I beg you to read this article, read it carefully and to the end. I will not say much, but hope it will touch your mind, touch your heart and make you stay silent for a while. Just think about how easily it could have been a nephew or a friend of your son or a friend of your daughter. Or how easily it could have been you, who didn't offer a home for a kid like the one the article is talking about. Thank You.
Terror from the Fringes:
Searching for Answers in the "Charlie Hebdo" Attacks.
By Holger Dambeck, Georg Diez, Björn Hengst, Julia Amalia Heyer, Mathieu von Rohr, Simone Salden, Samiha Shafy, Holger Stark, Petra Truckendanner and Antje Windmann Five Parts
Same article in one piece All Pages in One Piece
"I'm what you call a 'ghetto Muslim.'
They were unremarkable. Friendly. Really nice boys
How did three, seemingly normal sons of immigrant families turn into radicalized and vicious murderers? SPIEGEL went to Paris to find out. The resulting image is one of an identity search gone horribly wrong.
In its search for answers for what went wrong, SPIEGEL explored the backgrounds of the key figures in these attacks. The journey into their pasts led to the apartments where the Kouachis lived in Gennevilliers, near Paris, and in Reims, and to the closed doors of their relatives in Charleville-Mézières at the Belgian border. But it also led to their distraught former caregivers in the provinces, people who are unable to comprehend what happened to their former charges. It led to social workers and imams in the neighborhood where Amedy Coulibaly used to live, and to a friend of his wife Hayat Boumeddiene. SPIEGEL also had access to more than 100 pages of interrogation reports and court files.
It's a journey into the depths of French society, to children's homes, social centers and prisons, but also into the networks of radical Islamists and terrorists who have for decades been especially active in France. The three offenders were far from being lone wolves who came out of nowhere. The story of their radicalization reaches back more than 10 years. Indeed, the larger mystery is how the authorities failed to track them down prior to the attack.
It also raised a number of questions that must be addressed if France is going to approach an explanation for the attack. Is it a problem of angry young men? Is it a problem of society? Or is the issue one of a misguided interpretation of Islam, one that provides a haven for men who have lost their way, that is the fundamental problem?
The attacks cannot be explained by these inquiries, much less justified. Still, it is important to address the question of why three adolescents who seemed quite normal and promising became terrorists.
Read on ... please. Thank You.