Deepest sympathies, of course, to anyone living in Paris or otherwise directly affected by the recent attacks. Not much more can be productively said, I don’t think, from 5,500 kilometers away.
This posting is really a question for European readers. Please comment on how you understand these events. Are they part of a trend or grand plan? If so, how does life in France or Europe change?
Americans: How does the Web format of today’s newspapers strike you when an event like this occurs? In the old print world, coverage of a tragedy like this would occupy the entire front page and the reader wouldn’t be asked to contemplate the diurnal or trivial as well as the tragic. The nytimes.com site, however, has the news from Paris sharing with summaries of and links to articles such as “In Ireland, Milk Chocolate Reigns,” “Build Your Thanksgiving Feast,” a piece on fantasy sports, “Meet the Instamom, a Social Media Stage Mom,” etc.
Related:
- some photos that I took in Paris in happier times
- A drawing by one of our resident young artists, starting from the preceding photos:
As a European (who lived in Boston at the time of the Marathon bombing) I of course see the event as a part of a growing worldwide trend, stemming from a conflict that seems hard to resolve in the short term. Even if the western world were to eliminate ISIS, if it’s done without support of Islamic/Arab nations, then it seems likely that the problem will resurface in a near future.
But more specifically, as a European I regret the fact that the event coincides with a period of profound instability in Europe. The European financial crisis, which is far from over, exacerbated shortcomings of the European project and demonstrated the lack of coordination, leadship and consensus. This attack can’t be dissociated from the refugee crisis. While it is too early to know if these perpetrators infiltrated as refugees, or if they’re European nationals, the attack will certainly be used by the anti-refugee groups to support their agendas. Many ask for “tighter controls” but this will be hard to do with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing to Europe, and many of these claims are veiled nationalistic and bigoted sentiments claiming the closure of Europe, and that are gaining traction among disenfranchised and frustrated citizens. If the terrorists succeed in forcing the closure of borders, for instance, they are also contributing to disrupting the European project. I hope we don’t give in and don’t change our ways becauseo f them.
As a European citizen this is what worries me the most: that we don’t know how to deal with the problems (the war, the refugee crisis, the integration of immigrants) and at the same time we give in to the terrorists and sidetrack the EU project with a greater segregation of the European nations.
Military retaliation alone will not eliminate the radical ideology. The West must do more to eliminate the soil that allows the poisonous mushroom to grow.
Unfortunately, this fight against a terror group will distract the US and the West further from fighting the real long term threat: China.
Thomas Barnett (author of the Pentagon’s new map) argues that countries that have a per capita GDP of >$3,000 will get out of the violence business. Saudi Arabia used to be $28,000 20 years ago, now it is $6,000.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?182105-1/pentagons-new-map-powerpoint-presentation
Go to 1:43:47 mark and start watching.
He splits the world into the core world (N. America/Europe/China/Japan) and the gap world (middle east/africa/indigenous S. America). The US, according to him is an exporter of security and importer of connectivity. The gap lacks security and is not part of globalization – it needs to shrink. At 2:02 he proposes that to increase connectivity, people from the gap have to move to the core, and security has to move in.
Actually, that talk is from 2004, when Saudi Arabia’s per capita GDP was low – now it is $26,000. Wonder what Thomas Barnett is saying these days…
Terrorism in Europe has always been a way of life. There have been many other bombings in Spain, England, & France. The 2004 Madrid bombing killed a lot more people. There were Islamic bombings in 2005, 2004, 1995 & before that there were IRA bombings. The current bombing probably affected a lot more people because it came after a long period with Americans portraying Europe as a success story of gun control, welfare programs, environmental programs, peace through abstinence from war in the middle east. Americans praised the ease with which Syrian refugees could flee to Europe while US’s government acted glacially slow in giving them asylum. With everything that we were told Europeans were doing right, how could anything go wrong?
> Are they part of a trend or grand plan?
Yes, of the long, slow suicide of western Europe.
> If so, how does life in France or Europe change?
In western Europe, in the short term, it doesn’t. The peculiar mass
mental illness is incurable (see above – “I hope we don’t change our
ways”) and therefore terminal. In the longer term, there will be no
western Europe as we currently know it.
Central and eastern Europe however, having seen another example of the
benefits of Diversity, will be still less inclined to embrace it.
@jack crossfire: And there was anti-fascist terrorism in Spain, left-vs-rightwing terrorism in Italy, left-wing terrorism in Germany, and Algeria has been a source of terrorist incidents for France pretty much since its independence. And I’m still leaving a lot out. Terrorism is something that has plagued Europe extensively, almost since the end of World War II.
In retrospect, the political and media responses to those incidents seem far more measured, more reasonable than those in the last two decades.
@Francisco Feijó Delgado: I agree almost completely: except with the fact that the timing is unfortunate. We’ve always had terrorism in Europe. It is the political (and electoral) response to these events that has changed.
see above – “I hope we don’t change our
ways”
The late Mayor Koch of NY used to tell a story about a judge who was soft on criminals, but one day the judge himself had been mugged: Koch was giving a speech to a group of senior citizens in which he mentioned that this judge had come into court the day after his mugging and announced to his courtroom that although he had been mugged, he was not going to let it affect his treatment of criminal defendants in any way. At this point in Koch’s speech, an old lady in the back yelled out, “Then mug him again!”
So how many times does Europe need to get mugged before they change their attitude?
Westerners (who know nothing about Islam) keep saying that Islam is a religion of peace and that terrorism is not in keeping with the tenets of that religion, but ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has a PhD in Islamic theology from Islamic U of Baghdad. So maybe he knows more about Islam than you?
Because of political correctness or an ostrich head in the sand attitude or something, when Islamic leaders plainly and clearly say that they want to destroy the West, Westerners make excuses – oh, this is just rhetoric, they don’t really meant it, etc. Guess what – they really mean it.
@Izzie got it right on. The west has this all backward for a long time now. The west shows its toughness against virtually any country when it goes out of line but not once against the root source of this Islamic evil instigator such: Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE.
@Izzie: The notion that being “soft on crime” somehow causes it is part of a vicious cycle that has caused prison sentences in the USA to grow to span mulitple lifetimes, caused these “liberal judges” to be essentially removed from the sentencing system, and caused the United States to imprison an enormous part of its population with, arguably, little improvement in its safety or crime rate.
Your perception is that Europe is “soft on Muslims”.
Statistics seem to bely that: For example, European Muslims are significantly overrepresented in European prisons. Chérif Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly, two of the Charlie Hebdo terrorists, converted to radical Islam while serving sentences in the Fleury-Mérogis prison. Even though European police departments are probably not “soft on Islam”, the effect on stopping terrorist attacks isn’t necessarily positive.
You might argue that Europe’s border controls are ineffective at stopping radicals from travelling to the Middle-East and back, but European borders are very extensive (they include the entire mediterranean coast, and the border with Russia), and arguably, in the era of cheap and cheerful air travel, people can travel to the Middle-East by other ways.
The one way Europe can get “harder” on Muslims is by introducing measures that essentially make Muslim Europeans second-class citizens. Excluding them from certain types of public service. Denying them the right to be reunited with their spouse. Restricting their right to travel, etc. You might be happier to know that there are many political parties in Europe arguing that we should “change our ways” in this regard.
Personally, I’m not thrilled.
When I said I “I hope we don’t change our ways” [of living] I stand by it: our freedom and our liberties should not be cut because a band of lunatics decides to terrorize us.
I do hope we change our ways in the way we react against ISIS, but, like Michiel, I don’t think it’s by oppressing our own citizens (in France 5-10% of the population is muslim), by curbing our individual freedoms, or by stopping to welcome whoever we want to welcome. I do hope we change our ways in how we deal with integration and the admission of muslims into what are no longer going to be mono-ethnical and mono-religious countries. The defining values of Europe – and therefore the rules those who live here must abide to – cannot be its original religion and its original ethnicities, but the shared common humanitarian and social values we created and evolved during the centuries.
> I do hope we … welcome whoever we want … admission of muslims
> … no longer going to be mono-ethnical …
I.e. any problems arising from being in a hole can be solved by
digging harder.
Phil,
I wondered if I was the only person bothered by the NYT (and others) website layout.
Personally, I don’t think a tragic loss of life and limb should be shared on the same page with fantasy sports news.
I also think the world isn’t at war with any one nation or even group that’s easily identified. No, I think these terrorists are exactly like ants at a picnic: be it ten thousand or merely ten, they ruin things unless they experience total extermination and that simply isn’t possible with these terror groups. It’s a mind bending conundrum.
My late father, a decorated WWII veteran used to opine these ingeniously simple words:
Unless it directly involves us, STAY OUT OF IT!
Cleverly edited, but worth a watch.
I said to my wife right after the Paris attacks that I’d bet there will be a hard look at immigration in Europe following the Paris attacks. What was once a trickle of the truly needy and oppressed has appeared to turn into a geometric increase of the not so needy as friends tell friends tell friends tell friends. Is it possible to stop it at this point? What percentage of the Middle East and Africa can and should be absorbed? I don’t have any answers…I’m merely staggered by the scope of the problem.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/