Obama Was Right to Skip Paris

Yet it’s the European reaction that plays right into Al Qaeda’s hands, and the Americans who are actually taking the wiser approach by not turning the Paris terror attacks into a giant battle for civilization—and Charlie Hebdo into a rallying cry for free speech. It was hardly a surprise that the group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula appeared eager to claim responsibility Wednesday for the attacks. But for Al Qaeda, a triumph isn’t complete until it gets a reaction.

And, wow, did it ever get a reaction in Europe—precisely the wrong kind.

Overall, the direction of the public debate plays directly into Al Qaeda’s narrative that Muslims cannot live in the West without demeaning themselves. Meanwhile, the increase in anti-Muslim violence in the wake of the attacks reinforces the idea that Muslims are in danger and under siege.

I have witnessed the success of this recruiting campaign with my own eyes.

From about 2005 to 2009, I worked on several journalistic investigations into extremism in the Muslim world and the UK. In the early days after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, it was clear that al Qaeda’s Western recruits – in so far as there were any - were largely Muslim men who had been born abroad and likely had a personal connection to conflicts in the Middle East. A smaller group of recruits were British-born Muslims from immigrant families. These men, like Omar Sheikh Saeed, one of the killers of American journalist Daniel Pearl, came from relatively privileged backgrounds, and adopted al Qaeda’s cause after witnessing suffering in the Muslim world. (Saeed was radicalized after taking part in a relief convoy taking supplies to beleaguered Bosnian civilians in the 1990s.) At the time, al Qaeda’s rhetorical vision held no interest for men from the criminalized, drug and gang culture background of the Kouachi brothers.

In 2007, I spent a year embedded with radical groups in London and saw the membership profile change. The groups’ main activities were demonstrations, religious study circles (which focused heavily on the same literalist interpretation of Islam that Al Qaeda comes from) and attending mainstream Muslim events, such as weekly prayers, as a show of force to the wider community. To begin with most of the members I met were young and from Pakistani or Bangladeshi backgrounds with settled, professional or aspirant families. Many attended events without their families’ knowledge, saying that parents disapproved of them skipping classes at college or damaging their prospects at work. Spending time with them, their efforts to seem threatening by wearing hoods or bandanas over their faces in public seemed comical in contrast to their carefully packed lunchboxes full of home-cooked food. These men came to be outnumbered by an increasing group of slightly older men often with prison backgrounds and experience of violence. Some were from Pakistani or Arab families, although a significantly large proportion were Caribbean or white converts. These men spent less time attending study circles. They preferred demonstrations and other events that presented the chance of confrontation

The pool for the most potentially dangerous kind of recruit is thus much smaller in America. However, social and economic conditions are not the entire reason the United States has been more insulated. U.S. political figures have helped to ensure U.S. Muslims feel more secure in their “American-ness” despite hostility from some quarters of the media and general public. This goes a long way to undermine Al Qaeda’s narrative of an American-led war against them and their religion.

President George W. Bush’s remarks in the face of a rise in attacks against American Muslims in the days after 9/11 are a good case in point. The former president made an impassioned defense of the place of Muslims in American life and declared that the American Muslim leaders he had met “love America as much as I do.”

After Al Qaeda’s 2005 attacks in London, Prime Minister Tony Blair merely attempted to refute Al Qaeda’s ideology. This only had the effect of underlining popular Muslim grievances with Western foreign policy. By not acknowledging that these grievances were legitimate (which considering his political decisions, he could not have done) he allowed Al Qaeda to look like the champion of Muslim causes that it craves to be. Most damaging, British Muslims felt that he was drawing a line in the sand and daring British Muslims to choose between deeply held grievances and their place in Britain’s social and cultural fabric.

But despite the huge boost Al Qaeda’s rhetorical vision has received from the West’s recent wars in the Muslim world, it is not getting the global uprising of over a billion people it was after. Although more Muslims are ready to accept the idea of a war against Islam, surprisingly few in either the Muslim world or the West are signing up for violent resistance. In the Muslim world itself, the reason is largely down to Al Qaeda’s own failures. In Western countries, Al Qaeda’s message is least powerful where it is undermined by local political and economic circumstances. The lesson the United States needs to take from Europe’s experience—and what Europe needs to learn itself—is that the best counter-extremism policy is built around letting citizens feel they belong.