Europe’s Rising Islamic Insurgency

Daniel Greenfield:

That was the most overlooked revelation to come from the testimony of the former FBI director. While the media parsed every Comey hiccup to bolster its election conspiracy theories, it ignored that number.

Comey stated that there were around 2,000 terrorism investigations. 1,000 of those came from “home grown violent extremism” with no evidence of contact with foreign terrorists. Another 1,000 had “some contact with foreign terrorists”. 300 from that 2,000 had come to America as refugees.

Two-thirds of the refugee terrorists were from Iraq. The other third were mainly from the six countries named in President Trump’s travel pause which left-wing activist judges have unconstitutionally halted.

Two years ago, Comey listed around 900 investigations. Even assuming that some of the 1,000 “home grown extremists” aren’t Muslim terrorists, that’s a staggering and shocking rise in case numbers.

Back then, he had said that the FBI was having trouble with the sheer volume of investigations in every state. “If that becomes the new normal,” he had said, “that would be hard to keep up.”

The new normal is only getting worse.

Those 2,000 investigations represent active cases. When an investigation does not pan out, it’s over. The FBI investigated Omar Mateen before he carried out the Pulse massacre where the second-generation refugee murdered 49 people, according to his own words, “in the name of Allah, the merciful.”

A preliminary investigation has to be wrapped up in six months. A year at the most. Mateen’s investigation was wrapped up in the spring of ’14. His name went off the terror watchlist.

Two years later he struck.

Those 2,000 cases are the tip of a very large iceberg. Below those 2,000 cases are the larger numbers of potential terrorists who, like Mateen, had the book closed on their investigations.

In the UK, there are 3,000 potential terrorists being investigated, but 20,000 others had been “subjects of interest” in the past. We don’t know how large that second number is in the United States. But it’s probably not too far off the British one. In which case we also have over 20,000 potential terrorists.

Nor do we know how large the third number of potential terrorists who never appeared on the radar is.

Against these numbers, MI5, which handles counterterrorism in the UK, has 4,000 staffers. Only a small fraction of these would be employed in counterterrorism in MI5’s G Branch. London’s Counter Terrorism Command has a staff of 1,500. The Greater Manchester Police’s counter-terrorism unit had a team of 20. These numbers are obviously inadequate. But what number could possibly be enough?

The British military can put 10,000 soldiers on city streets after a terrorist attack. After Manchester, 5,000 soldiers were deployed. SAS special forces are reportedly being permanently positioned in London. The military was deployed for the first time in a century when Tony Blair sent tanks to secure Heathrow Airport after an Islamic terror threat. Now military deployment is becoming the new normal.

France deployed 10,000 soldiers to patrol cities after the Paris attacks. Operation Sentinelle is still underway two years later. Soldiers patrolling Paris are awarded a medal for Protection of the Territory. Half of the French soldiers deployed in a military role are patrolling the streets of Paris and other cities.

Belgium and Italy also deployed troops in Brussels and Rome in 2015.

The forces being deployed include such storied names as the French 35th Infantry Regiment, one of the country’s oldest regiments with a history dating back to the 17th century, the Irish Guards at Whitehall and the legendary Chasseurs Ardennais in Belgium. This is not counterterrorism. It’s a war.

In 2015, the year of many of these military deployments, 211 terror plots occurred in EU countries. These attacks killed 151 people and wounded another 360. 1,077 terrorism arrests were made.

Those numbers are closer to Iraq than anything in the West. And they are only growing worse.

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