Paris attack heightens European tensions with Muslims

Oren Dorell | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Paris officer killed amid hunt for massacre suspects Another police officer in Paris was killed in a shooting Thursday morning as a manhunt for two of the gunmen suspected in an attack on French satirical magazine 'Charlie Hebdo' continued.

Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misstated German Chancellor Angela Merkel's first name.

The terrorist attack on the satirical weekly in Paris threatens to create deeper animosities between Europe's growing Muslim minority and a native population that is increasingly embracing anti-Islam and anti-immigration movements.

"The radicals are trying to exacerbate tensions that are already there," said Jonathan Laurence, author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France. "They're trying to drive a wedge between Muslims and the West."

From France and Germany to Sweden and the United Kingdom, a backlash is spreading against Muslim immigrants, including tens of thousands of recent refugees from Syria's long civil war.

In France, which has Western Europe's largest Muslim community, the anti-immigration National Front Party won 25% of the vote in the most recent elections in May, and radical anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim protests have taken place in multiple German cities in recent days.

Until now, those and similar movements in other Western European countries have focused on limiting immigration and protecting the rights of publications to criticize Islam. They also have tried to halt what they view as excessive accommodations to Muslim culture: the use of Arabic language, headscarves worn by women, establishment of mosques, and serving halal food in school cafeterias.

Wednesday's attack will provide a security element to those arguments, said Laurence, who teaches political science at Boston College. It "ties a foreign threat of violence in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and Libya and brings it home and raises the conflict temperature to a dangerous levels within Europe," he said.

Nile Gardiner, director of the Margaret Thatcher Center on Freedom at the conservative Heritage Foundation, also predicted greater cultural conflicts in Europe. "It's inevitable there are going to be greater tensions now in France," Gardiner said. "These attacks will elevate the issue of homegrown jihadists to the top of the political agenda."

A similar discourse will take place all over Europe, as it has already in the United Kingdom, Gardiner said. "There's a massive homegrown terrorist threat in the U.K. It's also an issue in Belgium, Holland, Germany and across Western Europe," he said. "This attack will up the stakes."

French and other European officials have warned of heightened terrorist threats from citizens who identify with radical Islamist groups in North Africa and the Middle East, while political and populist leaders have railed against their countries' immigration policies, which they've characterized as lax and threatening to European culture.

The attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, which poked fun at Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox Jewish clerics, fits into a pattern of radical Muslim reprisals against European critics in the world of culture.

In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (legal decree) calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie over his allegedly blasphemous portrayal of Islam's prophet Mohammed. Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in 2004 for his film, Submission, about the treatment of women in Islam. And Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard escaped an assassination attempt in 2010 for his 2005 cartoon portrayal of the prophet, which caused riots and protests across the Muslim world.

Thousands of Germans took part this week in anti-immigration rallies in Dresden, Berlin and Cologne, organized by a group known as PEGIDA, a German acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West. Germany's political establishment, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, denounced the rallies as undemocratic and hateful.

The group was started by PEGIDA leader Lutz Bachmann in October to protest plans to add 14 centers for about 2,000 refugees in Dresden. Demonstrators reject charges they are far-right extremists or neo-Nazis. They say they are concerned by an influx of 200,000 refugees in 2014, many from war-torn Syria.

Similar sentiments have been expressed in Sweden by members of the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats Party, which centrist parties sought to isolate and weaken last month by forming a broad parliamentary coalition. In France, the National Front Party headed by Marine Le Pen has gained support among working-class voters who believe the mainstream politicians have failed to address their concerns about crime, immigration and jobs.

Paris massacre suspects may have robbed gas station Two masked attackers carrying machine guns and rocket launchers reportedly robbed a gas station 50 miles northeast of Paris on Thursday, prompting French authorities to investigate whether it was linked to the 'Charlie Hebdo' massacre.

"There's a growing sense across France that immigration laws have been too weak," Gardiner said.

He predicted that French officials would crack down on preachers of hate in radical mosques in Paris and other large French cities, and on French citizens seeking to fight with radical Islamist groups in Iraq or Syria. Whether that means far-right groups gain support depends on French President Francois Hollande's response, Gardiner said.

France has been at the forefront of European nations in the fight against Islamist extremists in the Middle East and North Africa, focusing on its former 20th-century colonies. Hollande sent 3,000 troops to Mali to battle Islamist extremists who'd taken over a large swath of that former colony. He also joined the U.S.-led coalition launching airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. And on Monday, Hollande said he would strike at Islamist militants in Libya who try to cross or send weapons into neighboring Niger, where France has a base.

France's domestic immigration issues also stem from its colonial past, including a civil war for independence from French control in Algeria that led to a flood of refugees into France in the early 1960s.

"France has this colonial legacy to deal with when negotiating the integration of the millions of descendants of these colonial subjects," author Laurence said. "It's a political problem. What the violence does is prevent a political solution because it tends to polarize and make it appear the problem is not resolvable politically and can only be resolved militarily."