Home-grown terrorists traumatise Europe
The attack on the editorial offices of the satirical French publication, Charlie Hebdo, that has claimed at least 12 lives, must serve as an alarm bell to awaken France, and the rest of western Europe, to the proliferation of homegrown radical Islam across the region. Unless the authorities take immediate action to tackle the menace, such terror violence will become more frequent and deadly. While Wednesday's killings have sent shockwaves around the world for sheer barbarity and high body count, the fact is that the attack was only the latest in a series of such jihadi strikes. December alone saw three such incidents in France. Jihadi apologists on the left (as much a part of the problem as the radicalised elements) have sought to underplay these incidents as isolated attacks carried out by madmen. But they forget that this is exactly the mode of operation that ‘organised' terror networks are now encouraging. If one needs still more proof of Europe's homegrown jihadi problem, one needs only to look at the large contingent of European fighters in Iraq and Syria these days. Tiny Belgium has been tagged as a ‘terror recruiting hub' while demonstrations in support of the Islamic State terror group have taken place in Germany, England, the Netherlands and France.
Home to the largest Muslim population in western Europe, France has more than a 1,000 of its nationals fighting for the IS, which is ironic because the French Government, alongside the US, is leading the fight against that terror group. Here too, jihadi apologists have made the case that it is Western action against IS barbarians that has hurt religious sentiments — when, in fact, Europe's jihadi woes go far back. In 2012, jihadis attacked French soldiers and a Jewish school in three different incidents, across two cities, killing seven. The year before, Charlie Hebdo had come under attack. In 2005, the london Metro was bombed; and it was more than a decade ago that a teenage jihadi butchered Theo van Gogh for the latter’s perceived attacks on Islam, on the streets of Amsterdam in 2004. In the case of France especially, the threat from radical Islam can be traced to as far back as the early 1990s. The wars in Algeria — a former French colony — and in the Balkans attracted thousands of Frenchmen who flooded the poorer Muslim neighbourhoods of France with military-grade guns and other weapons. The results were seen during the 2005 riots in the impoverished Parisian suburbs which remain vulnerable till date.
Today, France and the rest of Europe face a similar threat from jihadis returning home from Iraq and Syria. But the authorities seem ill-prepared for, if not in denial of, the consequences. France wants to take returning jihadis to court, but quite a few of them have slipped through the cracks in the system (such as Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed four people in an attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels in May 2014). Denmark hopes to reform them with a job, a home and Government handout, while Britain — which has a long history of sheltering Islamist radicals (such as Muslim Brotherhood leaders from Egypt) — is yet to see the folly of its ways, even as ‘Sharia'h zones' prop up around london and British soldiers are murdered in broad daylight.