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Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam

Thread ID: 13516 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2004-05-03

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confederate_commando [OP]

2004-05-03 21:34 | User Profile

Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam

By PATRICK E. TYLER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Published: April 26, 2004

Agence France-Presse—Getty Abu Hamza, a cleric, preaches martyrdom outside a London mosque.

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

Ishtiaq Alamgir, above, at his home in Luton, England, calls himself Sayful Islam, the sword of Islam. He is a follower of Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, who warns of attacks by "Muslims of the West."

A call for holy war is arising in Luton, where young Muslims live with their families from Pakistan.

UTON, England, April 24 — The call to jihad is rising in the streets of Europe, and is being answered, counterterrorism officials say.

In this former industrial town north of London, a small group of young Britons whose parents emigrated from Pakistan after World War II have turned against their families' new home. They say they would like to see Prime Minister Tony Blair dead or deposed and an Islamic flag hanging outside No. 10 Downing Street.

They swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden and his goal of toppling Western democracies to establish an Islamic superstate under Shariah law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. They call the Sept. 11 hijackers the "Magnificent 19" and regard the Madrid train bombings as a clever way to drive a wedge into Europe.

On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce — provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months — Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.

"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death — that is what they are looking for."

On working-class streets of old industrial towns like Crawley, Luton, Birmingham and Manchester, and in the Arab enclaves of Germany, France, Switzerland and other parts of Europe, intelligence officials say a fervor for militancy is intensifying and becoming more open.

In Hamburg, Dr. Mustafa Yoldas, the director of the Council of Islamic Communities, saw a correlation to the discord in Iraq. "This is a very dangerous situation at the moment," Dr. Yoldas said. "My impression is that Muslims have become more and more angry against the United States."

Hundreds of young Muslim men are answering the call of militant groups affiliated or aligned with Al Qaeda, intelligence and counterterrorism officials in the region say.

Even more worrying, said a senior counterterrorism official, is that the level of "chatter" — communications among people suspected of terrorism and their supporters — has markedly increased since Mr. bin Laden's warning to Europe this month. The spike in chatter has given rise to acute worries that planning for another strike in Europe is advanced.

"Iraq dramatically strengthened their recruitment efforts," one counterterrorism official said. He added that some mosques now display photos of American soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside bloody scenes of bombed out Iraqi neighborhoods. Detecting actual recruitments is almost impossible, he said, because it is typically done face to face.

And recruitment is paired with a compelling new strategy to bring the fight to Europe.

Members of Al Qaeda have "proven themselves to be extremely opportunistic, and they have decided to try to split the Western alliance," the official continued. "They are focusing their energies on attacking the big countries" — the United States, Britain and Spain — so as to "scare" the smaller states.

Some Muslim recruits are going to Iraq, counterterrorism officials in Europe say, but more are remaining home, possibly joining cells that could help with terror logistics or begin operations like the one that came to notice when the British police seized 1,200 pounds of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in late March, and arrested nine Pakistani-Britons, five of whom have been charged with trying to build a terrorist bomb.

Stoking that anger are some of the same fiery Islamic clerics who preached violence and martyrdom before the Sept. 11 attacks.

On Friday, Abu Hamza, the cleric accused of tutoring Richard Reid before he tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoe, urged a crowd of 200 outside his former Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the "culture of martyrdom."

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[url]http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/26/international/europe/26EURO.html?hp[/url]

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Though the British home secretary, David Blunkett, has sought to strip Abu Hamza of his British citizenship and deport him, the legal battle has dragged on for years while Abu Hamza keeps calling down the wrath of God.

Also this week, over Mr. Blunkett's vigorous objection, a 35-year-old Algerian held under emergency laws passed after Sept. 11 was released from Belmarsh Prison. The man, identified only as "G," suffered from severe mental illness, his lawyers told a special immigration appeals panel, which let him out of prison and put him under house arrest.

Mr. Blunkett insisted that that should not be the final judgment on a man already found by one court "to be a threat to life and liberty."

In an interview on the BBC over the weekend, Mr. Blunkett advocated a stronger deportation policy, initially focused on 12 foreign terror suspects held without charge since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Despite tougher antiterrorism laws, the police, prosecutors and intelligence chiefs across Europe say they are struggling to contain the openly seditious speech of Islamic extremists, some of whom, they say, have been inciting young men to suicidal violence since the 1990's.

One chapter in Sheik Omar's lectures these days is "The Psyche of Muslims for Suicide Bombing."

The authorities say that laws to protect religious expression and civil liberties have the result of limiting what they can do to stop hateful speech. In the case of foreigners, they say they are often left to seek deportation, a lengthy and uncertain process subject to legal appeals, when the suspect can keep inciting attacks.

That leaves the authorities to resort to less effective means, such as mouse-trapping Islamic radicals with immigration violations in hopes of making a deportation case stick. "In many countries, the laws are liberal and it's not easy," an official said.

At a mosque in Geneva, an imam recently exhorted his followers to "impose the will of Islam on the godless society of the West."

"It was quite virulent," said a senior official with knowledge of the sermon. "The imam was encouraging his followers to take over the godless society."

While such a sermon may be incitement, recruitment takes a more shadowy course, and is hard to detect, a senior antiterrorism official said. "Believers are appealed to in the mosques, but the real conversations take place in restaurants or cafes or private apartments," the official said.

While some clerics, like Abu Qatada — said to be the spiritual counselor of Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 hijacking team — remain in prison in Britain without charge, others like Sheik Omar, leader of a movement called Al Muhajiroun, carry on a robust ideological campaign.

"There is no case against me," Sheik Omar said in an interview. Referring to calls by members of Parliament that he be deported, he added, "but they are Jewish" and "they have been calling for that for years."

Among his ardent followers is Ishtiaq Alamgir, 24, who heads Al Muhajiroun in Luton and calls himself Sayful Islam, the sword of Islam. He says there are about 50 members here but exact numbers are secret.

Most days, he and a handful of his followers run a recruitment stand on Dunstable Road much to the chagrin of the Muslim elders of Luton.

Mainstream Muslims are outraged by the situation, saying the actions of a few are causing their communities to be singled out for surveillance and making the larger population distrustful of them.

Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque here and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.

"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."

Other community leaders look to the government to do something, if only to help prevent the demonization of British Muslims, or "Islamophobia," as some here call it.

"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical clerics," said Akhbar Dad Khan, another elder of the Central Mosque. He wants them prosecuted or deported. "We should be able to control this negativity," he said.

In Slough, Sheik Omar spent much of his time Thursday night regaling his young followers with the erotic delights of paradise — sweet kisses and the pleasures of bathing with scores of women — while he also preached the virtues of death in Islamic struggle as a ticket to paradise.

He spoke of terrorism as the new norm of cultural conflict, "the fashion of the 21st century," practiced as much by Tony Blair as by Al Qaeda.

"We may be caught up in the target as the people of Manhattan were," he told them.

And he warned Western leaders, "You may kill bin Laden, but the phenomenon, you cannot kill it — you cannot destroy it."

"Our Muslim brothers from abroad will come one day and conquer here and then we will live under Islam in dignity," he said.

Patrick E. Tyler reported from Luton, Slough and London and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Germany.

Peter Phillips

2004-05-03 21:48 | User Profile

Those militants are a godsend. The more shrill and extreme their language the more Europeans are going to wake up to the immigration disaster. This can be a blessing in disguise (if the parties on the right exploit it properly).

Peter Phillips

2004-05-03 22:18 | User Profile

[QUOTE=AntiYuppie]The problem, of course, is that our side either doesn't play this card correctly, or else is invisible when it does. The irony of the situation is that the very events that should strengthen our cause seem to work in our enemies' favor.

For some reason every time some Third World savage stirs up trouble in Europe, the neocon media uses it as a reason to strengthen America's presence in Iraq and increase America's support for Israel. When European politicians (Haider, Le Pen) actually stand up and want to do something about the Islamicization of their nations, they are universally condemned as "bigots" and "haters." In other words, it's acceptable to condemn the increased Muslim influence in Europe, as long as it doesn't lead to a "Europe for Europeans movement." Rather, the Islamicization of Europe can only be mentioned by neocons as another reason for their "war on terror" and the reason that "Israel is our only friend in the region."

In other words, the Europeans who actually suffer the consequences get no say in the matter, nor may one make any mention of why Islam has become so radicalized of late in the process.[/QUOTE] They can scream "Haters" at Haider and Le Pen but they cannot put a stop to people worrying about immigrants. My theory is that 9-11 was a godsend for the immigration-restriction movement in Europe. Just look at how many anti-immigration parties there were before 9-11 and then shortly after.

The more militancy there is, more people in Europe will embrace the restrictionists. Its really that simple. The Neo-Cons screaming for sending Armies to Iraq achieved little in Europe.

So yes, what you say is true but I think we need not exaggerate the impact of this. The real battle for European Immigration restrictionists are the Brussels bureaucrats who are seeped in multi-culti egalitarianism and do-gooderism. Nothing lessens their power like the mad Arab fanatics calling for Jihad in Europe. May their numbers grow.

Peter Phillips

2004-05-03 22:26 | User Profile

AY,

Your point is ofcourse vindicated by this article. The Neo-cons will come up with such contortions in their arguments to justify this war, that it truly boggles the mind.

[QUOTE]

Only Bush can save Europe Mark Steyn says that the US President’s ‘transformational’ response to Muslim fundamentalism can save the Old World; European ‘managerialism’ can’t [img]http://www.spectator.co.uk/images/article_line1.gif[/img] New Hampshire

Last July, speaking to the United States Congress, the only assembly on the planet in which he’s still assured of a warm reception, Tony Blair remarked: ‘As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind?’

Excellent question. Britannia will never again wield the unrivalled power she enjoyed at her imperial apogee, but the Britannic inheritance endures, to one degree or another, in many of the key regional players in the world today — Australia, India, South Africa — and in dozens of island statelets from the Caribbean to the Pacific. If China ever takes its place as an advanced nation, it will be because the People’s Republic learns more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong learns from the Little Red Book. And of course the dominant power of our time derives its political character from 18th-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go.

A decade after victory in the Cold War and end-of-history triumphalism, the ‘what do you leave behind?’ question is more urgent than you might think. ‘The West’, as a concept, is dead, and the West, as a matter of demographic fact, is dying. On the first half of the question, whoever makes the late Osama bin Laden’s audio cassettes these days showed a shrewd understanding of the situation in offering a ‘truce’ to any European nation that distances itself from America. Hard to see how some of ’em could distance themselves from America any more short of relocating to Mars, but that’s the point. Though many commentators see the offer as a sign of al-Qa’eda’s weakness, the jihad boys are being rather cunning. Just because they’re insane death cultists doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy winding up Old Europe as much as Rumsfeld does.

Look at it as a simple question of how big a bang for the buck:

September 11th: Within two months of attacking New York and Washington, the Americans have overthrown your pal Mullah Omar, your Afghan training camps are all closed down, and General Musharraf’s hitherto lethargic armed forces are harassing what’s left of your leadership all over Waziristan.

March 11th: Within one month of attacking Madrid, the Spaniards obligingly overthrow George Bush’s pal, European bigwigs start saying this terrorism business is really more about law enforcement than a ‘war’, and Mo Mowlam calls on Tony Blair to sit down to face-to-face negotiations with al-Qa’eda — preferably in London rather than Waziristan, so he’ll at least have a sporting chance of coming back alive.

And, as a bonus prize, it turns out (as Bruce Anderson noted last week) that a handful of timely Islamist bombs have done what all the Gallic hauteur of Giscard d’Estaing failed to do: eliminated the fiercest opposition to the absurd European constitution and thus made it a near certainty, which means that next time the hated Bush is looking for allies to attack a Muslim country he’ll have to pitch it to the ‘European Foreign Minister’ rather to than Tony Blair.

If that isn’t a productive ten minutes’ carnage, I don’t know what is. Given the dramatically different reactions to the Islamists’ transatlantic provocations, even the most doctrinaire jihadist can see there’s something to be said for muffling the death-to-all-infidels line in a bit of old-fashioned divide-and-conquer. As Mr Blair observed in that speech to Congress, ‘The political culture of Europe is inevitably rightly based on compromise.’ Al-Qa’eda’s PR department is learning how to talk to continentals in a language they can understand.

Most European politicians see Islamist terrorism as a managerial problem. After September 11th, George W. Bush opted to approach it transformationally. Around the world Islam is expanding, and around the Islamic world a radicalised form of Islam is expanding. Bush determined to tackle the problem at source: he decided — as I heard Condi Rice say last week at the US Naval Academy — to turn the map of the Middle East ‘upside down’. He would bring liberty to a region that had never known it. The Spectator thinks this is a mug’s game, and its editorial had some sport with the forthcoming Iraqi election: ‘Men and women with large rosettes and wide grins will be walking the streets, kissing babies and expounding on their plans for schools and hospitals. Thereafter, the members for Baghdad South and Basra Central will engage in raucous but civilised debate over the sale of council allotments and the merits of congestion charging.’

Two observations:

First, the Honourable Members for Baghdad South and Basra Central evidently sound pretty funny to my colleagues, but why are they inherently more hilarious than, say, the Honourable Members for Kandep (Mr Jimson Sauk, CMG, former minister for police) and Kairuku-Hiri (Sir Moi Avei, minister for petroleum and energy) in the Papua New Guinea parliament? All over the world people manage to practise Westminster democracy despite a shocking dearth of Old Etonians to put up for the nominating committees.

Which brings me to my second point: those who mock Bush’s ambitions for Iraq and beyond seem to imply that there’s something about Arab Islam that makes it uniquely inimical to freedom. They may be right. But, if so, that makes it a pressing problem not for Iraq but, giving current demographic trends, for Western Europe right now.

The editor of this magazine recently described an encounter he’d had with a ten-year-old girl who was distraught because Tony Blair was going around telling anyone who still listens that we were all in ‘mortal peril’. I think we can all agree that there’s no point going around scaring schoolgirls, except on Hallowe’en when I like to dress up as Justin Timberlake. Nevertheless, as Bill Clinton used to say, it’s about the future of all our children. Admittedly the former president was a little bit indiscriminate with this expression, applying it to the Highway Appropriations Bill and the mohair subsidy and the necessity for him to be able to have non-sexual relations with various parties without folks impeaching him for it. But for once it really is about the future of all our children. Picture that ten-year-old schoolgirl when she’s the age Boris is now — sometime in the 2030s, say.

What will London — or Paris, or Amsterdam (for she is after all a citizen of the European Union) — be like in the mid-Thirties? On present demographic projections, it will be far more Muslim — how far depends on whether European politicians make any serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, etc. If they make no attempt at all, then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?

A few weeks back I was strolling along the Boulevard de Maisonneuve in Montreal when I saw a Muslim woman across the street, all in black, covered head to toe, the full hejab. She was passing a condom boutique, its window filled with various revolting novelty prophylactics, ‘cum rags’, etc. It was a perfect snapshot of the internal contradictions of multicultural diversity. In 30 years’ time, either the Arab lady will still be there, or the condom store, but not both. Which would you bet on?

This is where, I regret to say, the recent Spectator leader ‘We are not at war’ (3 April), managed to go hopelessly awry. It stated confidently: ‘Osama bin Laden is no more likely to march triumphantly down the Mall than is a little green man from Mars. Al-Qa’eda has means but no end.’ Well, no, Osama won’t be going down the Mall, unless it’s his surviving granules of DNA on a gun carriage. But al-Qa’eda’s end — the Islamification of the West — is shared by millions of law-abiding Muslims. Only a tiny minority are prepared to go out and blow up trains to that end, but they move among communities that are broadly supportive of the goal.

The other day, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad told Lisbon’s Publica magazine that a group of London Islamists are ‘ready to launch a big operation’ on British soil. ‘We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents,’ he said, clarifying the ground rules. ‘Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value.’ The cleric added he expected to see the banner of Islam flying in Downing Street. ‘I believe one day that is going to happen. Because this is my country, I like living here,’ he said. ‘If they believe in democracy, who are they afraid of? Let Omar Bakri benefit from democracy!’

This is becoming a common line. The other day, who should show up at the airport in Toronto but the son and widow of Ahmed Said Khadr, known as ‘al-Kanadi’ because he was the highest-ranking Canuck in al-Qa’eda. One of Pop Khadr’s sons was captured in Afghanistan after killing a US Special Forces medic. Another has just been released from Guantanamo. Another blew himself up while killing a Canadian soldier in Kabul. Pop Khadr died in an al-Qa’eda shoot-out with Pakistani forces a few weeks back, in the course of which his youngest son was paralysed. So Mrs Khadr and her boy have now returned to Canada so he can enjoy the benefits of Ontario healthcare. ‘I’m Canadian, and I’m not begging for my rights,’ she declared. ‘I’m demanding my rights.’

Treason’s hard to prove in court, but given the circumstances of Mr Khadr’s death it seems clear that he had taken up with what we used quaintly to call the Queen’s enemies. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister of Canada thought this was an excellent opportunity to demonstrate his deep personal commitment to ‘diversity’. Asked about the Khadrs’ return to Toronto, he said, ‘I believe that once you are a Canadian citizen, you have the right to your own views and to disagree.’ That’s the wonderful thing about multiculturalism: you can choose what side of the war you want to fight on. Just tick ‘home team’ or ‘enemy’ when the draft card arrives. Like many enlightened Western leaders, the Canadian Prime Minister will be congratulating himself on his boundless tolerance even as the forces of intolerance consume him.

Even Mr Bush is somewhat constrained. National Review’s John Derbyshire wrote last week about a ‘1945 solution’ for Iraq. This is shorthand for the bombing of Dresden, the nuking of Hiroshima, etc. — the sort of stern measures that let an enemy know he’s well and truly whipped. But, as Mr Derbyshire points out, war abroad is determined by culture at home, and if we were fighting the second world war today, we wouldn’t nuke Hiroshima or even intern Japanese-Americans: the culture will not permit it. Nor will it permit old-school imperialism. Culturally sensitive nation-building is as aggressive as you can get these days. So Bush has gone for the only big-picture scenario available.

The Bush ‘transformational’ approach to terrorism may fail. The EU ‘managerial’ approach certainly will. It’s fine for small, contained, stable populations like Ulster, Corsica or the Basque country. But not for the primal demographic forces sweeping the Continent.

Last week Niall Ferguson called me ‘the Pangloss of Republican humourists’. I wish I was. But I’m not at all Panglossian these days, and I was interested to see that Ferguson, in a recent speech, has become a somewhat belated convert to the Eurabian scenario I’ve been peddling in these pages for a couple of years now. Perhaps he’ll have better luck with it than I’ve had. Meanwhile, in the current issue of Fortune, Philip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle, is even more apocalyptic: ‘So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world,’ he writes. ‘Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an antimarket culture dominated by fundamentalism — a new Dark Ages.’ That ten-year-old girl could have a lot more to worry about than gloomy Blair speeches.

‘What do you leave behind?’ asked the Prime Minister. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the mid-point of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings, in the way that the great cathedral of St Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum run by the Turkish government? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? The Bush vision is the best shot.

[/QUOTE]

darkstar

2004-05-03 22:34 | User Profile

'There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the mid-point of this century.' Funny how Steyn neglects to offer any kind of numerical basis for his claims. For of course, these are completely false claims -- unless one thinks 'around 200 million' counts as a few.

Steyn does not offer a wake up call. What he offers is more 'Old Europe' talk--in other words, Europe is dead, look to a white-American-Jewish-Asian hybrid to save 'the West.'

These people are just insane. They are raving lunatics; they belong in the time of Nero, but can't get back.