Stern on WBUR: Brussels Terror Attacks
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said the terror attacks on Brussels Airport and the Maelbeek subway station could be a result of poor integration of guest workers into Belgian society.
Stern made the comments in a March 22, 2016 interview on WBUR’s Morning Edition entitled “Belgium Has Long Been a Source of Jihadis.“
From the interview:
Belgium has long been a source of jihadis. The guest workers in Belgium and their children were very, very badly integrated into Belgian society so it’s a case where the Muslims were living often in self-segregated areas, often unemployed, not doing very well and they were vulnerable to recruitment.
In a way it really was a cauldron ripe for recruitment and it’s important to remember that ISIS aims to make Muslims feel unsafe in the West, and the goal is to increase prejudice, and given the way the children of the guest workers already feel in Belgium, this is I think a really enticing opportunity for them.
We are at war with ISIS’s aim to make Muslims feel unsafe in the West. That is the war we are fighting. ISIS has deliberately set out to destroy what it calls the “Gray Zone,” the area where Muslims can feel at ease living as moderates in the West. That is ISIS’s goal, and we need to avoid falling into the trap of displaying prejudice. That’s what ISIS wants.
Jessica Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She is currently working on a study of Radovan Karadzic, indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. Read more about her here.