The world weeps
An attack meant to divide us must bring us together instead
Once again the world has been shocked and horrified by a devastating terrorist attack, this time in the French resort city of Nice, where on Thursday a madman killed more than 80 people and injured scores more after plowing his truck through a crowd gathered there to celebrate Bastille Day, the country’s national holiday. We join people around the globe in expressing our outrage at this terrible crime and our profound sorrow for its victims and their families. The carnage was as senseless as it was brutal, and no political ideology or religious grievance can ever justify such wanton slaughter of innocents.
Authorities have identified the driver of the vehicle, who was killed by police during the attack, as a 31-year-old man of Tunisian descent who apparently had been living in Nice for some time before embarking on his murderous rampage. In a statement, the Islamic State claimed he was one of their soldiers, and French officials said Saturday that he was “radicalized very quickly.”
ISIS has repeatedly vowed to hit targets in Western Europe, and it has expressed a particular antipathy for France because of that country’s ongoing military involvement against terrorists in North Africa and the Middle East. The killings in Nice follow a string of murderous assaults carried out by ISIS in Paris and Brussels last year that killed or injured scores of victims.
Such attacks are difficult to anticipate or prevent, however, and the truth is that we can expect them to happen again despite the best efforts of national and international security forces. That prospect has driven ordinary people everywhere to ask when the killing will stop and what governments must do to keep them and their loved ones safe. There are no easy answers to those questions, but what we certainly must not do is succumb to fear. Our enemy’s goal is to make us afraid while sowing divisions that cause us to retreat from the world and turn on each other. That’s the only way the terrorists can win, and we cannot allow that to happen.
Instead we must stand up even more forcefully to those who would threaten us. We must take courage and refuse to surrender our ideals and our democratic way of life to a handful of fanatics with delusions of grandeur. Resisting their evil intentions will require summoning all our physical, mental and moral resources, but we can do so without sacrificing the values that make us who we are and that bind us together in common purpose.
In times like these it’s often easier to see what we shouldn’t do than what we should, because there inevitably will be voices counseling us to embrace our fears and act on them. That’s the dangerous allure of ideas like building a wall on the Mexican border to keep immigrants out, which Donald Trump insists he will do if elected president, or requiring Muslims to disavow any belief in Sharia law as a condition for entering the country, as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich suggested on Friday.
Mr. Gingrich’s view, which Mr. Trump also shares, plays right into the hands of those who are trying to drive a wedge between the West and the world’s 1.1 billion Muslims, the vast majority of whom are appalled by the Islamic State’s homicidal interpretation of Islam. The weight of their numbers makes them our most powerful potential ally in the fight against religious extremists, yet Mr. Trump and Mr. Gingrich’s proposals, if actually carried out, would push millions of believers into the arms of the terrorists.
In the aftermath of the terrible events in Nice, when our attention is focused on mourning the victims and comforting the families who lives have been cruelly torn asunder, we must resolve to come together in common purpose and compassion, not turn on each other. To do otherwise would be to hand our enemies a victory they could never achieve on their own.