The Spanish Roots of Europe’s Wave of Terror

While car-ramming attacks, like the one in Barcelona last Thursday, were first employed against Israelis in 2014, the current wave of simple, small-scale terror in Europe is the brainchild of a Spanish jihadist named Abu Musab al-Suri. Tom Wilson explains:

Suri has had a decades-long involvement in modern jihadism, and particularly with Islamist terrorism in Spain. The Spanish authorities have wanted Suri since 2003 for his role in establishing the country’s first al-Qaeda cell in the mid-1990s. However, . . . Spain also wants Suri in connection with the 1985 Madrid bombing by the Islamic Jihad Organization, in which a restaurant frequented by U.S. servicemen was blown up, leaving eighteen people dead. But it is also believed that he may have had a connection to the far more devastating 2004 Madrid train bombing, which killed 191 people. . . .

By 2005 . . . it seems that Suri had become disillusioned with al-Qaeda’s strategy [and broke with Osama bin Laden]. Al-Qaeda’s rigid, top-down structure and highly-organized, sophisticated attacks had brought about neither the desired awakening among Muslims nor the Islamist revolution the jihadists had hoped for. In 2005, Suri released his “Global Islamic Resistance Call” on the Internet. Envisaging a leaderless jihad, in which individuals or small cells would form their own organic and independent plots, [the document argues that such cells can] avoid detection by not linking to a large structured network and instead [using] the Internet to spread ideology and tactics. Crucially, Suri’s jihadist manifesto stresses the importance of ultimately capturing territory to establish an Islamic state. This obscure Spanish extremist set in motion events that would bring about the wave of terrorism being suffered today. . . .

European authorities are now engaged in trying to prevent any more of Suri’s vision from coming to fruition. But as the former head of [Britain’s] Mi5 [intelligence service] has warned us, it is a generational task we now face, and there can be little doubt that Europe is now caught up amid a new era of jihad.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Al Qaeda, ISIS, Politics & Current Affairs, Spain, Terrorism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society