ISIS Exposed: Beheadings, Slavery, and the Hellish Reality of Radical Islam (27 page)

          
STAKELBECK: Why aren’t Europeans more resistant to the growth of Islamism in their midst?

          
KERN: I think it has something to do with the social welfare state. Europeans are provided for, from cradle to grave. People would rather enjoy today than plan for tomorrow. They don’t want to have children, and the culture is very hedonistic. That attitude contributes to the atmosphere of Islamization. By rejecting the Judeo-Christian worldview, Europeans have created a huge spiritual vacuum—and Islam is filling it. Islam is very black and white—for people who are lost it is very appealing. It tells you what you can and can’t do and provides clear direction.

          
STAKELBECK: Is there any way Europe can turn this around?

          
KERN: Multiculturalism is so ingrained in the European psyche that it is very difficult to reverse. Even if Europe’s political class were made up entirely of conservative parties, it would still be very difficult to reverse because it is so ingrained.

ISIS actually owes Europe’s craven political class a debt of gratitude. Think about it: without the suicidal policies enacted by European governments over the past half-century or so, particularly in regards to mass Muslim immigration, the Islamic State would not have thousands of ruthless, fanatical European fighters bolstering its ranks today.

Perhaps more important, it would not possess such a strong foothold on European soil.

Islam has a long track record of aggression in Europe. At various points throughout Islamic history, Muslims conquered and ruled over Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, Greece, Hungary, and Bulgaria. Muslim armies raided southern Italy, attacked Rome, and reached the gates of Vienna twice before being turned back. Had a Frankish army led by Charles Martel not defeated an invading Muslim force at the Battle of Tours in central France in 732 AD, all of Western Europe might have come under Islamic dominion.

Today, every jihadist group, including ISIS, wants to reclaim those European territories and reintegrate them into a revived caliphate. Ironically enough, Islam has indeed established a firm foothold in Europe once again, but not through the kind of military conquest favored by ISIS and the jihadist armies of centuries past. In a 1995 speech in Ohio, the Muslim Brotherhood’s global spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who has
since been banned from entering the United States—declared, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through [the] sword but through Da’wa [proselytization].”
³¹

In the twenty-first century, Islamists—led by the Muslim Brotherhood—are putting al-Qaradawi’s words into action, employing a sort of demographic jihad (the Brotherhood calls it “settlement jihad”) that invariably includes the following steps: 1) Large numbers of Muslims migrate to a given European country. 2) Once settled in Europe, Muslims reproduce at higher rates than the indigenous, non-Muslim population. Additionally, native Europeans convert to Islam in small but steadily growing numbers. 3) Mosques are built at a rapid pace. Saudi, Qatari, and other Persian Gulf funding, as well as Turkish government money, flows into European Muslim communities and organizations, enabling the construction of sprawling “mega-mosques.” 4) Muslims form self-segregating enclaves—cut off from the broader society at large and often centered on mosques—where non-Muslims are not welcome and European laws and culture are not respected. Many residents of these enclaves receive welfare benefits. They become an increasingly important constituency that is pandered to by liberal politicians. 5) Islamist pressure groups, working hand in glove with liberal governments and the mainstream media, attempt to silence critics of Islamism by tarring them as right-wing bigots, fascists, and “Nazis.” Every new act of terrorism or foiled terror plot is dismissed by this triumvirate as having nothing to do with Islam. 6) Islamic anti-Semitism becomes more open and prevalent, particularly whenever Israel engages in military actions against Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah. 7) Culture clashes increase, whole communities change, and average Europeans are left feeling angry, frustrated, and powerless to halt the transformation of their countries.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. From immigration to mega-mosques to the government-media-Islamo-pressure group troika (the Council on American-Islamic Relations, anyone?), this seven-step process is already being repeated in the United States, albeit at a much slower pace
than in Europe—no thanks to the Obama administration’s full-on embrace of all things Islamic.

ISIS, for its part, is reaping the benefits of years of meticulous settlement jihad by the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe that dates back to the 1950s. Before the Islamic State even emerged, Europe already had plenty of radicalized mosques and immigrant communities filled with disenfranchised young Muslims looking for meaning and a cause. Then along came ISIS, conquering vast amounts of territory in the heart of the Middle East, declaring the return of the caliphate, chopping off head after head and chronicling it all on Twitter and Instagram. Scores of European Muslims in their teens and twenties were instantly smitten, and the great jihadi pipeline from Europe to Syria was open for business. Those who didn’t join the exodus to the new caliphate simply chose to stay put and advance its cause in their own backyards.

In short, things couldn’t have lined up any better for ISIS. It took advantage of already well-established jihad-friendly communities in Europe that were just waiting for a strong horse they could rally behind. ISIS has also benefited from the enthusiasm of European converts to Islam who are frequently drawn by what French scholar Dr. Mathieu Guidère calls “revolutionary appeal” rather than religious ideology: “There are people fighting with the Islamic State who don’t even know how to correctly recite the Shahada,” he says, referring to the Islamic declaration of faith. “They just want to fight the system, and to them jihadi groups have the same kind of appeal that radical left-wing terrorism used to have in the 1970s.”
³²

We saw in
chapter four
how ISIS has appealed to men, women, blacks, whites, freaks, geeks, and every demographic in between, resonating with Westerners in a manner that is unprecedented for an Islamic terrorist group. For instance, it’s estimated that converts to Islam make up some 60 percent of the French citizens fighting for the Islamic State, and 80 percent of ISIS’s Italian
mujahideen
.
³³

An August 2014 poll found that 16 percent—or one out of every six—French citizens supports the Islamic State. The number rose to 27 percent for those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
³⁴
Given that France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe and has seen more of its citizens join the Islamic State than any other European nation (with the possible exception of Great Britain), these poll results should come as no shock.

ISIS sees France as a gold mine of potential recruits and is making a concerted effort to woo more French citizens to its ranks. An increasing number of French fighters have appeared in ISIS propaganda videos, including one self-described former French paratrooper, a white convert who calls himself “Abu Qatada.” In an April 2014 video, Qatada said, “I am French, of French origin, with French parents, and I used to be a paratrooper in the French army. . . . I have disavowed that army of tyrants, and now I am here in an army that is [the] opposite [of the French army]. . . . Now I do not have comrades-in-arms, I have brothers. It is not the French flag that unites us, but rather Allah. . . .”
³⁵

In another video, released in November 2014, three French ISIS fighters burned their passports and called on French Muslims to either conduct attacks inside France or migrate to the Islamic State. That same month, two French citizens, both converts, appeared in a gruesome video featuring a beheaded U.S. aid worker, Peter Kassig.
³⁶

As of this writing, at least 118 French ISIS fighters have already returned home—including one who was clearly not ready to abandon jihad: twenty-nine-year-old Mehdi Nemmouche, whom we have already met.
³⁷
European intelligence services had their ultimate nightmare realized in May 2014, when Nemmouche, recently returned from Syria, gunned down four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels. How many more like Mehdi Nemmouche will return—or already have returned—to Europe after their jihadi apprenticeships inside the caliphate?

Then again, how many homegrown French radicals who have never even been to the Middle East are hell-bent on carrying out attacks on
French soil? Consider the carnage in France during one horrific three-day span in December 2014: 1) A man stabbed and wounded three police officers in central France while shouting “Allahu Akbar.” 2) Another man rammed his car into a crowd of people in the eastern city of Dijon, injuring thirteen, while screaming, you guessed it, “Allahu Akbar.” 3) Yet another man drove a van into a crowd of people at a Christmas market in the city of Nantes in western France, injuring at least ten people, one critically. An initial report claimed that the man screamed “Allahu Akbar” while mowing down pedestrians, but witnesses apparently said that he did not in fact use the infamous Islamic war cry.
³⁸

As we saw in
chapter three
, the steadily increasing number of jihadist attacks in France culminated in three days of horrific bloodshed between January 7 and 9 in and around Paris. Said and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers who had trained with al Qaeda in Yemen, stormed the Paris office of the satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo
and slaughtered twelve people, including two police officers. Meanwhile, Amedy Coulibaly, an acquaintance of the Kouachis who had pledged allegiance to ISIS, murdered a French police officer and then slaughtered four more people after taking hostages at a Jewish deli in Paris. The Kouachis and Coulibaly were eventually killed by French security forces. Following the attacks, ten thousand French soldiers fanned out across the country, protecting “sensitive sites,” including Jewish schools, synagogues, and businesses.
³⁹

I recounted in
The Brotherhood
how I was struck by the large number of hardcore Salafist Muslims, including many white converts, that I encountered on the streets of Cologne and Bonn during a June 2012 visit to Germany to investigate the country’s growing Salafi scene. One German journalist described to me the steady flow of German Muslims to jihadi hotspots like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and said that the problem was only going to get worse. Unfortunately, he was right. Germany’s intelligence service, the BfV, believes that the number of radical Salafists in Germany practically doubled between 2011 and the end of 2014, to a total of nearly seven thousand.