“History, Hypocrisy and Hurdle”

 Islamic terrorism in Europe 2022

First Published in the January 2023 edition of The Organiser magazine 

The 28 countries of the European Union [EU] is home to about 25 million Muslims; and their presence is currently the basis of controversy, debate, fear and in some parts, outright hatred. Never before has the European continent witnessed this level of mutual suspicion between mainstream European societies and Muslims. There is increasing fear and opposition to European Muslims in the EU, and are perceived as a threat to national identity, domestic security and the main-stream social fabric. Mainstream society in Europe can be loosely defined as that section of the population that believes in Christianity and its value system. Muslims in Europe, however, believe that the majority of Europeans reject their presence and vilify their religion.

Historically, Islamic globalization began as early as the late Middle Ages (500 to 1400–1500 AD), and the Muslim presence in Europe was only on the fringes of the continent, starting at the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and spreading along the Mediterranean shores to other parts of Southern Europe. Parts of the Ottoman Caliphate’s Balkan territory became Muslim in the early modern period (1440-1500), while Tartar settlers brought Islam to the Baltic region. In the late 19^th century, Muslim migration to Western Europe was largely connected to the empires. The first clusters of networks of Muslims emerged after 1918, as a result of the Great War (as World War-1 was known) which brought thousands of Muslims into Europe and institutionalized Islam in the continent. Muslim communities emerged in three spaces; the mosques as religious physical spaces, associations and organizations a legal spaces and constructive and intellectual spaces expressed through Islamic newspapers and media. Essentially, these three spaces were occupied by individuals who identified themselves as Muslims, and focused primarily on the formation of Islamic organizations identified by a common religion, rather than diverse ethnic or linguistic backgrounds.

Radicalization of these Muslim communities in Europe started in the 1960s due to the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928, by Islamic scholar Hassan al-Banna, the Jamāʿat al-Ikhwān al-Muslimīn, aka the Muslim Brotherhood has spread internationally, influencing various Islamic movements from charitable organizations to political parties, who have different names but a singular goal – jihad against the world.

While the Brotherhood's radical ideas have shaped the beliefs of generations of Islamist(s) over the past two decades, it has lost much of its power and appeal in the Middle East, crushed by harsh repression from local Arab regimes and rejected by the younger generation of Islamist(s). Europe however, has become an incubator for the Islamist political process. Since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers have moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organized network of mosques, charities, and Islamic organizations, with the focus on expanding Islamic law throughout Europe.

The radicalized Islamic students who migrated to Europe from the Middle-East 45 years ago and their decedents now, are leaders of local Muslim communities that engage with Europe’s mainstream political elite. Funded by generous and constant financial contributions from Qatar and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi community, they lead and dominate a centralized network of terrorism that spans nearly every European country. With expertise in modern rhetoric and fluent in German, French and Dutch languages; the terrorist masterminds have gained acceptance with members of the European governments and the media. As the Muslim community expands rapidly due to immigration, the mainstream political parties in Europe are engaging with them as potential vote-banks.

The duplicitous nature of the Brotherhood is openly demonstrated by their activities among their fellow Muslims, where while speaking in Arabic or Turkish, they drop their ‘moderate’ façade and embrace radicalism. While speaking in public about interfaith dialogue and social integration, they preach hate against the western society in their mosques and private gatherings. While publicly condemning murderous terrorist activities against average citizens, they continue to raise funds for Hamas, al-Qaeda and ISIS. The Europeans, forever eager to ‘understand the Muslim community’ and create a dialogue, overlook this duplicity. This is particularly visible in Germany; not only because it offered asylum to the first major wave of Muslim Brotherhood immigrants, but also for accepting their rhetoric at face value and ignoring the wider scope of the Brotherhood’s activities.

During the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of Muslim students left the Middle East to study at German universities, drawn not only by the German institutions' technical reputations but also by a desire to escape repressive regimes. Beginning in 1954, several members of the Muslim Brotherhood fled from Egypt to escape its ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser’s brutal efforts to neutralize them, and West Germany provided a welcome refuge. West Germany’s motivations were not based simply on compassion for the immigrants. It was based on a political decision whereby West Germany was cutting diplomatic relations with countries that recognized East Germany. [Till November 1989, Germany was divided by the Berlin Wall into two separate countries; West Germany which was influenced by Western democratic values and East Germany which was allied with the Soviet Union]. When Syria and Egypt established diplomatic relationships with the Communist government of East Germany, the West German government decided to welcome political refugees from Syria and Egypt. Many were Muslim Brotherhood members already familiar with Germany, several of whom had cooperated with the Nazis before and during WW2.

One of the first such members of the Brotherhood was Sa’id Ramadan, the personal secretary to Hasan al-Banna who founded the organization. Ramadan founded one of Germany’s three main Muslim organizations, the Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland (Islamic Society of Germany, IGD), over which he presided from 1958 to 1968. He also co-founded the Muslim World League, a well-funded organization that the Saudi establishment uses to spread its radical interpretation of Islam throughout the world. The U.S. government closely monitors activities of the Muslim World League which has been regularly accused of financing terrorism. In January 2004, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee asked the Internal Revenue Service for its records on the Muslim World League "as part of an investigation into possible links between nongovernmental organizations and terrorist financing networks."

After Sa’id Ramadan, Pakistani national Fazal Yazdani led the IGD for a brief period before he was replaced by Ghaleb Himmat, a Syrian origin member with Italian citizenship. During his leadership of the IGD (1973-2002) he was under scrutiny by Western intelligence agencies for his connections to terrorism. He was one of the founders of the Bank al-Taqwa aka the ‘Bank of the Muslim Brotherhood’ which has financed terrorism since the mid-1990s, possibly earlier also. Himmat was helped by Youssef Nada, one of the Brotherhood's financial masterminds to run Al-Taqwa and a web of companies headquartered in locations such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Bahamas, countries which maintain few regulations on monetary origin or destination. Both Himmat and Nada have regularly financed the activities Hamas and the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front and had reportedly set-up a line-of-credit for Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda operations.

Under the leadership of Ramadan and Himmat, the Brotherhood sponsored the construction of the Islamic Center of Munich in 1960, which was fully aided by large donations from the Middle-East kingdoms. According to the 1967 article in Sueddeutsche Zeitung (a German daily newspaper published from Munich) King Fahd of Saudi Arabia donated 80,000 German Marks (approximately 450,000 Euros of today). German Intelligence states that the Islamic Centre of Munich has been one of the European headquarters for the Brotherhood since its foundation. The centre publishes a magazine, Al-Islam, whose efforts (according to intelligence agencies) are financed by the Bank al-Taqwa. Al-Islam shows explicitly how the German Brothers reject the concept of a secular state, and its February 2002 issue states clearly that;

“In the long run, Muslims cannot be satisfied with the acceptance of German family, estate, and trial law - Muslims should aim at an agreement between the Muslims and the German state with the goal of a separate jurisdiction for Muslims”

The Islamic Centre of Munich is one of the important members of the IGD (Islamische Gemeinschaft Deutschland) and is a clear example of how the Muslim Brotherhood has gained power in Europe through its base in Germany.

Himmat was succeeded by Ibramin el-Zayat, a German born Muslim activist of Egyptian descent, and known to be a charismatic leader of numerous youth organizations. Zayat understood the importance of focusing on the new generation of German Muslims and worked consistently to recruit young Muslims into Islamic organizations. While the German authorities have no doubt that he is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, they have also linked him to the ‘World Assembly of Muslim Youth’ [WAMY], a Saudi sponsored NGO that seeks to spread Wahhabism, the radical and intolerant interpretation of Islam, throughout the world through its schools and literature. WAMY, which is controlled by the Muslim World League, has the stated goal of "arming the Muslim youth with full confidence in the supremacy of the Islamic system over other systems." It is the largest Muslim youth organization in the world and has unlimited financial resources.

In 1991 WAMY published a book called Tawjihat Islamiya (Islamic Views) that stated, "Teach our children to love taking revenge on the Jews and the oppressors, and teach them that our youngsters will liberate Palestine and Al-Quds [Jerusalem] when they go back to Islam and make jihad for the sake of Allah.” The sentiments in Tawjihat Islamiya are the rule rather than the exception and are taught even today across European mosques and madrassas.

German police have linked Zayat to Institut Européen des Sciences Humaines, a French school that prepares European imams. Several radical clerics lecture at the school and several European intelligence agencies accuse the school of spreading religious hatred. German authorities also highlight the fact that he is involved in several money laundering investigations. His association with officials of Milli Görüş (National Vision, in Turkish) has attracted the most attention from European Intelligence agencies. Milli Görüş, which has 30,000 members and perhaps another 100,000 sympathizers, claims to defend the rights of Germany's immigrant Turkish population, giving them a voice in the democratic political arena while "preserving their Islamic identity."

But Milli Görüş has another agenda. While publicly declaring its interest in democratic debate and a willingness to see Turkish immigrants integrated into European societies, many Milli Görüş leaders have expressed contempt for democracy and Western values. The Bundesverfassungsschutz, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, has repeatedly warned about Milli Görüş' activities, describing the group in its annual reports as a "foreign extremist organization."

The Saudis created the Islamische Konzil Deutschland (Islamic Council of Germany) under the leadership of Abdullah al-Turki, the well-connected dean of the bin Saud University in Riyadh, with other top positions being held by leaders of Milli Gorus and the Islamic Center of Munich. While an official German parliament report describes the Islamische Konzil as just "another Sunni organization," such an assumption indicates a dangerous misunderstanding of the Saudi relationship to German Islamists and their sponsorship of terrorist activities. Back in 1994, the Islamists realized that a ‘united coalition’ would empower them with greater political relevance and influence. Nineteen organizations united together to form the Zentralrat der Muslime [Central Council of Muslims in Germany]. Nadeem Elyas, the Zentralrat president has been linked to Christian Ganczarski, an Al-Qaeda operative currently jailed as one of the masterminds of the 2002 attack on a synagogue in Tunisia. Ganczarski, a German of Polish descent who converted to Islam, told authorities that Al-Qaeda recruited him at the Islamic University of Medina where Elyas had sent him to study, with all expenses paid for by Saudi donors. In an interview with Die Welt (a German daily newspaper), Elyas has admitted to having sent hundreds of German Muslims to study at one of the most radical universities in Saudi Arabia.

With many organizations operating under different names, the Muslim Brotherhood fools the German politicians who believe they are consulting a spectrum of opinion, while in reality it is the radical interpretation of Islam as expressed by the Muslim Brotherhood and not that of traditional Islam. With an unending access to massive Saudi financing, the Muslim Brotherhood has managed to become the voice of the Muslims in Germany. While the Brotherhood and its Saudi financiers have consolidated their hold in Germany, they have spread like cancer across other European countries. With generous and unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, combined with the Brotherhood’s meticulous organization structure that exploits the weaknesses of the European elites, it has gained prominent positions throughout Europe. In France the extremist Union des Organisations Islamiques de France (Union of Islamic Organizations of France) has become the predominant organization in the government's Islamic Council. In Italy, the extremist Unione delle Comunita' ed Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (Union of the Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy) is the government's prime partner in dialogue regarding Italian Islamic issues.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s acceptance into mainstream European society and their unchallenged rise to power would not have been possible had European elites been more vigilant, valued substance over rhetoric, and understood the motivations of those financing and building these Islamist organizations. The European’s weakness lies in many factors, mainly because their social integration policies have been erratic and inconsistent and assuming that only a tiny minority of Muslims are engaged in radical activities. The root of this assumption is the fear of being accused as racists by the immigrants and their decedents. Islamic radicals have learned that they can silence almost everybody with the accusation of islamophobia. The response to any criticism of Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations is outcries of racism and anti-Muslim persecution. European politicians have failed to understand that by interacting with radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood, they empower and grant legitimacy to terrorists. This creates a cycle of radicalization where the greater the political legitimacy granted to the Brotherhood, the more opportunity they receive to influence and radicalize new generations of European Muslims.

While Germany is being taken over politically through radicalization of the Muslim population, France has been the top target for Islamic radical attacks. According to official Europol data, France has been the targeted by more jihadi attacks than any other EU member nation since 2014, and that 300 French citizens have been killed in these attacks. France is the ‘perfect enemy’ for Islamic Jihadists since it has the largest Muslim population (about 7% of the population), the biggest Jewish population (1%) and a very important legacy of Christianism.

The first major terrorist attack on French soil in recent years took place on January 7, 2015, when assailants operating on behalf of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni branch stormed the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with assault rifles, killing 12 people. In the coming days, an associate of the gunmen killed five people in the name of ISIS; one policewoman and four patrons at a supermarket in Paris.

The Charlie Hebdo attacks were the deadliest on French soil for 50 years, but even they were surpassed on November 13, 2015; when eight ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers targeted a variety of locations throughout Paris and its environs—cafes, restaurants, the national stadium, and a concert hall—collectively killing 130 people and wounding 350 more in the deadliest attack on French soil since World War II.

Since then, ISIS has continued to inspire French residents to terror. On July 14, 2016, a Tunisian-born resident of Nice drove a truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day at Nice’s beachside promenade, killing 86 people and wounding more than 430 others. The attack came between two other ISIS-claimed attacks: on June 13, a convicted terrorist stabbed two police officers at their home in Magnanville, and on July 26, two ISIS assailants stormed the Saint-Etienne parish church in Normandy, killing an elderly priest.

These attacks and other attempts—including a September 2016 attempt by female jihadists to explode gas canisters near the Notre Dame cathedral—have highlighted the major strain on France’s counter-terrorism infrastructure as it struggles to monitor an estimated 15,000 terrorism suspects in the country. France is the largest source of Western fighters to Iraq and Syria, with an estimated 2,000 French nationals having traveled to the conflict zone as of May 2016. The country also suffers from a major radicalization problem within its prisons, where an estimated 1,400 inmates are believed to be radicalized.

France has been left struggling with the question of why it has become a prime target and how it should respond. As per President Macron, France is being targeted by terrorists because of its “freedom of expression, right to believe, or not, and its way of life.” He claims that a form of “Islamist separatism” has found fertile ground for its ideals in some parts of the country. For over forty years, successive French presidents have sought to manage the state’s relationship with an ethnically and religiously diverse Muslim community. In France, the concept of laïcité (secularism) enjoins a strict delineation between the state and the private sphere of personal beliefs. Designed in origin to protect individuals from state intrusion, and the state from religious influence, it has in recent years been increasingly wielded to do the exact opposite: encroaching evermore into the private sphere of Muslim citizens from defining dress codes to diet and religious education, whereby the state has sought to influence each of these in recent years, only to be confronted by the strength of a Republican framework where the courts have upheld the original principles of laïcité.

Discrimination against Muslims in France is prevalent in every sector of the French society; from housing to employment and interactions with the Police. According to the French government’s own survey, 42% of Muslims have stated that they have experienced discrimination due to their religion, a figure which rises to 60% among women who wear the Abbaya and Hijab. Around 67% of French Arab Muslims believe that their faith is perceived negatively, while 64% said the same in reference to their ethnicity. Many consider this as a form of creeping authoritarianism that is indicative of political racism. Proposed new laws will allow more tighter control over civil society, that will specifically include Muslim religious organizations and where their leaders will be required to conform to a ‘Republican charter’, a modern-day patriotism test imposed on the Muslim community. Under these laws, Imams will have to be trained through a state sanctioned organization which will ensure their conformity with the state’s version of laïcité (secularism).

Almost every country of the European Union has been the target of Islamic terrorism. The EU has introduced new policies with the cooperation of its member states to track the radicalization, funding and sponsorship of terrorism and prevent future attacks, however the EU’s refusal to accept the role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar in funding terrorism is still a hurdle to be overcome.

“We are determined to protect Europe’s societies and its people. We will uphold our common values and European way of life.  We will safeguard our pluralist societies and continue with firm resolve to combat all forms of violence which target people on the basis of their actual or supposed ethnic origin, or their religious belief or on the basis of other types of prejudice”.

EU HOME AFFAIRS MINISTERS -Joint Statement 2021

 

Compiled by Sardar Sanjay Matkar

For Organizer Magazine.

References:

• 1)      Khalid Duran, "Jihadism in Europe," The Journal of Counterterrorism and Security International.
• 2)      Georges Lepre, "Himmler's Bosnian Division: The Waffen SS Handschar Division 1943-45”.
• 3)      "Prasidenten der IGD," Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland website.
• 4)      Fouad Ajami, "Tariq Ramadan," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 2004.
• 5)      Official dossier on Ahmed Nasreddin, Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica (Italian secret service, SISDE)
• 6)      Report on radical Islam, Baden Württenberg state Verfassungsschutzbericht, 2003.
• 7)      Report on Ibrahim el-Zayat, Cologne police, Aug. 27, 2003,
• 8)      David Kane, FBI senior special agent, affidavit in "Supplemental Declaration in Support of Pre-Trial Detention," United States of America v. Soliman S. Biheiri, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The affidavit also details WAMY's links to the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.
• 9)      Michael Waller, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, Oct. 14, 2003.
• 10)  "Animosity toward the Jews, " A Handy Encyclopedia of Contemporary Religions and Sects (WAMY), FBI translation from Arabic; Steven Emerson, statement to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, July 9, 2003;
• 11)  Hugo Micheron, a postdoctoral research associate focusing on Islamic extremism at Princeton University,