Europe under siege: Good long read by Paul Wells

Good long read by Wells on the radicalization and other challenges in Europe. Where he ends up of note:

All of which suggests, to me, that the long-term solution to the urban terror of ISIS is not to shut down borders, banish newcomers, bulk up the surveillance state and out-tough the murderers. Certainly there is a market for that prescription. On a Monday night several days after the Brussels bombings, a gang of thick-necked soccer hooligans descended on the square in front of the Bourse, tearing down peacenik banners and picking fights with passersby who seemed, in the eye of the roving strongmen, excessively eager to make nice with Islamists. The police finally saw the counterprotesters off with water cannon. There will be plenty of politicians offering the marchers their brand of tough medicine in the next election, in Belgium and across Europe. There have been for decades.

But if Islamism is vying for the attention and affection of distracted and dissolute kids, whether second-generation rebel sons of moderate Muslims or slapdash converts from Christianity or atheism, then it is not in the West’s long-term interest to try to out-tough the killers. Rather it is to sap the appeal of terror and murder by ensuring, consistently over the long term, that another way of life really does look better.

On that score, I daresay that Europe, for all its strains and its frequent inanity, is doing well. On a bad day you could almost sell the notion that EU and ISIS are funhouse-mirror images of each other: polyglot, border-skipping multinational operations that operate in defiance of history, logic or human nature. But the comparison flatters ISIS and cheats Europe. The foreign fighters who have streamed to Raqqa to join the jihad have as often recoiled in horror as they have been embraced as useful recruits. The murders of innocent dozens in Paris, including Muslims, have badly undercut the appeal of ISIS in the French-speaking world. Cédric Mas, a French analyst, has pointed out that the latest issue of Dar al-Islam, the French-language ISIS propaganda magazine, devotes an unprecedented amount of space to defensive arguments for its terror attacks in Europe—and contains no long-term forecasts about the organization’s future. It is as if, at the moment of its apparent triumph, ISIS has found itself thrown on the back foot among its own clientele.

Europe, meanwhile, is Europe, revelling in its history and culture, refining its admittedly clumsy policing, learning from error. And not incidentally, living as a rich, compelling community—richer in many places, in important ways, than Brussels.

On Monday at a conference organized by the European Policy Centre think tank, Thomas Fabian, the deputy mayor of Leipzig, described the policies his German city of 500,000 people has adopted to integrate the more than 5,000 migrants who moved there last year. The newcomers are distributed throughout the city, including in affluent neighbourhoods, instead of being left in ghettos, Fabian said. The newcomers are obliged to take German lessons. Each family is assigned a city social worker to check in now and again, but for the most part newcomers are encouraged to leave their homes to visit doctors and other services, to strengthen their personal responsibility and self-reliance. The goal of it all, Fabian said, is to make sure the newcomers join Leipzig’s broader community, a community whose residents, 300 years ago, included Johann Sebastian Bach.

This is a better way to act. It is more fulfilling and will, over time, be more attractive. By coincidence I arrived in Brussels on the same Thalys train route, from Amsterdam through Brussels to Paris, on which three vacationing Americans subdued Ayoub El-Khazzani eight months ago. No guard rifled through my bag as I boarded, and the train did not stop at the border between the Netherlands and Belgium.

In my car was an American family. The mother read aloud to her three sons from a Harry Potter book for the duration of the two-hour trip. A society where family, community, technology and security can co-exist that well—most of the time, never perfectly—is stronger than it looks. Stronger than it has been made to feel this year. In the long-term battle between Europe and its assorted tormenters, keep betting on Europe.

Source: Europe under siege