REUEL MARC GERECHT
January 8, 2014
France and the New Charismatic Jihad
The terrorist attack in Paris on Wednesday—with 12 people killed by masked men yelling Islamist slogans—has been a long time coming.
After the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., Western counterterrorist experts probably feared European radical Muslims more than they did Islamic militants in the Middle East. Since the early 1990s, when Algeria’s savage war between the military junta and Islamists began to spill over into France, the French internal-security service, now known as theDirection central du renseignement intérieur, or DCRI, began to ramp up its capacity to monitor Muslim militants.
On Nov. 27, 2001, France’s premier counterterrorist magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguière, was pessimistic about “autonomous” jihadist cells in Europe and North America that “don’t need to receive orders to pass into action.” The Iraq War added to this widespread anxiety. Many believed that the Anglo-American invasion would provoke a maelstrom of holy warriors against the West.
It didn’t happen then. But it may be happening now.
The lethal attack in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo —which has made a specialty of mocking both sides of the too-much-Islam-in-Europe debate, and in 2012 famously published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad —probably isn’t a lone-wolf affair. But it may represent what Mr. Bruguière feared: native jihadist cells that can act independently of foreign terrorist organizations, like al Qaeda or Islamic State, but may act in concert, and certainly in sympathy, with these groups.
The DCRI, easily the most effective domestic-intelligence organization in Western Europe, has been sounding the alarm for over a year, warning that the Syrian insurrection against the Bashar Assad regime was becoming too bloody and too irresistibly magnetic for French Sunni Muslims. Several hundred of them have traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight under the banner of Islamic State and other radical groups. Hundreds of other European Muslims appear to have joined them. The French bastion against domestic terror appears to be cracking.
This isn’t good news, because America’s dependence on the French service and Great Britain’s domestic-intelligence outfit, MI5, cannot be overstated. They are part of America’s front line in the war against Islamic holy warriors. Take away communications intercepts, an American forte, and Washington has effectively no unilateral capacity to monitor Islamic militants on European soil. Other Western European services are quick to confess that the British and French are their models and have been indispensable in their own efforts to understand and check Islamic radicalism in a continent that is now effectively without borders.
If the French, who have more policemen and security officers per capita than any other Western country, cannot monitor and check Muslim extremists at home, Islamic radicals in Europe and elsewhere will surely take note.
The ability of Western European citizens to travel without visas offers enormous opportunities for jihadists whose dream target remains the U.S. There are now so many European Muslims it is impossible for American officials to identify suspect radicals without European assistance. Even random, targeted selections and entry denials, based on best guesses, could cause serious diplomatic problems with America’s European allies, who must protect the travel rights of their citizens. The Europeans carry the heavy load of American security in addition to their own.
The rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq—the first time jihadism has successfully conquered and occupied any large territory—has introduced a historically evocative charisma into Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic charismatics are always bad news for Westerners, even if their primary targets are Shiites, Kurds and Yazidis. The spillover is unavoidable, given the anti-Western core of modern Islamic militancy.
Part of the problem for Europe is undeniably home-brewed. The alarming, so far unchecked rise of anti-Semitism and violence against European Jews that is practiced by both Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans isn’t coincidental to the increase of Islamic terrorism in Europe. Contrary to the bizarre contention of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry , Israel and the travails of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had nothing to do with the rise of Islamic State and the birth of a new jihadism that is far more appealing than the less territorially successful jihadism of al Qaeda. Anti-Semitism has become inseparable from the gospel of a charged Islamic identity. (Western anti-Semitism, traditional Islamic suspicion of Jews, and anti-Zionism have congealed.) Anti-Semitism goes up in Europe as the appeal of a European identity to Muslims goes down.
Anti-Semitism nourishes the radical Islamic vision of a humbled Europe, once the motherland of imperialism. It encourages the idea that Muslims can dictate the terms of European expression about Islam. Not that long ago, Muslims couldn’t have cared less what Europeans thought about them or their prophet. Christians and Jews were infidels, after all, benighted souls not worth bothering with. That has changed as Europe’s Muslim population has grown and radicalized, and as traditional Islamic injunctions from the homelands were imported into an ultra-tolerant, increasingly politically correct Europe.
The French identity, more open than most European identities, has appealed to millions of Muslim immigrants. Thoughtful French intellectuals just a decade ago hoped that “French Islam” might work. A decade of troubles, including large riots in predominantly Muslim suburbs, increasingly lethal anti-Semitism, and now terrorism have stirred serious doubts even among the most optimistic.
Americans ought to hope that the French can get all of this right. If they can, then this horrible moment, too, shall pass. If they can’t—and it isn’t clear that the French can solve their worst counterterrorist problems unless Islamic State is demagnetized (pre-eminently an American military problem)—then the grim analysis in 2001 by Judge Bruguière may prove prescient.
Mr. Gerecht, a former Middle East-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine service, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
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