Thread: Europe Is New Cradle of Islamic Terrorists

Europe Is New Cradle of Islamic Terrorists, Expert Says
By GREG GRANT

The problem of Islamic terrorism has become more a Western European than a Middle Eastern problem, according to one participant in a Washington conference on global terrorism and U.S. security strategy.

Francis Fukuyama, a Johns Hopkins University professor of international political economy, said Sept. 7 that conventional analysis traces terrorism to the reassertion of a traditional form of Islam from the Middle East. The perceived solution, then, is that countries must either wall themselves off from the region or, as in the case of the Bush administration, go in and try to fix the problem.

Speaking at the New American Foundation conference on �Terrorism, Security and America�s Purpose: Towards a More Comprehensive Strategy,� Fukuyama said he believes the radical Islamic problem is more a reaction to globalization than any assertion of traditional Islam. In traditional Islamic society, everything is given to one, he said � one�s beliefs, identity and role in society.

In Western Europe and more cosmopolitan parts of the Middle East, society has become more complicated, and young Muslims have become separated from political power.

Living as Muslims in societies that are not necessarily Muslim, Fukuyama said, they are forced to choose their identity from Western liberal society, which is often unappealing. What someone like Osama bin Laden provides is an identity, he said � a very pure form of Islamic neo-fundamentalism. He compared the plight of young Muslims who follow bin Laden with the alienation from modernity among those who signed up for Bolshevism or Fascism in the early 20th century.

Fixing the Middle East is only part of the problem, Fukuyama said. Many Islamic terrorists who have struck the West in the past few years have come from Europe.Fukuyama said he believes the center of the global terror problem lies not in the Middle East, but in western European cities with large populations of Muslims who feel alienated from Western society.

The biggest problem for the West will be dealing with the challenges of assimilation, he said, noting that the United States has been more successful than European countries at assimilating Muslims into its own society.

President George W. Bush�s response to Islamic terrorism has been misguided, according to Fukuyama. The Bush doctrine of preventive strike relies on an assertion of American exceptionalism, that the United States could operate on behalf of the international community.

But the administration has failed to understand growing currents of anti-Americanism stemming from America�s hegemonic position. Many countries have terrorist problems that could be dealt with through a policy of preventive war, Fukuyama noted, but if Russia, India or China had declared they would use preventive war to deal with terrorists, the United States would have objected.

Fukuyama said benevolent hegemony must be not only morally benevolent but competent as well. With the Iraq war, the United States got so much wrong, beginning with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction there, that the global backlash has been even larger, stemming in part from the credibility problem.

link: http://www.defensenews.com/story.php...0389&C=america

An interesting article...