Islamic radicalism is a growing problem for Europeans, even if you live in a peaceful mountain enclave like Switzerland:
BERN, Switzerland — For centuries, this Alpine nation has successfully relied on a strict policy of political neutrality to insulate it from the wars, invasions and revolutions that have raged outside its borders. These days, a new threat has emerged: one from within.
As they have elsewhere in Europe, Islamic radicals are making inroads in Switzerland. Last month, Swiss officials announced the arrests of a dozen suspects who allegedly conspired to shoot down an Israeli airliner flying from Geneva to Tel Aviv. In a related case, a North African man has been charged with organizing a plot from Swiss soil to blow up the Spanish supreme court in Madrid.
For years, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, Swiss officials assumed that their country was one of the last places Islamic radicals would look to attack. Long considered a slice of neutral territory in a world full of conflicts, Switzerland trades on its status as home to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other diplomatic institutions.
As the global jihad movement becomes more decentralized and fragmented, however, Swiss security officials are warning that their country could become a target.
A target, or a launching ground. The September 11th attacks, after all, were planned not in remote Riyadh or Damascus, but in Germany among a group of Muslim immigrants. The same is true of the Madrid train bombings and last year’s attacks on London’s bus and subway system. Clearly, there is a portion of Europe’s Muslim population that, secretly, allys itself with Osama bin Laden and other architects of terror.? And Switzerland is only one example of the unlikely places where they are turning up.
In Sweden, another country with a long history of neutrality, prosecutors last month convened a top-secret closed trial of three terrorism suspects in the southern city of Malmo. Authorities have not identified the suspects or disclosed any evidence. But Swedish media have reported that the arrests were made at the request of British counterterrorism investigators.
In Denmark, counterterrorism authorities say they remain on high alert after a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that spurred boycotts, death threats and violent protests in Islamic countries.
And in the Netherlands, the Dutch government has classified the risk of a terrorist attack as “substantial,” a threat level proportionally higher than in the United States, where homeland security officials judge the risk as “elevated.” The Dutch government established its threat-ranking system in November 2004, when an Islamic radical killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh.
Of course, there are still those who stick their heads in the sand and refuse to believe that they could possibly be a target:
Andreas Wenger, director of the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said the warnings from Swiss intelligence and security services have been slow to register.
“Part of the political spectrum in Switzerland still has the feeling that because we are neutral and not associated with great power politics, that we are less likely to become a target,” Wenger said. “The public perception is behind other European countries, most definitely.”
And that is only likely to change when people in Europe begin to realize that the Islamofascists are not acting because they oppose a particular foreign policy move, but because they oppose Wester Civilization itself.
