Terrorists Draw Support From Their Communities

Maajid Nawas on support that terrorists draw from their communities.

And no insurgency is sustainable, or even possible, without a level of residual support for its core ideological aims among the core communities from which it draws its fighters.

As I've argued, terrorists lie at the tail of a distribution of people with varying degrees of sympathy, shared values, shared beliefs, and willingness to help or ignore. If you can understand that then a bunch of liberal beliefs about terrorism look absurd.

Molenbeek Belgium is giving us a signal. It is an indication of wht hte rest of Europe could become. The signal is coming from other parts of Europe too.

Jihadism has well and truly taken root among an entire generation of angry young Muslims. This is particularly the case in Europe, where thousands have left to join ISIS.

Therefore European leaders are crazy to dig an even deeper hole for their peoples with the current policy about Muslim migrants.

Consider the reasoning in this paragraph. Because the attackers are mostly born in Europe he thinks it does not make sense to become anti-immigrant. After all, the first generation won't be that radical. Only the second and later generations. This is crazy reasoning. The first generation will have babies. Those babies will become more radicalized than their parents. What then? What lies in store for Germany?>

For now, my guess will be that these attacks will only aid the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Frances far right, sweeping xenophobes to prominence, further polarizing communities, which for good or for bad, will only sustain the process of radicalization even further. This is so despite the fact that France has taken hardly any Syrian refugees, and Germany, which has taken hundreds of thousands, has yet to be hit as hard as France has. European born and raised jihadists have so far posed the biggest problem, not immigrants.

20 years from now the children born from the current immigrant wave will feel what about European people as compared to Muslim people?

What about in Arab countries? Take a look at the key role that al Azhar university in Cairo plays in teaching young Muslims beliefs that turn them into Jihadists. They are getting their ideas from the mainstream of present day Islamic academic thought.