In Europe’s midst

HOW can one begin to fathom what is going through the head of a man who, in the name of God and without warning, sets out to kill as many of his fellow citizens as he can? Barely a week after British suicide-bombers tore the heart out of London's rush hour, taking dozens of innocent lives, it is hard to see anything more than sheer hatred. But Europe, which is home to some 20m of the world's Muslims, will have to look deeper into the jihadi mind than that. There is a clear threat of more terrorist attacks, and not only in Britain.

On the July 7th attacks themselves, a surprising amount is already known. On July 12th British police announced their discovery that four young men carrying rucksacks packed with a specialised, military form of explosive had travelled to London. At least three of the friends seen smiling and laughing in closed-circuit television pictures at King's Cross station then blew themselves up on three Underground trains and a bus. Three of the men were from Pakistani families in northern England and the fourth was Jamaican-born, but all were British. One worked in his father's fish and chip shop. Police think the mastermind behind Britain's first-ever suicide-bomb remains at large, as do more potential bombers. If they are right, then the implication is that the London bombings were not just the act of isolated malcontents but a sign of the continued existence of a trans-national terror network.

The boy next door

Whether from such a network or from local groups, the threat of jihadism is being felt throughout Europe. In the Netherlands this week, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 27-year-old Dutchman of Moroccan descent, stood trial for the murder of Theo van Gogh, a film director whose work had attacked Islam's treatment of women. Mr Bouyeri was linked to the “Hofstad group”, some of whom were accused of wild plans to blow up Schiphol airport, the Dutch parliament and one of the country's nuclear reactors. In Italy, amid fears that the country faces attack, the government of Silvio Berlusconi plans to strengthen anti-terror laws. In Spain, they are still mourning the victims of last year's Madrid bombs.

The protean threat of jihad in Europe poses a wider danger, too. Freer than they would be in the Middle East and North Africa, radicals can ship money and manpower from wealthy Europe to violent groups elsewhere. Would-be attackers bearing European passports - often “clean-skinned”, ie, unknown to western intelligence services - can more easily transport terror to the United States - as they did on September 11th 2001 - than if they were known dissidents from Saudi Arabia or Syria. For everyone's sake, therefore, Europeans need to stiffen their campaign against indigenous jihad. And that means concentrating on three things: the jihadis, the law and - most controversially - Islam itself.

What could possibly explain the journey that led four young Muslims from childhood in Leeds to mass-murder in London? The fact that the chosen method was suicide feels especially shocking, but probably should not. It was already the method used on September 11th, and was then the intended technique of a Briton called Richard Reid who converted to Islam and sought to destroy a passenger plane with a bomb concealed in his shoe. In 2003 two educated young men quit Britain to become suicide-bombers in Tel Aviv. That a desire for martyrdom is added to the desire to kill may reveal the intensity of feeling, or just desperation to make the attack succeed. Much more important is the urge to kill in the first place.

For every one of these footsoldiers of terror, tens of thousands of similar young men choose to lead uneventful and peaceful lives. Amid Turks in Germany, Algerians in France and Pakistanis in Britain, it is vain to look for a simple cause that determines the conversion to jihad (literally, struggle). But there are subtle patterns and tendencies. Many are the children or grandchildren of immigrants, some of whom grew up huddled in what Robert Leiken, of the Nixon Centre in Washington, DC, calls “internal colonies ” - -ghettos cut off from the culture of their new homeland. Most are under 30; some are well educated. Although they may be middle class, their community is probably not. Often they have grown apart from their family: some might have drifted into petty crime, or an unIslamic taste for alcohol and women. Something then leads them to religion and thence radical voices preaching the Utopia of worldwide Islamic rule.

It is hard to intercept the wild career from misfit to Mujahideen precisely because it is so unpredictable. Some people blame the war in Iraq, but that is to confuse the means of recruitment with its fundamental causes. Al-Qaeda was busy bombing its way across the world before American tanks rolled into Baghdad. Atrocities in Chechnya and Afghanistan were the rallying call back then - and without Fallujah, would still be today. Iraq is a threat chiefly because it is a magnet and a training ground for foreign fighters. Hints at the withdrawal of troops only add to its potency.

A better response is to tighten the law at home. In the Netherlands, where some members of the Hofstad group were initially acquitted for all crimes but then rearrested, that will shortly mean increasing the powers of arrest and admitting evidence from the intelligence agencies and anonymous sources. In Italy it ought to mean fixing the country's hopelessly fragmented system of prosecutors and law-enforcement agencies. Across Europe, investigators need powers to inhibit terror financing and to trace networks of jihadis through e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers. In Britain, where police already have broad powers, it should mean no more than the creation of new offences of planning terror and preaching violence. The aim must be to enhance surveillance and the workings of justice without falling, as America has with Guantanamo Bay, into the trap of betraying the fundamental principles of the law or of civil liberty.

There is also a good case for taking a harsher line on the firebrands who preach violence and murder. Van Gogh's killer was the disciple of a Syrian imam. In London, which critics disparage as “Londonistan” for its willingness to accept dangerous radicals, Abu Hamza al-Masri, a one-eyed imam at the Finsbury Park mosque, preached to Zacarias Moussaoui, the would-be September 11th hijacker.

It would be wrong, though, to seek to exclude or lock up every imam who has uttered a provocative word. The struggle against the jihadis is the struggle of European tolerance against the closed mind of bigotry. It is a struggle that will ultimately depend upon Islam itself to guide its young men towards good deeds rather than the security services to identify those who have turned bad - vital though that plainly is. British Muslim groups have reacted well by vocally and unequivocally condemning the terrorists. It would be even better if they could now lead public marches against the men of violence and, within their communities, a public debate against jihadism.

For what is needed is a free and open debate within Islam, one in which the modernisers emulate the tactics of the extremists in a crucial way: that they exploit Europe's free flow of ideas in order to win the argument against those keener on medieval practices and violence. Ultimately, that will be what makes jihadis empty their heads of hatred.

Editorial on the implications of the terrorist attacks in London, 7 July 2005

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