Turkey’s top religious body tackles misinterpretation of Islam

Following the recent attacks in Paris and Beirut by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Turkey has shouldered an increased responsibility, as a key Muslim country in the region, to fight against Islamist extremism and terrorism.

Turkey’s top religious body, the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet), dedicated a Friday sermon on Nov. 20 to global terror, saying ISIS was “marching on the same path as the Crusaders.”

The sermon was read at some 80,000 mosques across the country, and over 2,000 mosques abroad that are linked to the directorate.

“It is not only innocent people that are killed in Ankara, Paris, Beirut, Baghdad and Nigeria... but also Islam’s holy values, which were sent as a mercy to mankind,” stated the sermon, entitled “The religion that is targeted by global terror.”

The sermon added that those who kill innocent people in the name of religion are killing all humanity.

A report released by Diyanet in August explained ISIS’s recruitment tactics, slogans and interpretation of Islam to influence especially Muslim youth.

Turkish imam Ahmet Muhsin Tuzer said he explained to people the real spirit of Islam each time he came across a wrong interpretation by ISIS members.

“My disadvantage is not to have a young community in the mosque I currently serve, but I’m in active dialogue with my entourage to clear up their mindset about real Islam,” Tuzer told Al Arabiya News.

“For instance, many people were impressed by the latest sermon of Diyanet, and began asking me questions about ISIS’s misinterpretations of the religion.”

He said Diyanet officials “and particularly imams have a serious responsibility to shoulder under these critical circumstances. We have to gain back those youth who are brainwashed, and give them the real inspiration of Islam.”

ISIS carried out attacks in the southeastern town of Suruc and the capital Ankara this year, killing more than 100 citizens.

Public opinion
According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, published on Nov. 17, 8 percent of the population have a favorable opinion of ISIS, and 73 percent unfavorable.

A July survey by the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) found that 91 percent of Turks think ISIS is a terrorist organization while 7 percent do not, and 82 percent think it is a threat to Turkey while 16 percent do not.

“This survey was before the Suruç, Ankara and Paris attacks, and one would expect that the image of ISIS would become even more negative, which the Pew survey highlights hasn’t happened,” Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the GMF, told Al Arabiya News.

“I think the favorable opinion of ISIS shared by just 8 percent of Turkish society, according to the Pew survey, is an indirect function of Turks’ unfavorable opinion of the West.”

Unluhisarcikli said this way of thinking - called Sevres Syndrome, in reference to the treaty the Ottoman Empire was forced to sign upon losing World War I - is prevalent among ordinary Turkish citizens.

“On top of this, there’s the Islamist way of thinking, which perceives developments from the prism of a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world.”

Murat Erdogan, director of Hacettepe University’s Migration and Politics Research Center (HUGO), said furthering cooperation and integration with the West would be crucial for Turkey to boost its position, as a Muslim country, against ISIS threats.

“However, the social influence of Diyanet and its appointed local imams remains limited among Muslim youth in Turkey, because there’s still social support for this terrorist group, although limited to a low percentage,” Erdogan told Al Arabiya News.

Unluhisarcikli agrees:“Although Diyanet has recently begun efforts to create awareness about the evil of ISIS in Friday prayers, I’m not sure those Turks who have sympathy for ISIS are followers of the Diyanet interpretation of Islam.”

Erdogan said the Paris attacks were likely to undermine social perceptions of Muslims in Europe.

“This requires Turkey and Turkish immigrants in Europe to show solidarity with Western countries, and display a sincere attitude without reservations against ISIS. Turkey should clearly and credibly declare that it’s against Islamist terror,” he added.
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/2015/11/30/Turkey-s-top-religious-body-tackles-misinterpretation-of-Islam.html

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Enlightened Islam against jihadist ideology

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urged French Muslim leaders on Sunday to develop an "enlightened Islam" to confront what he called the obscurantist views of Islamic State that lead young Muslims into violence.

At their first meeting since the Nov. 13 killings of 130 people, he told about 400 Muslim leaders, imams and activists that France would do everything it could to track criminals, but only they could win the battle of ideas within Islam.

The unusual meeting of 10 Muslim federations and five grand mosques was arranged to "cry loud and clear our condemnation of these acts," Anouar Kbibech, head of France's Muslim Council (CFCM), said of the massacre in Paris by mostly French and Belgian recruits to the Syrian-based Islamic State movement.

It swore allegiance to France and ended with the French national anthem, La Marseillaise. France's five-million-strong Muslim minority, Europe's largest, makes up about 8 percent of the population. Two-thirds of them are French citizens.

Cazeneuve, whose portfolio includes religious affairs, recalled Islam's "Golden Age" of prominent philosophers and cooperation among religions, which was a far cry from what he called the perverted Islam of today's jihadists.

"It is your responsibility to revive this enlightened Islam to denounce the spiritual duplicity of the terrorists and those who follow them," he told the meeting.

"You are the most legitimate and qualified to fight these deadly ideas ... we must protect our youth from the spread of this stupidity," he said. "Just think what effect this progressive Islam would have on the rest of Islam in the world."

France is home to many Muslim intellectuals who write long treatises about reforming Islam to make it fit better into western society. Most have only faint resonance among practicing Muslims here or in the Muslim world.

"ISLAM OF FRANCE"

Since the late 1980s, successive Paris governments have tried but failed to nurture a liberal "Islam of France" that would help integrate the faith into this mostly secular society.

The French Muslim community, torn apart by ethnic divisions and power politics, has for its part failed to unite to oppose radical Salafist groups that have established their presence in some mosques and neighborhoods as well as on the Internet.

Recently elected as CFCM president, Kbibech brought together the often rival federations and grand mosques to pledge to do more to train imams, fight radicalization and educate young Muslims in the principles of Islam.

"After the time for emotion, for condemnation and compassion, now is the time for action," he said. "French Muslims are ready to play their part ... to understand and prevent the drift of some of our youths into violence."

Islam played a part in this radicalization, even if only as a source for religious pretexts misused to justify violence, he said, but many political, economic and social factors also pushed young Muslims to extremism.

"We are witnessing an Islamization of their radicalism, not a radicalization of Islam," he said, citing a recent analysis by Olivier Roy, a leading French academic expert on Islam.

Cazeneuve, who announced a meeting with Muslim leaders about radicalization for early January, said French Muslims should develop a "Gallican Islam, that keeps abreast of modern society's concerns and resolves issues that (Islam) never had to resolve in its societies of origin".

Salafist Islam, the puritan literalist interpretation of the faith that is the basis for Islamic State's violent ideology, says Muslims must return to the practices of early Islam in the seventh century and shun many aspects of modern western life.

Cazeneuve said Paris would continue cracking down on what he called obscurantism and told the meeting that two mosques had been shut down and about 20 more searched since Paris decreed emergency powers to allow it to track down militants.

He praised the meeting for its unequivocal denunciation of extremism and allegiance to France and its values, calling a statement it passed "a declaration of love for the republic and for France".

(Reporting by Tom Heneghan)
Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/29/us-france-shooting-muslims-idUSKBN0TI0XG20151129#pgYXXkMEh9Itd8Zk.99

Comments:
Islam is already enlightened, its against terrorism, the misguided terrorists are using name of Islam to kill the innocent people. If a bad driver bangs new Mercedes car, its not fault of Mercedes but of driver, who needs training. Keep reading >>> 

Read more on:  Islam & Terrorism

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Muslims need to take a firm stand against Terrorists who are killing in the name of Islam

If the whole Muslim population is placed under a restive “judgment” of mistrust, it is not the fault of the “other” but our own “private bomber” who believes that they are going to “paradise” if they blow up a cathedral or an opera house full of people

I am a Muslim and I do not approve of what some “Muslim terror groups” are doing to the world in their frenzied state of heedless revenge against an enemy which is not even there. The Islamic State group for instance, brings shame to me being a Muslim. I was shocked the day Paris was attacked for it was only innocent people who got killed and maimed. It is always the innocent who get killed in majority (or should I say all) of the attacks perpetrated and then heretically owned by Muslim terror outfits. The policy makers, the aggressors and the assumed “proponent enemies” are seated behind fortresses while our Muslim brothers kill unassuming people who are out to earn their living or by all means live a happy life. This is terrorism and there is no running away from it. If the whole Muslim population is being blamed and is placed under a restive “judgment” of mistrust, it is not the fault of the “other” but our own “private bomber” who is persistently focused on the belief that he or she is going to “paradise” if he or she manages to blow up a cathedral or an opera house full of people. It is our own people who make lives difficult for us.

As for me, I am a man of simple faith and I believe in the ideals that my religion teaches me. But I am not frenzied; I am not out to hit out every person from a distinct faith to secure my position in paradise. I am far away from that, because first I am a human being and my religion teaches me love and compassion for not only other humans but even “inanimate” objects like the roads I walk on. My religion teaches me to feed the hungry rather than stuffing my own abdomen with loads and loads of food and I need to weigh, intrinsically, how focused I am on such “deeds”. I have to look out for my neighbours the way I look out for my father and mother. If I am a Muslim I have to abide by all that my religion preaches and not stay obscurely focused on “how to eliminate” the “other”. I would not mind if I may be hurting the sentiments of people who believe in a different, “conjured Islam” because it is high time that Muslims who love their religion for everything good it has to offer stand up against those who are out to disfigure the very instinct of it.

I do not see the West as an oppressor of Muslims specifically since the West has intervened in the internal affairs of almost every nation and has poked its nose into “everyone else’s business”. The fact that most of the regions that have been hit by Western diktats and unwanted intervention were predominantly Muslim territories owes allegiance to the fact that these territories are home to exhaustive oil and mineral reserves. Talking of that we find that the West has intervened in almost every territory that had or has the potential to precursor hegemony over Caspian oil and natural reserves and these interventions can genuinely be classified as “intrinsic” to the power play of such nation-states, for instance the US which has kept its position as a world super-power secure for a long time now owing to its power politics mediated through its aggressive armed interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan. In order to maintain its “hegemony” the US had to categorically maintain “lockdowns” on resource-rich territories or at least tried to do, lest it only witness its fall from “glory”. We must also realize as a population that the world has evolved since monarchs and emperors would engage themselves in sword-fights to conquer new lands and the changed world order has set the economic precedent for everyone. It is monopoly over markets and economies that lay the route for greater stability and super-powerfulness. If we hold grudges over that then maybe some of us need a dozen or so teleportation machines to be transferred back to the recesses of savagery.

So who are we fooling? Rather than laying a well-planned economic siege over magnates, who own disastrously wealthy corporations, and media giants who twist the “game” into their favour away from public discourse, why are groups like the IS irrationally disposed only to murder innocent people? My answer to my own question is that their vision is too blurred by fanatic ideologues and their ideologies to see where the world is actually heading. They are too desensitized to realize that instead of reeling in disastrous amounts of flak which puts the future of world Muslims at the crosshairs of missile launchers and snipers they could be the agents of change.

Resource hungry magnates drive opinions aided by debauch media houses which lead to aggressive interventions on part of the West in the rest of the world while our aimless armed “treatments” help them draft their courses of action. Common people are as innocent as ever and they have no idea what is generally going on. So, why should they be targeted? It would have made much more sense if our terror outfits, which in the name and under a misrepresented and misinterpreted emblem of Islam blow up the credentials of every living or dead Muslim on the face of the earth with every bombing they execute to achieve a miscalculated “revenge”, sat down with their very own people and tried to solve things by first solving their anger issues, setting their priorities right and then evolving mechanisms to eliminate disparities amongst the Ummah and then addressing the world as a singular, sane and rational voice which I am sure would be heard. Acting out of unwarranted trust-issues at the behest of blood-soaked petro-dollars pumped in by our own elite and maintain a steady body count of the “other” as segregate groups is only rendering the writing on the wall bolder – that all Muslims are ‘heedless terrorists’.
By Arshid Malik:
http://nation.com.pk/blogs/29-Nov-2015/we-muslims-need-to-take-a-firm-stand-against-our-fellow-muslims-who-are-killing-in-the-name-of-our

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Want to get richer? Then take in more refugees

As political debates about Syrian refugees rage on both sides of the Atlantic, initial assessments of their economic impact on receiving countries are comingin:Theinnuxis goodfor growth.

A new Bloomberg survey of economists predicts that Germany, the biggest recipient of Syrian asylum seekers in the Western world, will get a 0.2 per cent boost to its economic output next year if it takes in 800,000 refugees in 2015; that would be 12.5pc of Germany`s expected 2016 growth. The estimate is in line with the European Union`s most recent economic forecasts, which predict increases of 0.21pc for the gross domestic product of the EU as a whole in 2016, and 0.26pc in 2016.

These numbers may seem small, especially given some of the hyperbolic coverage of the `refugee crisis` in Europe. But then in equivalent terms, the influx of asylum seekers is small, too.

The 1.9 million refugees who arrived in the EU between January 2012 and July 2015 have increased the bloc`s population by 0.37pc. The European Commission predicts about 3 million will have arrived between the beginning of 2015 and the end of 2017, a tiny number next to the bloc`s total population of 508 million, although people in some neighbourhoods where refugees are being accommodated will feel otherwise.

The expected growth will mainly come from government spending. The German government estimates it needs to spend about 12,000 euros ($12,700) per refugee per year. That money, how-ever, is not going into a black hole: It stimulates domestic demand for goods and services. Economists have long been telling the German government it shouldn`t to be so tight-fisted, because the economy needed stimulus. Well, the refugees have melted Chancellor Angela Merkel`s heart and the stimulus is coming.

One could argue that this is unfair to locals: Why shouldn`t they, not some strangers, be at the receiving end of government largesse? As it is, local workers are at risk of being displaced by the refugees,andthe governments are only facilitating this with taxpayer money.

The unpopular answer is that locals are not procreating fast enough. European economies need more workers to keep expanding as the population ages, so the smarter governments are, in effect, buying immigrants to boost the workforce. A more politically acceptable argument in favour of the refugees is that their arrival increases the demand for local skilled workers in the bureaucracy, social services and education.

Integrating the newcomersisajobthatnooneexcept locals can take on. And more managers are needed as the workforce increases, as it inevitably will. That`s why the positive effect on growth is expected to be higher in 2017.

A recent World Bank study of the Syrian refugees` effect on the labour market in Turkey, which has accepted more than 2 million Syrians since 2011, registered this effect.

`The refugees, who overwhelmingly do not have work permits, result in the large-scale displacement ofinformal, low educated, female Turkish workers, especially in agriculture, Ximena Del Carpio and Mathis Wagner wrote.

`While there is net displacement, the inflow of refugees also creates higher wage formal jobs allowing for occupational upgrading of Turl(ish workers, while for women there is also an increase in school attendance.

Another reason the refugees are generally good for growth is that some of them come with financial assets.

Right-wing critics of permissive immigration policies like to point out that some of the newcomers are welldressed, equipped with modern smartphones and capable of paying human traffickers to bring them too Europe.

That`s not all bad. In 2013, the Jordanian Investment Board said Syrians had invested $1bn in the kingdom`s economy. In Turkey, the estimate is $10bn since 2011. Last year, Syrians founded more than 1,100 companies there, 26pc of all new foreign-owned firms.

Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan all have positive economic growth rates. They complain about the difficulties of dealing with millions of refugees and their shaky welfare states are certainly under strain. Even so, the newcomers are a force for growth.

In Jordan, the economicactivity rate of Syrians is higher than that of native Jordanians 48.5pc vs.

36.5pc. In Lebanon, just the humanitarian aid received by the Syrian refugees boosted GDP by 1.3pc last year, almost compensating for the drop in tourism and exports caused by the war in the neighbouring country, according to a study by the UNHCR, the United Nations` refugee agency.

There will be a temporary adjustment in Europe.

According to the EU`s forecast, per capita GDP in the bloc will drop by about 0.15pc next year because of the influx, because for now the refugees will naturally contribute less as a group than the settled population.

Europeans will notice the slight drop in living standards: Schools, clinics and police forces will of necessity be more strained than before.

The labour market, too, will become more competitive at its lower end. But soon, as public services expand tocope and the new labour force generates more output, this will smooth out.

Unfortunately, after the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, any argument in favour of accepting more refugees from the Middle East will struggle to be heard.
By Leonid Bershidsky
By arrangement with The Washington Post, dawn.com

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Terror Attacks in Paris: Western Imperialism Is to Blame

In the aftermath of the latest attacks on Paris that left more than 120 dead, the corporate, Eurocentric media of the West is in overdrive to scare working people into sacrificing their civil liberties and convince us of the need to launch more aggressive bombing raids, with the possibility of deploying troops, in Iraq and Syria to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). The attacks reek of a false flag operation by French security forces, but even if the attacks were indeed the work of ISIS, the attacks are nevertheless the inevitable response to Western imperialism’s exploitation of the Middle East and North Africa and worldwide military interventions. Each conflict in the Middle East and North Africa can be attributed to the policies of Western imperialism. The conflict in Syria is not a civil war; it is a regional proxy war being waged by Western imperialism through air strikes, sanctions, and support for regional proxies (i.e., so-called “moderate” rebels, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Israel, etc.),(note: also add Iran, Syria, Ressia ) all with their own agendas, to weaken movements and states opposed to their interests. Likewise, the war in neighboring Iraq can be directly attributed to the illegal occupation of the country by Western imperialism in 2003; al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of ISIS, was not formed until after the U.S.-led occupation. The U.S. and its allies have over the last 50 years caused untold devastation and suffering to millions of people in dozens of countries throughout the world, especially in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. There is hardly a single country in all three regions that hasn’t been subjected to airstrikes, invasions, coups, sanctions, and/or mass murders by U.S.-led imperialism. The rise of radical Islamic extremism itself has its origins in the policies of U.S. imperialism to overthrow the People’s Democratic Government of Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. Muslims were recruited, trained, and armed by the U.S. and its allies Pakistan, then under the control of Zia ul-Haq, an authoritarian, US supported military dictator with a radical Islamic agenda, and Saudi Arabia, still controlled by one of the most corrupt and oppressive regimes in the world with an extreme interpretation of Islamic law, in camps and madrassas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. These “freedom fighters”, as Ronald Reagan referred to them, poisoned the water of schoolchildren, mercilessly tortured teachers, raped women, and fought to reestablish the power of the feudal landlords. After the Soviet withdrawal and the overthrow of the socialist government, many of these Muslim fighters left Afghanistan to wage violent insurgencies against the authoritarian dictators that serve as the puppet masters of Western imperialism in their home countries and against the Western states that support them. Whenever a terrorist attack is committed, Western politicians and the media try to capitalize on the anger and fear of the masses to implement pre-planned agendas, while deliberately ignoring the history of these very states in committing terrorist acts themselves. France has terrorized the people of its former colonies for decades. In Algeria, 1.5 million were killed fighting for their independence from France, among many other bloody wars of independence fought against France. French imperialism routinely intervenes in its former colonies whenever its interests are threatened; French special forces were sent to control the uranium mines in Niger and the Central African Republic, and thousands of troops were deployed in the Ivory Coast to control the cocoa trade and also to Mali to control the country’s mineral wealth in competition with Chinese investments. To this day 14 former French colonies in Africa are forced to pay France a ‘colonial tax’, putting $500 billion of wealth into the French treasury each year instead of being used to help the desperately impoverished people of Africa. When French President Hollande declared, “Our democracy stands more true than these assassins,” he is referring to the same ‘democratic’ state that massacred 200 Algerian protestors in Paris in 1961. The most recent attacks in Paris have the hallmarks of a false flag operation. A Syrian passport was conveniently located by French police at the scene of one of the attacks, an extremely helpful piece of evidence to justify closing the borders for refugees fleeing the violence created by France and its allies and illegally bombing cities in Syria. Hollande’s accusation that ISIS was responsible for the attack, before any investigation was completed and before ISIS, itself, claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as the appearance on Wikipedia of a detailed account of the attacks within two hours of them happening and Hollande’s statement an hour before he made it raises serious suspicions that this was a pre-planned attack by French security. False flag operations have been used by many states to carry out pre-planned agendas. The Nazis did it in 1933 when they set fire to the Reichstag, Israel did it when Israeli agents planted bombs in American and British own civilian targets (known as the Lavon Affair) in Egypt, and the U.S. did it during the Vietnam War (Gulf of Tonkin Incident) and was prepared to do it Operation Northwoods, a plan by the U.S. to bomb civilians targets in the U.S. as a pretext for war against Cuba. French police conducted more than 150 raids following the attacks in Paris. If the U.S. Patriot Act and anti-terrorism activities of police in Canada, the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere tell us anything about these raids, it is that not all of them were against suspected terrorists. The FBI has used the Patriot Act to target anti-war, anti-globalization, environmentalist, immigrant, and socialist movements in the U.S., and the RCMP have used anti-terrorism legislation to monitorenvironmental and Aboriginal movements opposed to the Alberta Tar Sands. Working people must remember that the tragic and despicable attacks on Paris are the inevitable consequence of Western imperialism’s destructive policies of exploitation and terrorism abroad. Further restrictions on domestic civil liberties and more military interventions will not keep working people safe. To fight terrorism Western imperialism must first stop engaging in it and recognize the fundamental right of the people of the Middle East to live in peace and to self-determination.

By T. J. Petrowski, globalresearch.ca

T.J. Petrowski is an independent geopolitical analyst. You can read more of his work on his website tjpetrowski.com

More: Paris Attacks & Genesis of Terrorism

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A 30 year war in the Middle East

It's the 15th year of what used to be called the “War on Terror” – and it's about to intensify
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/we-must-prepare-for-a-30-year-war-in-the-middle-east-a6746886.html

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The Paris massacre and its fallout

WHEN French President Francois Hollande issued a declaration of war against the self-styled militant Islamic State group in the aftermath of the recent bloody attacks in Paris, he perhaps forgot that France has been at war with these terrorists for over a year. Ever since France joined the US-led coalition last year, the French air force has been regularly bombing targets in Syria.

And before this campaign, French forces have been active in Libya and Mali. So while I was horrified by the slaughter IS, also known by its Arabic acronym Daesh, has carried out in Paris, I was hardly surprised. In politics, just as in physics, Newton’s third law of motion applies: to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In politics, the reaction is not as immediate or as easily quantifiable as in physics, and can come in a different form, and may take years, but sooner or later, it does surface.

Thus, much of the mayhem and madness we witness in the Middle East is happening as a result of Western policies and wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, to mention only a few Muslim states. By upsetting the delicate balance between Shias and Sunnis, the Americans and their allies have triggered a violent sectarian conflict in which the two sides are backed by Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively. IS can trace its beginning to the early days of the Syrian civil war when jihadists were openly supported by the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and several of the Gulf states.

None of this is meant to justify or defend the bloody campaign carried out by IS; the idea is to explain the context in which this violence is taking place, as well as the birth and startling growth of the jihadist movement. Beginning life as Al Qaeda in Iraq during the American occupation, it earned a fearsome reputation for the bloodbath it triggered against Shias, as well as its attacks on American and Iraqi forces. The Americans responded by killing its leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian petty criminal who drew a rebuke from the Al Qaeda leadership for his excessive violence. After his death, he was replaced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. By the time the Americans pulled out, Al Qaeda in Iraq was seen as a spent force.

However, when the civil war in Syria broke out, the organisation gained a toehold there and soon became the dominant force among the various groups fighting the Assad regime. Following a split with Al Qaeda, Baghdadi renamed his group the Islamic State after it swept across the border and captured Iraq’s second biggest city of Mosul. He also announced he was the caliph of all Muslims. In Mosul, the jihadis grabbed a rich haul of American arms including tanks and heavy artillery. They also looted the Iraqi state bank of a billion dollars.

Since then, they have been highly effective in their recruitment drive on social media that has attracted thousands of young Muslims from around the world. A significant number of these came from France and Belgium. When the fighting in Syria drove hundreds of thousands to seek asylum in Europe, there is little doubt that several IS militants joined them to gain entry into countries like France.

As it is, France is home to the biggest concentration of Muslim migrants in Europe. A large number of them, especially the young, feel marginalised and discriminated against. Unemployment is very high, and they mostly live in bleak, depressing council flats that have come to resemble vast ghettos where the police are reluctant to enter. From time to time, riots erupt, and there are well-meaning vows to improve conditions in these depressed areas. But little actually happens, and young Muslims lose whatever hope for the future they might have had.

Many turn to crime, and when they are arrested and jailed, they come across members of jihadist organisations, and are recruited to their cause. Others are radicalised on the internet. Few, it would seem, are influenced in mosques that are now heavily monitored by security services.

There has been much criticism of French and Belgian intelligence services for letting several of those involved in the Paris massacre slip though their fingers, even though they had been on the anti-terror radar. They are also accused of ignoring warnings of an impending attack. But the truth is that terror threats are now so common that it’s hard to react to each one received from friendly intelligence agencies. And there are now literally thousands of suspects on the watch-lists maintained by security services, making it impossible to monitor every one of them. Prioritising them is essential to allocate resources, and often, somebody deemed to be a low risk individual turns out to be a key figure in an attack.

In the wake of the Paris attacks, French leaders have promised to tighten up security laws. Already, a three-month state of emergency is in force. Borders have been sealed, and the Schengen agreement that permits the free movement of EU citizens and those with Schengen visas has been suspended. It is very likely that the agreement might well be scrapped.

Suddenly, it’s a very different Europe, with fear and anger stalking the land. Angela Merkel and her generous open-door policy for asylum seekers stand repudiated. If anything, the reaction in the US has been even more extreme than in France, with 24 governors announcing they will not permit Syrian asylum seekers to be settled in their states. A bill has just been passed in the House of Representatives, calling for rigorous scrutiny of asylum seekers. Extreme rhetoric bordering on racism is being heard from Republican presidential candidates.

And for those of us who seek to justify the Paris killings, here’s a question: had a group of, say, Christians carried out a massacre in Lahore on the scale Paris has witnessed, what would have been the reaction of the public and the state?
By Irfan Hussain Dawn.com
http://www.dawn.com/news/1221523/view-from-abroad-the-paris-massacre-and-its-fallout

Paris attack suspect Salah Abdeslam 'escapes in BMW towards Germany' as Belgium police arrest 16 people - live ...

Telegraph.co.uk‎ -

... as search for Paris attacks fugitive Salah Abdeslam and 'several others' goes on - latest.

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