The message of these attacks is powerful: You are not safe anywhere.
That, after all, is the whole point of terrorism: to subvert our sense of the normal, to make us afraid of improbable dangers and invite us, in our fear, to overreact in ways that are destructive to our lifestyle and that will not make us any safer.
.. Cognitive therapy identifies mistaken and distorted thoughts that generate distress, and then challenges and corrects them. What the president needs to say to all Americans — over and over — is that although terrible, unpredictable things have happened, the country is not in peril. Such attacks are incapable of destroying us or coming close to bringing down Western civilization.
.. There is no way to eradicate risk in a free society, even if we are willing to trade some of our liberty for safety. We delude ourselves to think otherwise.
The Fragile French Republic
Among Parisians, one senses a quiet resolve to fall back into routines and social habits, not only because they must, but because they should, and can—because the so-called Islamic State is not, of course, an existential threat to Paris or to France, unless the French choose to give themselves over to hysteria, and to treat it as if it were.
.. And yet the policy response seems to reflect exactly this, less confident, stance. The choice is unfortunate but unsurprising; any democratic government, trapped by electoral calculus and the felt imperative of immediate action, might be expected to do the same. Yet French authorities have been particularly alarmist, opting for a response that is both notably bellicose and notably heedless of civil rights. They have retaliated with bombing raids in Raqqa, with calls to close French mosques and deport more radical preachers, and with the declaration of a three-month state of emergency that has already allowed for more than 1,000 warrantless police searches, 165 warrantless arrests, and the placement under house arrest, without judicial approval or the possibility of legal recourse of any kind, of more than 250 people. There have been serious calls for the internment of the thousands of people listed by the intelligence services as possible threats; Prime Minister Manuel Valls has declared himself open to the possibility.
.. What is certain, however, is that such responses are of precisely the sort the Islamic State sought to provoke. “What IS wants is to set off civil war,” pitting Muslims against their would-be oppressors in the West ..
.. A history of political upheaval and collapse seems to have instilled in the country’s political leaders the conviction, even in times of political calm, that France’s Republican project is terribly fragile.
.. “Anxiety” over the survival of the Republican model, a collective project that from its start has sought to impose national unity, and uniformity, from on high, is indeed “hard-wired into French Republicanism,” said the historian Emile Chabal.
.. the brutal Algerian war of independence, in which France’s colonial subjects effectively turned Republicanism against the French, demanding for themselves the freedom and equality it nominally guaranteed.
.. The possibility that the country’s particular approach to Islam, or the integration of its post-colonial underclass, or the poor concrete neighborhoods of the banlieues, might contribute in some way to this sad phenomenon has not been the subject of any serious political debate since the start of the Syrian conflict.
Saudi Arabia, an ISIS That Has Made It
The Saudi royals are caught in a perfect trap: Weakened by succession laws that encourage turnover, they cling to ancestral ties between king and preacher. The Saudi clergy produces Islamism, which both threatens the country and gives legitimacy to the regime.
.. One has to live in the Muslim world to understand the immense transformative influence of religious television channels on society by accessing its weak links: households, women, rural areas.
.. It is worth reading certain Islamist newspapers to see their reactions to the attacks in Paris. The West is cast as a land of “infidels.” The attacks were the result of the onslaught against Islam. Muslims and Arabs have become the enemies of the secular and the Jews. The Palestinian question is invoked along with the rape of Iraq and the memory of colonial trauma, and packaged into a messianic discourse meant to seduce the masses. Such talk spreads in the social spaces below, while up above, political leaders send their condolences to France and denounce a crime against humanity.
.. Since ISIS is first and foremost a culture, not a militia, how do you prevent future generations from turning to jihadism when the influence of Fatwa Valley and its clerics and its culture and its immense editorial industry remains intact?
.. Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.
How to Beat ISIS: Destroy the Group’s Economy
“Another basic requirement that I have been fighting to advance for 30 years is to come to an international consensus on the definition of terrorism.
“In my definition, it is the targeting of civilians to achieve political goals. That’s it. Instead, all sorts of politics gets mixed in. This one’s a freedom fighter, and so on. Even if a group has a legitimate cause, it should be agreed that using that tool of targeting civilians is not legitimate.