HUGO Micheron is a French political scientist: a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University’s Institute for Transregional Studies, whose work focuses on the evolution of jihadism in Europe. In particular, he has examined how jihad took root and flourished in specific locations in Europe, where it was propagated by veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war and refugees from training camps for the Afghan resistance in Peshawar after these were shut down by the Pakistan government in 1992. Wherever these activists settled in Europe, hotbeds of extremist preaching sprang up, imparting their zeal to new generations reared in exile. These breeding grounds of jihad cross-fertilised, forming networks across north-western Europe while maintaining contact with the Middle East.
In his most recent book, Jihadism in Europe: From the 1990s to the Present Day(translated by Cory Stockwell), Micheron has produced a meticulous record of the successive waves of jihad in Europe over the past three decades as the tides of terrorist activity have ebbed and flowed.
‘At high tide, in phases of ferment,’ he writes, ‘the movement is visible. Sympathisers give priority to armed jihad and actual fighting.’ This is the time when large-scale terrorist attacks are most likely. Then the tide turns, and ‘jihadism seems to have been defeated, and enters into a state of retreat’. At this point, the tendency has been for Britain, along with mainland Europe, to breathe a sigh of relief, and concentrate on what appear to be more pressing matters. A bad mistake: for though ‘armed jihad seems for all intents and purposes to have disappeared’, it is replaced by ideological subversion, as its forces adapt and reconstitute themselves, actively recruiting new zealots in anticipation of the next high tide.
‘This wave-like movement,’ says Micheron, ‘remains a poorly understood aspect of jihadist dynamics in the West. The usual approach tends to ignore this pendulum and measure it in static ways, solely from the standpoint of the threat of terrorism, in other words through a lens in which only the phase of strength is visible’. As a result, the renewed wave of violence, when it arrives, takes us by surprise.
It should not. The strategy of alternating attack and retreat is, in fact, recommended by prominent ideologues of Islam, who urge the jihadis to follow in the path of Muhammad himself: Islam’s prophet having avoided confrontation in the early days of his mission by fleeing from Mecca with his small band of followers, coming back in conquest only after they had gathered strength in Medina.
In this book Micheron ‘aims to put forth elements that allow for an explanation of the expansion of jihadism outside the Middle East, and the political tensions that stem from it in Europe’.
I have to confess that I found it, on the whole, not an easy read. The sheer number of Arabic names involved are a challenge to both pronunciation and memory, and at times, overwhelmed by the jostle of so many facts and people and places, my mind glazed over in a pathetic demonstration of intellectual wimpishness. However, there is plenty to make the effort worthwhile: in particular, the sections devoted to England. Here, for instance, is a scene from Wembley Stadium, as long ago as 1994:
Omar Bakri, a man in his early thirties with a thick brown beard, is sitting behind a podium. The atmosphere is electric. He steals a glance at his audience from behind his thick glasses, straightens his shoulders (which are wrapped in an immaculate tunic), and addresses the crowd of almost seven thousand participants who have come to listen to him:
OMAR BAKRI: What do we want?
AUDIENCE: Jihad!
OMAR BAKRI [in a louder voice]: What do we want?
AUDIENCE [in a louder voice]: Jihad!
A MAN IN THE CROWD: Fi sabil illah [in the way of Allah]!
OMAR BAKRI [cheerfully]: We want jihad in the way of Allah for Bosnia, Palestine, Kashmir, nobody disagrees with that! What do we want every time someone attacks Muslim territory?
AUDIENCE: Ji-had!!!
Yet what is taking place here‘hardly registers in the minds of Britons’.
How can we have been so blind? Or, as far as our long succession of multiculturally fixated governments are concerned, is it a case of ‘none so blind as those who will not see’?
Micheron gives a devastating picture of London in the 1990s, when, with its star preachers, ‘the three emirs’ Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza and Omar Bakri, it was a hub of Islamic ferment. Omar Bakri, in particular, had enormous influence, both here and abroad. It was he who founded the organisation Al-Muhajiroun, with the goal of establishing a caliphate on British soil. Indeed, even after he fled to Lebanon during the phase of ‘armed jihad’ which saw the 2005 London bombings and, in consequence, an attempted crackdown on radical preachers, he maintained his influence, both through his protegé and successor in Britain, Anjem Choudary, and by continuing to direct operations from the Middle East.
Micheron follows the progression of ebb and flow to the next high tide, when second and third generation immigrants flocked to fight for ISIS in Syria and Iraq. It was in the camps of Syria, he says, that the women recruited as wives began to play a significant part in jihad, as mothers indoctrinated their children with a passion to fight and martyr themselves for the cause. Today ‘family cells’ have joined preaching hubs and prisons as fertile recruiting grounds for future generations of jihadists.
What can be done in the face of home-grown Muslim supremacists who have been allowed their head for far too long, abusing, while despising, the freedoms offered by their adopted countries? Micheron concludes his book with some proposals designed to thwart the machinations brought into play at ‘low tide’, but the sheer numerical strength of this alien and militant religion now firmly ensconced in our European homelands suggests that, at this late date, such cautionary measures may prove inadequate.
How, for instance, do you ‘protect the rule of law’ when a vociferous and growing minority are denying its jurisdiction, and setting up their own sharia fiefdoms where halal reigns supreme?
How do you ‘reclaim the disadvantaged areas targeted by these groups’ without violence when in England, at least, many of them have become fiercely defended no-go areas for the police?
How to ‘obstruct the preaching machines’ which, it seems, are now established not only in the mosque and on the internet, but in the privacy of ‘family cells’?
And how to tell a jihadist from an ordinary follower of Islam?
Micheron refers several times in his book to the tendency of the far right to make ‘no distinction between a Muslim and a jihadist – thus falling into the trap of acknowledging the claims of jihadists to be the sole embodiment of Islam’.
Unfortunately, though it may be a small minority of extremists who drive the agenda and commit the atrocities, experience suggests that, when push comes to shove, most ‘ordinary Muslims’ fail to stand up to the firebrands. As ex-Muslim Danny Burmawi says in this video (14.32 – 21.40 in), ‘The problem is that the majority of Muslims, who don’t practise the complete Islam, always side with those who practise the complete Islam, because of the tribal nature of Islam, the concept of the Ummah: this trumps everything else.’
To make things worse, what we are dealing with now is not merely a supremacist ideology: it is a supremacist ideology armed with demographics.
I remember the words of the ‘respected imam’ who told Gavin Ashenden some years ago, in the course of inter-faith dialogues, that his work to establish an Islamic Republic in Britain was now complete: demographics would finish the job.
I hope that the imam was over-optimistic. I hope that proposals such as those offered by Hugo Micheron can stem the tide not only of jihad, but of the stealthy Islamification of our countries. At any rate, his book shows clearly that it is not the outbreaks of violent jihadism which should monopolise our attention, but the steady process of recruitment and indoctrination which is being carried on continuously, beneath the radar, in mosques and Islamic centres, in prisons, and in private homes – cheered on by acolytes of the far left who, he says, ‘for the laudable reasons of openness and the fight against discrimination, fail to see Islamist militancy for what it is’.
