Slowly, slowly
Christopher Caldwell in the NYT describes how, little by little, things seem to be changing in places like Germany, which in 2003 had been part of an “anti-US crusade” regarding Iraq:
Last June, Albert Einstein was supplanted in the German mind as the archetypal resident of Ulm by Tolga Dürbin. A German citizen who the authorities say was apprehended waging jihad in Pakistan, Mr. Dürbin is now under arrest in Germany, accused of incitement to violence. He reportedly worked for a business that sold solar-energy equipment in Ulm, a medieval city on the Baden-Württemberg side of the Danube, and one young man he took under his wing and introduced to radicalism was his boss’s son, Fritz Martin Gelowicz, who had converted to Islam as a teenager.
Mr. Gelowicz was arrested on Tuesday in the vacation village of Oberschledorn with two others: a fellow German convert named Daniel Martin Schneider and Adem Yilmaz, a Turkish citizen. The three, who the police said had traveled to Pakistan for terrorist training from an Uzbek group called the Islamic Jihad Union, were charged with plotting to detonate gigantic bombs made with highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, of which they had managed to procure three-quarters of a ton…
The “Ulm scene,” as it is called in the German newspapers, has been a headache for German law enforcement since the late 1990s, according to Benno Köpfer, deputy head of the research group on Islamic terrorism and Extremism for the Verfassungsschutz (a government office set up in the wake of World War II to identify and monitor extremist groups) of Baden-Württemberg.
Ulm and its twin city of Neu-Ulm, across the Danube in Bavaria, together have a population of 167,000, of whom 16 percent are “foreign,” according to the cities’ official figures…What was most hard-line about the Ulm scene, Mr. Köpfer says, arose from a heavy influx of migrants out of Bosnia in the late 1990s, many of them highly politicized. Two centers of radical activity cropped up: in Ulm, an Islamic Information Center, and in Neu-Ulm, a club called Multicultural House that flourished until authorities shut it down in 2005. Mr. Gelowicz was reportedly an habitué of both.
And radical Muslims began to exert a glamorous gravitational pull on some German youths, German authorities say. In 2003 a local convert calling himself “Hamza” Fischer was killed fighting against Russian troops in Chechnya. “They like the clear rules,” Mr. Köpfer says of the young converts. “Many of them are attracted to Islam not as a religion but as an ideology”…
Germany’s interior minister, the Christian Democrat Wolfgang Schäuble…wants a revamping of the laws for fighting terrorism, many of which were devised decades ago with the idea that the worst radical threats could come from inside the government itself. Membership in a foreign terrorist organization was made a crime after Sept. 11, but the authorities noticed only after the arrest of Mr. Dürbin earlier this year that a nonmember who was getting trained in terror tactics by such an organization was not committing a crime at all. At an emergency meeting in Berlin on Friday, state interior ministers agreed on a plan to criminalize getting terrorist training. A further measure that Mr. Schäuble has been seeking since the spring is authorization to troll for information on the computers of terror suspects…
Reuters noted a few days ago, in a story that included excerpts of the conversations of the terrorists, who had been bugged for months: “The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began a year ago, when U.S. officials alerted German authorities to e-mails intercepted from Pakistan.”
The NSA’s surveillance of, and action on, Pakistan’s email traffic, the pro-active international cooperation, the more aggressive German attitude, even the casual tone of the Times, taking for granted that everyone knows what “waging jihad” is — quite a lot has in fact changed in the last six years.