What France Does Best — y Reuel Marc Gerecht & Gary J. Schmitt
Two waves of terrorist attacks, the first in the mid-1980s and the second in the mid-1990s, have made France acutely aware of both state-supported Middle Eastern terrorism and freelancing but organized Islamic extremists. In comparison, the security services in Great Britain and Germany were slow to awaken to the threat from homegrown radical Muslims. Britain’s gamble was that its multicultural approach to immigrants was superior to France’s forced-assimilation model. But with the discovery of one terrorist plot after another being planned by British Muslims, as well as the deadly transportation bombings that took place in London on July 7, 2005, the British have begun to question the wisdom of their “Londonistan” approach to Muslim immigration.
Similarly, until recently, the belief in Berlin was that Germany was safe from homegrown Muslim terrorism; but two major bomb plots over the past year and a half—one aimed at German trains, the second at American installations and interests in Germany—have raised serious doubts in the minds of many German security officials about that previous assumption. And French scholars and journalists have been way ahead of their European and American counterparts in dissecting Islamic extremism and in analyzing the phenomenon of European-raised Muslim militants. French officials who work in counterterrorism are well apprised of this intellectual spadework, often maintaining friendly relationships with scholars and journalists working in the field. The French interior ministry and prison system, for example, were remarkably helpful to the Franco-Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar in his interviews of jailed al-Qaeda members.
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