PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

Between the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris on January 7, 2015, and the attack on an elderly French Catholic priest named Jacques Hamel, who was assassinated as he was celebrating mass in his church in Normandy on July 26, 2016, 239 persons of all nationalities and religious denominations were killed by jihadist terrorists in France. Included in this number are the 130 people murdered on November 13, 2015, in the attacks at the Stade de France, in the streets of Paris, and at the Bataclan music hall—the worst single massacre of French civilians since the one committed by the Nazis in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane during World War II. France was the first victim of this new Islamist terrorism during the second decade of the twenty-first century, but Belgium was also struck, notably in March 2016, with the suicide attacks on Brussels National Airport and the Maelbeek metro station—which serve the European Union’s institutions. In addition, Denmark and Germany were attacked, as 2016 ended with Tunisian jihadist Anis Amri driving his black truck into the Berlin Kurfürstendam Christmas market on December 19, killing twelve, as a reminder of the attack in Nice that had killed eighty-six on Bastille Day. That first truck was white—black and white are the colors of the flag of ISIS, which claimed both attacks. Europe, seen by the jihadists as the West’s soft underbelly, was the prime target of this “third-generation jihadism.” Starting in 2005, this form of jihad spread after the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, failed to mobilize the world’s Muslim masses.

The United States has remained a tempting target of this new wave of jihadism, as was shown by the attacks committed in the name of radical Islamism in San Bernardino and, especially, in Orlando, at a gay nightclub called The Pulse, on June 12, 2016—just a day before the assassination of two French police officers by a jihadist in Magnanville, near Paris. The explicit objective of these multiple attacks in the West is to provoke reprisals targeting Muslims living in Europe and the United States. Such reprisals would, in the jihadists’ imagination, cause Muslims to view themselves as victims of “Islamophobia” and would rally all Muslims together under the jihadists’ banner, triggering religious war that would ultimately lead to the destruction of the West and the worldwide triumph of jihad. Such is the jihadists’ dream, but they are far from realizing it, owing to the calm resolve of European societies, which have avoided conflating the Muslim population as a whole with jihadists trying to take that community hostage.

Nonetheless, the electorate’s exasperation has been reflected in growing support for far-right and populist candidates campaigning on ethnic and cultural issues. The rise of Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France, of the Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, and of Geert Wilders’s party in Holland (which wants to ban the Quran), as well as the success of far-right groups in Austria and Denmark (which are at the center of governing coalitions pursuing policies hostile to immigrants and to Islam), have been in large part fueled by jihadist attacks on European soil—attacks committed mainly by young Muslims who were born and brought up in Europe and who are citizens of European countries. The election of Donald Trump, who promised during his campaign to prevent Muslims from entering the United States and to enact a government registry of Muslims, has galvanized these European right-wing, identitarian parties that are battling not only against immigration and Islam but also against the European Union and for the reaffirmation of a national identity that seems to them to be their sole protection against the anomie felt by a white lower middle class disoriented by a globalization that also threatens its jobs and its way of life. These groups feel that traditional European identities are being submerged both by migrations—which the far right calls “the Great Replacement”—from the southern and eastern Mediterranean region and by transfers of sovereignty to a European Union that is perceived as dysfunctional, bureaucratic, dominated by the business world, and favoring outsourcing and consequent unemployment.

In this context, and returning to the French scene in particular, the mobilization of French Muslim voters—which began with the 2007 presidential election but was decisively manifested by the contribution of this voting bloc to François Hollande’s victory in the 2012 French presidential elections—has become a political factor. When numerous imams rejected the socialist government’s proposal to authorize same-sex marriage, many Muslim voters abandoned the left, and various community-based lobbies subsequently sought to capture them for their own ends—notably during the struggle against “Islamophobia” led by activists connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, who wanted to use them to construct their political hegemony over their co-religionists.

The present book, which appeared in French in late 2015, just after the attacks of November 13, 2015, is intended to provide readers with information about jihadism in the West based on a precise knowledge of the facts. It is founded, first of all, on several decades of fieldwork in France’s neglected neighborhoods, in particular its infamous banlieues1 (one of the few contemporary French words to have passed into foreign languages and thus one that needs no translation here). It is also founded on a reading of the ideologically charged primary source material in the original Arabic that motivates this unprecedented form of jihad in the West. From these bases, this book places modern jihad into a historical and comparative perspective, from the first wave of jihad in Afghanistan and its fruitless sequels in Bosnia, Egypt, and Algeria (1979–1997), to al-Qaeda’s second wave of jihad against America, whose high point was reached on September 11, 2001, and whose decline was signaled by the jihadist failure in an Iraq occupied by the American army (1998–2005). The book recounts the emergence of a third jihadist wave during the pivotal year 2005, with its focus on combat on European soil and its inclination to find recruits among the millions of second-generation immigrants from the Muslim world who have put down roots in Europe. Contrary to Osama Bin Laden’s top-down organization of the attacks on New York and Washington, third-wave jihadism is network-based and organized from the bottom up. Third-wave jihadism also takes advantage of the spectacular growth of social media, which began in 2005 with the birth of YouTube.

What’s more, 2005 was the year when France witnessed the greatest riots in its history in the disadvantaged banlieues where most of the second-generation immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa lived. Although these people had no connection with jihadism, their coming of age coincided with the appearance of an enclave-based ethnic-racial logic of violence on which the jihadists of the third-wave jihadism have built their brand of terrorism. Third-wave jihadism was also facilitated by the matchless incubation chamber of the French prison system, where incarcerated jihadists became the mentors of petty delinquents to whom they offered an eschatological prospect of redemption through politicoreligious violence and even martyrdom. Mohamed Merah’s massacre of Jewish children at their school in Toulouse in March 2012 marked the beginning of this kind of jihadism’s operational phase, which was to continue in subsequent years, reaching peaks with the carnage at Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, at the Bataclan on November 13, 2015, and in Nice on July 14, 2016.

France has been an especially tempting target because of the disastrously high unemployment rate among young people from immigrant backgrounds who live in the banlieues. The largely Arabic-speaking North African provenance of these children of immigrants—an echo of French colonial history—is a boon for Arab jihadist recruiters, who target this community in particular. (The appeal of jihadism among Turks in Germany and among Indo-Pakistanis in the United Kingdom is, by contrast, more limited, though the spectacular Christmas market attack in Berlin by a Tunisian ISIS jihadist showed that the old continent as a whole has become a target.) Hence the French situation is exemplary and premonitory, and a deeper knowledge of it can help us decipher situations in which we see jihadism spreading in the West, whether in the rest of Europe or in North America.

This English language edition was revised and updated by me.

G.K.

December 2016

1 The term banlieues in our context refers to areas on the outskirts of Paris and other large cities that are now occupied chiefly by immigrants and descendants of immigrants.