Anxiety and Division Flourish Amid Europe’s Struggle With Terrorism
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Version 0 of 1. In Germany, opponents of immigration march on the streets of Dresden, decrying what they term the Islamization of Europe. In France, the prime minister, Manuel Valls, speaks of a kind of ethnic apartheid within his own society, an assessment mirrored by some British Muslims who accuse their government of setting them “inherently apart.” The anxieties and fragmentation, moreover, are not limited to Europe’s frayed relationship with Islam. “I never thought I would see the day,” said Britain’s home secretary, Theresa May, “when members of the Jewish community in the United Kingdom would say they were fearful of remaining here.” Since the attacks by Islamic militants in the Paris area this month that killed 17 people, four of them at a kosher supermarket, there has been a dawning perception that Europe’s malaise reaches deep into national fabrics and will not be resolved by counterterrorism policing alone. As much as Western governments may clamor for enhanced powers to round up suspects or penetrate social media sites in their battle to ward off attacks, it seems that Europe has reached a tipping point where the distant killing fields of Syria and Iraq have fused with — and fueled — homegrown extremism. Yet, those same governments are floundering in their quest to enlist Muslims as their allies against the militants. That much emerged from a passionate debate in Britain this week after Eric Pickles, the communities and local government minister, sent a letter to Islamic leaders urging them to show their followers that militants “have no places in our mosques or any place of worship.” The Muslim authorities, indeed, should be “explaining and demonstrating how faith in Islam can be part of British identity,” he said. His letter drew protests that Muslims were being stigmatized. “We do take issue with the implication that extremism takes place at mosques and that Muslims have not done enough to challenge the terrorism that took place in our name,” the Muslim Council of Britain said, rejecting “the idea that Muslims and Islam are inherently apart from British society.” If nothing else, the exchange showed that the Paris attacks had magnified passions across the continent. Even before the three-day convulsion of violence began on Jan. 7, aimed first at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and then at a police officer and Jewish shoppers, there had been clear signs of growing and hazardous polarization. Like the advance of anti-immigrant parties in France and Britain, the marches in Dresden predated the attacks in Paris but seemed to draw strength from them. So did a spike in European anti-Semitism originally ascribed to the fighting in Gaza last summer. Muslims, too, have felt neglected. “Sadly,” Areeb Ullah, a student leader in London, said in an open letter to Mr. Pickles, “it seems the only time you engage with us is under the rubric of counterterrorism.” Even the most senior intelligence officials, however, acknowledge that counterterrorism measures alone will not keep Britons safe. “At some point these threats will get through, and there will be another terrorist attack in this country,” John Sawers, a former head of Britain’s MI6 overseas spy agency, said this week. In some ways, the peril — difficult to detect among loosely organized or so-called lone-wolf militants — lies in the conflation of two conflicts: Disaffection among Muslim minorities in Europe has inspired thousands of young jihadists to join militant groups in Syria and Iraq as combatants, threatening to turn their homelands into second fronts when they return. For years Europeans have wrestled with rival approaches to absorbing those they thought of as outsiders. The results have been ambivalent at best. And now, Mr. Valls, the French prime minister, said, “we must add all the divisions, the tensions that have been brewing too long and which we discuss only intermittently.” He was alluding to his own country, but the message, like the shootings two weeks ago, resonated much farther afield. |