France has enacted tougher and more intrusive counterterrorism laws in the wake of the Jan. 7 Charlie Hebdo massacre carried out by two Islamists against a satirical magazine that had lampooned Islam.
In Egypt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday expanded a campaign to forcefully urge his country’s Muslim leaders to purge an ideology of violence from its ranks. The president, a former head of Egypt’s military forces, does not hesitate to say the religion of Islam has an extremist problem.
Even Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani, addressing a joint session of Congress Wednesday at the end of a four-day Washington visit, said leaders in Muslim-majority countries must do more publicly to condemn terror movements such as the Islamic State, even as Mr. Ghani denied jihadi terror groups were a true reflection of Islam as a faith.
For public officials and Islamic leaders in Muslim-majority countries, “silence is not acceptable,” Mr. Ghani said.
The United States is home to a relatively small, but growing, Muslim population of 5 million to 8 million people, or about 2 percent, compared to 4 percent in Britain and France’s 8 percent. But the U.S. too has witnessed the kind of incidents seen in Europe. American Muslim residents have traveled to Syria to try to join the ultraviolent Islamic State terror army. Authorities have stopped a number of homegrown terror plots. Some, such as the Fort Hood massacre and the first attack on the World Trade Center, were carried out by self-proclaimed jihadis in this country.
Soeren Kern, an analyst at the Gatestone Institute, which tracks radical Islam, said domestic politics are at work in Britain and France just as much as security concerns. Britain has general elections set for early May.
“The flurry of counterterrorism activity in recent months is an attempt by the Conservative government to stanch the flow of votes to right-wing parties such as the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has long warned of the danger posed by radical Islam, and which is now the third-most-popular political party in Britain,” Mr. Kern said.
In France, presidential elections are two years away, but the security issue is already playing into the jockeying for advantage.
“In the wake of the jihadist attacks in Paris in January, we can expect all presidential candidates to take tough positions against radical Islam and Islamic terrorism as the election draws near,” Mr. Kern said.
via NorthEast Calling http://ift.tt/1HIWNcc
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