On Sunday, seven young Syrian men were arrested and charged with terrorist activity aimed at mainland Europe. The men deny the charges and obviously we should assume them innocent till proven otherwise. But this case is about more than establishing guilt.
Security forces across Europe are on high alert. They anticipate that the terrorist organisation Islamic State (IS), resurgent in Afghanistan, will try to carry out its recent promise to strike within Europe (as well as the US, Russia and China). The unfolding of the Maltese case could have an impact on our security irrespective of the verdict reached.
If the men turn out to be innocent, terrorist sympathisers will use it to build a sense of grievance and victimhood among Muslims in Malta, a first step in grooming recruits.
If the men are guilty, the government will come under pressure to harden its attitudes towards legal Muslim immigrants – an outcome IS would hope for.
When dealing with terrorism, there are two kinds of naivety we should be wary of. There’s the naive idealism associated with a section of the political left. But we shouldn’t forget the naive ‘realism’ associated with the right.
Naive idealism blames terrorism mainly on ‘the West’ and its global policies. If ‘we’ behaved better, ‘they’ wouldn’t attack us.
Such idealism misses how IS operates. For IS, everyone who is not within it is against it. That’s why it’s killed more Muslims, within Muslim-majority countries, than it has killed non-Muslims elsewhere.
No policy change would appease IS. It rejects the international order wholesale. It has an apocalyptic vision and is bent on organising the world’s destruction so that a new one can be born.
Within the confines of Malta, there’s another version of naive idealism. It says that if we would only keep our noses out of anyone else’s business, and stick to a do-nothing neutrality, then terrorists would leave us alone.
Alas, we couldn’t be neutral on terror even if we wanted to. Terrorists will still target us, even if it’s not to attack us. They like nothing better than a small jurisdiction, with limited policing resources, to use quietly as a base for operations elsewhere.
If we don’t do anything about that, we’d be complicit. Cooperation with other security agencies is necessary before we even get a whiff of activity. Whether we like it or not, terrorism draws us into its web.
Naive idealism is unrealistic about security issues. But there’s a way of urging realism about security that is itself naive about policies and their consequences.
Naive realism prides itself on its hard-headed, black-and-white, anti-wishy-washy attitude towards immigration and Islam. It lumps everyone together, favours banning Muslims from the country and decries the legal system and administrative state that rule such policies out.
We couldn’t be neutral on terror even if we wanted to. Terrorists will still target us, even if it’s not to attack us- Ranier Fsadni
If I were an IS agent provocateur, I’d do my best to encourage such ‘realism’. It would help provide the breeding ground of sympathisers I’d want to groom.
Naive realism prides itself on being tough-minded and calling things by their proper name. But it is remarkably soft-headed about how the world works.
Naive realism assumes would-be terrorists spring into our world like invading aliens. The European record suggests that recruits are often home-grown, with a profile similar to teens groomed by drug rings and organised crime – which is why some of the successful anti-terror programmes have learned from their anti-drug counterparts.
Far from being representative of a particular culture or family structure, some recruits shock their otherwise well-adjusted and integrated families.
The younger brother of one of the Brussels Airport bombers is Mourad Lachraoui, who won Belgium its gold medal at the European Taekwando championships only two months after his brother’s crime. Asked about the bombing, Lachraoui distanced himself (as did the Belgian Muslim community generally) and said he hadn’t spoken to his brother in years.
Just as it’s naive to address drugs and crime without a focused data-driven approach, it’s naive to lump all Muslims together when experience suggests we should be interested in a much narrower profile.
The link to drugs and crime is an established pattern. Far from being exemplary Muslims, several of the Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) bombers were already known to the police because of their involvement in petty crime, drugs and shady bars up to a few months before the attacks. They were ordinary thugs, violating even the basic precepts of Islam, before they ‘caught religion’.
Why them, not others? Part of it is chance. Saleh Abdeslam was a childhood friend of his recruiter, Abdelhamid Abaaoud; they grew up in the same Brussels neighbourhood.
Part of it is systemic. Like other Islamist terror organisations, IS moves into areas where Islamic authorities are missing, providing its own preaching and teaching. In North Africa, it finances itself through the drug trade.
It is not social alienation alone that’s responsible for recruitment to IS. But policies that exacerbate it play into the terrorists’ hands.
The lessons are clear. If we care about our security, we need some policy changes. We should be giving permits to new mosques and preachers of good standing, rather than clamping down on them and allowing shadier operators to operate informally.
And we shouldn’t forget that keeping our eye on the ball is about more than surveillance of civil society. It’s also about keeping ourselves in check.
There’s ample documentation that Malta’s laxity with gaming and financial transactions has sometimes made it, effectively, complicit with organised crime to our north. If we end up similarly lax with the production and export of ‘medical marijuana’, we could end up complicit with the financing of terrorists, on our southern shores, smiling grimly at our opportunistic ‘realism’.