The 9/11 Wars (127 page)

  30
.
Author interview, Dr Alain Bauer, Paris, July 2009.

  31
.
Author interview, Paris, July 2009.

  32
.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue (Jytte Klausen),
Al Qaeda-Affiliated and ‘Homegrown’ Jihadism in the UK: 1999–2010,
September 2010, p. 8.

  33
.
Author interviews, Berlin, September, 2009.

  34
.
Author interview with Gilles de Kerchove, counter-terrorism coordinator for the European Union, Brussels, September 2008. Jason Burke, ‘Don’t be soft on Islam, says EU terror chief’,
Observer
, September 28, 2008.

  35
.
Author interview, NYPD representative in Paris, Paris, September 2006, September 2008.

  36
.
Operation Cast Lead sparked both outrage and a spate of anti-Semitic attacks. Overall around 270 cases of anti-Jewish racist violence were reported in the UK in 2009, according to figures compiled by the Community Security Trust (CST), the body that monitors anti-Jewish racism, with most blamed on anti-Israeli sentiment in reaction to hostilities in Gaza. Attacks recorded during the first Palestinian Intifida of the late 1980s averaged sixteen a month. Mark Townsend, ‘Rise in anti-Semitic attacks “the worst recorded in Britain in decades” ’,
Observer
, February 8, 2010. Altogether, there were 113 anti-Semitic incidents in France during the month following the December 27 launching of Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza, including twenty-two attacks against private individuals and five attempts to burn down synagogues. Bernard Edinger, ‘Tense ties in France’,
The Jerusalem Report
, March 2, 2009, Paris. In the June elections to the European Parliament, Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom in the Netherlands won 17 per cent of the national vote. The anti-immigrant British National Party, which warned of the ‘creeping Islamification’ of British society, won its first two seats. In Austria the right-wing Freedom Party almost doubled its share of the vote, at 13 per cent. ‘The first Islamic invasion of Europe was stopped at [the battle of] Poitiers in 732. The second was halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Now we have to stop the current stealth invasion,’ argued Wilders.

  37
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Replacement level was reached in Iran, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey. While the average age at first marriage for women was between eighteen and twenty-one in most countries in the region in the 1970s, it was between twenty-two and twenty-five by the late 1990s. North African countries saw an especially steep increase in marriage age. In Libya, the average rose from age nineteen to age twenty-nine between the mid 1970 and late 1990s. The average marriage was above age twenty-five in all the north African countries except for Egypt, where it was just twenty-two in 1998. Farzaneh Roudi-Fahimi and Mary Mederios Kent, ‘Challenges and Opportunities – The Population of the Middle East and North Africa’,
Population Bulletin
, vol. 62, no. 2, 2007.

  38
.
Pernin et al.,
Unfolding the Future of the Long War
, p. 213.

  39
.
Author interview with Carl Haub, senior demographer, Population Reference Bureau, Washington, July 2009.

  40
.
William Underhill, ‘Why fears of a Muslim takeover are all wrong’,
Newsweek
, July 10, 2009. Eric Kaufmann, ‘Europe’s Return to the Faith’,
Prospect
, 2010, p. 57.

  41
.
Another study predicted the nominally Muslim population in countries such as Switzerland and Austria – which already had very substantial Muslim populations – might reach between 9 and 15 per cent by 2030 and between 10 and 20 per cent by 2050. Ibid., p.58.

  42
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Olivier Schmitt, ‘Sécurité en Europe, la France compte parmi les pays les plus durs’,
Le Monde
, August 19, 2010. President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was a particularly good example of a mainstream politician whose language, particularly during the presidential campaign of 2007, had veered close to that of the extreme right. In one rally in Metz, the author heard Sarkozy speak of how the France he dreamed of was one ‘where no sheep were slaughtered in a bathtub’, a common accusation against the French Muslim Arab or Berber immigrant community. A telephone survey of twenty mayors in areas with major immigrant populations conducted by the author revealed that no such incident had occurred for a decade at least.

  43
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‘Few fear terrorist attack in the Netherlands’, Press release, November 26, 2009, National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, The Netherlands.

  44
.
Justin Davenport, ‘Muslim chef sues “insensitive” Met over pork sausages’,
Evening Standard
, May 11, 2009.

  45
.
The Gallup Coexist Index 2009: A Global Study of Interfaith Relations
, May 2009. Author telephone interview with Magali Rheault, Gallup researcher, July 2009. One depressing example of this was the prevalence of conspiracy theories. If significant numbers of French Muslims doubted the official accounts of 9/11, so did 11 per cent of their non-Muslim compatriots. NOP found that 36 per cent of British Muslims thought that Princess Diana was murdered in 1997 to stop her marrying a Muslim and 17 per cent thought the Holocaust was ‘exaggerated’ (the view of most Holocaust deniers). An ICM poll published in the UK’s
Jewish Chronicle
in 2004 found that 14 per ccent of people in the UK more generally thought that the scale of the Holocaust had been exaggerated and 27 per cent of the general public told NOP in 2003 that Princess Diana had been murdered. ‘Six years after her death, a quarter of Britons say Diana was murdered: poll’, AFP, August 31, 2003.

  46
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See, for example, ‘Ramadan: jeûne pour 70% de Musulmans’, AFP, August 20, 2009, citing IFOP poll of 1,300 interviewees. Cécilia Gabizon, ‘Les Contrastes de l’intégration à la française’,
Le Figaro
, October 15, 2009.

  47
.
In Germany, for example, the number of women who
always
wore a headscarf dropped; the proportion of those who
sometimes
wore a headscarf rose among second-generation immigrants. Survey: Muslim life in Germany, Federal Minister of the Interior, June 2009, pp. 6–7.

  48
.
‘More Dutch Muslims are skipping the mosque’,
NRC Handelsblad
, July 29, 2009. Annual Report on Integration, Netherlands Government Bureau of Statistics, press release, 16 December 2008. Author interview with Professor Jan Latten, director Netherlands Government Bureau of Statistics, January 2009. Jason Burke, ‘Holland’s first immigrant mayor is hailed as “Obama on the Maas” ’,
Observer
, January 11, 2009.

  49
.
Cécilia Gabizon, ‘Le ramadan séduit de plus en plus les jeunes’,
Le Figaro
, August 21, 2009.

  50
.
Malik,
From Fatwa to Jihad
, pp. 12–13

  51
.
Cecile Calla, ‘Les Musulmans d’Allemagne seraient assez bien integrés’,
Le Monde
, June 27, 2009.

  52
.
Author interviews, Paris, August 2009.

  53
.
The Arabic terms the Maghreb and the Mashriq have been in use since the seventh or eighth century CE and broadly indicate ‘the region west’, i.e. the north African coast, and ‘the region east’, i.e. the land west of modern Iran and south of present-day Turkey including, by some definitions, the Arabian peninsula. Theoretically Egypt is part of the Mashriq, as is, according to the
Encyclopedia Britannica
, the Sudan. In reality Egypt floats between the two. The use of both terms here is, in part, meant to underline quite how Eurocentric the Western term ‘the Middle East’ is.

  54
.
Pew Global Attitudes Project,
Declining Support for bin Laden and Suicide Bombing
, September 10, 2009.

  55
.
An invitation had been extended to successive Algerian groups but rejected systematically since the early 1990s.

  56
.
The failure of the GSPC, as previously mentioned, had been widely noted as an object lesson in how not to execute a jihad by radical Islamic strategists such as al-Suri and Abu Bakr Naji. For more on the latter, see Jarret Brachman and William McCants, ‘Stealing al’Qaida’s Playbook’,
Studies in Conflicts and Terrorism
, May 2006. Also, Devin Springer, James Regens and David Edger,
Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad
, Georgetown University Press, 2008, pp. 23–5, 46–7, 49, 173. For more on Algerian militancy see Burke,
Al-Qaeda
; Kepel,
Jihad
; John Philips and Martin Evans,
Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed
, Yale University Press, 2008. See also Jean-Pierre Filiu, ‘The Local and Global Jihad of al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghrib’
, Middle East Journal
, vol. 63, no. 2, spring 2009. One of the most notable figures to accept amnesty was Hassan Khattab, the former chief and one of the founders of the GSPC. ‘Hassan Hattab, un ex-chef sanguinaire dans la peau d’un “réconciliateur” ’,
El Watan
, February 11, 2009.

  57
.
Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, p. 203. Tawil, a London-based correspondent for
al-Hayat
, is probably the best reporter and analyst working on Islamic militancy in the Maghreb. He interviewed al-Birr in Algeria in March 2009.

  58
.
See Jean-Pierre Filiu, ‘Al’Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb’,
CTC Sentinel
, vol. 3, no. 4, April 2010, p. 14.

  59
.
Tawil,
The Other Face of al-Qaeda
, pp. 42–3.

  60
.
The first militant also complained about ‘setting up fake checkpoints to rob Muslims of their money and abducting and terrorizing innocents in order to receive money’, Springer et al.,
Islamic Radicalism
, pp. 177–8.

  61
.
AQIM appealed direct to Algeria’s Berbers, ‘our brothers, the free kabylie, the descendants of Tariq bin Ziyadh … to stand against “the traitorous rulers” ’. Andrew Black, ‘Al-Qaida Operations in Kabylie Mountains Alienating Algeria’s Berbers’,
Jamestown Terrorism Focus
, vol. 5, no. 16, April 23, 2008.

  62
.
‘Cinq gardes communaux sauvagement assassinés’, Liberté, June 23, 2009.

  63
.
Author interview, London, June 2009.

  64
.
A largely independent semi-criminal faction was based in the far desert south.

  65
.
The secretary of state had even, despite the ongoing close cooperation between the notoriously brutal Egyptian intelligence services and their American counter-terrorist counterparts, singled out Egypt for criticism over human rights abuses. In response to the criticism, Mubarak made a number of small cosmetic changes then proceeded to make sure he won 87 per cent of votes cast at the 2005 presidential elections. The new pragmatism forced on the Bush administration in Iraq was rapidly communicated to the White House’s general approach to the region. By 2007 and 2008, there was little pressure for serious reform. What did remain of the ‘Freedom Agenda’ by the time Obama took power in Washington was, however, the liberalizing economic element. This had seen taxes cut, tariffs removed and foreign direct investment courted. Egypt was dubbed with the slightly unlikely title of ‘world’s top reformer’ in 2007 by the World Bank, then under Paul Wolfowitz, the longstanding advocate of democratization, neoliberal economics, the invasion of Iraq and the man who as deputy defense secretary had been one of those most blamed for the failures that had followed the ‘liberation’ of 2003. The Egyptian economy had started growing rapidly towards the end of the decade. After averaging about 4 per cent through the 1990s, economic growth reached 8 per cent in 2007. John R. Bradley,
Inside Egypt
, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 167. Isobel Coleman, ‘Egypt’s Uphill Economic Struggles’, The Council on Foreign Relations, February 2011.