“Us versus them” thinking serves ISIS propaganda

Alan Grignard is a leading police officer who works for Belgium’s counter-terrorism task force. His assessment is: “Previously we were mostly dealing with 'radical Islamists' – individuals radicalised toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam – but now we’re increasingly dealing with what are best described as ‘Islamised radicals’.”

According to the website vox.com, this sentence “explains Belgium’s jihadism problem.” Indeed, the difference matters a lot. Grignard’s argument is that terrorist violence in Europe basically results from the alienation of young people from migrant families. These young people are marginalised, become angry, develop violent attitudes, join criminal gangs and form networks of aggressive perpetrators. As Grignard sees it, they only later join outfits with a fundamentalist religious ideology.

In this perspective, it is more important to ensure the inclusion of young people in society than to worry about Islam. In this perspective, investment in education and social work is at least as important as spending on security forces. In this perspective, providing opportunities is the solution, rather than the repression of a minority. If, moreover, the terrorists are youngsters who grew up in Europe’s cities and have the citizenship of European countries, refugees from the Arab world cannot be the problem.

Right-wing populists don’t like what Grignard says. His view raises inconvenient questions about Europe. Many citizens of the EU find it more comforting to discuss the shortcomings of Islam than to consider shortcomings of European states. Publicly expressed discomfort with Islam, however, does nothing to reduce the threat of terrorism. It only makes it worse.

The point is that ISIS strategists want Muslims to be marginalised in Europe. They are keen on some kind of clash of civilisations. The less Muslims in Europe feel at home in Europe, the easier they can recruit fighters. ISIS wants the public narrative to be one of “us versus them.”

That narrative resonates especially among Europe’s prison population, a disproportionate share of which is Muslim, but not deeply religious. Many inmates are indeed only Islamised in prison, and European governments are doing very little to stem that problem. Prison services could employ people who are well-versed in Islamic theology to challenge crude fundamentalism, for example. Husamuddin Meyer is one of the far too few Imams who does that kind of work in Germany. He says that extremists abuse the Islam as a justification for violent actions that are actually not religious. He wants to raise awareness among prisoners and eradicate “ideological misconceptions”.

ISIS violence is awful, and so is ISIS propaganda. Depressingly, many journalists are unwittingly serving ISIS propaganda, however, by feeding Islamophobia now. It would be much wiser to stay cool, as Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian: “There is no sensible defence in a free society against atrocity. But there is a defence against its purpose. It is to avoid hysteria, to show caution and a measure of courage.”