It’s been a while since Isis staged a major attack on the West. Occasionally the group’s degraded propaganda organs will try and claim one, but even that is less common nowadays. Still, just because Isis central isn’t orchestrating mass murder in Europe, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t still people killing in the name of jihad — if anything, the Islamist terror threat is still claiming many more lives and much more frequently than we realise.
The overwhelming focus from authorities, political leaders and the press has become the personal and psychological dramas of the perpetrators. After every incident, the attackers’ pasts are combed and every twist and turn in their tangled biographies is retrospectively injected with significance and relevance to their (often much later) decision to kill.
Of course, the personal profiles of perpetrators are important, but the resultant disconnection of the spate of stabbings, vehicular attacks and, less frequently, shootings and bombings across Europe leaves us in danger of prematurely writing off the lingering jihadist threat.
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We should know by now that militant Islamism in the West has long horizons. It was eight years between the 7/7 bombings and the murder of Lee Rigby; the following year, Isis proclaimed itself a “Caliphate” and instructed Muslims worldwide to migrate to their bloody utopia — at least 6,000 from Europe answered the call. France and Belgium suffered terribly in the years to follow, while Britain saw a wave of jihadist attacks three years later.
There is no reason that lulls should be interpreted as a waning threat, yet today attention seems elsewhere. Last October, political leaders in Britain greeted what looks like the jihadist assassination of one of their colleagues with a very serious debate on online anonymity. And only this month, thanks in part to the Americanisation of political discourse, the bloated cottage industry of which I am a part was more comfortable gorging on year-old events 3,600 miles away at the US Capitol building than discussing threats closer to home.
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In the wake of America’s withdrawal from the region, much has been made of the danger of Afghanistan once again becoming a terrorist safe haven threatening the West. Such concerns are certainly legitimate. Whenever they have controlled territory, jihadists have made the West pay: from the archipelago of training camps in Afghanistan which churned out the “Magnificent 19” hijackers, to the commandos dispatched from the Isis caliphate to gun down revellers and commuters in Paris and Brussels.
The more urgent concern, however, should be on Europe, and how the jihadist movement reconstitutes itself inside the continents borders after the Islamic State. The principal concern for security services has been the threat posed by Isis returnees, and with good reason. There is nothing new about Europeans travelling to jihadist conflict zones, but more travelled to Syria and Iraq for jihad than every previous jihadist insurgency combined. Not all made it home, but many did or will in future.
Available evidence does suggest that only a minority of foreign fighter returnees attack at home, but this should not necessarily be a cause for complacency. The statistics alone do not account for the constant ideological transformation and evolution of militant Islamism in the West: when commuters were murdered in London in 2005, or when Mohammed Merah executed Jewish schoolchildren and soldiers in France in 2012, these acts sparked internal debates on legitimacy within salafi-jihadist circles. Today, thanks to the work of salafi-jihadist scholars, there would be no such debate.
Nor do low rates of attack tell the whole story of the impact of returnees. Each generation of returnees from conflict overseas has successfully helped to cultivate a new and larger generation of extremists. Isis hotspots in Europe often directly overlap with recruitment hotspots for jihadist insurgencies from decades ago. If the Isis generation is able to socialise a new, more violent, more extreme generation of salafi-jihadists then it may be years, or even decades, until we feel the full force of the most recent returnee wave.
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That isn’t to say these jihadis are driven by pure rage and bloodlust, reflexively likely to slaughter the first infidel they see. Like any terrorist group or movement, jihadists learn from their tactical and strategic mistakes, and some believe they overplayed their hand with the attacks of 2015-17. Many believed a tipping point had been reached, and that such bloodletting would spark the civil conflict on the continent they desired, in doing so drastically and disgracefully overestimating their support within Western Muslim communities. Meanwhile, the attacks on the West also served to accelerate the aerial bombardment of the “caliphate” on the ground, only hastening its demise. This helps explain why the main jihadist groups are no longer claiming or orchestrating major attacks in the West: it isn’t only a sign of weakness, but of the movement adapting to realities.
Hakim el-Karoui and Benjamin Hodayé’s recent extensive study of European militants suggested two possible scenarios for the future of jihadism in the West: the first, as hinted at above, sees the veterans of the Syrian jihad and their future cohorts turn their crosshairs primarily towards Europe, rather than some distant war zone.
The second, arguably more unsettling, prospect, is the jihadist population in Europe reconstitutes into a social movement, accelerating what European governments term separatism. At the very least, it’s possible a faction of Europe’s salafi-jihadis remain committed to mass casualty violence against civilians and their dreams of a caliphate. Recognising the shortcomings of ISIS need not lessen commitment to the utopian ideology: “real communism has never been tried.”
In this scenario, salafi-jihadis would establish closed communities withdrawn from and hostile towards the ignorance and sin of wider society. Perhaps they would only occasionally lash out, but more people would certainly die in Europe over ‘blasphemy’ and cartoons. There is precedent here in the monastic communities established in some of the global jihadi hotspots, from Toulouse and the surrounding countryside to the isolated salafi-jihadi communes in the Caribbean.
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Another French academic, Hugo Micheron, recently spoke to dozens of imprisoned jihadis and some hinted at this change in strategy. Instead of simply radicalising others for attacks, their aim is rather the total homogenisation of Western Muslim belief under their interpretation (the only true Islam, as they see it), before encouraging or enforcing separation and withdrawal from the surrounding unbelief. The objective, according to the incarcerated extremists, is to insert a salafi-jihadist project at the heart of Europe instead of a faraway battlefield. If this strain of thought becomes dominant then, as Micheron writes, jihadism becomes a social, intellectual and political challenge “before it ever picks up a Kalashnikov”.
For now, Western Jihadis have gone quiet. But it could prove a major miscalculation to interpret this lull as jihadism finally on the wane, to be usurped by some other ideological challenge. As expert Suzanne Raine recently warned, when terrorists have gone quiet in the past, it usually means they are planning. The challenge is syncing the terrorist planning cycle with the resource and short attention cycle of Western governments and publics.
Perhaps we’re lucky that many of Europe’s most committed jihadis and thinkers — ones with real experience and connections — are in prison, or stranded in Syria. Thus the residual attacks are perpetrated by losers and the misfits without links to formal cells or networks, so we put it down to mental health and soothe ourselves into believing this is all that is left of Western jihad. But those in prison will soon get out and others will make it back from Syria. They now know better than to blunder into more confrontations with Western states from a position of weakness. A movement that thinks in centuries will not rush into its next move.
Of course, the jihadist movement could collapse or fade into irrelevance. It’s just that there’s no reason to think it will, and that all the indicators — mostly from historical precedent — point the other way. Jihadis are not some nightmarish omnipotent force as they were too often portrayed during the Isis years. But while there is no call for alarmism, there may well be cause for pessimism.
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SubscribeI wonder if the continentals have the same banal reluctance to call terror Islamist as the UK politicians? Apparently this same misconstrued fear of ‘racism’ means the grooming gang problem here is still not being fully faced up to. Unless of course it is the usual problem caused by politics: if we appear to criticise a demographic they won’t vote for us – such a patronising view.
We mustn’t forget to call out the cowardice of state broadcasters around both of these scenarios.
Their cowardice is akin to complicity. When we have actors calling for Shakespeare’s texts to be cancelled for their ‘misogyny’ we know we are in an era of peak stupid for you can bet that the same actor would be horrified if the blatant misogyny of the Koran was called out.
It’s more than that. Calling Islamist terror and violation by their proper names would unravel the “narrative” with which the current elite deceives the public and comforts itself; a sentimental fable in which humans have no background, no loyalties and in which they would mingle in rainbow coloured joy, but for the divisive influence of “fascists”. Like all reversions to childish naivety, this fable is profoundly narcissistic, for the “fascists” in question are only ever identified among the “host” communities of the west; never, but never from other societies – not even when they murder Christians or mutilate girls or keep women concealed and locked up. This same narcissistic left can witter on about “Handmaids’ tales” in the face of persistent Islamic misogyny; it can “demand” acceptance of millions of migrants or refugees – they no longer even pretend to distinguish – whilst letting all non-European societies off the moral hook entirely. So Afghans are expected to be housed in Dover, not Teheran, for example. It is, in a way, a form of “white supremacy”, found exclusively on the left and composed of extreme moral vanity. And it is destroying the west.
The current malignant cancer eating away at Western civilisation beautifully expressed and summarised. Thank you Simon Denis.
Well stated. It is truly a cancer, one that takes decades to metastasize. What is it about the stated goal of a global caliphate does the West not understand?
Nabil Qu’reshi’s book, ‘Answering Jihad,’ analyses this problem.
In the Netherlands where I live it has mostly the case.
“the bloated cottage industry of which I am a part was more comfortable gorging on year-old events 3,600 miles away at the US Capitol building than discussing threats closer to home.”
There is something about Secret Police. Their work is gaining confidence, in lulling people into being overly comfortable, and then collecting damaging information. Spying, eavesdropping, watching wile hidden, recording, studying; I mean, well and good, I suppose, in times and places, sometimes morality is relative, ethics situational I guess…. But it is a type. I could not do it. So much literature is of them, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn: SAVAK, Stasi, ISI, CIA with Air America and Iran/Contra, Dulls Brothers, USSR and CCP, and every tyrant – even democracy. Louis the XIV, Henry the VIII had secret police much feared….
But it is what a secret Police is, FBI, CIA, M-I5, and the dozens and dozens of other organizations we never even hear of. What? A Million employees in the ‘counter terrorism’ industry in UK and USA? And Biden said the Islamist Terror time is past, that ‘Domestic Terrorism’ is now the greatest danger in the West. To make it clearer we go back to the quote at the top – and what we hear on the MSM, and from the leadership – that it is the conservative Right who are the worry, the suspicious. 5Th Column never existed in the West, but it seems now it may be suspected, and ‘The Usual Suspects’ to be rounded up.
If the West would just eject everyone needing deporting almost all fear of domestic Islamic Terror would go away. Why Not do that? Do that instead of becoming a Police State watching for problems instead of just preemptively deporting them.
In my days I have seen a lot, enough I fear the Growth of our own Secret Police directed internally more than any external fear. I know how they need results, they are political, and they are not as good at justice as should be. Thought crime, Political Prisoners, Political Crime, making examples of…… I find the secret Police very scary, even as I am totally innocent of anything – it is just, well, scary. I have read so very many books, fiction and non-fiction – seen a lot of the world, and had encounters that were uncomfortable.
It’s not ignoring the threat. It’s pretending the threat doesn’t exist because it’s impossible to avoid it while relying on immigrant labour.
It would be perfectly possible to allow immigrant labour only from non-Muslim countries. Whether any politician has the cojones to enact this is another matter.
According to Statista, Islamists have murdered 58,552 people in Nigeria since 2011. Our fixation with our own back yard can blind us to the sufferings of the innocent elsewhere.
I disagree. If every country, including Nigeria, did fixate on their own back yard and minimized their own terrorist problems, then there would be less suffering of innocents globally.
During the Cold War, there used to be a ritual played out when a Soviet spy ring was uncovered. A number of Soviet diplomats would be expelled. Not all those expelled were the ones actually doing the spying, rather they simply made up the number of expulsions, which was intended to reflect the gravity of the espionage. I do not recall anyone bleating about the human rights of expelled Soviet diplomats.
Maybe a policy that could be re-jigged to deal with violent jihadism?
If you are implying that a number of immigrants would be deported every time there was an event, I would like to know how that would be productive. It certainly would not be in line with the values and the morals that all of us claim to uphold.
The values and morals that all of us claim to uphold…….
If you mean religious tolerance, women’s equality, gay rights and so on, then mass immigration of people from fairly backward muslim countries is a strange way to secure those values.
I am not implying that. It would mean the expulsion of those who are both (a) known security risks and (b) either dual nationals or have a claim to other nationalities.
Sometimes there just has to be a reaction, no?
Excellent and thought provoking article. I just hope our political leaders understand and deal properly with this existential challenge.
‘Say and do whatever is necessary to get close enough to my enemies to destroy them.’ ‘Do not use violence until you are strong enough to overcome my enemies.’ Nothing new in their thinking; they have just learned to go back to it. And the ‘moderate’ Muslim criticism of Islamic terrorism is not based on principle, but on its tactics and timing.
Are you really suggesting that every Muslim is a terrorist? That the majority are? That a plurality are? That there is a large portion who are?
No one is claiming that every Muslim is a terrorist but a very small number of violent extremists can cause great harm. For every person willing to commit violence there are many more who endorse the same views. Even so, we are not talking about a small number. There is polling on this topic and the findings are concerning. According to Pew (2013), more than 20% in Egypt, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Palestinian Territories agreed that “suicide bombing in defence of Islam is often or sometimes justified.” More than 10% in Jordan, Tunisia, Pakistan, Turkey, Malaysia, and Kosovo agreed. Sure, a majority do not support violence but that is hardly reassuring. When 13% of Pakistanis surveyed agree that “suicide bombings in defence of Islam is often or sometimes justified”, you’re talking about potentially 30M people.
https://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-2013-2/
There is an ‘official’ narrative which suggests that no muslims are terrorist BECAUSE of islam: that the minority who support terrorism do so for reasons unconnected with islam, and that the majority who do not practice terror do not tacitly support the political gains for islam arising from extremism. This a very naive and dangerous policy to foist on the populace. I never understand the fear of the establishment about saying or ascribing anything negative to islam, yet have no problems in demonising communism, for example.
Or Christianity!
There is the potential for every Muslim to become a terrorist and a greater potential for them to support and condone terrorism. It is built into their sacred texts. Mohammed said “I have been made victorious by terror”.
Every good Muslim is supposed to imitate Mohammed. They might imitate him by pretending to be peaceful when in the minority (the Meccan texts of the Quran) and pretending to be friendly; but the quran tells Muslims not to take unbelievers as friends but only to feign friendship. It is a mistake to regard Islam as just a religion. It is a totalitarian political movement with religious aspects attached. Anything goes which will promote Islam, including lying about the aims and methods of Islam.
The very use of the word “Islamist” shows the desire of the West to stick their heads in the sand and pretend that the threat is much smaller than it really is. The proper word is Muslim or Islamic.
The extent to which particular Muslims are a threat depends largely on which teachers they listen to, for their knowledge of their own texts can be very poor. If they have “compromising” teachers, they may be relatively harmless. But their children may actually read the texts or come under the influence of imams who stress the violent texts.
So few understand the level of the existential threat that exists. Churchill was correct.
Perhaps we spend too much time trying to figure out what drives these murderers. Let’s just say they are dangerous psychopaths, or whatever, and get on with the more important task of stopping them in their tracks.
The sad thing is that we already know what drives them. It would simply be too inconvenient for our government officials to do anything about it.
Sort of like the police, who can’t do anything UNTIL the crime is committed.
The extent to which the Human Rights Industry is infiltrated and co-opted by the unholy alliance of leftist SJW’s and jihadists will determine the chances of turning back the tide of the Islamisation of Europe.
Importing misogynistic millions who have no sympathy with the secular post Enlightenment ambiguous West. What could possibly go wrong?
No mention of the pandemic lockdown possibly playing a role in dampening things down a bit?
Also, there’s the football this year. People from all walks of life look forward to these things, especially now that the razzmatazz and jollity associated with the event will be coming from the ME. Can’t see the event coming from Mexico City anymore. The last time it was staged there was in ‘86 (and I recall in nearly every match broadcast the John 3:16 banner hung behind the goal area; I recall too the wondrous 1970 event; but now the place is just too risky). It’s not exactly like they won’t have the TVs switched on in the prisons of Europe. They will. And everybody will be cheering on a good show. So there is that. Element. You know.
Returning to Europe? This reminds me of a particular scene in the movie Catch Me If You Can, the (true) movie about the pursuit of the artful con man played by Di Caprio, chased by the good cop character played by Tom Hanks, set in 1960s America. It’s Christmas Eve night, the overworked Hanks character is alone in his office, at his desk, trying to figure out where the fugitive is, when the con man Abnegale (the di Caprio character) unexpectedly rings his desk telephone and then proceeds to taunt the Hanks character about his constantly futile or thwarted efforts to catch him. Then the Hanks character sits up, a smile creasing his face, as he tells Abnegale that he now knows why he rang. “Why?” “Because it’s Christmas Eve and you got nobody else to call!”. Abnegale slams his phone down, chastened, ashamed. Hanks laughs his head off.
So yes, they return to Europe because there’s nowhere else to go.
The movie had a pleasant ending though.
Maybe there’s hope.
“Can’t see the event coming from Mexico City anymore. The last time it was staged there was in ‘86 (and I recall in nearly every match broadcast the John 3:16 banner hung behind the goal area; I recall too the wondrous 1970 event; but now the place is just too risky). “
The World Cup in 2026 will have games hosted in Mexico City
To understand the scale of the underlying terrorist problem, can we learn from the statistical analysis from similar active/non-avtive ratios in public life, such as the number of complaints to the BBC?
If my memory serves me correctly it was reliably estimated that for every complaint the BBC recieved there were, on average, 100 others who felt the same, but who, whatever the reason did not at, at that time, complain.
Is it possible that for each terrorist attack in the UK by someone claiming to be in the name of some community X, Y or Z (e.g. neo-nazi, Islam, etc), that there are hundreds or even thousands in that same community who fully support that attack, but do not have the motivation too actually do it themselves at that time?
Given how the practice of attacking innocent civilians is so naturally abhorrent and limited by the authorities, when there are such sporadic attacks, is this evidence of a far greater and wider pressure within that community (than it would publicly admit) to do so?
Is there deep, credible research into the underlying support and tolerance within the various communities X, Y, Z,… for their respective practices, that are utterly incompatible with British laws and norms: such as honour killings, racist grooming/paedophile gangs, shariah law, gang violence, knife crime, anti-Semitism and other racially motivated attacks, etc?
I would expect responsible, competent government to understand the scale of the problems it has to deal with and to be able to effectively inform it’s population every step of the way until solved.
“I would expect responsible, competent government to understand the scale of the problems it has to deal with and to be able to effectively inform it’s population every step of the way until solved.”
….stated with tongue firmly planted in cheek.
There are European countries that experience hardly any internal terrorism: Switzerland and Hungary come to mind. What are they doing right?
Let just say that this strategic view of how rad Islam may adapt to past mistakes is among the best takes I have seen. As are Duffy’s other takes on the situation in France and the attempts, often misguided, to counteract what is the most difficult and dangerous internal threat in Europe.