Under Our Very Noses:The terrorist next door

National Review, Nov 5, 2001 by Adrian Karatnycky

As U.S. and British bombs strafe Afghanistan's sparse landscape, it is comforting to think that we are striking at the heart of Islamic extremism. Yet while Osama bin Laden's network is clearly a major coordinating and breeding ground for terror, not all the terrorists who attacked America on September 11 were the products of the Islamic Middle East and South Asia. Many became extremists while living in the West, sustained by fanatical mullahs and organizations that operate openly in our midst.

It is indeed reassuring to view the terrorists who now threaten us as an exogenous threat rooted in the Middle East's Hobbesian environment of obscurantism, poverty, and repression-but police and press investigations offer evidence of a far more complex, and ominous, picture.

The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression. Equally important, it is becoming clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of graduates of bin Laden's schools for terror are Muslims who have grown up and been educated in the United States and Europe.

To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class, shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin in Zurich or London; or of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in Paris. Like their Leninist revolutionary forebears, the terrorist shock troops of al-Qaeda see their mission as an international revolution-in their case, to create the khilafah, a global government under Islamic rule. For them, Islamism is the new universal revolutionary creed, and bin Laden is Sheikh Guevara.

Mohamed Atta was the son of a moneyed Egyptian lawyer and official, and those who knew him have described him as a class snob and snazzy dresser. Atta spent his last nine years living in Germany and the U.S. While he may have been linked to activist groups in Egypt, there is nothing in his record that indicates that he was a committed political extremist or even deeply religious. Rather, there is significant evidence that he came to his fanatical beliefs in Hamburg-home to as many as 2,500 Islamic radicals in a community of some 80,000 Muslims. No longtime Islamist "sleeper" deposited from the East, he was shaped by the environment of extremist Islamic politics at a German technical university.

Another hijack leader, Ziad Jarrah, was the son of well-off Lebanese parents who subsidized his life in the West, wiring thousands of dollars to support his academic studies and pilot's training. Educated in Lebanon at exclusive private Christian schools, Jarrah played basketball, drank alcohol, and while in the U.S. drove a red Mitsubishi Eclipse. He is unlikely to have been a committed Islamic radical in Lebanon; he went to Germany soon after concluding high school. Another key terrorist, Marwan al-Shehhi, came from this same Hamburg community, where, according to a terrorism export quoted in the Boston Globe, "there is a lot of peer pressure" to embrace radical Islam.

Counterintelligence operations and arrests around Europe have confirmed that other suspected plotters came to their radical views in the West. Zacarias Moussaoui-now being held by federal authorities in New York- became radical in 1991 under the influence of a Wahhabi group at his university in France. Djamel Beghal, now under arrest in France, has admitted to organizing a conspiracy to blow up a U.S. cultural center. Beghal grew up in the Paris suburbs and lived in London from 1997 to 1999, where he recruited future terrorists from Muslims who had also grown up in Europe.

As the dragnet widens in Germany, France, and Britain, more attention is being focused on the significant network of "religious" political groups. The website of the Islamist, London-based al-Muhajiroun, Arabic for "the emigres," offers a global map of the organization's branches in England, the U.S., Lebanon, and Pakistan. A press release issued by the group on September 16 screams, "USA at War with Islam." Among the group's slogans are "USA, You Will Pay" and "The Final Hour Will Not Come Until the Muslims Conquer the White House." Their goal is a world state under Islamic rule.

Al-Muhajiroun's "spiritual" leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammed, is a Syrian cleric who after the September 11 attacks issued a fatwa branding Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf an apostate and non- Muslim. Earlier fatwas by the sheikh (who lives on the dole, courtesy of British taxpayers) denounce as apostates Muslims who run for office in Britain and brand as sinners those Muslims who vote in British elections. A February 2001 report in the Guardian noted that "Sheikh Bakri has openly admitted to being responsible for sending as many as 700 undergraduates to fight abroad, mostly in Kashmir."

A mosque in London's Finsbury Park is home base for Supporters of Sharia (SOS), "sharia" meaning the Islamic way of life and law. The group is headed by Abu Hamza, a cleric who lost both arms and an eye fighting in Afghanistan. Such battle-hardened fanatics have gravitated to the West in part because of the freedom of maneuver and expression they enjoy in democratic societies. Under the guise of religious practice, they are now engaged in the education of new generations of vengeful fanatics, some of whom they inspire to learn from bin Laden the arts of terror and war. Hundreds of British Muslims already have been recruited to fight in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Kashmir, and Chechnya; many eventually become part of the bin Laden terrorist network.