Europe as a giant Medina

In 2004, Mary Habeck said that when Osama bin Laden relocated his operations from Saudi Arabia to the Sudan, and later, after the Sudan had turned against him, when he relocated from Sudan to Afghanistan, those moves were seen by him as replicating Muhammad’s move from Mecca to Medina—from a place where Muslims are oppressed to a place in which they will have power and from which they can wage jihad.

In the 1990s, before I had encountered this analysis, I read Steven Emerson’s articles describing America (and implicitly Europe) as a safe-house for terrorists, where Islamic extremists had fled from anti-fundamentalist regimes back home and where they could live in safety while they waged war against those regimes.

Robert Leiken has added to this analysis. According to Frederick Kempe writing in the Wall Street Journal:

The implications go beyond Europe. The Nixon Center studied 373 mujahedeen in Western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 and found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis, and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites or Libyans. A full quarter of the jihadists were Western European nationals eligible for visa-free travel to the U.S. Mr. Leiken calls Europe the new Medina, comparing it to the city where Mohammed recruited an army to conquer Mecca and the Holy Lands. This time the whole Mideast serves as Mecca.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 15, 2005 11:41 AM | Send