THE EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENT

Islamist extremists and terrorists have found a number of facilitating factors in Europe. They can utilize geographic, demographic, political, and social features of the host countries to promote their agenda and achieve their operational goals.

Favorable Legal Regimes

Extremists in Europe attempt to take advantage of Western values and highly developed legal systems. Conceptions of privacy and civil liberties, asylum laws, stringent rules of evidence, and other legal protections not available in most countries in the Muslim world, all lend themselves to manipulation by extremists. Over the past decades, European asylum policies admitted not only the unjustly persecuted but also a slew of radicals banished from their home countries – and even some other European countries – for inciting violence and destruction. For instance, members of the Frankfurt cell later convicted of plotting to bomb Strasbourg’s Christmas market sought refuge in London from French counterterrorist authorities. Elaborate judicial procedures and legal protections enabled foreign extremists to remain active through a seemingly endless series of hearings and appeals, building up their organizations and acquiring followers.

After protracted legal proceedings, the British government succeeded in deporting two of the most notorious extremists in the United Kingdom, Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada, but efforts by the Norwegian government to deport Mullah Krekar, founder of the terrorist Ansar al-Islam organization and declared by the Norwegian government to be “a threat to national security,” to Iraq have been thwarted by legal proscriptions that prohibit extradition of refugees to countries where they may be at risk of death or torture. Radwan Al-Issar, considered to be the spiritual leader of the Hofstad Group, to which Van Gogh’s assassin belonged, was able to continue to operate in Germany and the Netherlands for years and to travel between the two countries despite repeated expulsions and detentions. In Germany, it took the courts decades to finally expel the Turkish extremist leader Metin Kaplan, the leader of the radical Islamist movement Kalifatsstaat (Caliphate State). The French, by contrast, have regularly expelled radical imams.