The family of Abdelhamid Abaaoud,the mastermind of the Paris attacks, livedon Future Street in Brussels. Theirs wasa “spacious if shabby corner home,” mycolleagues, Andrew Higgins and Kimiko deFreytas-Tamura, write. Abaaoud’s parents,Moroccan immigrants to Belgium, had donewell enough.
The Rue de l’Avenir, or Future Street, wassupposed to lead to a decent European life,not veer off to Syria and the apocalypticuniverse of the Islamic State. Future Street, aplace of opportunity for the industrious, waswhat the Turkish and Moroccan and Algerianimmigrants coming to Europe from the1960s onward sought.
Abaaoud, son of Brussels, was not poor,not stupid, not marginalized. He was on theladder before he stepped off into a zigzagginglife between Syria and Europe. He attendedfor a year an exclusive Catholic School, theCollège Saint-Pierre d’Uccle. I lived in Ucclebetween 1980 and 1982. Europe does not getmuch more leafy or placid than that.
But Future Street, so luminous a halfcenturyago during the great postwarEuropean recovery — what the Frenchcall “Les Trente Glorieuses” (or the 30glorious years) — has become a much moreambiguous place. It is now situated, thanks totechnology, between homeland and adoptedland in the jangling, borderless, cacophonousspace of modern civilization.
A bad economy is not what f lipsyoung Muslims off Future Street ontothe road to Raqqa. It’s the humiliation ofpurposelessness. It’s a quest for respect. It’slaying the burden of choice to rest through asubsuming mission against the “decadent”West. It’s the discovery of a plausible flightfrom ambivalent modernity to the Caliphate’szealous strictures.
Abaaoud, killed by French security forcesin the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, joinsall the other sons (mainly sons) who couldnot abide the future despite comfortablecircumstances and opted to take refuge fromit in the all-resolving ideology of jihadistviolence. He joins Mohamed Atta and FaisalShahzad and Michael Adebolajo, plottersand perpetrators from New York to Londonwho did not come from poverty or socialexclusion.
Atta, who took the first plane into the NorthTower, and Shahzad, who plotted mayhem atTimes Square, and Adebolajo, who killed aBritish soldier with a knife and machete on aLondon street, placed their college educationsat the service of destruction of the liberalWestern order. Theirs were the educatedchoices of what the late Fouad Ajami called“Islam’s nowhere men,” people for whomWestern freedom became alienation.
ISIS is not a social issue. You don’t kill130 people in Paris because you lost yourjob or never had one. It is ideological. It musttherefore be fought by a counter-ideology,among other things. This neither the UnitedStates nor Europe nor their nominal Arab andMuslim allies have been able to articulate.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey have played doublegames with their bastard child, ISIS.
What inhabits that spacious if shabbycorner house on Future Street? In one IslamicState video, Abaaoud urged Muslims toshake off a “humiliating life” in Europe andfind “pride and honor” in their religion and injihad.
Humiliation is an ample notion. It mayembrace anything from the Algerian war ofmore than a half century ago to the Iraq war;it may invoke Gaza; it may be social; it maywell be sexual. But whatever its nature, it isescaped by adherence to the Islamic State’sstate in the making, that border-straddlingland where doubt goes to die, where each dayhas its assigned task and all needs are met.
The dangerous thing about this ISISterritory, the Caliphate’s embryo, is not somuch its oil revenue, or its training facilities,or its proximity to the West, or its control overseveral million people — it is its magneticassertion of Suuni jihadist power, the retortto humiliation that drew Abaaoud fromFuture Street. The United States and Europewould not have accepted its existence in 2001.
They would not have accepted that terroristscentered in a sanctuary close to a NATOborder could shut down Brussels or theUniversity of Chicago.
But the West will no longer deploy infantryagainst global jihad. Nor will Arab states.
That is a high-risk policy — too high, in myview. ISIS is working on the means to makethe carnage in Paris look modest.
Europe is now entwined with the Syriandebacle — its refugees moving westward,its violence, its intra-Islamic battle, and itsjihadi-spawning void. Abaaoud’s story isalso a warning in a world where, as DefenseSecretary Ashton B. Carter put it recentlyat Harvard’s Kennedy School, “destructivepower of greater and greater magnitude fallsinto the hands of smaller and smaller groupsof human beings.”Future Street has done a one-eighty.
Europe’s opportunities drew Abaaoud’sfather to Brussels. Abaaoud’s youngerbrother, Younes, was 13 when he left Brusselsfor Syria. He will likely return. And thismiddle-class adolescent Islamist will not bebearing a bouquet.
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ROGER COHEN>
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