The Real Roots of Terrorism in Europe

Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press

We’ve long ago lost count of the number of atrocities that have killed thousands and thousands of people since 9/11. According to one estimate, there have been over 27,000 attacks globally connected to Islamists since 9/11, or more than 5 per day.

Modern Islamist-organized terrorism has been ongoing since at least 1979, when the mullahs took power in Iran. Since then, numerous groups, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, al-Qaeda, and many others, have wreaked havoc in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world.

The horrors of Nov. 13-14 in Paris are only the latest example.

Yet we refuse to condemn the cultures underlying these mass murders, pretending that the perpetrators, even if allied to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State (ISIS), are just fringe criminals with disordered minds, just aberrations. Why is this?

Theorists like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and their ilk have done their work well: they instilled in western liberal elites, who now govern European and North American countries, a guilt complex so deep about their historic imperialist transgressions against the rest of the world, that these politicians will now not even properly defend their nations against the existential threats that face them.

After all, the ideological cults of diversity and multiculturalism, born of a non-critical relativism, forbid us to acknowledge this “elephant in the room.” Indeed, thanks to ideologues such as Fanon and Said, we even have to acclaim them as in many superior to western cultures.

Born in Martinique, a French Caribbean colony, Fanon’s influential 1961 book Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth) was an analysis of the dehumanising effects of imperialism on people in the Third World. 

Written during the brutal Algerian war to overthrow French rule, Fanon’s advocacy of justified violence by the colonized people against the foreign colonizer was seen as necessary for their mental health and political liberation. 

A psychiatrist, he maintained that murderous violence was “therapeutic” for Third World peoples. The book became required reading among generations of revolutionaries.

Said’s Orientalism, an even more seminal work, published in 1978, virtually created the academic field of “post-colonial studies.” A Palestinian by birth, his work has become a bible among those wishing to destroy Israel.

Said defined orientalism as a “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arab-Islamic peoples and their culture,” a prejudice derived from Western representations that reduces non-western peoples to irrational so-called “others.” Such cultural depictions dominate the discourse of peoples in Europe and North America towards the rest of non-white the world.

Bernard Henri-Levy pointed out in his 2008 book, Left in Dark Times, that the new form of barbarism in the 21st century is the partnership that has emerged between western leftists and Islamists. What unites them is their hatred of western civilization, Israel, and individual liberty. 

Imagine letting in millions of people of the same culture as those already terrorizing Europe. Indeed, political correctness has led to the absurd situation whereby one can’t even say such things out loud -- as if Winston Churchill had put you, rather than British fascist leader Oswald Mosley, in jail during the war for criticizing Nazi Germany.

As refugees pour into Europe, there is no doubt that some will turn out to be potential terrorists who support the Islamic State. There are already Belgian, French and German urban areas which are known as hotbeds of radicalism.

Fears of ISIS sleeper agents posing as refugees to slip into western countries is now a reality. There have already been calls in some European countries to tighten the flow of asylum seekers as a result of the Paris attacks. But Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, rejects the idea.

Nonetheless, the European Union is coming under severe strain. Maintaining European adherence to the Schengen agreement, which guarantees open borders across much of the continent – 22 EU countries, plus four others – will become more difficult. France, the Netherlands and Spain tightened their border controls after the Paris attacks.

So be prepared to see massive zeitgeist shifts and start reading another significant work, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, published in 1996. 

Huntington contended that, with the end of the Cold War, the primary axis of conflict in the future would be along cultural and religious lines. So far little has proved him wrong.