MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 04th November, 2020) Programs for deportation and deradicalization of suspicious persons in Europe can reduce the number of terrorist attacks on the continent, Anton Friesen, a member of the German parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee from the rightist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told Sputnik on Wednesday.
"We don't know if there will be more attacks. But we could significantly reduce the risk by deporting potential terrorists. And by looking closely at who wants to come in our country. Many of the perpetrators are known to be so-called refugees," Friesen said.
According to the lawmaker, the radicalization of islam in European societies has been ongoing "for decades," including via financial support from external actors such as Turkey.
The fact that the European law enforcement agencies have failed to hold such persons duly accountable for actual crimes � for example, by repeatedly letting them serve shorter prison sentences than initially prescribed by court � "gives Islamists the impression that the peoples of Europe are weak" and "encourages them to terror," Friesen argued.
That radicalization of young Muslims in Europe is "nothing new" is also the opinion of Gareth Jenkins, a non-resident senior research fellow with the Joint Center Silk Road Studies Program and Turkey Center at the Institute for Security and Development Policy in Stockholm. In this regard, the expert believes that Europe should seek to "minimize the number and nature of the attacks."
"In order to minimize the number of attacks, and the number of casualties they cause, the intelligence and security services need to remain vigilant. Complacency, such as can occur in long periods between attacks, is very dangerous. But there also need to be more deradicalization programs, and governments need to work with local Muslim communities rather than against them," Jenkins told Sputnik.
An important component in this is to bear in mind that the "vast majority" of Muslim youth are "appalled by the violence carried out in the name of their religion" and the governments' responses should try not to alienate them, the expert argued.
A series of brutal terrorist attacks took place in France and Austria over the past three weeks, prompting the authorities to ramp up counter-terrorist measures across Europe.
On Monday night, six different locations in the Austrian capital of Vienna were subjected to shooting attacks, which left five people killed � including the gunman � and 17 others injured. Austrian Interior Minister Karl Nehammer said that the attacker was a supporter of the Islamic State terrorist organization (banned in Russia).
Last week, a 21-year-old man from Tunisia killed three people in a church in France's southern city of Nice, including two by beheading. Two weeks before that, a 17-year-old Muslim teen beheaded a Parisian teacher who showed caricatures of Islamic prophet Muhammad during a freedom of speech lesson.
