Hi Gus, Thomas Friedman has written a column just for you and your fellow Belgian Arabs:
January 27, 2002
The 2 Domes of Belgium
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BRUSSELS — For all that has been written about Sept. 11, there is still one big hole in our knowledge: We know who Osama bin Laden is. He is a unique cult figure — a Muslim Charles Manson with the organizational skills of Jack Welch. We also know who bin Laden's passive supporters are — all those Muslims who sympathize with him out of anger with their own leaders, America or Israel. But who were the guys in the middle — the killer pilots who went beyond passive support to become suicidal mass murderers?
In search of that answer, I came to Europe. Why? Look at the biographies of many of the key hijackers or Al Qaeda agents: Mohamed Atta, Ziad al-Jarrah, Marwan al-Shehhi, etc. It's the same story: He grew up in a middle-class family in the Arab world, was educated, went to Europe for more studies, lived on the fringes of a European society (many in Belgium), gravitated to a local prayer group or mosque, became radicalized there by Islamist elements, went off for training in Afghanistan and presto — a terrorist was born. The personal encounter between these young men and Europe is the key to this story.
A female Arab friend who also studied abroad with young Muslim men described them this way: "They are mostly men who grew up in an environment where the rules were very clear. They grew up never encountering anything that shakes their core. Suddenly they are thrown into Europe, and there are a whole different set of social rules that shakes their core. They don't know how to adapt because they've never had to, so they become more insular and hold onto their [Islamic] core even more."
This trend is reinforced by the fact that Muslim immigrants are often perennial outsiders in Europe. In America, Muslims can enjoy a fairly rapid transition to citizenship, but in Europe there is no melting pot. "Our problem in Belgium is that there is Islamophobia," said Nordin Maloujahmoum, president of the Muslim Executive Council of Belgium. "Some 54 percent of the population here say they don't believe non-Belgian ethnic groups could ever be real Belgians. A woman wearing a veil here finds it impossible to get a job."
Fauzaya Talhaoui, the only Muslim woman in the Belgian Parliament, told me that her parents' generation came from North Africa and just wanted to assimilate but that many in her generation, after being frozen out, have turned to Islam. "They took the view — if you want to treat us differently, we will act differently," she said.
Here's the truth: What radicalized the Sept. 11 terrorists was not that they suffered from a poverty of food, it was that they suffered from a poverty of dignity. Frustrated by the low standing of Muslim countries in the world, compared with Europe or the United States, and the low standing in which they were personally held where they were living, they were easy pickings for militant preachers who knew how to direct their rage.
"Many of the terrorists we are now confronting are a Western phenomenon, existing inside the Islamic diaspora in the U.S. and Europe," wrote Adrian Karatnycky, the president of Freedom House, in a highly original essay in National Review. These men are not "sleepers" planted within Europe years in advance by bin Laden, he argues; instead, they are minted right there, when they encounter the West.
"Like the leaders of America's Weather Underground, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy's Red Brigades, and Japan's Red Army Faction, the Islamic terrorists were university-educated converts to an all-encompassing neo-totalitarian ideology," Mr. Karatnycky argues. "For them, Islamism is the new universal revolutionary creed, and bin Laden is Sheikh Guevara."
Mr. Karatnycky is right: the real challenge of the West is to understand what is happening not just in Iraq or Saudi Arabia, but also in its own backyard, in the chemical reaction between Western societies and their own mosques and Muslim diasporas. That's where the killer pilots were conceived, and that's where they must be tracked — but in a way that respects the fact that 99.9 percent of the Muslims in Europe or America are good citizens, not militants.
Belgium is a microcosm of the whole story. There are 300 mosques in Belgium today, with 300 domes. But there is another famous dome here: the huge radar dome at NATO headquarters in Mons. Somewhere in the cultural encounter between these two domes of Belgium — the dome of NATO and the dome of the mosques — lies the key to this Sept. 11 and maybe the next.
nytimes.com |
