In this global network terrorist organizations and sympathizers meet, train and plot with relative freedom. Yet these diverse groups belonging to different nationalities from all over the world do not have a common political entity that they would call their own. They express the need of a state because according to their home-made reading of Islam, war and peace can be declared by a state, whose laws they would all abide by.Hence these radicals, mostly religious zealots, have created a virtual electronic caliphate. They rely on each other’s determination to wage a holy war in the house of evil that is occupied by Christians, Jews and Muslims alike who are not as radical as they. This fictive state/caliphate has many Web sites, chat rooms, blogs and message boards. Youths especially, who are dissatisfied with what they are and the immediate social environment in which they are living, find each other in this electronic jungle and share their grudges, dissatisfactions and expectations. Their passion to destroy a world that does not offer them meaning and hope is sharpened with each other’s hatred, generated by a different indoctrination that separates the world into the house of evil or war and the house of goodness or peace (the caliphate).
Most of Europe’s intelligence services in countries where Muslims have taken up residence ran studies on such communities and have found that radical Islam has inspired a multitude of movements, organizations and groups that sympathize with militant Islam. These Islamist groups are very active on the Internet.
For example, British authorities have verified that as many as 3,000 individuals have been trained in al-Qaeda camps over the years, some in Afghanistan prior to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, some in Pakistan’s tribal areas after Sept. 11. What is surprising is that they were born and raised in the United Kingdom.
Systematic polls taken in Britain have shown that about 100,000 British Muslims, mostly from Pakistani families, were in favor of the July 7, 2005 subway and bus attacks in London. Some 200 embryonic plots trailed by Britain’s internal intelligence service, MI5, were tracked back to Pakistani Britons, mostly well-educated youths from middle-class families. The information gathered by the British authorities worried them a great deal.
In the early 2000s, after the attack on the Twin Towers, the DST and the RG, France’s internal intelligence services, estimated that 40 percent of the imams in 1,000 main mosques in France had no proper or professional religious training. They have simply put together sermon material from pro-al-Qaeda Web sites and preach it to the local Muslim migrants.
These sermons influence young and old alike. Last year an American Muslim military psychiatrist, namely Maj. Nidal Hassan, age 39, went into a frenzy on Nov. 5, 2009 and killed 13 people, 11 of whom were soldiers, and wounded 30, at Fort Hood, Texas. It is reported that he fell under the spell of this electronic jungle of hate. His guide to this massacre was a US-born Yemeni cleric who had left the United States and moved to Yemen. As tensions rise in Yemen and al-Qaeda moves in due to NATO pressure to oust it from Afghanistan, a crescent of radicalism is in the making across the Gulf of Aden and Somalia.
Together with Afghanistan, this area seems to be the new target for fighting against extremism together with some of Pakistan’s tribal areas and Karachi, a port city of 18 million. The Taliban is fighting and organizing to take over the government in Afghanistan, while the NATO and US forces fall victim to the Vietnam syndrome. So it seems that it will be a drawn-out struggle with dubious results.
In Muslim countries such as Morocco and Saudi Arabia, it is claimed that roughly 1 percent of their populations are religious extremists and 10 percent fundamentalist, essentially in sympathy with the extremists’ agenda. When converted to numbers on a global scale, of the 1.3 billion Muslims on earth, there are roughly 13 million extremists and 130 million sympathizers. We have a lot to do in fighting against radicalism rather than radicals and extremists.
