Jihadism as an Excuse

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Islamic terrorism is used as an excuse to curtail the rights and freedoms, exploiting the insecurity created after each attack. The massive electronic spying by the authorities on the privacy of citizens and the ‘special’ laws that suspend constitutional rights and guarantees have become the new Orwellian normal without having served to stop jihadist attacks in Europe or anywhere else for that matter. In France, the state of emergency becomes permanent and 2015 legislation allows security forces to exercise massive electronic eavesdropping, wiretapping and hacking on computers without a warrant. The law gives security forces “excessively broad powers to carry out very intrusive surveillance, based on vast and poorly defined objectives, without the prior authorization of a judge, without an adequate mechanism or independent control”, criticized the Committee on Human Rights of the UN. Anti-terrorism laws in Britain allow police to detain a person without charge for 14 days. The law of public safety in Spain – ‘gag law’ – is the largest reduction of freedoms since the transition and the new anti-terror laws and surveillance in Germany allow spying on conversations and video recording in homes without judicial authorization. The democratic backsliding that this type of legislation was inaugurated by the US administration of George Bush with the Patriot Act of 2001, which had an immediate impact in Europe through the storage of personal data from air passengers and US spying on their Bank transfers. The EU signed in 2004 an agreement with the US so the Americans could get airline personal data of Europeans flying to the country, although it violated European law. The controversial agreement was renewed in 2007 and 2011, although a note of the legal service of the European Commission indicated that it was not compatible with European law. The EU discovered in 2006 that the US had spent several years spying on bank transfers of Europeans, which are conducted through the global computer network SWIFT. Instead of ending, the EU negotiated another agreement for the US to continue to have free access to these data, although it also violates European law. Edward Snowden leaks revealed that the safeguards  introduced by authorities were not respected by the National Security Agency (NSA). The EU says that espionage has allowed the government to stop several attacks without providing specific data to confirm this. The European directive on retention of personal data in telecommunications was declared illegal by the Court of Justice of the EU in 2014, because it is a “very serious and disproportionate interference” in fundamental human rights. The Court noted that the data retained as a whole can provide very precise information about the private lives of people, their daily habits, their movements, their activities and their social relations. Despite the devastating judgment, national laws enacted based on that directive remain in force until today, because the European Commission refused to request that their application be suspended. Following the attacks in Paris and Brussels, the EU agreed to create its own database of air passengers. The European Commission and governments presented the law as essential to combat terrorism, even though those responsible for the attacks were traveling by car through Europe and jihadists returning from Syria had also used land routes. The avalanche of data on all citizens prevents the detection of significant data on the behavior of Islamic extremists and convicts, known or potential jihadists that have been radicalized, as has happened in France and Belgium. Data exchange between the security services of European countries remains limited and even between different bodies security within the same state is poor, as in Belgium and France. Meanwhile, European governments continue to allow Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf countries to finance the proliferation of Islamic enclaves within the EU, where the militant rejection of democracy and European core values is defined as wicked and absolutely contrary to Islam.

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