View From a Height

Terrorism as Law Enforcement

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal carried another article about the growing internal Muslim threat to Europe, "New Terror Threat to EU: Extremists With Passports."

Interviews with dozens of investigators, terrorism experts and acquaintances of Mr. Azzouz, as well as access to previously sealed court documents, suggest he may be more than a lone, misguided youth. Prosecutors see him as the face of a new terrorist threat: a homegrown network of young European Islamists dedicated to waging jihad at home.

Until this year, the West's struggle with Islamic terrorism has largely been a battle to stop outsiders from entering and doing harm. But according to European officials, the Continent now finds itself fighting members of its own Muslim communities -- young men like Mr. Azzouz who were born in Europe or moved there at a young age.

The challenges for law enforcement are huge. These young men hold local passports, speak local languages and fit into local immigrant populations. And instead of using Europe as a safe house for plots against the U.S. as earlier groups like al Qaeda had done, they are taking aim at targets across the Continent.

...

Terrorism experts say Europe is also proving to be a good substitute for Afghanistan, where from 1996 to 2001, an earlier generation of Islamic terrorists trained and coalesced from disparate bands into a coherent organization. Although Europe doesn't have the sort of training camps used back then by groups like al Qaeda, it has its own advantages. Instead of pickup trucks, transportation is on high-speed trains across the borderless Continent. Money doesn't come from charities or rich donors, but from petty crime in urban areas packed with rich tourists. And recruits come not from Peshawar guesthouses, but from pools of common criminals or the disaffected youth of Europe's immigrant slums.

...

Mr. Issar, who is thought by police to be hiding in Italy, is believed to have introduced the group to the teachings of Takfir wal Hijra, an ultra-orthodox sect that arose in Egypt in the 1960s. Takfiris view violent jihad as an obligation for every Muslim, and they have expanded targets of jihad to include practically everyone outside of their sect, investigators say.

Bolstered by Takfiri thought, younger European Islamists have turned to petty crime against infidels to finance their actions. Radicals in Spain, for example, bought the 440 pounds of explosives used in the Madrid bombings with hashish smuggled from Morocco, investigators say. In France, a Brinks security guard in March allegedly helped steal more than $1 million from an armored truck by simulating a kidnapping. Some of the money was later traced to Algerian radicals, and officials believe the rest is likely being used by European cells.

We probably want to avoid making too much of the Takfiris themselves. If they're spending time targeting other Muslims, they may be lethal when encountered, but unlikely to be encountered much.

What really bothers me is that we see articles like this every couple of months, and Europe still doesn't seem to get it.

By now, the demographic problem that Europe faces is well-known to everyone but the Europeans. Apparently, so is the ideological problem. These people take Saudi-trained clerics, mix in a dash of Iranian mullah-worship, and claim to see theocracy as only a bomb's-throw away. But their governments are happily midwifing an Iranian bomb, so long as it's aimed at the real threat to peace and stability, the Jews - er - Israel.

All they're doing is playing defense, expanding their treatment of the Law-Enforcement-and-Intelligence Problem, without understanding that there's a war going on out there.