WarSclerotic

EU Commission’s Willful Blindness on Islamist Terror, Clarion Project, Leslie Shaw, September 29, 2016

Illustrative photo: © Flickr/Ally Aubry

This outright refusal to call a spade a spade mirrors the policy of the Obama administration. The terminology is identical, with no reference to Islam, as if the problem were a generic one common to all belief systems rather than one in particular.

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On September 26, 2016 the European Commission organized a conference in Brussels titled Addressing Radical Ideologies and Violent Extremism: The Role of Research.

The absence of the word “Islamic” from the title, prospectus and agenda of the conference is an indication of the extent to which the European Commission is in denial as to the nature of the threat, in spite of the fact that all of the terrorist attacks throughout Europe in the past number of years have been perpetrated by Islamic radicals.

This outright refusal to call a spade a spade mirrors the policy of the Obama administration. The terminology is identical, with no reference to Islam, as if the problem were a generic one common to all belief systems rather than one in particular.

The conference, attended by around 120 people, mostly academics and representatives of NGOs, was organized to coincide with the publication of the policy review Addressing Terrorism: European Research in social sciences and the humanities in support to policies for inclusion and security written by Gilles Kepel and Bernard Rouquier, two of France’s leading experts on the global jihad.

Their policy review is a summary of currently available scientific knowledge, including 10 projects funded by the European Union on emerging forms of violent radicalization and terrorism. It proposes concrete areas of research needed to further increase this knowledge.

The conference opened with an informative and no-holds-barred joint presentation by Kepel and Rougier, who, surprisingly, identified the threat for what it is: global jihad driven by Islamic radicalism.

Recognizing that the main problem was one of national security, they nevertheless subscribed to the idea that research conducted by social scientists could at least partially contribute to dealing with the problem by addressing the causes of radicalization and proposing ways to minimize or contain it.

However, they left the audience in no doubt that from their perspective the problem is not one of radicalization but jihad.

One could sense a degree of unease and embarrassment among the European Commission representatives on the panel, as well as in the audience, at the straight talk of Kepel and Rougier, as if their presentation had caused the mask of denial and political correctness to slip.

Robert-Jan Smits, Director General for Research and Innovation of the European Commission, even asked them to confirm he had understood correctly when they said that Europe was at war with radical Islam.

The conference continued with a series of presentations on EU-funded projects including topics such as identities, personal belonging, youth, cities and ideologies that erode social cohesion.

Not one of these presentations pointed the finger at radical Islam as the principal source of the deadly threat that Europe is facing and will continue to face for decades to come, if not longer.

Close observation of the body language of Kepel and Rougier revealed beyond a doubt that they were not impressed with the content of the presentations nor with the recommendations for the bridging of knowledge gaps and future research needs.

This is not surprising given their close proximity to global jihad in the course of their work. Kepel is even on the Islamic State hit-list.

None of the questions put by members of the audience challenged the softly-softly approach of the speakers, and some audience members seemed to be of the opinion that jihadists are victims of European society rather than its mortal enemies.

An obvious question would have pointed to the blatant policy contradiction involved in admitting over a million migrants to Europe in 2015 and continuing to let them in during 2016, in the full knowledge that among those migrants were Islamist terrorists and that the homegrown Islamist terrorists in France, Belgium and elsewhere are the children and grandchildren of previous waves of Muslim immigration.

All in all, aside from the outstanding contributions of Kepel, Rougier and Hugo Micheron, another French expert on jihad, one left the conference with the impression that the European Commission is willfully blind to the jihadist threat.

It is as if people living in a building with a leaking roof decided to research the causes of rainfall by studying meteorology, in the vain hope of finding a way to stop the rain, instead of fixing the roof.

This entry was posted on September 29, 2016 at 3:01 PM and is filed under Europe and Islam. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Europe and Islam