Train bombings in Madrid and Spain, three years ago killed 191 people, the London transit attack two years ago killed 52 commuters, and a string of plots have been discovered and foiled. Then this month, arrests were made in a plot in Germany that the police said could have caused even worse carnage than in Madrid or London.
In response, Europeans for the most part are looking inward to explain why Islamic extremists have made the continent a favoured target, while the United States has been spared — despite its leadership and the anger it has stirred waging wars in two Muslim countries.
In that setting, questions about how minority populations of Muslims are integrated into the mainstream are coming to the fore, along with basic questions about Islam itself. Less attention is being focused on finger-pointing at the United States, analysts say.
German newspapers reporting on the arrests this month of three men — two German citizens who converted to Islam and a Turkish resident of Germany — did not mention the Bush administration. Instead, they focused on the tougher security measures, and Islam itself.
France and Germany both opposed the war in Iraq, and both countries have been targets of terrorist plots by Islamic extremists, noted François Heisbourg, a French expert on terrorism and a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. A French government white paper in 2006 described 11 attempts by Islamic jihadists to blow up targets in France in the past 10 years, some of them before September 11, Heisbourg said. This showed, he said, that just because France has criticised the Bush administration and stayed out of Iraq, it has had no immunity from terrorism.
As Europeans search for the reasons for their vulnerability to terrorism, the German Marshall Fund of the United States released a survey this month that showed a sharp increase in the number of Germans who fear international terrorism. The survey found that 70 percent of Germans felt they might suffer a terror attack, 32 percentage points more than in 2005. That brings the fear of terror among Germans close to the level of fear among Americans, which stood at 74 percent in a similar survey, said John K. Glenn, the director of foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund.
The most recent results by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show a continuing low regard for the United States in Europe. In a 2007 survey in Germany, the proportion with a favourable opinion of the United States fell to 30 percent, from 60 percent in 2002.
A 2005 survey by the Royal Elcano Institute, a Madrid research organisation, found that 63 percent of respondents felt Islamic terror sprang mainly from religious fanaticism, and only 17 percent said it was reacting chiefly to American policy.
Across Europe, a deep uneasiness about the spread of Islamic radicalism has taken hold, said Christoph Bertram, the former director of the Institute of International Security Affairs in Germany. Each European country is discovering its own set of problems trying to deal with its Muslim population.
In France, for example, the riots in 2005 in Paris among mostly North African immigrants, many of them Muslims, were mainly about economic discrimination, said Heisbourg. In response to the 2005 attacks on the London transit system, and before the foiled attack in Germany, the British and German governments were searching for ways to better integrate their Muslim populations.
Constanze Stelzenmuller, the director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin, said that earlier government attitudes of “indifference masquerading as tolerance” have now been shunted aside. Now, she said, German language courses are offered to Turkish immigrants, particularly women, to better integrate those at the edges of the population of Turkish origin.
The core of the September 11 attackers hatched their plan in Hamburg, so “no one is blaming the Americans,” Stelzenmuller said. “A reasonable German on the street will say that the jihadists are brought on by their rejection of society, and that Western foreign policy is a root cause of that.”
NYT