Europeans are waking up that America is not to blame for their terrorism

From the New York Times comes this article, Seeking Terror’s Causes, Europe Looks Within.

Since the terror attacks on the United States on Sept. 11 six years ago, Europe has faced far more new attacks and reported plots than the United States.

But, apparently, the fact that there have been no terror attacks carried out on US soil does not gain George W Bush and his administration any credit.

Train bombings in Madrid three years ago killed 191 people, the London transit attack two years ago killed 52 commuters, and a string of plots have been discovered and foiled. Then last week, arrests were made in Germany in a plot that the police said could have caused even worse carnage than in Madrid or London. In response, Europeans for the most part are looking inward to explain why Islamist extremists have made the Continent a favored target, while the United States has been spared — despite its position of world leadership and the anger it has stirred waging wars in two Muslim countries.

What the heck is an "Islamist extremist"? Isn't an Islamist an extreme believer in Islam?

In that setting, questions about how minority populations of Muslims are integrated into the mainstream are coming to the fore, along with basic questions about Islam itself. Less attention is being focused on finger-pointing at the United States, analysts say.

That's because Islam is at its core a violent, expansionist political doctrine wrapped up in a religious cloak. At some point people will work that out.

German newspapers reporting on the arrests last week of three men — two German citizens who converted to Islam and a Turkish resident of Germany — did not mention the Bush administration. Instead, they focused on the debate about tougher security measures, and on Islam itself. An editorial in Bild on Friday said: “There are no easy answers. But the 1.4 billion or so Muslims owe it to the rest of the world to at least try to give answers and find a remedy. A religion with bloody margins does not belong in a world which wants to and must move closer together.”

The margins may be bloody but it's fair to say that mainstream Islam provides significant moral and financial support to the extremists. In fact, they couldn't exist without that support. Muslims are happy to go nuts, burn hundreds of cars, destroy property and threaten to murder (or actually murder) those that publish a few crappy cartoons, write a book they don't like (The Satanic Verses) or make a film that shows Islam in a poor light (which cost Theo Van Gogh his life) but when school children are beheaded in Southern Thailand, a whole school is taken hostage in Beslan, thousands of innocent people are killed on 9/11, children are targeted in suicide attacks in Iraq and tourists are killed in Egypt the response from mainstream Islam is...? Silence.

France and Germany both opposed the war in Iraq, and both countries have been targets of terrorist plots by Islamist extremists, noted François Heisbourg, a French expert on terrorism and a special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “Bush is incredibly reviled in Germany, and Iraq is viewed as a total disaster, which it is,” he said. “But it doesn’t lead people to say we have terror because of Bush. Why? Because these guys strike a country that is against the Iraq policy.”

While Bush is certainly going to be somewhat unpopular in some European countries, that's the type of over the top statement of the type generally held by leftist 'elites' and 'intellectuals' so it's probably a personal view.

A French government white paper in 2006 described 11 attempts by Islamist jihadists to blow up targets in France in the past 10 years, some of them before 9/11, Mr. Heisbourg said. This showed, he said, that just because France has criticized the Bush administration and stayed out of Iraq, it enjoys no immunity from terrorism.

"Islamist jihadists"!!!! What other type of jihadist is there???? Buddhist jihadist? Christian jihadist? Jewish jihadist?

The foiled attack announced by the German government last week was probably motivated by Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan, said Jeremy Shapiro, a specialist in European affairs at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

These people have got Three Monkeys' syndrome. The reason Germany, France and England are being targeted by Islamists is because of the one thing Islam needs in order to expand - opportunity. These countries' declining cultural and values weakness presents them with the opportunity they need.

German troops in Afghanistan have been targets of the Taliban, and demands for a withdrawal are growing in the German Parliament. A vote on German participation in the war is scheduled for next month. Europeans’ concern about their vulnerability to terrorism was highlighted last week when the German Marshall Fund released a survey showing a sharp increase in the number of Germans who fear international terrorism. The survey found that 70 percent of Germans felt they might suffer a terror attack, 32 percentage points more than in 2005. That brings the level of fear among Germans close to the level among Americans, which stood at 74 percent in a similar survey, said John K. Glenn, the director of foreign policy at the German Marshall Fund. The increased alarm in Germany follows the failure of an attack during the World Cup last year in which two suitcase bombs were placed on commuter trains but did not explode. Two Lebanese suspects in that plot were said to have been angered by cartoons published first in a Danish newspaper that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad.

Is there any greater example of the adolescent immaturity of the Islamic mind than wanting to kill and maim hundreds of people because of a bunch of cartoons? No wonder the left gets on so well with Islamic extremists given their parallel intellectual adolescence.

The growing anxiety of Germans could also reflect stepped-up warnings of the danger of attacks from the interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble. The most recent results by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that the United States continues to be held in low regard in Europe. In a 2007 survey in Germany, the proportion of respondents with a favorable opinion of the United States fell to 30 percent, from 60 percent in 2002; and in France the percentage with a good impression of the United States fell to 39 percent, from 62 percent. The surveys had margins of sampling errors of plus or minus 3 or 4 percentage points.

Why is the NYT so dishonest when it presents data to the public? They always pick outlier years as the basis for comparisons. Climate change comparisons use the mid-70s or 1850 as the comparison year, as they're low points in the temperature record. In 2002, shortly after 9/11, favourable opinion of the US was at a high. Why not compare to 1999 when Bill Clinton was in charge or 1985 under Reagan, a time at which the US really was reviled in Europe?

In Spain, a great majority of the population concluded after the attacks on commuter trains in March 2004 that if José María Aznar, as prime minister, had not dispatched Spanish troops to Iraq in league with the Americans, the attacks would not have happened, said Juan Aviles, a professor of contemporary history at the National University for Distance Learning. Even so, he said that a February 2005 survey by the Royal Elcano Institute, a Madrid research center, found that 63 percent of respondents felt that Islamist terror sprang mainly from religious fanaticism, up from 59 percent in May 2004, and that only 17 percent believed that anti-American sentiment was the cause, down from 24 percent nine months earlier.

Spain is the front line of European defence against Islam so it's no surprise that people there are getting somewhat nervous about Islamic antics and their seeming lack of correlation to anything the United States has done.

The deep uneasiness about the spread of Islamist radicalism has taken hold across Europe, said Christoph Bertram, the former director of the Institute of International Security Affairs in Germany.

Good.

“There is a sense in our societies that the radicalism was not created by the United States but caused by the lack of integration,” Mr. Bertram said. “One of the points we all recognize is that it has been extremely difficult to integrate the third generation.”

Of course there's been a lack of integration. Idiot left wing governments have been caught up in the myth of multiculturalism and moral equivalence while introducing legislation that ensures pluralism, the only thing that ensures true integration, doesn't get any oxygen.

Each European country has encountered its own set of problems trying to deal with its Muslim population.

Really? Each one? Does that mean every one? Of course it does. But apparently the problems are due to victimisation, US foreign policy or, shock horror, the Jooooos.

In France, for example, the riots in 2005 in Paris among mostly North African immigrants, many of them Muslims, were mainly about economic discrimination, said Mr. Heisbourg, the terrorism expert. In Britain, the Muslim population is overwhelmingly Pakistani and is reasonably well integrated economically, but many Pakistanis feel stronger cultural ties to Islam and Pakistan than to Britain.

The French really have dug themselves a quite deep hole that will be a tad hard to climb out of. The British still have a little time for common sense to prevail even though I think they'll be the first country to crack down really hard on their Muslim population.

In response to the 2005 attacks on the London transit system by four suicide bombers, and before last week’s foiled attack in Germany, the British and German governments were searching for ways to better integrate their Muslim populations.

Knock Sharia Law on the head. Ban burqas and other forms of Muslim oppression of women (including female circumcision). Throw trouble making Imams and Clerics out of the country. Stop providing social security to anyone that turns up. Only allow immigration from countries that share cultural norms. Problem fixed.

Constanze Stelzenmuller, the director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin, said earlier government attitudes of “indifference masquerading as tolerance” had now been shunted aside. Now, she said, German-language courses are offered to Turkish immigrants, particularly women, to better integrate those at the edges of the population of Turkish origin, which totals 2.7 million.

Why are Turks allowed to migrate to Germany if they can't speak the lingo? It guarantees that communities won't integrate.

The core of the 9/11 attackers hatched their plan in Hamburg, so “no one is blaming the Americans,” Ms. Stelzenmuller said. “A reasonable German on the street will say that the jihadists are brought on by their rejection of society, and that Western foreign policy is a root cause of that.”

Well then, the 'reasonable German on the street' needs a lesson in reality. Why do we have to bend our foreign policy to suit lunatic Muslims' agenda when the foreign policies of their native countries are so profoundly at odds with ensuring peace and security?