By Hans Vogel
Obama is holding out an olive branch to Islam: "My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy," Obama is quoted as saying, adding "We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect." Coincidentally, across the board US-muslim relations are quite good. Most Middle Eastern regimes are somehow or other supported by the US. Saudi Arabia is a close ally and so are the Gulf States. Egypt's regime can only survive thanks to regular wheat shipments from the US. Arab (Muslim) bankers and businessmen have invested heavily in the US economy and have been buying plenty of bonds over the past decades.
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On the other hand, Obama has announced he will step up military efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while the recently inaugurated US embassy in Iraq indicates the US is planning to stay indefinitely and continue to run the country like a colony or protectorate.
In line with Samuel Huntington's concept of a struggle between civilizations, at least since 9/11 2001, the US has been engaged in a widely publicized war on Muslim fundamentalism. It has been trying with reasonable success to draw its European client states into the fight as well, but the Europeans seem reluctant to go whole hog. After all, there are sizeable Muslim minorities in most of Western Europe. North African Muslims, especially young male Moroccans who tend to be woefully undereducated, constitute a serious social problem in countries like France, the Netherlands and Belgium. These kids tend to be violent, volatile and aggressive, engaging in periodic bouts of rioting with often devastating results. There are efforts under way by imams in Britain and elsewhere to introduce Muslim law (sharia) in neighborhoods with a Muslim majority. With segregation rampant-most Western European inner cities are in the process of being islamicized or are already muslim-it is understandable native Western Europeans are worried about the future. Most are now afraid of terrorism.
The Threat of Terrorism
There is a widespread belief, often nurtured by Western European governments for reasons of expediency, that Islamist terrorism has become a major threat. However, so far these fears are not at all supported by data.
According to Europol's "EU Terrorism Situation and Trend report 2007," (which covers 2006), there were only 498 terrorist attacks in that year, "the vast majority of them resulted only in material damage and were not intended to kill." Yet although there was only one terrorist attack identified as "islamist", almost 260 persons (out of a total of some 700) were arrested on suspicions of planning islamist terrorist attacks.
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