A FASHION FOR EXTREMISM

A major political scandal has erupted in Belgium. Some 150 people assembled on the square outside the Euro-bureaucracy offices (the European Commission and Council of the European Union) to call for members of Muslim communities in Europe to be banned from involvement in European political parties. The slogans were simple and easy to understand: "We don't need Shariah" and "Europe must be democratic". The Belgian authorities responded quite harshly and the demonstration was described as racist. No-one had given permission for it to be held.

Participants in the Brussels rally, mainly from the far-right, had travelled from across Europe, but 150 demonstrators hardly means we can talk about wide-scale Islamophobia in Europe. Nevertheless, the surge in popularity of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National in France, the rise of the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands and, finally, constant calls from Europeans "to limit migration" and so on do at least give pause for thought.

Sadly, not one nation is exempt from xenophobia and of all the states in Europe today only the Vatican remains fully Christian and, perhaps, the isolated island of Iceland. All the other countries have Muslim quarters and the European Court for Human Rights has to deal with appeals from French Muslim girls upset at the ban on wearing religious attributes, including the hijab, in French schools. 

But while they discuss the "dialogue of civilizations" and try to calculate the dynamics, others note a worrying fact: European Muslims include a growing number of adherents of radical religious and political tendencies, even of Salafi teaching. When the world was marking the sixth anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks in the USA, a terrorist alert was sounded in Germany. People were arrested on suspicion of planning attacks on Frankfurt airport and the American military base at Ramstein. Two were German citizens while another had a Pakistani passport. It soon emerged that the alleged terrorists arrested in Germany - two Germans and a Turk - had undergone training in Pakistan in camps belonging to the Islamic Jihad Union, which is a branch of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Germany's Federal Prosecutor Monika Harms said that all three were part of a German cell of the Islamic Jihad Union and were probably closely linked with Al-Qaeda. Harms also said that they had been watched for a long time by the German special services. The potential targets of the alleged terrorists were to have been not only the airport and base in Ramstein, but other American facilities in Germany and discos, bars and pubs frequented by US citizens. The suspects planned to use vehicles loaded with explosives in their terror attacks and park them outside institutional targets or leisure facilities. Uzbek consular offices in German were also among the targets. The terrorists planned to use them to get the Bundeswehr base in the Uzbek town of Termez closed, which is used to supply the German contingent in Afghanistan.

According to the Interior Ministry, the arrest of the terrorists averted the threat of a specific terrorist attack. However, the terrorist threat to Germany remains for the foreseeable future. The German law-enforcement bodies are looking for at least 10 people who might be part of the terrorist grouping.

Analysts say that Frankfurt airport is one of the busiest in Europe. The base in Ramstein, 130 km southwest of the airport, is one of the most important US air bases outside the USA. Moreover, what was planned for Frankfurt is very reminiscent of the recent dramatic events in Glasgow in Britain, where terrorists tried to smash into the airport's passenger terminal in a jeep loaded with explosives. 

Car bombs, just like attempts to attack airports, are already traditional acts of international terrorism. Remember May 1972 when fighters of the Japanese Red Army wrought carnage by opening fire on passengers in Lod airport in Israel. On 7 August 1982 two Armenian terrorists, armed with a pistol and grenades, opened fire in the departure lounge at Ankara's Esenboga airport. One of the terrorists took more than 20 people hostage in the airport restaurant while the other was arrested by police. During the shoot-out with the bandit nine people were killed (including one American and one West German citizen) and 82 were wounded. ASALA, the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, claimed responsibility for the attack. The arrested terrorist, Levon Ekmekjian was tried, found guilty and punished for his role in the attack.

Something else catches the eye on the banks of the Elbe and Spree. Few people doubt that a branch of the Islamic underground is operating in the country. It is enough to remember that in 2001 Al-Qaeda used the northern port city of Hamburg as its bridgehead for the 11 September attacks on the USA. Moreover, this year the German prosecutor's office has brought charges against Lebanese citizen Jihad Hamad - he himself confessed that he plotted to place explosives on two railway trains in Germany. This was conceived as revenge for the publication of the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten in September 2006. German security services arrested Hamad and three other suspects on 31 July in Cologne as they were trying to bring suitcases with homemade bombs into the railway station. They were recorded by security cameras. A day later explosive devices were found in trains at Koblenz and Dortmund stations in Germany - fortunately, the detonators were faulty and no tragedy ensued. 

Germany is not the only country whose authorities have come up against an increase in extremism in the Muslim community. Italy was first to sound the alarm when it emerged that underground "Shariah courts" were operating at the Islamic Centre in Milan. Women were found in the city who had been stoned for marital infidelity and men who had been flogged for drinking alcohol.

London's shock at the terrorist attacks of July 2005 was not soon forgotten. The French newspaper Le Monde said that many Londoners were shaken that all the suicide bombers had appeared to be very ordinary young people to those who knew them before the terrible morning of 7 July. "One of the terrorists was a sportsman, a keen cricket fan and not interested in politics," the newspaper wrote. "The second was a quiet family man. The third was a religious young man who, thanks to prayer, managed to overcome his adolescent waywardness. All three terrorists were ordinary young Britons who were no different from other members of their Pakistani immigrant community."

And it is this outward normality of those whom the English press described as "suicide bombers from the suburbs" that most shocked the authorities and the general public. The press has already published the stories of young British men who have gone to Iraq and also of at least one Belgian woman who adopted Islam and became a suicide terrorist in Iraq. In other words, the fashion for extremism in European Muslim communities has become dangerously widespread. 

At least at first glance, this is not surprising. Islamic communities in Europe form states within a state. The residents of the Muslim areas, where you are more likely to hear Arabic or Persian than English or Italian, have their own shops, trade centres and schools, not to mention mosques. So Muslims are often scarcely integrated into European society. Moreover, the Iron Curtain is not always closed by the Christian majority: many see the opportunity to maintain their "moral foundation" in being a closed community. Finding themselves in an alien environment, members of the Muslim communities cling to archaic rules and laws which would be considered anachronistic back home.

The closed nature of their communities also creates near ideal conditions for radical preachers. They are active, often trained in the simplest methods of recruitment and have substantial financial resources at their disposal. They are happy to discuss what their audience most wants to hear: that by their moral qualities Muslims exceed their "decadent neighbours", that they must help one another and not allow their children to fall under the "pernicious influence of the West". No-one starts off a conversation by recruiting suicide bombers - it is simply necessary to tell the listener what he most wants to hear and to do it in such a way that he comes back.

For a long time in Europe there has been practically no struggle against radicals. Metin Kaplan, accused of terrorism in Turkey, managed to get political asylum in Germany and came to the attention of the police when he was involved in the murder of his political rival. Many of his colleagues in the "jihad underground" easily received political refugee status in Europe. They also understand full well in European countries that today any arrests of Muslims, searches in mosques, even if they find explosives and forged credit cards, understandably affect the audience and increase the level of hostility. Again radical preachers do not fail to use this, with all the consequences that ensue.