The 9/11 Wars (71 page)

The situation was similar in continental Europe. The number of failed, foiled or successful attacks reported by EU member states in 2009 was down a third on 2008, which had itself seen a steep drop from 2007. The vast bulk of these incidents involved internal separatist violence within European countries and were not linked to Islamic militancy. The trend was also reflected in the number of arrests for Muslim extremism in the EU outside Britain. These numbered 110 in 2009, a decrease of 22 per cent from 2008, of 30 per cent from 2007 and of more than 50 per cent from 2006, when 257 individuals had been detained.
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The number of member states reporting arrests for Islamic militancy had also dropped from fourteen to ten.
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Like their British counterparts, senior European counter-terrorist officials and policy-makers continued to insist that a threat remained – ‘It only takes a few to get through the net to cause a very big problem,’ as Alain Grignard, the head of the Belgian counter-terrorist police put it in March 2009 – but the number of radicalized individuals who did manage to evade counter-terrorist measures appeared extremely small.
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Throughout 2008, there had been only one partially successful attack in the whole of Europe attributable to Islamic militancy, that executed by a twenty-two-year-old, psychologically ill, self-radicalized convert, Nicky Reilly, who had injured himself badly while trying to detonate a home-made bomb in the toilet of a shopping mall restaurant in Exeter, in south-west England. In 2009, there was also only a single operation that came close to succeeding – again by an apparent lone operator, an Italian who made an unsuccessful attempt to carry out a suicide bombing on a Milan military barracks. Six months after the UK dropped its threat level, the Dutch dropped theirs too. This was the second time Dutch intelligence services had moderated their estimation of the threat terrorism posed to the Netherlands. In 2007, they had said that ‘the situation surrounding the known jihadist networks in the Netherlands can … be described as reasonably calm’, arguing that ‘a [positive] phenomenon that was described [last year] in cautious terms appears to be a trend’.
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In March 2008, the release of a provocative film by populist anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders had caused the threat level to be raised once more, but by mid-December 2009, the Dutch authorities were once again convinced that the danger from Islamic terrorism could be better described as ‘slight’ rather than ‘substantial’.
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In Germany too, there was a new calm – though inevitably punctuated by occasional scares. There were fears, for example, that the rising profile of Berlin’s troops in Afghanistan and elections in the autumn of 2009 might provoke an attack. In the end, none occurred. In France senior advisors to Sarkozy said that their main concern was no longer al-Qaeda or its ideology but state-sponsored terrorism, particularly from Iran.
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This may have been going too far – domestic counter-terrorist officials once again made sure that the sense of threat did not die away completely by making a fresh series of frightening statements – but French security officials privately remained confident of containing the threat from radical Islam both to French interests overseas and within France. ‘We did OK before 9/11, we did OK after 9/11 and we are doing OK now,’ one DST officer said.
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No one anywhere in Europe was declaring victory, least of all the security services or the politicians – nor would they have been right to do so given the rapidity with which any stabilization could be reversed. However, for once something appeared to be going at least partly right, rather than very badly wrong.

Exactly what was going right was as difficult to answer as levels of threat were difficult to guage. One factor was certainly the constantly improving competence, capability and reach of security services, the police and all others involved in the counter-terrorist effort. Bolstered with new legislation, funding and understanding, authorities had been able to build on the strategic shifts undertaken in 2006 and 2007 to take the initiative against Islamic militancy. British officials used a convoluted metaphor involving the defensive tactics of Arsenal, the north London football club, in the 1980s to describe how by bringing in local police, social services, even schools and mosques, they were able to divert individuals who they felt were potential threats from becoming real dangers well before they became involved in serious militancy. Headmasters, clerics, community workers and others, MI5 felt, were much better placed to intervene to divert ‘individuals of concern’ from potential radicalism than the security service. As in the USA, another key development was legal. Earlier in the decade many trials in Britain had collapsed. This was partly due to a failure of prosecutors to understand the phenomenon they were up against – individuals were repeatedly charged with membership of al-Qaeda and were then acquitted for lack of evidence – but also due to a variety of legal loopholes. With many of these now plugged, law-enforcement agencies were able to get those who did become involved in violence locked up much more easily. Conviction rates in trials for terrorism offences in the UK in 2008–9 were 86 per cent.
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In France, surveillance and contacts within Muslim communities, already extensive, had been rolled out further. In Germany, where strict privacy laws had once contributed to the 9/11 hijackers evading detection, new legislation granted powers of investigation and information-gathering that, coupled with further research into the process of radicalization undertaken by police sociologists, allowed security authorities to believe, like so many of their counterparts and despite public statements, that they had ‘the problem largely under control’.
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At a European level, though officials at the Commission had concerns about an overly ‘politically correct’ approach, as the EU’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Gilles de Kerchove, put it, successive measures enhancing cooperation were bearing fruit.
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Improved transatlantic relations also had an impact. Whereas the New York Police Department’s liaison officer in Paris had once been largely ignored by his Parisian counterparts, left in his office to watch the river traffic on the Seine, by mid 2009 he was being invited into key meetings. If he had spoken French he might even have been able to understand what was being said in them.
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Another factor was geopolitical. Sentiments in Muslim communities in Europe had obviously been very influenced by what was happening in the Islamic world. The winding-down of the messy and brutal war in Iraq, the American withdrawal from all but a few bases in the country and the departures of Blair and Bush had all undermined the neat lines of the Islam-against-the-West worldview that had been propagated so effectively earlier in the decade. Other issues – global warming, swine flu, the financial crisis – were increasingly forcing the conflict further and further down the news agenda. The war in Afghanistan undoubtedly provoked strong reactions. So too did the Israeli military operations in Gaza in January 2009. But the militant ‘single narrative’ was increasingly based on events that appeared historical and the actions of individuals who had left the scene.
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New voices from within Muslim communities in the UK and elsewhere also continued to emerge to counter the extremists with growing confidence.

The later years of the decade had also seen the positive effects of the new scholarship on radical Islam and related questions. Arguments based on ignorant generalizations or stereotypes had progressively became harder to sustain in the face of solid research. One good example was the idea that Muslim hordes would overrun a ‘senescent Europe’ or constitute a ‘fifth column’ based in ‘mini-Fallujas’ to undermine it from within. Successive studies showed that in fact the growth of the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and north Africa was slowing rapidly, with the average number of children born per woman dropping from seven in 1960 to three in 2006 or even drifting down to the replacement level of about 2.1 children per woman.
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The American Rand Corporation concluded that by 2025 the youth bulge problem in the Middle East would begin to ease.
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A flood of Muslim immigrants thus looked unlikely. As for the Muslim population within Europe, no one doubted that it had grown rapidly in recent decades and, particularly given its relative youth, would continue to expand in years to come. However, demographers again predicted that fertility rates would decline as they had done among almost all other populations which had experienced progressively higher levels of wealth, healthcare access and literacy. There certainly appeared little reason why immigrants should reproduce more in Europe than in their countries of origin.
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One Dutch study showed that births among Turkish- and Moroccan-born women in the Netherlands had dropped from 3.2 to 1.9 and from 4.9 to 2.9 respectively between 1990 and 2005, and fertility rates for Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants to the UK had gone from 9.3 in 1971 to 4.9 in 1996 and finally to under three by 2009.
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That nominally Muslim populations would reach a size that would have a significant impact culturally and politically was clear, but the reality appeared to be a long way from the inflammatory estimates of those who had seen ‘Eurabia’ as an inevitable consequence of immigration.
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Further contributing to a drop in tension, even if the tabloid press and mainstream right-wing politicians continued to stoke popular fears of being ‘overrun’ or ‘swamped’, were the actions taken by European governments. These, by the summer of 2009 almost entirely centre-right, moved swiftly to further restrict immigration from Muslim countries and elsewhere.
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Along with the clear messaging from almost all states but Britain that Muslim Turkey, with its population of 80 million, was not welcome in the European Union, these often severe measures showed that governments were responsive to the concerns of their population and, whatever the economic arguments or the long-term strategic considerations, would move to restrict immigration if that was what the electorate wanted. This undermined some of the more fantastic projections of the future growth of immigrant communities in European nations, which were based on the premise that no politicians on the continent would or could move to restrict the influx from overseas because of the potential impact on ailing economies desperately in need of manpower to support ageing populations. It was connected to another emerging trend: a shift in the nature of the animosity directed at Europe’s various Muslim communities. As the end of the decade approached, the antipathy towards Muslims appeared to be less specific, part of a more generalized resentment directed against immigrants rather than being directly linked to a perceived threat of violence as it had been for several years. In the tight economic times of 2008 and 2009, the individual Western European citizen seemed to be defining his or her ‘security’ more broadly than he or she had done in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Classic issues such as employment, the cost of social welfare, crime and delinquency – historically associated with immigrants in popular imagination – resurfaced. In Holland, only 1 per cent of people asked in 2009 said they were concerned about terrorism and terrorist attacks, though 13 per cent worried about unemployment and about ‘neighbourhood safety’.
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Alongside the concern about the threat ‘Muslims’ posed came a recrudescence, especially in eastern Europe, of that old European malaise: anti-Semitism.

Significantly 18 per cent of those questioned in the Dutch poll said they were concerned about ‘values’. For alongside this new broader sense of insecurity going well beyond a sense of physical threat came a sharpening of the perception of a ‘cultural’ threat. Here, unsurprisingly given the history of European relations with Islam, there were many potential flashpoints. Though some claimed otherwise, the reality remained that Muslim communities in Europe, like other faith groups on the continent, were largely much more conservative than the population in general. This, as it had done over previous years, led to repeated clashes on issues such as
burqas
and veils (in France), mosque construction (in Germany), minarets (in Switzerland), segregation and diet (pretty much everywhere). Many such rows were either based in misunderstandings – such as over exactly what ‘
sharia
law’ might mean – or bordered on the absurd – such as a British Muslim cook who claimed financial damages for discrimination on the basis that wearing plastic gloves and using tongs was not enough to protect him from the possibility of being spattered with pig fat while preparing pork sausages – but they were often based in genuinely different visions of what was acceptable social behaviour.
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Though surveys revealed that local national specificities often had a much greater impact than usually thought – where adultery or pornography were generally accepted, such as in France or Germany respectively, so they were accepted by a higher proportion of local ‘Muslims’ – overall the views of many who described themselves as Muslims on moral questions remained much closer to those of the American religious right than the largely secular local communities among whom they lived.
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Importantly, the long-cherished idea that younger people, the children of the immigrants, would prove to be more liberal than their parents was also proving questionable. Indeed, throughout most nations in Europe there were strong indications of a new affirmation of a Muslim religious and cultural identity among 16–24-year-olds which went beyond the simple maintenance of inherited traditions, focusing instead on outward signs of difference rather than on conventions and customs inherited from parents who had been born in Algeria, Pakistan, Turkey or wherever.
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In many European countries, though only a small minority wore the headscarf or veil, those who did so were usually no longer following an inherited tradition but making a deliberate choice to assert their difference both from the broader community and from their parents.
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In Holland, though mosque attendance dropped sharply and the gap between ‘autochtones’ and immigrants in education and the labour market narrowed, more ‘people with a non-Western background’ chose to move to homes in the same neighbourhoods and avoid the company of ‘Westerners’.
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In France, even as rates of intermarriage or use of French as a first language in the home continued to increase, rates of declared observance of the Ramadan fast and professed abstinence from alcohol climbed steeply too.
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Though 48 per cent of British Muslims said they never attended a mosque, 78 per cent said their religion was ‘very important’ to them.
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As polls in the UK (and elsewhere) also showed that Muslims wanted more integration not less, that Muslim populations tended to admire institutions such as parliament or the courts more than non-Muslim populations, that fewer and fewer would serve the cuisine of their parents to a visitor and that Muslims were much more likely to be part of a local sports club than of a religious association, the only conclusion was that no one tendency was dominant.
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If integration had progressed more than was often said, it had occurred very unevenly, throwing up powerful reactions and counter currents. Though talking of a single, monolithic ‘Islamic identity’ or community in Europe was impossible, one strong emerging trend amid the mass of apparently conflicting data was a new affirmation of a strong and conservative cultural and religious identity among Europe’s Muslims which posed, as it did in the Middle East and in south Asia and elsewhere, a significant social and political challenge for Western policy-makers.