Misunderstanding Terrorism in Europe

Everywhere is becoming like Israel in the need to take security measures that encroach further and further into daily life. One would not be surprised if Israelis did not feel a sense of schadenfreude; after all, those who criticized Israel as a police state now indulge in the same practices.

Paris recently saw terror stalk its streets again. This time, it was a stabbing attack that claimed one life and injured four others. The police shot the attacker; he screamed “Allahu akbar,” while carrying out his attack. This follows the terror attack in March at a supermarket in Carcassonne, southern France that saw four people killed. This included the police officer Lt. Col. Arnaud Beltrame, who substituted himself for a hostage, enabling the storming of the supermarket by his comrades. He sacrificed himself in an act of supreme bravery. His death will not be the last.

Europe is facing dark times. The specter of Islamist terror hangs over the population of the Western part of the continent like a shroud, mirrored in the funeral shrouds of its victims. Britain was the country to suffer most in 2017, followed by Spain. In 2016, it was France and Germany. In 2015, it was France. The tide of violence that came in with the appearance of ISIS in 2014 has abated somewhat since that organization’s dismemberment in the dustbowl of Iraq and Syria. It is not an unseemly thing, however, to mourn and remember the dead: in 2015, there were 164 killed; in 2016, it was 145; in 2017, it was 56. These numbers show a decline, it is true, but the impact on Europe’s psyche has been significant, as always happens with terrorism. That is its goal after all.

The mistake that we make is that we give into ‘mission accomplished’ syndrome. This was evident following Bin Laden’s death. Obama proclaimed the success of the operation that killed him, and many celebrated, as is understandable. However, the issue was that many also thought the Islamist threat was now over. This betrayed the view of the Islamist phenomenon as essentially organizational in nature: kill the leader of an organization, neutralize that organization, neutralize terrorism. This warped view of the problem led to such bon mots as Obama calling Islamist terrorism “Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism.” This fundamentally flawed conception of the problem demonstrated the inability to see the roots of the terror faced not as something emanating from organizations, but from a belief system that these organizations were grounded in. The belief system came first—not the other way around.