Random Politics & Religion #00

COPENHAGEN — Arrested for stabbing a 19-year-old passenger on a commuter train in November 2013, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein blamed his brutal, random and nearly fatal attack on the effects of hashish, telling a court last December that he had been gripped by wild fear and thought his victim wanted to hurt him.

Last weekend, just two weeks after his release from prison for the knife attack, Mr. Hussein went on another violent rampage, killing two strangers and wounding five police officers. But this time he was gripped not by drugs but by a fanatical strand of Islam whose mission, according to a message he posted on Facebook shortly before the attacks, “is to destroy you. We will come to you with slaughter and death.”

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Mr. Hussein’s journey from drug-addled street thug to self-proclaimed jihadist declaring loyalty to the Islamic State terrorist group has stirred soul-searching in liberal-minded Denmark over whether Islam in fact was really a prime motivator for his violence, or merely served as a justifying cover for violent criminality.

“This is a very difficult question to answer,” said Manu Sareen, the minister for integration and social affairs, who shortly before the attacks launched a program to combat radicalization through outreach to parents, schools and other efforts.

That same question squarely confronts other European countries and the United States. As President Obama holds a summit meeting on ways to combat the lure of jihad in Western nations, he has come under criticism for his cautious language distancing violent extremism from Islam.

The link between the two has become a wellspring of debate in Europe, as societies grapple with the same messy knot of motives and influences following recent attacks in Denmark and France and a thwarted plot in Belgium. All involved angry, alienated young Muslims.

Often the attackers invoke Islam. But just as often, well before they had found religion, the professed jihadists built up long track records as violent criminals. Though many have become radicalized in prisons, they often seem determined to find an outlet for their violence one way or another.

One of a trio of gunmen responsible for the killing spree that terrorized Paris in January, Amedy Coulibaly, similarly fit the bill, chalking up at least six arrests — five for robbery and one for drugs — even before his embrace of anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism led him to storm a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes and kill four people.

“This is classic trajectory into jihadist terrorism in Europe. There is not a single pathway, but this one is very worrying,” said Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on jihadist movements at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. “They are misfits who find a solution to their problems in radical Islam.”

In embracing violence in the name of Islam, Mr. Hussein, a former member of a Copenhagen criminal gang called the Brothas, “substituted one subculture for another,” Mr. Hegghammer said, adding, “The easier it is for someone to plug into this radical Islamic subculture the more radicalized misfits you are going to have.”

“At the moment it is very easy,” he said, referring to a plethora of extremist websites and underground preachers.

Announcing new measures on Thursday to fight against terrorism, including extra funding for intelligences services, Danish officials did not mention religion while vowing to defend what Mette Frederiksen, the justice minister, described as “one of the most generous societies there are.”

"We take care of each other, and if you are in need of help, the welfare state will step in,” she said. Denmark, she added, does “not have room for those who wish to tear this down.”

Danish Islamic organizations, including the mosque that rallied hostility to Denmark across the Muslim world over the 2005 publication of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten, have condemned Mr. Hussein’s weekend attacks on a Copenhagen cafe during a discussion attended by a Swedish cartoonist and on a synagogue in the center of the city. But they have also all insisted that Islam played no role in the violence, blaming it on a mutant misreading of the faith.

Junaid Mann, a former Copenhagen gang member who went to the same boxing club as Mr. Hussein, said he did not know the gunman well but had crossed paths with him at the gym. “He was a criminal who went nuts,” he said, adding, “I don’t think this attack had anything to do with Islam.”

Mr. Mann, who is now studying law and works part time as a counselor to troubled Muslim youths, said Denmark and other European countries needed to defend, not stigmatize, Islam as only this can combat “street Islam,” a toxic jumble of half-digested lines from the Quran and political passions plucked from the Internet.

Olivier Roy, a leading French expert on Islam, has taken a similar line, telling Information, a Danish newspaper, that Denmark should counter wild strains of Islam imported from the Middle East by building up a “national version of Islam” through state funding for mosques and preachers, just as it funds Denmark’s state church.

But Mr. Sareen, the minister responsible for integration, said such an approach would do nothing to “prevent scenes like we saw at the weekend” because young people do not get radicalized in mosques but in jail or sitting at home watching YouTube videos posted by the Islamic State or other militant groups. “The state could finance dozens of mosques but you would still see people getting radicalized,” he said.

The trigger for extremist violence, added Mr. Sareen, a self-declared atheist and former social worker, is rarely the result of a single cause. “You have a part that is social, part that is psychiatric, part that is brainwashing and part that comes from messages in the mosque or from radical preachers.”

Mehdi Mozzaffari, an Iranian-born Danish political science professor, complained that mainstream Muslims and Western governments often downplay the powerful and poisonous pull of Islamist ideology, which mixes piety and politics.

“It is very evident that this ideology is playing a major role,” he said. “Without it we are facing just hooligans. But these people have an ideology that is very strong. It justifies their behavior and identifies their enemy.”

Testimony at Mr. Hussein’s trial last December by the defendant and others made no reference to religion, indicating that he underwent a rapid jihadist conversion in jail. He received a two-year sentence but was released less than three months after the verdict because he had an appeal pending and had already spent more than a year in pretrial detention.

A court psychiatrist, Katarina Adamikova, reported “no signs of severe mental illness except for a suspected hash abuse.” Mr. Hussein, according to court documents, presented himself as a “positive, open and social person, easy to get in touch with and calm in temper.”

He said that he had been stabbed in the leg before the train attack and “felt a lot of anxiety and felt in danger of being assaulted.”

Such feelings of persecution provide fertile ground for a radical Islamist ideology that, according to Erhan Kilic, a Turkish-born lawyer in the northern city of Aarhus who counsels Danish jihadists who have returned from the war in Syria, promotes and exploits a narrative of victimhood. “They always look at their problems through the glasses of victims,” he said.

Muslims, he added, do have legitimate complaints like other groups but young radicals often know next to nothing about their faith and twist it to serve their own personal hang-ups and failings. His message to returnees from Syria, he added, is simple: “A Muslim cannot be a terrorist and a terrorist cannot be a Muslim.”

That so many young Muslims feel angry at and alienated from a country that offers their families some of the world’s most generous welfare benefits has left many Danes flummoxed and also angry. This in turn has helped fuel the rise of the Danish People’s Party, an anti-immigration group that regularly denounces Muslim misbehavior and, according to opinion polls, now stands neck-and-neck in popularity with the biggest mainstream parties.

“It is very, very obvious that these attacks were connected to religion,” Soren Espersen, deputy chairman of the Danish People’s Party, said in an interview. “There is no doubt this was religious terrorism,” he said, adding that Mr. Hussein had himself declared to be “acting in the name of Islam.”

A survey published Wednesday by Metroxpress, a newspaper, found that half of Danes surveyed want to restrict immigration and a quarter want to ensure that Muslims never account for more than 5 percent of the population. The government is barred by law from classifying residents by religion but a study by Aarhus University in 2013 found that Muslims represented around 4.2 percent of the population.

“To be a Muslim does not coincide with the definition of being Danish, whatever that entails, and the Muslims therefore feel that as long they hold on to their religion, they can never be accepted as a true Dane, and thus the feeling of alienation from society automatically emerges,” said Sandy Madar, the founder of Streetmanager, a private association that seeks to help young criminals and youths at risk of becoming criminals.

Criminals, Ms. Mader added, “in general are not very religious,” but Islam, or at least distorted versions of the faith, can, depending on the individual, be both “a catalyst for their anger and actions” and also “an excuse for their violent attitudes.”

The government, headed by the Social Democratic prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, has sought to avoid a public backlash against Muslims by insisting that Islam and Western values can coexist. “This is not a war between Islam and the West,” the prime minister declared immediately after the attacks.

As in many other European countries, however, Muslims in Denmark may coexist with their non-Muslim neighbors, but they often cling to the values and conspiracy-driven mind-set of their home countries.

Mr. Mann, the law student and youth counselor, for example, said he was convinced that the United States government had a hand in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You have to be blind” to think otherwise, he said.

Helime al-Amed, a Palestinian from Syria and mother of five children in Mjolnerparken, the housing project where Mr. Hussein grew up, praised Denmark as a generous and friendly country, but she still believes that last weekend’s attacks were “orchestrated by people who are against us, who want to provoke anger at Muslims.”

Mr. Hussein, she added, had been deliberately killed by police officers in a shootout Sunday morning to prevent him from talking. “When he died the truth died with him,” she said.