United front needed to beat terrorism
The knife attack in a French town church brings home the reality that no human is entirely safe from extremists, and that to combat terrorism, a resilience reminiscent of the spirit of the British Blitz is needed,
NICE // Another day in western Europe brings another attack carried out by men claiming to act on behalf of ISIL. A priest of 84 is murdered while celebrating mass at his own church and another person is left “between life and death”. A church in a small town in rural France may seem the softest of targets for terrorists to visit their evil on innocents.
But there is nothing new in the tactic of causing death and injury in places of worship, as countless Muslims know whose mosques – along with their faithful – have been bombed or shot at by men purporting to act on behalf of Islam.
Indeed, France has already experienced a determined attempt to cause bloodshed among churchgoers.
In April last year, just three months after the French-Algerian Kouachi brothers murdered 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie
Hebdo, a 24-year-old Algerian student was arrested as he allegedly prepared to kill worshippers at one or two Catholic churches in the suburb of Villejuif.
Juif means Jew in French and some analysts suggest the name appealed to the would-be assailant, or those directing him, as a symbolic target.
This month has been particularly active for those linked to ISIL or, at the very least, seeking to carry out crimes that would please the terrorist organisation.
The carnage of Bastille night in Nice on July 14, when 84 people died and more than 300 were injured by a man who ploughed a 19- tonne lorry into helpless crowds on the Promenade des Anglais, was followed by the train and music festival attacks in Germany.
There was also the highly suspicious, if as yet officially unexplained, attempt by two men described as “of Middle Eastern appearance” to kidnap a British serviceman as he jogged outside a Royal Air Force base in the eastern English county of Norfolk.
Before that, it had been the turn of the US, most recently last month’s slaughter at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which Omar Mateen, an American of Afghan descent, killed 49 people, proclaiming an allegiance to ISIL that the group willingly adopted.
The lesson is as simple as it is bleak. No human, no gathering in public or private can be considered safe from attack by ISIL or its sympathisers, or by similar groups (the Kouachi brothers claimed to be serving Aqap, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch). Similarly, no act can be seen as so depraved as to be beyond these desperate but acutely dangerous private armies.
ISIL is especially intent on exporting death and destruction as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq.
Consider the Nice mass murderer, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the first terrorist attacker on French soil in recent years to be wholly unknown to the intelligence services.
Lahouaiej Bouhlel, killed by police at the end of his rampage, was the father of three children aged 5 and under. He presumably had no way of knowing whether their playmates would be on the promenade for that night’s fireworks display.
His estranged wife, questioned at length before being released without suspicion, was said to have originally planned to take their own children.
No courage is needed to attack a small group in a church, killing an elderly priest and terrorising others including two nuns.
But while such an act reveals deep cowardice, it is also effective. It spreads fear of the unknown, an unnerving awareness that menace now clouds the most mundane of everyday pursuits.
The people of the West, and this includes millions of Muslims living law- abiding lives, must learn to accommodate this threat. They must develop a peacetime version of the Blitz mentality, the spirit of resilient defiance that saw the people of Britain through grim events of the Second World War. Habits will have to change. Security needs will place additional disruptive restrictions on much of what they take for granted.
ISIL will score other “victories” for a cause that finds no favour among serious Islamic scholars, and it will admit responsibility for crimes of which it has no prior knowledge – the work of opportunists willing to die in some spurious reflected “glory”.
But it has become pointless to mock the basic criminality, fecklessness and even boozy, drug- taking womanising of many of those trying to kill or maim in the name of religion.
Just as no violent deed is regarded by ISIL as a step too far, no personality defect or innate streak of wickedness is an impediment to becoming one of its “soldiers of Islam”, offensive as those three words will be to most Muslims.
In France, Germany, Britain and other western countries in ISIL’s firing line, more attacks will be foiled by the work of security forces, or by luck, than succeed.
But the future is uncertain and, sadly, will deliver more loss of life.
The West will endure its share of the suffering that also afflicts parts of the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Africa.
France’s president, Francois Hollande, says his country must wage war against ISIL “by every means” within the law.
In south- east Germany, the Bavarian federal premier Horst Seehofer acknowledged that “Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany”. Among the many challenges that lie ahead for society and for its leaders is to rise and remain above unsubstantiated sweeping conclusions.
We are all, or should be, in this together and must find the moral strength to resist the ugly voices of racial or cultural prejudice.