is on the brink of a major social explosion because of the failure of Muslims to integrate into French society.

The report shows how the problem is being exacerbated by radical Muslim leaders who are promoting the social marginalization of Muslim immigrants in order to create a parallel Muslim society in France that is ruled by Sharia law.

In Spain, Salafi preachers in the north-eastern region of Catalonia have set up Sharia tribunals to judge the conduct of both practicing and non-practicing Muslims in Spain. They also deploy Islamic “religious police” in Lérida and other Catalan municipalities to monitor and punish Muslims who do not comply.

In one case, nine Salafists kidnapped a woman in Reus, tried her for adultery based on Sharia law, and condemned her to death. The woman just barely escaped execution by fleeing to a local police station.

In another case, a Salafi imam in Tarragona was arrested for forcing a 31-year-old Moroccan woman to wear a hijab head covering. The imam had threatened to burn down the woman’s house for being and “infidel” because she works outside of the home, drives an automobile and has non-Muslim friends.

Back in Denmark, local politicians appear oblivious to the spread of Sharia law. In September, the city council of Copenhagen gave its final approval for the construction of the first official “Grand Mosque” in the Danish capital.

The mega-mosque will have a massive blue dome as well as two towering minarets and is architecturally designed to stand out on Copenhagen’s low-rise skyline.

Unlike most mosques in Europe, which cater to Sunni Muslims, the mosque in Copenhagen pertains to Shia Islam. The mosque is being financed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and critics say that theocrats in Tehran intend to use the mosque to establish a recruiting center for the militant Shia Muslim group, Hezbollah in Europe.

The Copenhagen city council says that who pays for building the mosque is none of its concern. But the Copenhagen mosque is, in fact, being built bty Ahlul Beit Foundation, a radical Shia Muslim proselytizing and political lobbying group run by the Iranian government.

Ahlul Beit already runs around 70 Islamic centers around the world, and has as its primary goal the promoting of the religious and political views of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ahlul Beit is especially focused on spreading Islamic Sharia law throughout Europe including Denmark.

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook.