The alienation and isolation of Europe's substantial Muslim minority does not just present a potentially explosive problem for the continent, a United States State Department official said on Wednesday. Europe's inability to integrate its immigrant population also represents a threat to US security, he warned. US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington that high unemployment among Muslims in European countries combined with widespread discrimination and integration problems have created fertile ground for Muslim extremism.

"Many, perhaps most Muslims in Western Europe are outside the mainstream in several respects. They are a minority, and even the third generation is still predominantly viewed as 'foreign,'" Fried said, according to the transcript of his statements posted on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Web site. "In many countries, this is compounded by legal institutions that struggle with the challenge of free speech that is exploited by extremists, thus leading to the phenomenon sometimes called 'tolerance of intolerance.' Add a deeply negative perception of US foreign policy among Western Europe’s Muslims, and relative freedom of movement across the Atlantic, and you have a particularly dangerous mix."

Fried's warning was echoed by Henry Crumpton, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, who pointed out that much of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US were planned in Europe. "Five years later and despite many counterterrorism successes, violent Islamic extremism in Europe continues to pose a threat to the national security of the Untied States and our allies," Crumpton said. 

The trans-Atlantic upbraiding comes as Europeans are taking an intense look at integration and vocally lamenting their seeming inability to accept foreigners seamlessly into their midst. Germany recently has been wringing its hands over excessive violence in a high school in the Berlin neighborhood of Neukölln. The teachers at the school, 83 percent of whose student body is comprised of immigrants, recently went public with the increasing violence and aggressiveness in the classrooms. A number of German states have also recently considered adopting tests to determine the attitudes of potential citizens to the German constitution. The Netherlands, France and Denmark have likewise been confronting major difficulties with integrating their foreigner populations -- many of whom are part of the 15 to 20 million Muslims who live in Western Europe. French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy last month proposed a EU-wide contract that immigrants would be forced to sign requiring them to learn the language of their new home country.

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is currently planning a so-called "integration summit" with representatives of Germany's Muslim community. Though a date has not been set, Schäuble said in a Thursday interview with the Berliner Zeitung that something urgently needs to be done. He said that while all levels of government must do what they can, immigrants themselves must also realize that "they have to integrate."

"Those who continue shirking their obligation to integrate and who don't want their children to live as Germans made a mistake when they came to Germany," Schäuble, of the governing conservative Christian Democrats, told Berliner Zeitung. "We will not achieve integration if the parents of children born here don't realize that they bear a responsibility for raising and integrating their children into German society."

Schäuble's party on Wednesday also demanded that immigrants who do not take part in integration courses be punished with cuts to their social insurance payments or a refusal to renew their residency permits. If nothing is done, warned one conservative politician, a number of immigrant neighborhoods in German cities could become foreigner ghettos.

In his comments on Wednesday, Fried did concede that only 1 to 2 percent of Muslims living in Western Europe were extremists. But he warned that extensive opposition to US policies in the Middle East, particularly US support for Israel and the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, had pushed many European Muslims into the arms of extremists.

Both US officials told the Senate committee that Europe understood the gravity of the problem. "But despite this shared perception of the threat, there is disagreement over the most effective means to counter the threat," said Crumpton. "Some European countries continue to argue that terrorism is merely -- or mainly -- a criminal problem."

cgh/Reuters/AFP