The Islamist Tantrum: Bret Stephens, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16, 2015 —We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront.
Paris Changes Nothing: Father Raymond J. de Souza, National Post, Nov. 16, 2015 — The terror in Paris was both horrific and routine.
Paris: the New Normal?: Walter Russell Mead, American Interest, Nov. 16, 2015 — The whole world has its gaze fixed on Paris these days—and rightly so…
A France-U.S. Anti-Islamist Alliance: Reuel Marc Gerecht, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 2015— The morning after the Paris attacks, a store around the corner from my house put out a little sign on the sidewalk: “L’amour est la réponse,” it read.
The Belgian Neighborhood Indelibly Linked to Jihad: Steven Mufson, Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2015
Someone Tell the President We Can't Fight Radical Islam By Being Politically Correct: Steven Emerson and Pete Hoekstra, Forbes, Nov. 16, 2015
Obama Takes the War to His Hawkish Critics: Eli Lake, Bloomberg, Nov. 16, 2015
The Same Fight: Judith Bergman, Israel Hayom, Nov. 16, 2015
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16, 2015
We live in the age of the sanctified tantrum—the political and religious furies we dare not name or shame, much less confront. Students bully college administrators with contrived political demands. The administrators plead they can do better, then capitulate. Incompetent writers pen trite racial screeds aimed at the very society that lifts them above their ability. They are hailed as geniuses. Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination epitomizes the politics of the tantrum. He’s angry as hell, and so is his base. We’re supposed to respect this.
And then there is the tantrum of Islam, another eruption of rage that feeds off our astonishing willingness to indulge it. Before Friday’s carnage in the City of Light, the world was treated to the hideous spectacle of Palestinians knifing Jews in Israel. The supposed motive of these stabbings was a rumor among Palestinians—fanned by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas—that the Israeli government intended to allow Jews to pray on the Temple Mount.
This was a story the Israeli government adamantly denied and every serious person knew was false. Yet no senior Western leader dared call out Mr. Abbas to correct the record. Palestinian tantrums are sanctified tantrums. The violence they breed might be condemned, but the narrative on which they rest has the status of holy writ. It is no more to be questioned than the Quran is to be burned. “To counteract the radicalization [in Europe],” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström said in a televised interview only hours after the Paris attacks, “we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which . . . the Palestinians see that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence.”
Here was the sanctified tantrum par excellence: People murder and maim because they have been put (by Israel) to a bleak choice. Rage is not to be condemned but understood, mitigated and mollified. Later that day, at the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton and the two noncontenders for the Democratic presidential nomination each refused to use the term “radical Islam” in referring to the ideological force behind the Paris killings. The furthest Mrs. Clinton would go to naming the enemy was to say “you can talk about Islamists who also are clearly jihadists.”
Apparently, however, you cannot mention Islamists who are not yet “clearly jihadists,” lest some other invisible line be transgressed. To do so might set off another tantrum among people who tend toward violence whenever they are accused of violent tendencies.
Nowhere are Islamist tantrums so richly indulged as in Europe. Take the Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, which turns out to have been home to at least one mastermind of Friday’s attacks. “In Molenbeek, the newspaper Het Volk published a study of the local Muslim population,” I noted in this column in August 2006. “The editor, Gunther Vanpraet, described the commune as a ‘breeding ground for thousands of Jihad candidates.’ ”
For many years the mayor of Molenbeek was a man named Philippe Moureaux, a Socialist best known as the author of the 1981 Law Against Racism and Xenophobia. In 2004 he helped pass a law allowing noncitizens to vote in municipal elections. Roughly a quarter of Molenbeek’s 96,000 residents are not Belgian citizens. Mr. Moureaux was also instrumental in engineering the political marriage of his Socialist Party with Muslim arrivals from Turkey and North Africa—a Europe-wide phenomenon that accounts for left-wing sympathies for Islamists whose views on subjects such as gay rights or the equality of women are less than progressive.
It was under Mr. Moureaux’s indulgent eye that Molenbeek became what it is. For years, a group called Sharia4Belgium—no prizes for guessing its goals—was active in the neighborhood until a Belgian judge shut it down in February. The Muslim fanatic who last year opened fire on the Jewish museum in Brussels, killing four, also once lived in Molenbeek, as had the man who tried to open fire on a high-speed train in August. “I notice that each time [there is a jihadist attack] there is a link with Molenbeek,” Charles Michel, Belgium’s prime minister, admitted Sunday. Nice of him to connect the dots.
I lived near Molenbeek for two years when I worked for this newspaper’s European edition and used to jog along the canal that cuts through the neighborhood. It took no special insight to see what was likely to come out of the place. Now 129 people are dead in Paris because Europe decided to make a fetish of its tolerance for intolerance and allow the religious distempers of its Islamist communities to fester over many years. That’s what happens when you sanctify political tantrums, explain and appease them, refuse to name them, try to look away.
Father Raymond J. de Souza
National Post, Nov. 16, 2015
The terror in Paris was both horrific and routine. The particular time, place and style of Islamist terror attacks varies, but after 9/11 in New York and Washington (2001), Bali (2002), Istanbul (2003), Madrid (2004), London (2005), the Toronto 18 (2006), Algiers (2007), Bombay (2008), Fort Hood (2009), Moscow (2010), Marrakesh (2011), Benghazi (2012), Nairobi (2013), Brussels, Ottawa and Sydney (2014), and Paris (January 2015), Paris (November 2015) was not novel. When and where will the jihadists next strike? We don’t know. We only know that it is not a question of if — only when, where and how many dead. That’s the reality.
The travelogue of terror encircles the globe. The above list does not even include the places where Islamist terror kills dozens not yearly, but every week or month — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria. It does not include attacks in Israel, or its Arab neighbours, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.
So will Paris 2015 be just the latest entry on the list of places once traumatized — or twice traumatized in this case — but that otherwise leaves things unchanged? Not that nothing changes. Airport travel becomes more cumbersome. Surveillance by security services becomes more intrusive. In Paris, all the Jewish schools became garrisons after the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish grocery store attacks, with permanent round-the-clock armed forces stationed on school grounds. What doesn’t change is the ability of the jihadis to visit
Will this reality change? It depends. The first step toward changing reality is acknowledging it. That was Al Gore’s message in Paris on Friday. But Gore — who was U.S. vice president during the World Trade Center bombing (1993), the American embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi (1998) and the USS Cole bombing in Yemen (2000) — was not speaking of the reality of terror.
No, Gore was hosting his annual climate change broadcast, 24 Hours of Reality — The World is Watching. Joined by various pop stars, Gore brought his show to Paris in advance of the climate summit due to begin in two weeks. 24 Hours of Reality began on Friday afternoon, just hours before reality came crashing down upon Paris. Gore’s 21st-century telethon had to be cancelled. The world was watching to be sure, but it was tuned into the carnage, not climate politics.
That really is the question, isn’t it? What will Paris 2015 mean? Will it mean, as it does for the tens of thousands of climate activists and bureaucrats coming to a conference that, at a cost of $240 million, hopes to save the planet in 2030? Or will Paris 2015 mean the urgency of stopping the travelogue of terror and the expansion of ISIL?
The response will be, in the words of French President François Hollande, “pitiless.” His allies were not quite so sure. The U.S., Germany and Canada all indicated that they would stand in unbreakable solidarity with France, but would not actually change any of their policies on fighting ISIL or refugee resettlement. Perhaps Paris 2015, climate-wise, might mean significant change. It already seems evident that, despite Hollande’s rhetoric, Paris 2015, terror-wise, might mean nothing much at all.
The routine nature of mass terror was reflected in the rituals of mourning. The Eiffel Tower went dark, just as it did in January. There was the drawing of a cartoonist’s pencil that went viral on social media in January. This time there was a sad looking peace symbol cum Eiffel Tower. They gathered in the streets to sing John Lennon’s Imagine in January. This time it was an instrumental version on a piano outside the concert hall where the massacre took place. Last time U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry brought James Taylor to sing You’ve Got a Friend at Paris city hall. No word yet on who the Americans might send to sing to Parisians this time.
There is much that is attractive in an imaginary world, especially when ISIL is shaping the real one. In an imaginary world, tens of thousands of refugees from Sunni-dominated camps in Syria will pose no security threat upon arrival in Germany or Canada. In an imaginary world, grave evil does not have to be opposed by armed forces, justly deployed and capable of the mission. Lennon’s Imagine is the go-to anthem for sentimental, and radically sceptical, sorts in times of terror. And so Paris’ bloody weekend began with Al Gore’s version of reality and concluded in John Lennon’s imaginary world. In between were the cold and cruel souls who have a firm grasp — a lethal grasp — on the reality of life and death on the streets of our cities. Which one is next?
Walter Russell Mead
American Interest, Nov. 16, 2015
The whole world has its gaze fixed on Paris these days—and rightly so, given both the horrific nature of the attacks and the reverberations the massacre has already sent through European and American political discourse. The shock is still fresh. The wounded are still in the hospitals; the dead have not yet gone to their rest. The politicians are making speeches, and President Hollande has declared that France is at war, but it is already painfully clear that nothing France or its allies can or will do in response will end the threat of Paris-type attacks.
Regardless of what kind of response the West ultimately launches, military efforts in the wake of Paris will not spell an end to terrorism. There is no chance for a cure for the causes of terrorism anytime soon, no matter how much Paris may have stiffened Europe’s resolve. Across the Middle East, democracy isn’t taking hold, economic development is further away than ever, and bad governance is still endemic. This “civilizational wound” isn’t going to be cured, and the sense of backwardness, bitterness, alienation it creates isn’t going to get better. The Arab world as a whole is no closer today to, say, an East Asian-style development miracle than it was in 1950 and neither the West nor anybody else has the slightest idea how to change that.
Meanwhile, in the West, Muslim populations in Europe will be economically underprivileged for a very long time. They’ll be facing a future with few jobs, bad schools, and popular prejudice running against them. This will increase the radicalization that we are already seeing in places like Belgium.
We have had “never again” moments before in COFKATGWOT (the Conflict Formerly Known as the Global War on Terror). There were the attacks in Mumbai and in London. There was the Madrid train bombing. And, of course, there was 9/11 itself. We have used bombs and ground troops. We have engaged in efforts to build bridges to the Islamic world. We have collaborated with “moderate Islamists.” We have promoted democracy, both by the former President George W. Bush method in Iraq and the President Barack Obama method in Egypt. We removed despots in Libya and Iraq; we have supported strong men in Egypt and Turkey. None of it has made the jihad go away.
Nothing we do after Paris is going to make it go away, either. We can kill Osama bin Laden. We can (and we should) crush ISIS. But we can’t change the reality that jihadi ideology is alive and well, feeding off the discontent and disempowerment felt so widely in the Islamic world. We can strengthen our security at home, we can continue to improve intelligence collection and to disrupt the ability of terrorists to communicate, to travel, and to raise and move money. None of these measures can ever be completely successful, and new jihadi movements will likely spring up to replace the ones we defeat. But we cannot relax our vigilance. The price of failure is too high.
To survive and to thrive, the West will have to become more like Israel: guarding ourselves constantly against a threat that can’t be eliminated. The terrorists will continually try to develop new tactics to get around our security measures, and our security forces will have to find countermeasures against new and shifting terror attacks. Life in the West will be marked by periodic episodes of violence, which will be followed by security increases—but life will still go on.
Grave dangers remain. The terrorists are still on the hunt for WMD. Chemical weapons are being used in Syria; the jihad knows no scruples when it comes to their use. The dirty bomb, the chemical attack, the poisoning of reservoirs: These dangers grow over time.
But for now, Paris simply reminds us that, like the Israelis, we live in a dangerous world. The peace and security of the western world, our ability to enjoy the amusements and the diversions of the greatest and most beautiful cities the world has ever known, all depend on the vigilance of our security forces and the competence of their leaders.
The French and their allies have every right, and even have a duty, to strike ISIS as hard as they can. The hopes and the prayers of the civilized world will go with the pilots and fighters as they bring retribution to the authors of evil. But we cannot be naive. The war against terror has a long way to go, and we must brace for more horrors like the ones so recently visited on the City of Light.
A FRANCE-U.S. ANTI-ISLAMIST ALLIANCE
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Wall Street Journal, Nov. 15, 2015
Even before the French-born Kouachi brothers went on a shooting rampage at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in January, French officials knew their luck was running out. Paris had always counted on its internal-security services—the finest counterterrorist force in the West—to keep the peace. However, the post-Arab Spring chaos and the American withdrawal from Iraq gave rise to Islamic State and reanimated al Qaeda, and this started overloading the capacity of France’s counterterrorist agencies. As a French internal-security official put it to me a month ago, “We just can’t surveil anyone else.”
The massacres of Nov. 13 may well prove as momentous as 9/11. France is no longer a great power. Yet, fascinated by the might and freedoms of the U.S. and diffident about their own capacities, the French underestimate their influence. Frenchmen largely set the narrative for Western elites after the second Gulf War started going south.
Remember the 9/11 Le Monde editorial—“Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans)—written by Jean-Marie Colombani. The guardian of France’s center-left establishment, Mr. Colombani juxtaposed sympathy for a wounded U.S. with criticism and schadenfreude. Washington hadn’t been sufficiently attentive to the enmity-producing exercise of its unchallenged, unbalanced power.
He added that the American “hyper-power” had brought this evil upon itself by giving rise to Osama bin Laden by arming Muslim radicals against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Read liberal American critiques of post-9/11 America—including President Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech, with its apologies, cautions and irenic aspirations—and hear the echoes of French critiques.
But imagine if Paris had joined the Americans in the invasion of Iraq; the now-dominant Western narrative of that conflict might have been very different. Because of the attacks Friday, the narrative will change. The soft-power-heavy, somewhat guilty Western analysis of Islamic militancy—where the progressive-minded avoid referring to Islam in describing an antipathy that sanctifies killing—is now dead in Europe and will soon be irretrievably embarrassing across the Atlantic.
President Obama’s inability to have an adult conversation about Islam’s manifest problems with modernity, which also tore Christianity apart, have kept the West’s loudest bully pulpit from provoking contentious and entirely appropriate debates among Muslims. The advancement in the Middle East of grand modern causes—the abolition of slavery, the slow march of women’s social and political rights, the expansion of education, the brutal tug of war between secularism and religion—has always been stirred by Western thought and actions.
Having the French more vigorously in this game will help compensate for the politically correct, ahistoric timidity that has seized much of the intelligentsia in the U.S. and Britain. Trailblazers in analyzing modern Islamic fundamentalism, the French could well rescue the American left from its fixation on Islamophobia. They could provide encouragement and cover to American liberals to reflect and act without fear of being labeled Islamophobes (who are a dime a dozen on the American right and, as handmaidens of isolationism, don’t matter).
The attacks will make the French prouder and more protective of Western civilization. Several Western military incursions into the Middle East may lie before us. If we are to sustain that fight against Islamic State and other radical Muslims who mean us harm, Westerners obviously need to know—to feel it in their cultural bones—why they are fighting. Such things are not a given, as anyone knows who has watched President Obama try to transform the Afghan conflict from a “war of necessity” to a “war of choice.”
Washington always needs European allies to reinforce the moral purpose of sustained military action. The British are probably finished as a power of consequence. That leaves the French.
If they are committed to seeing this fight through to the end, the French make it more likely that the U.S. will commit more ground troops in Iraq and, as consequentially, put soldiers into Syria to create a defensible haven where civilians and the armed Sunni opposition can gather without fear of attack. Europe’s refugee and counterterrorist nightmares have no chance of resolution until the Syrian war is stopped.
The French and Americans are currently in a perverse situation since they have de facto aligned their military actions with the Shiite Alawite regime of Bashar Assad against the Syrian Sunni population. As long as the Alawites and their Russian, Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese allies are slaughtering Sunnis—and they are doing the lion’s share of the killing in the war and are driving the refugee crisis—Islamic State is unlikely to be defeated. And Islamic State’s propaganda, depicting France and America as allies of Shiite butchers, will continue to have real influence among Sunni Muslims in Europe.
Both Paris and Washington know this, even if they want to pretend that a political solution is possible without militarily checkmating the Assad regime and its friends. If the French are willing to commit the Foreign Legion in Syria, an idea no longer unthinkable, it is much more likely that the Americans will consider ground troops and the arduous, dangerous, long-term effort to stabilize Syria. Although profoundly constrained by the size of its armed forces, France could serve, as Margaret Thatcher did for George H.W. Bush, as a back stiffener and force multiplier.
Franco-American alliances have never been easy. But it wasn’t merely a desire to enjoy Paris that convinced the Americans to put the center of their European counterterrorist efforts in France after 9/11. However faltering, the French remain the backbone of Europe’s defense against Islamist terrorism, which makes them the front-line defense of the U.S. Nous sommes tous en guerre. We are all at war. The rest remains in Monsieur Colombani’s imagination.
The Belgian Neighborhood Indelibly Linked to Jihad: Steven Mufson, Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2015— Just across the canal from the chic cafes, businesses and elegant buildings that define the heart of Belgium’s capital is the neighborhood of Molenbeek, a largely Muslim area that has become one of the world’s main breeding grounds of violent Islamist extremists.
Someone Tell the President We Can't Fight Radical Islam By Being Politically Correct: Steven Emerson and Pete Hoekstra, Forbes, Nov. 16, 2015 — "This is an attack not just on Paris, it's an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share," – President Obama hours after the terrorist attacks in Paris began unfolding.
Obama Takes the War to His Hawkish Critics: Eli Lake, Bloomberg, Nov. 16, 2015— President Barack Obama couldn't have been looking forward to his press conference on Monday in Turkey. Here he is, overseeing a war he says has "contained" the Islamic State. And there his critics are, asking why he hasn't done more to stop these barbarians who have just committed atrocities in France and Lebanon.
The Same Fight: Judith Bergman, Israel Hayom, Nov. 16, 2015 — The terror attacks perpetrated by Islamic State in Paris on Friday night spurred a huge wave of solidarity from around the world.
