When They Become Radicalized

The editors of the Washington Post lament the problems faced by France and other European countries:

The challenge for France’s leaders, and its European Union neighbors, will now be complex. They must promote greater security, defend free speech and fight anti-Semitism. But they must also head off a backlash against a disadvantaged and alienated minority Muslim population that already is the target of populist demagogues.

and detect a similarity between the Tsarnaev brothers, presumed perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombings, and the Kouachi brothers, presumed murderers of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and editorial staff:

The attacks offer intriguing parallels to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. Both cases involved brothers from immigrant Muslim families who grew alienated and embraced radical Islam. In both cases, the brothers led police on bloody manhunts. And they were both known to authorities as suspected militants prior to the attacks. The French brothers, Said and Chérif Kouachi, were part of a radical network first organized a decade ago in an immigrant-dense Paris slum; another member of the group was killed Friday after taking hostages in a kosher supermarket, while his female partner was still at large.

The French case, like that of Boston, shows the difficulty of preventing assaults by militants who may be inspired by al-Qaeda or other foreign extremist groups but who blend in among fellow citizens — including the vast majority of Muslims who are peaceful and law-abiding. One of the Kouachi brothers had been imprisoned for attempting to travel to Iraq to fight U.S. forces in 2005, while the other was known to have visited Yemen in 2011 and trained with al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch. That will lead to reasonable questions as to why French police did not have the brothers under closer surveillance. But hundreds of French citizens have traveled to the Middle East to support extremist groups; in a democratic society, it is not easy to continuously monitor all of them.

France’s Muslim population is mostly of long standing, the emigration from France’s former African colonies having begun in the 1940s and 50s. Most of France’s Muslims are French citizens, most born French citizens. France’s Muslim population has predominantly been quite secularized. Islamist radicalization is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Not enough note is being taken of France’s 1,400 Muslim citizens who have gone to fight with DAESH in Syria and Iraq or the unknown number of its citizens who have received training from Al Qaeda’s Algerian or Yemeni affiliates and, presumably, become more radicalized during the experience. As the experience with the Kouachi brothers underscores, they cannot all be watched all of the time.

None of France’s alternatives are particularly easy or appealing. My hope would be that France deal with its social problems in which despite their French birth and citizenship its Muslim population is all too frequently relegated to second class citizen status. In other words I would hope they are brought closer rather than being pushed farther away but it is France’s problem to solve.

In my view the worst case outcome is not capitulation to radical Muslim demands or Muslimization but one in which the most radical views of both sides dictate the agenda.