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Gilles Kepel on Terror in the Hexagon
It’sa shame that so many news shows in France are in French, because I often find the quality of their analyses of France’s state more detailed and insightful than those of American analysts of France, and wish I could share some of the interesting discussions I can watch here with you.
This isn’t available on YouTube, but you can click here to watch a recent interview with Gilles Kepel, who’s one of France’s better-known experts on Islam and the Arab world. It’s in English. He just published a book called Terror in the Hexagon: Genesis of the French Jihad which after a decade of research was rushed into print after last month’s terrorist attacks in Paris.
Here’s part of a review of the book in Quartz, by Emma-Kate Symons:
In the often-hysterical debate over the origins of ISIL-inspired “bottom-up” terrorism seen in the Nov. 2015 Paris attacks, and echoed by the San Bernardino massacre, a leading French intellectual refuses to let either radical Islam or Western elites off the hook.
Both must share part of the blame, says Gilles Kepel, internationally recognized expert on the Arab world and the politics of Islam in Europe, for laying the fertile ground that has enabled the rise of “3G” or third-generation jihad: born alongside YouTube, and with the decline of second-generation “top-down” satellite TV-driven terror organizations, like al-Qaeda. …
“Behind the jihadist eruption, lies the entrenchment of Salafism … the most radical elements of which, their eyes fixed on Syria and Daesh, are aiming for the destruction of Europe through civil war,” Kepel tells Quartz in an interview from Paris, where he is professor of political science at Sciences Po.
Terror in the Hexagon offers probably the most comprehensive history to date of the leading homegrown Western jihadist movement. The deadly roots of “retro-colonial” jihadisme français stretch back more than 50 years to the end of the Algerian war for independence, Kepel argues, culminating in the multiple deadly attacks that rocked France this year, starting with January’s massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine, and the Hyper Cacher market, and ending in a Kalashnikov bloodbath on the terraces of Parisian cafés and restaurants and at the Bataclan concert hall.
Between these two poles, lies the history of a society increasingly riven by “virtual and mental enclaves,” growing rejection of common values, and heightened social, political, and economic marginalization, especially of Generation Y. So it is no coincidence that far-right demagogue Marine Le Pen … is soaring in popularity, goes the Kepel argument. Almost simultaneously, the Islamic State is luring a growing radicalized fringe of “desperado” 20 to 30-somethings to commit mass murder of kuffar (“miscreants” or non-Muslims, particularly Jews), as well as “apostates” (“bad” Muslims). The two extremist phenomena feed in to each other, and are even secret or overt allies. “Behind the jihadist eruption, lies the entrenchment of Salafism.”
“They both want to create a society split into two distinct groups,” Kepel explains. “On one side, Muslims who are victims of what is relentlessly termed ‘Islamophobia,’ and on the other the extreme right.”
In reality, however, the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris and the strong showing by the National Front in regional elections (Le Pen’s party registered its highest legislative score since 2012 with close to 7 million votes) express “rejection of the French elites,” a power structure Kepel disparages as “an aristocracy increasingly cut off from society.”
“Economic abandonment and disenchantment with politics contributes as much to the intensification of Islamism as it does to the success of the National Front which feeds on the fear of terrorism,” he says.
Jihadists, for their part are jubilant on Twitter about the National Front’s success, Kepel points out, and they want it to win precisely because the party’s politics are so anti-Muslim. “That way there will be pogroms, all Muslims will be able to group under their banner of jihadism, and civil war will begin,” he says.
Kepel unpacks the Gallic jihadist trajectory and its intersection with foreign ideologies and the politics of the Middle East, but his thesis also has important implications for the United States and other Western nations struggling with the seemingly breakneck surge in locally-bred terrorists connected to ISIL.
“San Bernardino in a certain sense resembles [the Paris attacks] because it fits in with the same global trend and general logic of jihadism 3G,” he says, noting that there is still no certainty Paris attackers like Abaaoud and the Abdeslam brothers received an explicit order to attack. “Nov. 13 was claimed [by ISIL] but in reality responsibility was taken by the Francophone group of the organization.”
“In San Bernardino, too, we don’t know what the attackers’ exact link with Daesh was,” he notes. “On their Facebook pages they pledged allegiance to Islamic State which later congratulated them for the attacks. But this attack was likely committed without an order given by the organization.” France doesn’t need more secularism. Instead it needs to be more inclusive.
Kepel presents the hopeful possibility that despite the carnage, the terrorists in the French capital and California, by targeting indiscriminate victims, have failed in their ultimate goals. In contrast, the Jan. 2015 murders of the Charlie Hebdo team, a French Muslim police officer and Jewish supermarket shoppers, inspired the blowback “je ne suis pas Charlie” (“I am not Charlie”) movement.
“There are two objectives of terrorism: to terrify the enemy and mobilize the Muslim masses,” Kepel says. “But in Paris and San Bernardino they have made what appears to be a strategic error because they have not succeeded in mobilizing widespread Muslim support.”
Before they committed terrorist acts, most French 3G jihadists found radicalism in what Kepel condemns as the “carceral incubator” of prison, left unchecked or abetted by French authorities for years. They then completed their ISIL indoctrination online, although some passed through notorious mosques and consulted imams such as in the remote Artigat region of the southwest, generator of terrorists like Mohammed Merah and his siblings, and ISIL Francophone spokesman and convert Fabien Clain.
Still, the journey to fighting for the “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq, and subsequently returning to commit terrorist acts of horrifying violence on European soil cannot be simply attributed to an adolescent crisis fueled by cyber recruiters. Scathing though he is about the failure of France’s power elites to create a more inclusive society for the children of post-colonial immigration, and young people of all backgrounds, Kepel refutes the “Islam has nothing to do with this” argument by detailing the calculated and alarming surge in radical Islamic separatism exemplified by Salafism.
This obscurantist strain calling for a return to “original” Islam was exported from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, then launched in France by its neo-purist ideologues with heightened zealotry from 2005. The “new wave” Islamists refusing to shake women’s hands, fetishizing the full-body covering veil, and banning sport and music, seized the opportunity after the conservative Muslim Brotherhood was sidelined for its perceived failure to control the spectacularly violent youth riots around public housing projects across the country.
Having documented the transformation of many banlieues into separate ethnic, religious, consumer and cultural identity spaces created by Salafist radicals, Halal entrepreneurs and colluding politicians, Kepel wades directly into a high-stakes politico-cultural battle by taking aim at this neo-fundamentalist branch of Islam and its detrimental effects on the cohesion of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural French society. …
It may not be dominant among French Muslims, but Kepel says Salafism, which is also on the rise in the US, “exercises a hegemony over Muslim discourse that stops other trends from emerging.”
The left’s historic failure to fill the void left by the decline of communism and unified working class politics is also in his critical sights. The jihadist genesis can thus be traced at least as far back as the presidency of François Mitterrand in the 1980s, Kepel writes, as translated from the French by Quartz. The socialist leader mostly ignored the grievances of immigrants from the former colonies and their children, playing a Machiavellian political game with the National Front “to the point where the extreme right is today entrenched at the heart of French political life and in a position to hit the jackpot, while the marginalization of the children of Muslim immigration has opened the floodgates to Salafization and jihadism” …
In the “suburbs of French Islam,” the third generation of French Islam arrived at the age of adulthood, around 2005, the year of the French riots. It was also the year marked by the birth of 3G jihad, with the online publication of (the late, former Bin Laden adviser and breakaway figure) Abu Musab al-Suri’s 1600-page call to bottom-up globalized holy war waged by disaffected Muslim youth, targeting the “soft underbelly of the West”—Europe.
In Feb. 2005, Kepel equally notes, YouTube was registered as a business in California. And this changed the terrorism game.
“The first jihad revolution was by fax,” Kepel writes. “With Bin Laden it was satellite TV—there is no al-Qaeda without Al Jazeera—and today it’s YouTube with its MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) of jihadism that spread the theories, and of course the social networks, principally Facebook and Twitter.”
Intelligence services didn’t see the connection between the digital revolution and the theory of al-Suri, believing such a system and organization, which was so uncontrollable, “was going to make the jihadist machine implode.”
Meanwhile, seemingly by stealth, but repeatedly highlighted by researchers like Kepel, Salafism spread its tentacles through French society and particularly among the “retro-colonial” Generation Y, angry about their own and their forbears exclusion from the Gallic dream and in some cases, like Mohammed Merah, nurtured in Algerian families that hated France. In Feb. 2005, YouTube was registered as a business in California. And this changed the terrorism game.
During the transitional years of 2005 to 2012, the “incubation” of jihadism was underway until the Merah murders on the eve of François Hollande’s election as president, 3G jihadism burst out with a brutality that shocked French authorities. “The intelligence services were incapable of anticipating the fusion that it demonstrated between a foreign Islamist ideology spread through social networks, and the new political sociology of radicalized French Salafism,” Kepel writes.
Soon afterwards, the divorce between traditional Muslims and Hollande, who had been the beneficiary of the “Muslim vote,” was sealed with his law on gay marriage, inspiring mass protests when Catholics and Muslims “marched together under the banner of conservative values, but also because of the aggravation of the economic crisis which heavily struck the suburban ghettos.”
“This was the fertile terrain for the eruption of French jihad, in a society where the immigrant neighborhoods were caught in a vice-like grip between the resistible ascension of the National Front and the breakthrough of Salafism,” Kepel writes.
Islamist groups also brought the generations of French Islam and jihad together by offering to post-colonial youth of the suburbs “a universal projection of their social frustration’’ on to the Palestinian cause, and Hamas. This continues right up until today’s fanatical devotion to ISIL by some 5,000 French ‘’implicated’’ in the so-called caliphate’s jihadism.
Among the most controversial yet persuasive contentions of Kepel’s book, is his attack on the elevation of “Islamophobia” by Salafist leaders and associated zealots as the “cardinal sin” of the French republic.
Kepel decodes this catch-phrase as a debate-silencer. Behind it lies a sinister “victimization mentality” that he says permanently accuses the French state and the West of structural and institutional racism towards Muslims and so-called “philo-Semitism” or favoritism towards Jews and the memory of the Shoah.
The exclusionary, anti-Semitic discourse traps adherents in a fundamentalist bind that puts them on a separatist collision with broader society, and ignores or shuts down the at least five million-strong French Muslim community’s remarkable diversity. A staunch defender of the secular, pluralist model, Kepel concludes with a plea that France should not “concede victory to these zealots and entrust them with representing the Islamic community as only the fundamentalists imagine it.”
Watch the video; it’s interesting. Tell me what you think.
Published in Foreign Policy, General, Islamist Terrorism
Yes, it is.
But it’s not just that it’s a Federal bureaucracy at work. Starting (at least) with John Kerry’s campaign, the Democrat theme has been that “terrorism” is to be conceived of as a law enforcement problem.
Yes, it has a law enforcement aspect, yes, prison dawa is a big problem. But the Muslim Brotherhood/CAIR influence on law enforcement training concerning Islam has been pernicious, and overall the Obama administration’s approach to law enforcement has been counterproductive and socially divisive (which isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.) ISIS is inside our OODA loop.
Couple that with the social destruction created by the Great Society and its metastases, and we have serious problems.
Not all of the suburbs are bad neighborhoods (some are absolutely lovely). The story has its origins in the postwar reconstruction of France — one of five buildings had been destroyed; 1.2 million homes had been lost. There was huge pressure in the next few decades to build housing as quickly as possible — not least for demographic reasons; in France as in the US there was a postwar baby boom, then came the repatriation of French citizens from Algeria, and above all, France, like most developing countries, experienced a very rapid transition from rural to urban life.
So for about three decades after the Second World War, the state directed the construction of mass housing in what had been little towns on the outskirts of cities. The utter ugliness of what they built is something that gets less attention than it should. They’re monstrous to look at, particularly compared to the glorious beauty of the cities these projects surround. The most useful way to look at those buildings is to see them as permanent postwar rubble.
The demand for any kind of clean, modern, sanitary housing was massive in postwar France. But naturally, no one who could afford to live elsewhere wanted to live in these soul-destroying housing projects. So these neighborhoods became dominated by immigrants precisely because immigrants entered France at the bottom of its economic hierarchy.
Since you are a multicultural-diversity kind of guy, I am curious whether there is a country where so-called multiculturalism has worked. In Malaysia, the majority Malays legally discriminate against the Chinese and Indians; in Indonesia, they massacred and drove the Chinese back to China; in Sri Lanka, the Tamils and Sinhalese are still at each other’s throats; in India, the Hindus and Muslims are fighting in Kashmir; in China, the Han Chinese drove the minorities up into the mountains;
and even in the US, the media-sanctioned Black leadership propagandizes successfully about structural white racism and feels entitled to reparations; the Black President thinks racism is in the American DNA; La Raza is La Raza; campus protests about microaggressions unwittingly expose the students’ intolerance of diversity; and you already know about Europe. About the only place where multiculturalism might be viewed to work is Singapore but tight controls including govt mandated distribution of racial groups in public housing exist.
We all wish multiculturalism is viable but history seems to belie that fantasy. What’s viable is assimilation which usually happens with small minority populations participating in the national culture/identity. Large minority populations usually spell discord, much as we hate to admit it and prefer to frolic in little ahistorical fantasies. If you have an example, I would be interested to research it further.
What’s your definition of “working?” If by “it works” you mean, “has never experienced any tension or disharmony among ethnic groups,” that’s quite a rigorous standard, but I think the only places you’d find pure monocultures in the 21st century would be tribal villages.
How are you defining a “culture” — by race, language, self-identification, religion?
Yes, but that’s really astonishing. Because we invented the idea of the OODA loop, to the point where we use it to describe everything.
Just today — at last — the Atlantic wrote a piece about the failure of our propaganda. (I’m guessing they saw the same interview with Fernandez and decided it was time to publish this piece.)
But how did so many people miss this observation? It seems to me sometimes as if there’s a huge time-lag between foreign events and American reactions to them. Somehow we’re now hailing ISIS as “propaganda geniuses.” They’re not — they’re just propaganda-competent.
In an age when anyone can speak to ISIS fanboys immediately and at no risk to themselves, why is the nature of their propaganda only now being reported? It’s never been easier for people to meet the enemy online. Anyone on Ricochet could interview one of them and report what they have to say and how they see themselves. (In fact, why don’t you?)
We should have all the advantages here. I don’t understand the failure of initiative and imagination.
Kevin quoted Sun Tzu in his most recent post: “Know thy enemy, know thyself, and you will be invincible.” The full quote, depending on the translation, is “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
We seem neither to know them, nor ourselves — at least, not to the point where we can appreciate how hopelessly out-of-touch we look to the audience we’re trying to reach.
It’s a disastrous recipe.
It seems to me that his statement
would cover any of those; “assimilation usually happens with small minority populations” is an assertion that deserves serious consideration.
Assimilation has to be done with intention. In the early 20th century, the integration of numerous immigrant groups was substantially accomplished by schools and social service agencies, and peaking around 1960, the integration of blacks considered desirable.
The Great Society’s assault on black families and the rise of multiculturalism mean that for two generations – more than a full career in academia and government – the Federal Government has been putting trillions of dollars into both integration and disintegration; that has spilled over from blacks to other ethnic groups that the Democrats could carve out as political blocs.
Meanwhile, as a part of the long march through the institutions, the belief that assimilation is a good thing has been systematically purged from the institutions that a century ago accomplished it.
That’s the USA’s version; other countries have different histories and problems.
There was a story earlier this year from the UK of a municipal police department that would not investigate Pakistani rapists for fear of offending the Pakistani community.
That case is often cited on blogs (well, the ones I read anyway) as a canonical example of failed institutional multiculturalism.
Myself, I think multiculturalism pushes prejudice from the conscience mind to the unconscious, with the result that acts of prejudice become highly unpredictable, even chaotic. In the past minorities could plan their lives around the prejudice of others, but that is becoming increasingly hard to do.
It was dead easy for me to plan my life around the prejudice against bisexuals. It is much harder to plan for ethnic prejudice, given the taboo against discussing intra-white ethnic conflict.
I addressed what “works” above–that is, assimilation, where small minority groups share the core values of the national culture while maintaining their cultural identity. I would say the standard would be the assimilated small Asian populations in the US and if you regard the different European immigrants as being of different cultures, their assimilation would also form part of the standard.
But another way to understand what works is to look at what hasn’t worked; and I listed several countries above–Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and of course Europe. I might add, thinking of Muslim populations, Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar, Russia.
Race and culture are intrinsically tied. People of a certain racial group tend to share a common history, language, politics, and religion. So, indeed, the best test of multiculturalism is to consider where large racial groups within a national border have co-existed harmoniously–as per the different assimilated European groups and Asians in America.
Your notion of “pure monoculture” is unhelpful. If you want to argue monoculture, try Japan and China as closest in meaning, not some tribal societies.
Assimilation of small groups works, but multiculturalism in its grandest yet most banal leftist incarnation is what fails, but fulfills our fondest fantasies and is thrown around like an article of faith.
“It is much harder to plan for ethnic prejudice, given the taboo against discussing intra-white ethnic conflict.”
Joseph, do you mean conflict based on the competing interests of different economic classes?
“Assimilation has to be done with intention. In the early 20th century, the integration of numerous immigrant groups was substantially accomplished by schools and social service agencies, and peaking around 1960, the integration of blacks considered desirable.”
Koolie, wouldn’t you say the best measure of assimilation is the rate of intermarriage? In which case it’s something that happens ( or not) because of the actions of individuals from majority and minority groups rather than due to Govt policy or strategy.
Parts of the US are currently having a bit of a freak out over Mexican migration, but in a couple of generations I wonder if the lines between ethnic groups won’t become increasingly blurred. With every ‘group’ and its culture changing.
I would definitely say that.
I wouldn’t. That’s just mixing. If the black flag spreads across America with four idiot wives per thug, that’s not assimilation.
Likewise, I am married to a Japanese in Japan. Hell if I’m assimilating, though. Not what I came here for. I’m polite and I don’t comment on a whole lot here, because I just work here.
BDB – what is the difference, as you see it, between assimilation and mixing? What about the children born from these marriages?
I’ll throw this one to the crowd.
Canada is such a country. I think it’s a mistake for it to have not made English the official language for government business (and to have made government a smaller business) because the differences between the English and French provinces have threatened to tear the whole country apart. But it has stayed together, and Quebec has a lot of latitude in running its own affairs.
Canada’s treatment of indigenous peoples has not been so liberal (compared to that of the U.S.) as some like to think it is, but in the last century both Canada and the U.S. have allowed these groups greater latitude in running their own affairs.
And both the United States and Canada have made accommodations to the cultures of the Anabaptist groups within their borders, in matters of schools, military service, and social welfare. The United States was rather anti-multicultural under Wilson’s administration during WWI, but it has changed for the better since then.
Thank you for that. The biggest problem I faced with the interview was the knowledge that there was a back-story that I wasn’t familiar with. Encouraging immigration without providing for the immigrants with a clear buy-in to the good life is madness. You’ll end up with an underclass that will have no interest in supporting the existing system.
Zafar: Intermarriage is assimilation and I support it. But people do not marry to assimilate; they marry for myriad other reasons, love, cultural affinity, compatibility, etc…It cannot be relied on as the bulwark against balkanization when large, different racial groups share a nation. And historically, it hasn’t functioned as such. But there are many other ways to assimilate, other than intermarriage, as the U.S. experience through 1965 would suggest.
As an aside, on intermarriage, my observation is that Muslims again appears to be the most difficult group to integrate because of their strict requirement that the non-Muslim spouse convert; and upon conversion to Islam, the legal penalties, including jail and death variously, against leaving the religion.
I wouldn’t characterize the reaction to the illegal immigration from Mexico and the South as “parts of the US…having a bit of a freak out.” That belittles the prevailing deep concerns over unlawfulness, sovereignty, and national culture/identity. Your reliance on intermarriage resolving problems of assimilation is not backed by facts. Intermarriage occurs at a snail’s pace, driven by factors wholly unrelated to assimilation.
I have not thought of Canada as a multicultural country as yet. I have thought of Canada as a country beginning to experience some of pitfalls of having to digest an as yet small number of immigrants whose religious beliefs may not be compatible with modern Western/Canadian culture and traditions.
Perhaps you have a different notion of multiculturalism than the feel-good, leftist, fantasy that drives mainstream narrative. This is what I mean. If Canada were to import Chinese or Muslims to make up, say, 30 percent of its population and make it work, such that race/religion is more or less an afterthought rather than fundamentally divisive issues, then it would be a multicultural success in the mainstream sense.
Your notion of viable multiculturalism perhaps seems closer to mine where relatively small minority groups have mostly assimilated to the majority culture and traditions while maintaining their own cultural identity.
I cannot speak for BDB but he brings up a valid point, I think, specific only to Islam. I read his comments as saying that intermarriage that leads to the imposition of political Islam and shariah is not assimilation to the majority Western cultural tradition. Assimilation in the general sense has to be to the existing national culture and identity.
This brings to mind something Lee Kuan Yew once said:
“Muslims want to assimilate us. It’s a one-way traffic…They have no confidence in allowing choice.”
Lee said to Huntington on the latter’s “Clash of Civilizations”: “Look, I agree with you only where Muslims are concerned, only there…Hinduism, Chinese Confucianism or Communism, Japanese Shintoism, they’re secular really. They know that to progress, you must muster science and technology….But the Muslims believe that if they master the Qu’ran and they are prepared to do all that Muhammad has prescribed, they will succeed. So, we can expect trouble from them and so, it happened.”
Lee spoke to BDB’s point, if I have interpreted BDB’s comments correctly.
“Intermarriage is assimilation and I support it. But people do not marry to assimilate; they marry for myriad other reasons, love, cultural affinity, compatibility, etc…It cannot be relied on as the bulwark against balkanization when large, different racial groups…”
Intermarriage and offspring illustrate a basic truth about race – there really is only one human race.
I would say it is a measure of social integration as well as one of its drivers. But that also illustrates integration being the sum of many individual decisions rather than a Government level thing. Government policy can incentivise it, but in the end it’s about people and how they feel and what they do.
Intermarriage between castes or language groups or religious groups is on the rise in India – which reflects social changes – there has been no change in Govt policies.
No.