How terrorism finds root in the West

Alienation and radical European politics are factors.

By John K. Cooley

from the May 23, 2007 edition

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ATHENS - It's conventional wisdom that Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian terrorists attack Western societies partly as reactions to conflicts in their own regions, such as the Palestinian-Israeli strife. But there's plenty of evidence that extremist ideologies, even if born abroad, are often nurtured in the West.

New French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his advisers and supporters in the academic world realize this. It's why they recommend that France, Britain, and their European neighbors strengthen integration of their Muslim and other immigrant populations – in the way, for example, that millions of Arab-Americans, Iranian-Americans, and Hispanics have been helped to be successful members of US society.

Leading French Islamic expert Olivier Roy has pointed out what this journalist has experienced over decades of reporting: Domestic extremism in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia isn't just domestic. Sometimes it even originates or is nourished in the West.

Examples: Movements against French colonialism in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were encouraged by leftist French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Henri Alleg, who supported Algeria's eight-year struggle for independence, was a French Communist. He also wrote about the French Army's use of torture against terrorists and militants of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). The FLN won a bloody and costly war for Algeria's freedom in 1962. It's still Algeria's ruling party, as confirmed in May 17 elections, which featured record-low turnout of about 35 percent. This was partly because extremist Islamist parties were banned from the polls, following outbreaks of lethal terrorism claimed by an umbrella Islamist group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Algerians, including millions now living in France, abhor terrorism. They have bitter memories of the 1990s civil war that Islamists fomented after the Army-backed FLN government banned them from a national election in 1992 that they were certain to win.

Early leaders of Morocco and Tunisia, where Paris's rule ended in 1956, were steeped in French and other European democratic and secular ideologies. Tunisia's Habib Burguiba, president from 1957 to 1987, empowered Tunisian women and otherwise modernized his country.

Morocco and Tunisia, like Algeria, sternly fight to neutralize Islamist terrorists. Some of the terrorists moved to Europe: Moroccans now on trial for the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and several Tunisians held or tried in Italy are examples.

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