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Thu 13 Sep, 2007 08:54 am
Home grown terrorists. The infection grows
Letter from Europe: Local terrorism suspects puzzle Germany
By Katrin Bennhold
Published: September 12, 2007
NEUNKIRCHEN, Germany: 'He could have been in my class," said Johannes Richter, his brow furrowed as he studied the blurry photograph of Daniel Martin Schneider, the youngest of the three terrorism suspects arrested in Germany last week. Both men grew up in this provincial western German town. Both are 22 years old.
What fascinates and deeply disturbs Germans is that two of the three suspects detained in the alleged plot to bomb U.S. installations are pretty much like them - ordinary Germans, not immigrants from another continent or people of foreign heritage. The third man arrested is a Turkish resident of Germany.
Like thousands of other young Germans, Schneider and the other German suspect, Fritz Gelowicz, 28, grew up in middle-class Christian homes and went to high schools in sleepy suburban neighborhoods.
"It gives the concept of homegrown terrorism a new quality," said Rolf Tophoven, head of the German Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy. "Every German family relates to their background in some way."
Britain was stunned two years ago when it emerged that the mastermind behind the suicide bombings in London that killed 52 people was a British-born man of Pakistani origin who spoke with a cockney accent and appeared to be well-integrated in his local community.
But, as sociologists point out, the fact that he had a foreign-sounding name and darker skin allowed white Europeans to preserve a distance between their experience and his.
That buffer is now gone in Germany. A mix of fear and unease was evident in dozens of conversations with ordinary Germans - a pervasive unease because they must ask themselves how an ordinary German upbringing can nourish such hatred.
"It's a wake-up call for Germany," said Hajo Funke, professor of politics at the Free University of Berlin. "There is no margin left for abstraction or scapegoating. Our society, our civilization has produced these young people. They were corrupted by a foreign ideology, but that ideology filled a vacuum we left."
According to Funke, Germany needs a two-pronged approach to tackle this phenomenon: fighting the sources of jihad ideology and remaining vigilant but also facing up to a certain number of failures in Western societies the jihadis can turn to their advantage. This goes beyond the challenge of integrating Muslim minorities by providing them with economic opportunity, he said. In the battle against homegrown terrorism, the government will also need to reflect on an increasingly impersonal society in which troubled youths - foreign or German - are not spotted and are not given the support they need, a society in which teenagers often spend more time in online chat rooms than schoolyards, potentially exposed to those who seek to manipulate vulnerable young minds.
"The days of clichés are over," said the newspaper Berliner Kurier in a recent editorial. "Terrorists can also be called Fritz; we know that now. Terrorism is coming closer, and it also speaks German."
This is not the first time that modern Germany has had to come to terms with extreme alienation in its own backyard. On the day that the arrests of Schneider and Golowicz were announced, the country was remembering another bout of home-grown terrorism: the beginning of a terrorism campaign on Sept. 5, 1977, by the Red Army Faction, a group of leftist extremists whose founders were also young middle-class Germans, consumed by ideology and violence.
The parallels do not stop there: Like far-left ideologues calling for a fight against capitalism and vowing to unchain the proletariat, jihad ideologues vow to free a global Muslim underclass from Western shackles. In both ideologies, anti-Americanism was a defining characteristic.
Now, six years after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, more than 7 in 10 Germans say they consider Islamic terrorists more dangerous than the Red Army Faction terrorism of the 1970s, and one in four say they feel personally at risk, according to an opinion poll by the Emnid institute, published Sunday.
The danger, observers say, is that instead of doing away with old stereotypes, recent events will create new ones, targeting German converts to Islam and reinforcing prejudices against Muslims in general. That could provide fodder for far-right anti-immigrant parties seeking to exploit people's fears.
The arrests last week have certainly sharpened the focus on converts, who according to German intelligence officials, are increasingly being targeted by Islamic militants eager to recruit followers who blend in.
Of the 3.3 million Muslims in Germany, about 18,000 are converts, according to the Islam Archive, a government-funded research group. An overwhelming majority of them convert because they marry a Muslim and are not considered to be at risk of radicalization, according to one intelligence official.
Like Gelowicz, who converted to Islam following his parents' divorce, Schneider became a Muslim as a teenager against the backdrop of a difficult family life, according to a German investigator.
Described as a good and inconspicuous student, Schneider abruptly left high school two years before graduating and enrolled in a technical college, because, according to the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, he wanted to go to a school "where only men teach." In April, he moved to a rundown house on the outskirts of Saarbrücken, with a makeshift prayer room known as the Omar Mosque in the backyard. Living off unemployment benefits, he shared a small apartment with two Tunisian students and another German convert, according to his Jordanian-born landlord, Jamil Khalil.
"He was the first German I have ever seen here," said Ingold Bungert, who owns a hairdresser's shop next door and has a clear view of the mosque from his backyard. He said he tried to talk to Schneider a few times.
"He would look at me and turn away. The only time I heard sound come from his mouth was when he chanted during his prayers, and he did that every three hours," Bungert said. "It makes you wonder how many other people who look like they could be my son are sitting in their apartments and are hatching plots."
Sarah Platt contributed reporting from Frankfurt.
It's the same problem in most countries with Muslims; but we must also be realistic that ingrown terrorists are not necessarily Muslims.
CI
Agreed we must be realistic. Today's terrorists are primarily Moslem.
Define
What is terrorism?
I will be much obliged to get some
legal, ethical, moral
definition of the word TERRORISM.