Europe’s New Terrorist Normal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-new-terrorist-normal-1424029932
Islamist attacks are becoming routine on the Continent.
Islamist violence visited Denmark twice on the weekend, underscoring Europe’s new terrorist normal. Homegrown or immigrant Muslim terrorists targeting innocents and the Western way of life are becoming a feature of Continental life.
The alleged assailant didn’t choose his victims at random. First he fired dozens of rounds at a cafe in Copenhagen during a debate on free speech, killing one and wounding three. Police believe the same man attacked a synagogue hours later, killing a Jewish civilian guard and maiming two officers. Early Sunday police killed the man they believe committed both attacks. Witnesses heard him cry “Allahu Akbar” during the cafe assault.
Among those attending the debate at the Krudttoenden cafe was Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has received death threats and an al Qaeda bounty since the 2007 publication of a cartoon he drew that mocked Muhammad. A failed suicide bomber attacking downtown Stockholm in 2010 mentioned Mr. Vilks’s name in an email explaining his motives, and later that year the cartoonist’s home was the target of arson. He lives under police protection.
Denmark is also home to Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that set off days of Muslim rage world-wide in 2005 by publishing Muhammad cartoons. Five suspected terrorists were arrested in 2010 and four later convicted for plotting to murder Jyllands-Posten staffers, and an ax-wielding Somali tried but failed to murder one of the newspaper’s cartoonists at his home.
The 8,000-strong Danish Jewish community has also been besieged by anti-Semitism from the country’s Muslim quarters. In 2012 Israel’s Ambassador to Denmark warned visiting Israelis not to wear kippahs and other visible religious symbols.
Elite hostility to Israel amplifies street-level anti-Semitism. The Danish government has disbursed millions of kroner to anti-Israel activists and agitprop campaigns in recent years, according to NGO Monitor, an Israeli civil-society organization. Perhaps Danish officials will now spend less time henpecking Jerusalem about efforts to prevent terrorism and devote more energy to protecting their own citizens from the same forces.
They might look to France, where since the attacks on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, the government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls has ramped up counterterror powers. These include isolating jihadists in prison, giving security forces broader authority to monitor terror suspects online, and boosting staff and funding at intelligence agencies. These prudent measures, so bewailed by imprudent civil libertarians, can help avert large-scale atrocities that would result in public demand for mass detentions, expulsions and other broad restrictions.
Stopping terrorism from becoming normal will also require describing accurately the jihadist threat. The Obama Administration in the U.S. has refused to identify Islamism—or even “Islamic extremism”—as the ideology behind the recent attacks on the Continent and the horrors in Syria and Iraq. Such obfuscation doesn’t help moderate and reformist Muslims, whose cooperation is essential to defeating jihadists. Copenhagen can set a counterterror example by calling the enemy by its name.
Comments are closed.
