For some Muslim immigrant families in France and other parts of Europe, the hope of a better future for their children in their adopted country is turned into a nightmare when they fall prey to the teachings of religious extremist groups, Colin Randall writes…
Staring at the flickering video clips of Mohamed Merah, the small-time criminal who chose to kill and be killed after reinventing himself as a jihadist warrior in the unlikely battleground of southwestern france, the mother of another young French Muslim sees striking similarities.

Merah and her son, she says as she studies the features, could almost have been brothers.

Sadly, the resemblance ran deeper than physical appearance. Her son is five years younger than Merah but shares his fervent desire “to die a martyr”.

Abdel (a pseudonym) is 18. He was one of a number of young men recruited for a branch of the Islamist network Forsane Alizza (Knights of Pride), based in the eastern suburbs of Nice. The group was broken up by police raids in the aftermath of Merah’s seven fatal shootings in Toulouse in March, though no direct link is suggested.

His mother, her own first name changed to Fatima, thinks back to when her son stopped being a shy teenager interested mostly in football and his PlayStation. She noticed his attempts, not very successful, to grow a beard and hoped it might be a sign he was developing a more masculine edge to his personality. When she realised other thoughts were on his mind, she was devastated.

“It was after Ramadan last summer,” she told Nice-Matin, a newspaper circulating on the glitzy, sunny Cote d’Azur, far from the grim Parisian banlieues where radicalism is generally considered more likely to breed.

“Overnight, he changed and became reproachful of me for not being a good Muslim. Suddenly, everything was sinful. He stopped his young brother going to the cafe on the seafront in Menton, saying it was non-believers, the impure, who were serving him.”

And then she found him packing kit for a “grand trip” to Afghanistan, intent with or without family approval to leave France for a “true Islamic land”.

Fatima is just one more Muslim parent in the West whose life has been turned into a nightmare by dramatic changes in an offspring’s demeanour, inspiring fears that a logical outcome may be violent death or a life wasted in jail. Her son was talking of joining about 30 other young Frenchmen of Moroccan, Tunisian and Algerian origin to travel via Tunis to Libya. There, they would undergo combat training and “learn the true Islam, not that of imams corrupted by the West” before being “ready for Afghanistan”.

Others have followed a similar route, a phenomenon now under intense scrutiny by the French authorities in the wake of the horror caused by Merah’s series of shootings, and because of the apparent manner of his radicalisation in prison and on visits to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The stern response of the state runs parallel to the despair felt by Muslim parents struggling to bring up children in the hope they can break free from the trap of low-paid, dead-end employment or no employment at all.

Where they failed, as immigrants with few opportunities, they want their children, educated and raised in France, to succeed. And above all, in the overwhelming majority of cases, they want to prevent them falling under the influence of extremists capable of exploiting grievances fostered by routine discrimination in jobs and housing and the gnawing sense of alienation.In a pleasant, middle-class suburb of the city of Narbonne, not so far from the scenes of Merah’s killings of children, off-duty soldiers and a teacher, and his own death at the hands of a special police unit surrounding his Toulouse apartment, Aicha El Wafi yearns for contact with her younger son, Zacarias Moussaoui. He sits 8,000 kilometres away in a top-security US prison cell, serving life without prospect of parole as the only person convicted in relation to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And he professes to want nothing more to do with her.

It is a case complicated by the fact that Moussaoui was not even at liberty on the day hijacked planes were flown into the twin towers and the Pentagon, and crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He was in a US jail for breaches of immigration law. What role, if any, he played in plotting the events of September 11 remains unclear six years after his trial. He owes his predicament in large part to a rambling series of confessions – or, rather, boasts – about plans to carry out attacks on US soil. The jury concluded he knew something about the 9/11 plot and, by keeping quiet, contributed to the slaughter.

Mrs El Waifa, who arrived in France from Morocco as a teenage bride, opposes extremism to the extent that she has gone into French schools to lecture Muslim teenagers on the virtues of tolerance. She invited me into her spacious, neatly furnished bungalow last year, soon after the 10th anniversary of September 11 had reopened wounds for so many. Her natural ebullience frequently gave way to signs of a mother’s distress as she explained her fierce belief in her son’s innocence, a belief she has clung to even as he has proclaimed his guilt.

Just as she was sure her son’s exposure to prejudice when young hardened him as he approached adulthood, she wondered whether she also bore some blame. Family life had been turbulent. Had she failed in some way as a mother, making him more susceptible to the influence of Islamists he later met while studying in London?

“His last words to me were to go away and forget him, never to speak to a lawyer or journalist again,” she told me. “But I simply cannot see how any parents can turn their back on a child. I will not rest until I see him free, or repatriated to prison in France.”

These are the high-profile cases. There are others from around France and neighbouring countries. In Paris, the story is still told of the young woman with a bright law career who suddenly abandoned her job at the Palais de Justice on the banks of the Seine and departed for Cairo. She told her mother she intended to study, but also that her heroine was Muriel Degauque, the so-called “Belgian baker” who, after marrying a Moroccan with militant views, blew herself up in an attack on US troops in Iraq.

And how many British Muslim mothers have agonised over sons who ended up in Guantanamo Bay or UK prison cells?

These women’s experiences show how mothers can be dragged into the front line of the struggle between fundamentalism and authority. And the actions of their disenchanted, radicalised children can inspire still deeper suspicion in the countries where they have made their lives, and even have been born.

When events as terrible as the killings at a Jewish school in Toulouse occur, and blame is attached to one person or more purporting to act in the name of Islam, many people react in knee-jerk fashion. The pleadings of moderate community leaders, who argue with some force that the bulk of France’s five million to seven million Muslims wish only to live in peace, much as they crave greater respect for their religion and a good deal more social justice, are too often overlooked.

“Someone told me recently: ‘Go back to your own country’,” Amina, a student wearing a headscarf, told a French reporter while attending France’s biggest annual gathering of Muslims on the outskirts of Paris in April. “Yet my mother is a native of Le Mans. I’m French!”

Mathieu Guidère, professor of Islamic studies at Toulouse II-Mirail University, offers the reassuring thought that few French Muslims go as far as to follow the route taken by Merah and Moussaoui. Tougher laws made organised cells less likely than individual gestures, usually stopping short of active engagement. But even this translates as 10 or so going each year from one area, the Midi-Pyrénées, on “jihadist” journeys to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia.

“Some have grown up in fairly comfortable conditions in France,” Guidère told La Dépêche newspaper in Toulouse. “But the more gentrified they are, the better indoctrination works. It is more rewarding being in Afghanistan with a Kalashnikov than doing nothing in Toulouse on benefits.”

Down on the French Riviera, Fatima is grateful that the arrest of a Senegalese man suspected of heading the Forsane Alizza branch has disrupted her son’s planned odyssey in search of his “true” Islam. However, she fears he will see his mentor’s detention as a setback but remain determined to see his project through.

“In the state he’s in,” his mother says, “we will be unable to keep him here. He doesn’t stop telling us he wants to die a martyr. But it is those who have put him in this state of mind who are the true enemies of Islam.”

SOURCE:THE NATIONAL

Outraged by cuts to living standards, more and more people are turning to radical politics and even violence.

FIVE years into the great recession that has plagued Europe and brutally cut living standards, the armies of the new poor are increasingly desperate. Street protests about lost hope are turning violent as once liveable suburbs have become impoverished breeding grounds for the disenchanted, who are turning to extremist political movements in an economically ruined Europe.

The new poor want what they had before the meltdown: a job, education for their children and food on the table, and they want a way out of the unique underclass that is now part of the demographic of many countries in Europe.

In this underclass, unemployed migrants as well as the educated and the skilled are bound by a common thread: the system has failed them all.

Political analysts across Europe say that the disenchanted are increasingly turning to the extremists from the far right and the far left, feeling that their governments have let them down.

”This is the greatest challenge before Europe,” says Dr Magnus Ranstorp, an expert in terrorism and political violence from the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies in Sweden. He is alarmed by the swing to the extremes of politics, made worse by poverty and the backlash against migrants and Muslims since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

”Now you have not only huge immigration issues, but also segregation of populations … unspeakable social degradation and exclusion of people from society that is the result of discrimination, overt or hidden, and that has led to a pretty vast underclass,” says Ranstorp.

”You actually have parallel societies in some states. It is a huge challenge for most states to be able to tackle the conditions that have contributed to this social segregation. Political parties would do well to study how to clip the wings of right-wing and extreme left-wing parties.”

While the extremist politics of Europe, particularly from the far right, recall the ”rivers of blood” scenario envisioned by conservative British politician Enoch Powell when criticising immigration in 1968, the situation is more dangerous now as groups ranging from the extreme right to the anarchists seek support among those crushed in the economic meltdown.

That’s what happened in Greece, says Ioannis Konstantinidis, associate professor of political science at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki. The huge number of Greeks who voted for the anti-migrant, anti-Muslim, neo-Nazi Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party, should not, he says, be seen as supporting racism, but rather as responding to their dire economic situations. ”These people [Golden Dawn] are really dangerous,” says Konstantinidis. ”But the fact is they got this percentage [of the vote] under very strange circumstances.”

Last week, as Greece failed to form a government, the leader of Golden Dawn – it got 6.9 per cent of the vote in national elections, 25 times more than two years ago – played to form by insisting there were no gas chambers in German wartime concentration camps, and that the figure of 6 million dead Jews was an exaggeration.

That Nazi and anti-migrant rhetoric has spilled over into violence in recent times. Ten months ago, right-wing extremist Anders Breivik killed 77 people in Norway.

The murders in December of two Senegalese traders in Florence by Gianluca Casseri, who had links to Italian fascist organisation CasaPound, shocked the country. The country’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, described the killings as a ”blind explosion of hatred”.

The terrorist threat increased dramatically in Italy last week, where 20,000 military and police officers guard 14,000 installations and 550 individuals 24 hours a day against terrorists. The government has now added 400 more offices, installations, and business and public officials to the protection list.

The number of people needing protection is likely to increase in the wake of the Interior Ministry sending out a national alert on possible terrorism linked to protests about the lack of work, and possible attacks on public servants such as tax officials. The main threats come from the new Red Brigades and the anarchists, who are capitalising on the impact the downturn and the government’s austerity measures are having on Italians.

Tax offices in Italy have been firebombed, reportedly by anarchists. Last week in Genoa, the Federazione Anarchica Informale kneecapped an executive from a nuclear engineering company, part of the Finmeccanica industrial conglomerate.

In a Milan court, members of the new Red Brigades who are appealing sentences they received on terrorism, arms and conspiracy charges pledged, amid cries of ”Viva la rivoluzione”, to continue the armed struggle. Now the army is to protect tax offices and Finmeccanica.

The political tapestry of Europe is complicated, however. Three years ago, 29 right-wingers were elected to the European Parliament, some from parties that have parlayed xenophobia and racism into votes. But the ascendency of right-wing political parties is being challenged from the left.

The far right did well in Greece, but the far-left party Syriza did even better with 16.78 per cent of the vote. The socialist Pasok got 13.18 per cent, the communist KKE 8.48 per cent and the moderate Democratic Left 6.1 per cent. In France, the socialist Francois Hollande is now President. The right got hammered in Italy’s local elections last week. A week before, the far-right British National Party was wiped out in Britain’s local elections.

”Everybody is concerned about some of the limited wins by the far right,” says Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development in Britain, who sees a clear correlation in those wins with the expansion of the recession, the deepening of the eurozone crisis, and racism. ”France and Greece are good examples of how polarised society can become [with] the scapegoating of certain groups that are described as parasitical on the economy,” says Ahmed, author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: and How to Save It.

But the traditional far right is changing, says Matthew Collins, a one-time leading member of the British National Front. ”In northern and western Europe, it is more culturally conservative and Christian-based, whereas in other parts of Europe they cling to anti-Semitism and racial superiority as themes.

”The new right want to turn Europe into some kind of fundamentalist Christian continent,” Collins says, adding that the new far right ”is equally dangerous”. Collins is a member of the England-based Hope Not Hate party that for years has worked electorally to crush the far right. He sees the defeat of the British National Party (BNP) in the recent local elections as partly the result of that campaign.

”Next, we will launch the biggest campaign ever to remove any [far right] member of Parliament, British or European, and that will be the British member of the European Parliament and chairman of the BNP, Nick Griffin,” says Collins.

The new right has also changed some of its rhetoric from the anti-Semitism of hate-the-Jew to the Islamophobia of hate-the-Muslim. New adherents are from the digital age. They have September 11, the 2005 London terror attacks and new digital media in their arsenals to get people to fear and hate Muslims and migrants.

Right-wing extremism is very much based on the internet and Facebook, says Sweden’s Magnus Ranstorp. ”They have a physical base as well, from Norway to Sweden to northern Europe, and recently they gathered in Denmark to make a European alliance. It is now pan-European, which is a worrying trend.”

The growth in support for the radical right and radical left is widely ascribed to failures by governments and centre left and right parties to respond to citizen concerns. ”They gave an opening to these [far-right] parties because they were not addressing their legitimate concerns … immigration, radical Islam,” says David Rusin, research fellow at the Philadelphia-based Islamist Watch, which monitors militant Islam in the West. He sees dangers in both the anti-Islam push and in radical Islam.

Jonathan Laurence, associate professor of political science at Boston College and author of The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims, believes the fact that one-fifth of the French electorate voted for Front National shows ”serious fault lines” in terms of satisfaction with government, particularly as the front’s members ”do not hesitate to play fast and loose with some pretty vile politics”.

But Laurence, also a senior fellow in foreign policy at Washington’s Brookings Institution, warns that those who voice legitimate concerns about what is happening in their countries cannot be ignored. ”We have to be careful not to demonise people who want to protect their borders. Obviously, illegal immigration cannot be accepted,” says Laurence, who deems the refusal to address such fears ”a failure of democracy”.

Gianfranco Baldini, from the political science department at Bologna University, sees dangers there, too. He thinks elements of the swings to the far right have historically been cyclical, but that changed a lot with September 11. He also believes the fragmentation of the vote for mainline parties that do not respond to voter concerns will present significant threats for all.

In Britain, warns Ahmed, Muslims continue to be victimised just for being Muslim, adding to a polarisation that can breed violence on all sides. He fears that unless the racial and religious hatred fusing with the economic crisis is confronted, Europe may repeat the history of the 1930s.

”The similarities [to pre-war Germany] are quite worrying. I am not saying we are heading down the same trajectory. But if we look at 1930s Europe, we are seeing the same kind of rhetoric. The lesson we can learn is that unpredictable things can happen … the blanket demonising of Muslim minorities in Europe,” he says.

”We have seen legislation that is largely targeting Muslim communities. Look at Geert Wilders [leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands]. He has repeatedly talked about internment and the need to expel Muslims if they are considered to be against society.”

As Greece prepares to again go to the polls, Austrian filmmaker Fabian Eder is putting the finishing touches to a documentary, Greece In Bloom, A Spring Odyssey. It concerns what people in the islands and the interior have to say about those responsible for plunging their country into chaos.

When Eder stopped filming for the day, some of his subjects would tell him off camera what they thought should happen in the real Greece. ”Bring back the junta,” they said, referring to the right-wing military governments that ruled Greece after the 1967 coup d’etat.

”The people who said that were older Greeks, over 60, but I was still shocked,” says Eder, who believes, nevertheless, that he has captured the real beauty and humanity of Greece, which, he says, is not the Greece of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.

Laurence is also cautiously optimistic that Europeans can get beyond the polarisation. He says Europe is far away from its darkest days. ”It is not out of the woods … But voters have come a long way from the brown-shirted March on Rome and the Nazi salute. Voters are turned off by that.”

SOURCE:smh.com.au

Apart from good times in Bali,Australians tend to see Indonesia
as a place where bad things happen. It’s a poverty-stricken nation where Australians are victims of Islamic terrorism, drug busts, natural disasters and plane crashes. It’s where boat people set sail. And it’s where Australian cattle are slaughtered cruelly.

Yet, while Australia has been captivated by the China boom, we have largely missed the good news from our nearer neighbour. Since the 1997 East-Asian financial crisis that precipitated the fall of the repressive Suharto regime, Indonesia’s democracy has sailed through the global financial crisis, become a valued member of the G20, and comfortably posted 6 per cent-plus economic growth. Within the next decade, its economy could be bigger than Australia’s.

The stability and prosperity of the world’s biggest Muslim nation is of immense economic, security, and geopolitical importance to Australia. Until recently, the issue for Australian business has been how to grab a bigger slice of one of the world’s fastest-growing middle-class markets. While competitors in natural resources such as coal, Australia and Indonesia are still underweight in bilateral trade and investment flows, notwithstanding the purchase of the Brisbane Roar soccer team by Indonesia’s Bakrie family.

Yet a less rosy story is emerging as Indonesia’s youthful democracy struggles to mature. As eminent Australian National University economist Peter Drysdale wrote in this newspaper last week, Indonesia is turning “inward and backward’’. The backsliding was confirmed in Jakarta last week by a visiting team of senior Australian editors , including from The Australian Financial Review, sponsored by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. At the same time, Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, Greg Moriarty, warned of a “discernable increase in regulatory changes and economic nationalism’’ that threatened Australian interests.

Nearing the half-way mark of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s second, and final, five-year presidential term, a loss of policy momentum threatens Indonesia’s religious moderation and material aspirations.

The increased influence of fringe and even thuggish Islamic groups created worldwide headlines last week through a police ban on American pop superstar Lady Gaga. Paradoxically, an ostensibly more liberal Indonesian society is becoming more accepting of intolerance, including against minorities such as Christians. Even liberal elites in Jakarta declare that Indonesia needs a good strong leader. Indonesia has gone from an authoritarian state to a state without authority, says a moderate Islamic commentator.

President Yudhoyono’s own indecisiveness partly reflects his lack of authority under Indonesia’s multi-party Parliament. While still popular, he runs a minority government that is hostage to shifting allegiances. The democratic era has devolved power to regional governments. There is no clear successor for the 2014 presidential election. And Indonesia’s basic political cleavage between Islamism and secular nationalism drives personality, rather than policy, competition.

This also shows up in the battle to reduce the massive fuel subsidies that provide half-price petrol to households. The government’s budget is being drained by subsidies to the cars and motor bikes that notoriously clog Jakarta’s streets. The subsidies could be better used to fund a proper mass-transit system that one of the world’s biggest cities so desperately needs. As the World Bank points out, they mostly go to wealthier households and businesses rather than to the poor.

The sidelining of key reformist technocrats has been followed by new barriers to fruit and vegetable imports in response to Chinese competition. Foreign mining companies will be required to divest their majority stakes after 10 years, and have been slapped with a 20 per cent export tax for a host of commodities that aren’t first smelted or further processed.

Banking, where Australia’s ANZ Banking Group is prominent, may also be in the firing line. Although labelled nationalism, such protectionism will push up Indonesia’s cost base, crimp exports and discourage the foreign investment needed to fill its infrastructure deficit. Trying to become self-sufficient in beef, rather than buying it from Australia, will push up food prices as Indonesia’s middle class seeks to improve its diet.

This new economic nationalism confirms that producer interests, often associated with business oligarchs, have captured Indonesia’s democracy. The problem is compounded by pervasive and deep-seated corruption, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of Indonesia’s anti-corruption commission, KPK. Too many powerful domestic interests would prefer to rig their internal market of 240 million people than be exposed to foreign competition, money and ideas that would help the Indonesian people achieve their full potential.

SOURCE:FINANCIAL REVIEW