[The link between the two
is now a wellspring of debate in Europe, as societies grapple with the same
messy knot of motives and influences after recent attacks in Denmark and
France and a thwarted plot in Belgium. All involved angry, alienated young
Muslims.]
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Mourners on Thursday at
the funeral of Dan Uzan, a security guard who
was killed outside a
Copenhagen synagogue on Saturday.
Credit Scanpix
Denmark/Reuters
|
COPENHAGEN — Arrested for stabbing a
19-year-old passenger on a commuter train in November 2013, Omar Abdel Hamid
El-Hussein blamed the effects of hashish for his brutal, random and nearly
fatal attack, telling a court last December that he had been gripped by wild
fear and thought his victim wanted to hurt him.
Last weekend, just two
weeks after his release from prison for the knife attack, Mr. Hussein went on another violent rampage,
killing two strangers and wounding five police officers. But this time he was
gripped not by drugs, but by a fanatical strand of Islam whose mission,
according to a message he posted on Facebook shortly before the attacks, “is to
destroy you.”
Mr. Hussein’s journey
from drug-addled street thug to self-proclaimed jihadist declaring loyalty to
the Islamic State has stirred soul-searching in liberal-minded Denmark over
whether Islam, in fact, was really a prime motivator for
his violence, or merely served as a justifying cover for violent criminality.
“This is a very difficult
question to answer,” said Manu Sareen, the minister for integration and social
affairs, who shortly before the attacks began a program to combat
radicalization through outreach to parents, schools and other efforts.
That same question
squarely confronts other European countries and the United States. As President
Obama holds a conference on
ways to combat the lure of jihad in Western nations, he has come under
criticism for his cautious language distancing violent extremism from Islam.
The link between the two
is now a wellspring of debate in Europe, as societies grapple with the same
messy knot of motives and influences after recent attacks in Denmark and
France and a thwarted plot in Belgium. All involved angry, alienated young
Muslims.
Often the attackers
invoke Islam. But just as often, well before they had found religion, the
professed jihadists built up long track records as violent criminals. Though
many have become radicalized in prisons, they often seem determined to find an
outlet for their violence.
Amedy Coulibaly, one of a
trio of gunmen responsible for the killing rampage that
terrorized Paris in January, similarly fit the bill, chalking up at least six
arrests before his embrace of anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism led him to
storm a kosher supermarket and kill four people.
“This is classic
trajectory into jihadist terrorism in Europe,” said Thomas Hegghammer, an
expert on jihadist movements at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment.
“There is not a single pathway, but this one is very worrying. They are misfits
who find a solution to their problems in radical Islam.”
In embracing violence in
the name of Islam, Mr. Hussein, a former member of a Copenhagen criminal gang
called the Brothas, “substituted one subculture for another,” Mr. Hegghammer
said, adding, “The easier it is for someone to plug into this radical Islamic
subculture, the more radicalized misfits you are going to have. At the moment,
it is very easy.”
Announcing new measures
on Thursday to fight terrorism, including extra funding for intelligence
services, Danish officials did not mention religion while vowing to defend what
Mette Frederiksen, the justice minister, described as “one of the most generous
societies there are.”
Danish Islamic
organizations, including the mosque that rallied hostility toward Denmark
across the Muslim world over the 2005 publication of newspaper cartoons here
lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, condemned Mr. Hussein’s weekend attacks on a
Copenhagen cafe and on a synagogue. But they have also all insisted that Islam
played no role in the violence, blaming a mutant misreading of the faith.
Junaid Mann, a former
Copenhagen gang member who attended the same boxing club as Mr. Hussein, said
he did not know the gunman well but had crossed paths with him at the gym. “He
was a criminal who went nuts,” he said, adding, “I don’t think this attack had
anything to do with Islam.”
Mr. Mann, who is now
studying law and works part time as a counselor to troubled Muslim youths, said
Denmark and other European countries needed to defend, not stigmatize, Islam,
as only this can combat “street Islam,” a toxic jumble of half-digested lines
from the Quran and political passions plucked from the Internet.
Olivier Roy, a leading
French expert on Islam, has taken a similar line, telling Information, a Danish
newspaper, that Denmark should counter wild strains of Islam imported from the
Middle East by building up a “national version of Islam” through state funding
for mosques and preachers, just as it funds Denmark’s state church.
But Mr. Sareen, the
integration minister, said such an approach would do nothing to “prevent scenes
like we saw at the weekend” because young people were just as likely to get
radicalized in jail or sitting at home watching videos on YouTube. “The state
could finance dozens of mosques, but you would still see people getting
radicalized,” he said.
The trigger for extremist
violence, added Mr. Sareen, a self-declared atheist and former social worker,
is rarely the result of a single cause. “You have a part that is social, part
that is psychiatric, part that is brainwashing and part that comes from
messages in the mosque or from radical preachers.”
Mehdi Mozaffari, an
Iranian-born Danish political science professor, complained that mainstream
Muslims and Western governments often play down the powerful pull of Islamist
ideology, which mixes piety and politics.
“It is very evident that
this ideology is playing a major role,” he said. “Without it we are facing just
hooligans. But these people have an ideology that is very strong. It justifies
their behavior and identifies their enemy.”
Testimony at Mr.
Hussein’s trial last December by the defendant and others made no reference to
religion, indicating that he underwent a rapid jihadist conversion in jail. He
received a two-year sentence but was released less than three months after the
verdict because he had already spent more than a year in pretrial detention.
A court psychiatrist,
Katarina Adamikova, reported “no signs of severe mental illness except for a
suspected hash abuse.” Mr. Hussein, according to court documents, said that he
had been stabbed in the leg before the train attack and “felt a lot of anxiety
and felt in danger of being assaulted.”
Such feelings of
persecution provide fertile ground for a radical Islamist ideology that,
according to Erhan Kilic, a Turkish-born lawyer in the northern city of Aarhus
who counsels returning jihadists, promotes and exploits a narrative of
victimhood. “They always look at their problems through the glasses of
victims,” he said.
Muslims, he added, do
have legitimate complaints like other groups, but young radicals often know
next to nothing about their faith and twist it to serve their own personal
hang-ups and failings. His message to returnees from Syria, he added, is
simple: “A Muslim cannot be a terrorist, and a terrorist cannot be a Muslim.”
That so many young
Muslims feel angry at and alienated from a country that offers their families
some of the world’s most generous welfare benefits has left many Danes
flummoxed and angry. This in turn has helped fuel the rise of the Danish
People’s Party, an anti-immigration group that regularly denounces Muslim
misbehavior and, according to opinion polls, now stands neck-and-neck in
popularity with the biggest mainstream parties.
“It is very, very obvious
that these attacks were connected to religion,” Soren Espersen, deputy chairman
of the Danish People’s Party, said in an interview. “There is no doubt this was
religious terrorism,” he said, adding that Mr. Hussein had himself declared to
be “acting in the name of Islam.”
A survey published
Wednesday by the newspaper Metroxpress found that half of Danes surveyed want
to restrict immigration and a quarter want to ensure that Muslims never account
for more than 5 percent of the population. The government is barred by law from
classifying residents by religion, but a study by Aarhus University in 2013
found that about 4.2 percent of Denmark was Muslim.
“To be a Muslim does not
coincide with the definition of being Danish, whatever that entails,” said
Sandy Madar, the founder of Streetmanager, a private association that seeks to
help young criminals and youths at risk of becoming criminals. “And the
Muslims, therefore, feel that as long they hold on to their religion, they can
never be accepted as a true Dane.”
As in many other European
countries, Muslims in Denmark may coexist with their non-Muslim neighbors, but
they often cling to the values and conspiracy-driven mind-set of their home
countries.
Helime al-Amed, a Palestinian from
Syria and mother of five children in Mjolnerparken, the housing project where
Mr. Hussein grew up, praised Denmark as a generous and friendly country, but
she still believes that last weekend’s attacks were “orchestrated by people who
are against us, who want to provoke anger at Muslims.”
Mr. Hussein, she added,
had been deliberately killed by police officers in a shootout Sunday morning to
prevent him from talking. “When he died, the truth died with him,” she said.
Martin Selsoe contributed
reporting.
