TARGETS FOR A REASON
The attacks in Paris have shown us that cities are our greatest, most vulnerable creation.
Cities, humanity’s greatest creation, are also among its most vulnerable. Strike the city, you strike its people; the two are inseparable. If you’re ISIS, that’s the point.
As events in Paris reminded us last week, that’s why terrorism is an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon. The hinterland can be targeted, of course, but when the aim is simply to kill and maim, disrupt and destroy, inflict maximum damage, cities are the preferred objective.
Such is the logic of terrorist violence; though random, its victims are carefully chosen not only for who they are but what they’re doing. In the mind of an ISIS fighter, just watching a concert, drinking a coffee or walking home is enough to shoot a stranger to death.
That’s why the Paris attacks resonate so powerfully around the globe. Our lives are so much the same. As John Kennedy might have said, today we are all Parisians.
The temptation will be to hit back — and hard. Already French borders have been tightened and several thousand heavily armed police and soldiers now patrol the streets of Paris. The city looks like New York after 9/11.
The anti-Muslim backlash will be tsunami-like. Conflated with the mass influx of Syrian and Middle Eastern refugees, the carnage will play into the hands of the right-wing politicians in France, across Europe and beyond. For liberals, the attacks will lead many to question their willingness to be more generous and accommodating.
But already we know that several of the perpetrators of last week’s killings were French and living in Belgium. Though details are scarce, no one would be surprised to learn some were raised in the Paris banlieues, a part of the capital city where tourists never go. We are also told that between 1,200 and 1,450 ISIS fighters come from France, a third to a half of all foreign fighters.
These bleak concrete communities have become synonymous with generational poverty and systematic alienation. Little has changed in the largely highrise suburbs since riots broke out in 2005. The prospects for young residents of these neighbourhoods aren’t promising. Youth unemployment stands at 40 per cent or higher.
As the Paris banlieues make clear, cities contain the seeds of their own destruction. What the forces of density bring together, they can also tear apart. Another urban phenomenon, the ghetto, doesn’t just drain precious resources — human, social, economic, cultural, intellectual — it creates anger and resentment.
Toronto isn’t Paris, but similar forces are at play in this city. ISIS’s fight may not be about the living conditions of Muslim immigrants in France — it kills indiscriminately — but much of its support comes from radicalized young men (and women) who feel they have no future in their adopted homeland.
Toronto’s reputation for tolerance and integration will not withstand the growing disparity of opportunity forever. Middle-class Torontonians are feeling stretched to the limit, let alone the poor and marginalized increasingly relegated to the city’s inner suburbs, places where opportunity is as rare as transit.
Regardless of heroic efforts to integrate historically isolated communities such as Regent Park and Lawrence Heights, Toronto isn’t immune to the polarizing effects of inequality, prejudice and poverty.
Calls for more bombing raids and drone strikes in response to the events in Paris will only make things worse, and attract more foreign volunteers. Fighting violence with violence, hatred with hatred, however appealing, will solve nothing.
We shouldn’t forget that cities can be the source of their own demise, but also of their own salvation. The real battle must be fought in those places, urban and suburban, centre ville and banlieues, Paris and Toronto, where the dispossessed are confined. They must be opened up and reconnected, if they ever were. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca.