Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  The Netherlands—the most densely populated country in Europe— did not need more immigrants for any social or economic reason, Fortuyn argued. But unlike Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front to whom he was unfairly compared, Fortuyn did not call for the expulsion of immigrants already in the Netherlands.7 In fact, he called for more government spending on health care, housing, and education, most of it to be directed toward the country’s immigrant population to better facilitate their integration. To call this a fascist political program is to denude the term fascist of all meaning. If Fortuyn was a fascist, then Dick Cheney is an anarchosyndicalist and I am a Whig.

  The press made another serious category error in describing Fortuyn’s assassin. Van der Graaf, who at the time he murdered Fortuyn was thirty-three years old, was white and Dutch-born. The media made much of the fact that he was a vegan. If you mention his name to the average European, that’s the word they will search for—“Oh yes, that vegan.” It’s true that he was an animal-rights activist who as a teenager had laundered oil-soaked birds. But it is absurd to imagine that this had anything to do with Fortuyn’s death. Fortuyn was not known for having any opinion at all about animal rights: his party had scarcely formulated an opinion on the issue. When Van der Graaf subsequently confessed the crime, he stated that he had killed Fortuyn to protect “vulnerable members of society.” By this he clearly did not mean the short-toed treecreeper or the black-tailed godwit.

  But it would be an equal mistake to see Van der Graaf as an Islamist sympathizer or even a deranged but sincere defender of minority rights. Psychiatrists inspected him closely and found him perfectly sane. His alleged sympathy with the Netherlands’ most vulnerable members was transparent window dressing, an excuse calculated to appeal to a Dutch public and judiciary that reflexively find that vocabulary heartwarming. In truth, Van der Graaf had never before in his life lifted a finger to assist Dutch immigrants. He had never attempted, through any legal means, to help any human member of society.

  This is a particularly interesting point: He had no real reason for murdering Fortuyn. He could not explain his action in terms of any coherent ideology. The murder was a piece of sanguinary performance art detached from any set of principles—violence for the sport of it. Police found in his garage condoms filled with a chemical explosive made of calcium chlorate and sugar. Nearby were flasks of sulfuric acid. They found a timer device and anarchist publications in his attic, along with floor plans for the homes of other Dutch politicians. Van der Graaf later told the courts that he found these things “exciting and interesting.”

  Van der Graaf is an old figure in Europe—a vague, disaffected sociopath who is for some reason attracted to the word anarchist and who feels most fully alive when people die and things explode. He might have stepped right off the pages of Demons, Dostoevsky’s portrait of the murderous young nihilists of czarist Russia. Indeed, Van der Graaf’s spiritual ancestors were the narodniki, the group whose terrorist wing, the People’s Will, undertook a campaign of political assassinations throughout Russia that culminated in 1881 in the murder of Czar Alexander II. The narodniki inspired anarchists and political assassins throughout Europe, who spent the next thirty-odd years picking off heads of state before achieving their ultimate triumph, setting all of Europe ablaze, in 1914, with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It is important to remember how it all ended: These kinds of assassinations are contagious, and their consequences have been known vastly to exceed the imaginative capacities of their authors.

  King Umberto I was stabbed in Naples, in 1878, by the anarchist Giovanni Passanante. The king survived, only to be assassinated in 1900 by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci—another vague, disaffected sociopath who had, he said, taken the action for the sake of the common man. “Strange that he should have committed such an act, I thought,” wrote his insane contemporary Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian-born American anarchist. “He had impressed me so differently from most of the other Italians I knew. He was not at all of an excitable temperament and not easily aroused.” 26 Sociopaths rarely are, actually. The personality type is quite fixed. If you consult the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders under “antisocial personality,” you will see these characters described: few emotions, little remorse, a taste for mayhem.

  In France, the great Anarchist Terror lasted from 1892 to 1894. The French terrorist Ravachol, the living symbol of violence for its own sake, committed his first murders in 1886 when he broke into the home of an elderly recluse and split his skull with a hatchet, then chased down and killed the man’s elderly servant. Realizing that he had found his calling, he subsequently took to bombing judges, prosecutors, and army barracks, dabbling on the side in robbing graves. At his trial, when convicted at last of murdering his landlady, he professed his commitment to anarchist principles and, much like Van der Graaf, declared himself to have been acting on behalf of the weaker members of society. He remains a cult hero among French anarchists: If you search under his name on the Internet, you will find websites devoted to his memory—and to urgent action on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal, bien sûr.

  Ravachol served as the inspiration for a host of sociopathic French terrorists, including Auguste Vaillant, who in 1893 threw a nail bomb from the public gallery in the Palais Bourbon into the chamber, injuring twenty deputies; and Emile Henry, who in 1894 tossed a homemade bomb into a crowd because he found its members “pretentious and stupid.” The terror culminated on June 24, 1894, when an Italian anarchist, Sante Jeronimo Caserio, assassinated the French president, Marie-François-Sadi Carnot.

  The Empress Elisabeth of Austria—widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Europe—was killed in 1898 by the Italian anarchist Luigi Luccheni. Mark Twain, living in Austria at the time, was particularly anguished by her death. He described Luccheni thus in a rather maudlin letter to his friend, the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell:

  And who is the miracle-worker who has furnished to the world this spectacle? All the ironies are compacted in the answer. He is at the bottom of the human ladder, as the accepted estimates of degree and value go: a soiled and patched young loafer, without gifts, without talents, without education, without morals, without character, without any born charm or any acquired one that wins or beguiles or attracts; without a single grace of mind or heart or hand that any tramp or prostitute could envy him; an unfaithful private in the ranks, an incompetent stone-cutter, an inefficient lackey; in a word, a mangy, offensive, empty, unwashed, vulgar, gross, mephitic, timid, sneaking, human polecat.27

  He was, in other words, a classic specimen of the type.

  The European influence spread to America, as it so often does. Leon Czolgosz, a figure very much like Van der Graaf, assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. Czolgosz was a recluse, as most of them were. This trait, too, is often characteristic of sociopaths. He spent much of his time reading socialist and anarchist newspapers. When he was arrested, police found a folded newspaper clipping about Gaetano Bresci in Czolgosz’s pocket. Evidently, he had spent many hours studying Bresci’s life and career. Sentenced to electrocution, his last words were: “I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people—the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.” None of these killers had an intelligible plan for the future. All claimed to be acting on behalf of some oppressed or marginalized section of society. All were in fact acting on behalf of no one.

  In light of this, Europe’s response to Fortuyn’s assassination—a recrudescence of a deadly European disease—was bafflingly tepid and equivocal. El Mundo, a leading Spanish newspaper, appeared to blame Fortuyn for his own death, seeing his execution as the natural consequence of his “incendiary racist calls,” labeling him an “heir of Nazism,” and sympathetically portraying his assassin as “fearful and harassed by demagoguery.”28 The editorial stopped just short of applauding the murder. “The brown parties of Europe have a new martyr,” sneered Aftonbladet, Sweden’s leading newspaper
.829 (Not long afterward, the Swedish foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was stabbed to death in a department store by a deranged Serb sympathizer, although her assassin was so clearly off his trolley—when asked to choose a lawyer, he requested Tom Cruise—that it would be a stretch to relate this murder to much of anything.)

  Astonishingly, the Dutch courts declined to give Fortuyn’s murderer the maximum life sentence. Although he showed few signs of remorse, he was sentenced to only eighteen years’ imprisonment. He was fined 34,000 euros. He is widely expected to be free by 2014—well before I’m eligible to collect Social Security. The Dutch judiciary certainly sent a terrifying message with that verdict: Assassinate a politician on Dutch soil and you can expect a very stiff fine.

  Any terrorist considering this case would be hard-pressed not to come to the conclusion that assassinating public figures in the Netherlands is an eminently cost-effective proposition. At the risk of appearing intolerant, I must observe that when a country’s politicians face the prospect of life in a high-security prison cell but their murderers don’t, one worries about that society’s incentive structure.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHITE TEETH

  WHO ARE THESE YOUNG ISLAMIC RADICALS, and why is Europe breeding so many of them? Let us look at this question in Britain, where they have most recently made their presence so obvious.

  First of all, they are not, as is often asserted, an infinitesimal fraction of the population. According to a December 2002 poll conducted by Britain’s ICM Research for the BBC, 44 percent of British Muslims agreed with the statement that al Qaeda’s attacks were a justified response to American aggression. Another 9 percent declared themselves unsure. Nearly 60 percent did not believe al Qaeda had been responsible for the September 11 attacks anyway. Seventy percent believed that Britain and the United States had declared war on Islam. Another 10 percent were unsure.1 Similar results have since been replicated in many other well-constructed opinion polls.

  Islamic radicalism now flourishes among alienated young firstand second-generation immigrants in London. In the north, in cities such as Bradford, Birmingham, Leicester, and Oldham, it is epidemic. The London transport bombers were part of a large cohort of such men in Leeds. Shortly after the bombings, a Whitehall minister warned the prime minister that al Qaeda was recruiting affluent, middle-class Muslims in British universities to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain. Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police chief, noted separately that as many as 3,000 British-born or British-based Muslims had passed through Osama bin Laden’s training camps.

  Nor are these men silent and hidden. Immediately after the attacks, Muslim radicals living in Britain publicly and vocally defended the terrorists’ actions. On July 8, Hani al-Siba’i, head of the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London, described the attacks as “a great victory.” 2 Anjem Choudary, the U.K. leader of the Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, remarked that “in reality the real terrorists are the British regime, and even the British police, who have tried to divide the Muslim community into moderates and extremists, whereas this classification doesn’t exist in Islam.”3 Less than a week later, London’s Guardian offered one of their trainees, Dilpazier Aslam, a forum to relieve himself of his opinions about the bombing. Like the terrorists, he wrote, he was “a Yorkshire lad, born and bred,” and although he did not mention this in his editorial, he was also an Islamic extremist—a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organization dedicated to restoring a global caliphate under Islamic law. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been banned throughout the Middle East and most of Europe. It is an organization every bit as radical as al Qaeda. “Second-and third- generation Muslims,” Aslam explained to readers, “are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks or not.” 4 It is a revealing measure of contemporary Britain’s climate that less than a week after the slaughter of 52 London commuters by second- and third-generation Muslims, one of its leading news organizations could be so egregiously tone-deaf as to offer a forum to a young, male Islamist who suggests, by association, that suicide bombing is a form of sassy boat-rocking.

  Britain has, clearly, been infected by a malefic and virulent ideology. As elsewhere in Europe, the vector of transmission has been foreign-born radical clerics. Britain has welcomed foreign dissidents since the time of Garibaldi. Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, this tradition permitted some of the world’s most radical jihadis, Arab clerics who had fought in Afghanistan and faced criminal sentences for terrorism in their native countries, to seek and receive asylum in Britain. Statutes designed to promote racial tolerance permitted these clerics, mostly trained in Saudi-sponsored madrassas, to promulgate delirious hatred of the West from the pulpits of British mosques. London became the international headquarters for radical groups such as Takfir-wal-Hijra, Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, the Bahrain Freedom Movement, and the Algerian Armed Islamic Group. British authorities studiously ignored this development. Since the 1990s, frustrated French counterterror officials have for this reason referred to the British capital as Londonistan.

  The Salman Rushdie affair, in 1989, galvanized Muslim youths throughout Britain; clerics seized upon this opportunity to organize these newly radicalized young Muslim men into a national political force. Islamist sects in Britain openly recruited for the Taliban. While the clerics were Arabs, their followers were, like most Muslim immigrants in Britain, chiefly men of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin. Pamphlets so inflammatory they would have been banned in most Middle Eastern countries became widely available in the bookstores of Central London. These tracts, like the note stabbed to Theo van Gogh’s chest, assumed as a given that a great jihad had begun and would end only with the West’s utter destruction.9

  The jihad accelerated after September 11. Well before the July 7 bombings, the town of Luton was covered with “Magnificent 19” posters glorifying the hijackers who flew jets into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Islamic terrorists made multiple failed attempts to attack London with conventional and biological weapons before they succeeded: On March 31, 2004, eight Pakistani-born Britons were arrested near Heathrow Airport with half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the ingredient used in the massive bombs that exploded in Bali in October 2002, and in Istanbul the following year. One week after the arrest, British police aborted an Islamist plot to detonate a massive bomb full of the nerve agent osmium tetroxide at Gatwick Airport. In September 2004, four men linked to al Qaeda were arrested in Britain while attempting to purchase radioactive material for a dirty bomb. The intended targets, police believed, were civilians in a crowded area of London. British authorities at the time described an Islamist strike against Britain as “inevitable.” They were right.

  Until recently, the claw-handed Cyclops, Abu Hamza al-Masri, preached to vast crowds of Pakistanis, Bengalis, Algerians, and Egyptians outside London’s Finsbury Park Mosque. Al-Masri tutored Zacarias Moussaoui, who was to have been the twentieth hijacker on September 11, and Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoes. Al-Masri has been captured on film urging his followers to kill non-Muslims:

  If a kafir goes in a Muslim country, he is like a cow. Anybody can take him. That is the Islamic law. If a kafir is walking by and you catch him, he’s booty. You can sell him in the market. Most of them are spies. And even if they don’t do anything, if Muslims cannot take them and sell them in the market, you just kill them. It’s OK.5

  Special points, he stressed, will naturally be awarded in paradise for killing Jews and Americans.

  In January 2003, police discovered chemical warfare protection suits at the Finsbury Park Mosque, as well as a range of conventional weapons, fake passports, and suggestively annotated maps of the London Underground. British government officials warned, though, that to suggest the mosque might be harboring or supporting terrorists “would have worrying racist overtones.” 6<
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  More than a year later, al-Masri was at last arrested and the mosque officially shut down. But when I visited in the autumn of 2004, I was assured by the young Muslim men in the cafés and Islamic bookstores nearby that it was still functioning—“just knock on the door”—and that sermons were held outside the mosque as usual on Fridays. They made no effort to conceal this.

  THE SOCIOECONOMIC GROWTH MEDIUM

  When The Muslim News, a prominent British journal, asked its readers, “Who do you think you are? British-Muslim? British Muslim? Muslim in Britain?” responses such as this one, from “Saghir, United Kingdom,” were typical:

  I am most definetly [sic] not a British muslim but a muslim living in Britain. I don’t ascribe to the corrupt values thoughts [sic ] of this society. Some people ascribe to the view that if we don’t like it here then why don’t we leave. Simply because i [sic] was born here.7

  This is not inevitable or self-explanatory. It is enormously important to observe that American immigrants rarely feel this intensely estranged from America. There are isolated and much-publicized examples to the contrary, but for the most part, Muslims, like most immigrants, come to America and become loyal Americans. Why should British Muslims feel otherwise? Why, in fact, does the British press generally speak of British Muslims, rather than Muslim Britons?

  Not all British Muslims are disloyal to Britain—most aren’t—and not all are hostile to America. Terrorist apologetics are certainly not limited to its Muslim population. (Note to the Guardian: Please be sporting and report that I stress this when writing your otherwise hostile review of this book.) But these views are particularly widespread among Muslims, and there are reasons for this.