Holy War in Europe: Is al Qaeda a Eurocentric organization?

The Weekly Standard ^ | March 20, 2003 | Reuel Marc Gerech

[quidnunc]

On August 26, 1995, a militant Islamic group led by a 24-year-old French Muslim named Khaled Kelkal attempted to blow one of France's high-speed trains off its rails. Luckily, the bomb's detonator, which used an ordinary 12-volt battery, failed. Later that fall, other bombs would go off in France: two in double-decked metro rail cars in suburban Paris, one in a trash can along the very bourgeois Avenue de Friedland, another in a Parisian open-air market, and one more in a provincial Jewish school. In all there were nine attacks in three months, which killed 10 people and wounded 114.

The bombings in 1995 provoked a widespread awareness for the first time in France that the country had a radical-Muslim problem, which was increasingly homegrown and not imported. Kelkal moved to France from Algeria when he was one month old; not known for being religious in his troubled youth, he became an Islamic militant in a French jail, as have hundreds of highly Westernized French Muslims. Many more thoroughly secularized French Muslims, who did not have crime-filled youths, have become Islamic radicals, culturally at war with the society that made them. Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker" of 9/11, is the most notorious example of an areligious Frenchman who became intoxicated with the holy-war ideology preached in many radical mosques throughout Western Europe.

This phenomenon of highly Westernized Muslims and converted Christians becoming radicalized believers has happened throughout Western Europe. Relatively few Turks have joined radical Islamic organizations allied with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, even though Turkish fundamentalists are numerous and often hardcore. At home and abroad, they are perhaps more numerous and better organized than are fundamentalists of any other nationality. But the Turks who have been arrested for association with al Qaeda usually share one bond: They were either born or raised in Germany and are culturally more German than they are Turkish Muslim. These young men are part of what the Iranian-French scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar has called the néo-umma guerrière — "the new holy-war community of believers" that recognizes neither national nor ethnic identity nor traditional Islamic values. Their Islam is "a new type of Nietzscheanism" where suicide and murder become sacred acts of an elite, self-made race of believers who want to bring on a purifying Apocalypse.

-snip-

[AlbertWang]

1995? The liberals will Blame Bush.

[rageaholic]

al kaida looks for weak targets of opportunity with a population they believe is easily intimidated. Naturally they would turn to France. The French won't do much, at least not until Parisian women are told to cover their legs, and wine is forbidden.

[jocon307]

From later in the article "September 11 could not have happened without a European base of operations."

Very good post, if unsettling, I urge all to read it in its entirety. (Gosh I wish I could spell!) The piece has some new angles on the whole darn mess.

Good post quid!

[blanknoone]

Spain is irrelevant to the dreams, aspirations, and hatreds of Arabs.

I disagree wholeheartedly. They have a religious command to never surrender territory...they want al-Andalus back, because it is a command of Allah.

I am curious how far that goes...bin Laden and islamonline.net definitely covet Spain...but their reach once went as far as Poitiers, although only briefly. As well as Vienna.

[junta]

Does the WS still classify the Albanian and Bosnian Muslims as good Muslims?

[nonomous]

good stuff

[claudiustg]

---Their Islam is "a new type of Nietzscheanism" where suicide and murder become sacred acts of an elite, self-made race of believers who want to bring on a purifying Apocalypse.---

Nice try, but anarchists were blowing things up in Europe long before Nietzsche ever lifted a pen. The use of his name always seems to portend some intellectual dishonesty.

[quidnunc]

claudiustg wrote: < I>(---Their Islam is "a new type of Nietzscheanism" where suicide and murder become sacred acts of an elite, self-made race of believers who want to bring on a purifying Apocalypse.---) Nice try, but anarchists were blowing things up in Europe long before Nietzsche ever lifted a pen. The use of his name always seems to portend some intellectual dishonesty.

What's your point; to what 'intellectual dishonesty' are you referring?

[JasonC]

The article starts with several true paragraphs, and then just when you expect him to back it up by citing crossover figures in European ideology that speak to both the modern EU left and to Islamic fundamentalism, instead it veers off to talking about Spain and a possible US-EU split, which is does it terms that are frankly gushing and pro-terrorist.

[jordan8]

If a Western split doesn't happen, then we will probably have the French to thank. They know that Zacarias Moussaoui was once upon a time a good Frenchman.

No, he never was, and that is the nub of the problem. Islamic terrorism in the West is merely a symptom of the violence of the genocide western elites are waging against their own people, the worst aspect of which is mass colonization. And you can bet that the Weekly Standard is a big supporter of the wonderful wonderfulness of the multiculturalism that enables Islamoterrorism in the West.

[Cindy]

LINKS OF INTEREST
http://www.truthusa.com/LinksOfInterest.html

[claudiustg]

Nietzsche had no patience with true believers or political extremists of any stripe. I wonder if anyone actually reads his books before they start bandying his name about.

[claudiustg]

see above

[walden]

"This phenomenon of highly Westernized Muslims and converted Christians becoming radicalized believers has happened throughout Western Europe."

Excuse me? This is just lightly tossed out there and then not a single word in the rest of the article indicating that ANY of these jerks have EVER been Christian. Moral equivalence, anyone?