From Germany to Belgium to France, European countries have been on a manhunt for terrorists in the wake of January’s shootings at the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo and a Parisian kosher supermarket. The pursuit has been especially intense in Belgium, where officials describe their targets as jihadist sleeper cells about to mount new terrorist attacks.
But while top forces have been mobilized against migrants who have supposedly left Europe to train with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), only to return and wreak havoc in Europe, there’s another explanation for recent attacks.
The real breeding ground for extremism stems from the treatment of immigrant groups within Europe. Racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination have driven a generation of young migrants to radical movements as a solution to an absence of job prospects, poor education, deteriorated neighborhoods, lack of respect, and repeated bouts in jail. Ironically, the crackdown on these communities in the aftermath of the attacks could potentially escalate the problem.
Rather than focus its attention on outsized warnings about terrorists being trained abroad, European countries would do well to oppose the anti-immigrant movements at home and promote left that can organize not only the traditional working class, but immigrants as well.
Fanning the Flames
The fear coursing through the public, and motivating public officials, is not surprising.
After all, the western media have painted an image of thousands of homegrown jihadists returning to Europe, to sow terror after they’ve received military training in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria at the hands of al-Qaeda and ISIS. CNN, among the most sensationalistic of the media sources, has warned its global audience that “as many as 20 sleeper cells of between 120 and 180 people could be ready to strike in France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.” And, as the narrative goes, European security agencies are barely able to follow up on them.
The sense of entering an exceptional period has been reinforced through high-profile media appearances by so-called security experts like U.S. Senator John McCain, Interpol chief Jürgen Stock, and former CIA chief Leon Panetta.
McCain has declared the threat to the West so great that only deploying American “boots on the ground” to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria will stem the terrorist tide in the West. Stock has urged hitting suspected terrorists “before they hit you.” And Panetta has said that the terrorist assault is now entering “a much more dangerous chapter” that will require more coordinated surveillance and action on the part of U.S. and European security forces. He has warned that ISIS and al-Qaeda “are engaged in a much more aggressive effort to conduct violence not only in Europe, but I think it’s a matter of time before they direct it at the United States as well.”
The Real Threat
How much is reality and how much is fantasy when it comes to the so-called sleeper cells remains to be sorted out. What is a real threat is the treatment of migrant communities in Europe, which — to borrow Panetta’s words — is entering a new, more dangerous chapter.
In their official responses to the Paris events, Western European governments have mainly called for inclusiveness and assimilation for migrants and the Muslim community. As German chancellor Angela Merkel put it in a speech preceding a Muslim solidarity rally, “Islam is part of Germany…. I am the Chancellor of all Germans. And that includes everyone who lives here permanently, whatever their background or origin.” Or as German president Joachim Gauck later said at the rally, “We are all Germany.”
But despite these words of inclusivity, migrants throughout the continent fear that the real solution entertained by increasing numbers of white Europeans is the one proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. He declared bluntly: “We should not look at economic immigration as if it had any use, because it only brings trouble and threats to European people. Therefore, immigration must be stopped. That’s the Hungarian stance.” Ironically, Orban said this after attending the January 11 “Unity Rally” in Paris where thousands of Muslim migrants participated, bearing the slogan Je suis Charlie.
Although these dynamics have touched many countries, France has become the epicenter of the continent’s struggle over migration. It’s home to more than 4 million Muslim immigrants, the largest such population of any country in Europe. And in France, anti-immigrant forces have a particularly vocal spokesperson in Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right National Front Party.
In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, she called not only for “restricting immigration” but also for “stripping jihadists of their French citizenship,” a proposal that many migrants took to apply to more than just active jihadists. What’s more, Le Pen’s National Front is on a roll, having won 26 percent of the vote, or 4.1 million votes, in the May 2014 elections to the European Parliament — a result French Prime Minister Manuel Valls described as “a shock, an earthquake.”
And Le Pen’s influence is likely to remain strong — recent polls predict she’ll be the frontrunner in round one of the 2017 presidential elections.
Missed Opportunities
The situation that led to the Charlie Hebdo attacks has been in the making for a long time, and addressing it earlier might have prevented some of the damage.
A decade ago, massive riots rocked the banlieues, the miserable suburbs of French cities. The 2005 riots lasted 20 successive nights and resulted in the burning of 9,000 vehicles and the destruction of 80 schools and many business establishments. They brought to the eyes of France and the world the desperation of migrant communities that inhabited the suburbs, and the tremendous resentment felt by their young people. As Mary Dejevsky of The Independent wrote, the riots offered a glimpse of the “France that is marooned between town and country, shut away behind ugly concrete walls, confined inside rotting tower blocks…the France that has failed.”
It was in these banlieues that the Charlie Hebdo gunmen — the Kouachi brothers Cherif and Said — were born, raised, and worked.
Things could have gone differently. The riots could have been taken as an opportunity to truly integrate communities that had been defined as French but lacked the opportunities available to other French people. Yet for ten years, hardly any substantial reform took place to speed up the migrants’ assimilation and improve their living conditions.
One reason for the lack of reform was, paradoxically, rooted in the ideology of the French Revolution. As a French immigration specialist noted, “Our approach to integration, based on the concept that everyone is equal, is part of the problem. The idea that we are equal is fiction. Ethnic minorities are being told they do not exist.”
French official ideology is so intent on erasing particularities, that the government does not allow statistics to be broken down by religion or ethnicity. As Guy Arnold explains in his book Migration: Changing the World, the result of these ideological blinders is a “resentful society of supposedly equal French citizens that has grown up in the heart of France’s capital under the blind eyes of successive governments that have simply not wanted to know.”
The treatment of immigrants has been further complicated by another legacy of the French Revolution — the core principle of laïcité, or secularism. The separation of church and state has always been strict in France. But in recent years, it has bordered on intolerance, with a devastating impact on relations between Muslims and the dominant society.
Invoking the idea of laïcité, a movement drawing support from left to right was in 2004 able to pass a law banning the hijab, a scarf that covers the head and chest, in public schools. This was followed in 2011 by another law, again with support across the ideological spectrum, that criminalized hiding one’s face in public. That law effectively banned two other traditional items of clothing worn by Muslim women: the niqab, a veil that covers the entire face, and the burqa, an outer garment that covers the body from head to toe.
Some analysts claim that it was not so much the ideology of laïcité that was at fault. Rather, they blame doctrinaire ideologues and self-interested politicians who allowed the issue to run out of control. Those same public figures could have appealed to common sense and tolerance, allowing these regular items of female Muslim dress to become parts of a diverse sartorial scene, as in Britain and the United States.