There are an awful lot of French citizens who sympathize with the Muslim terrorist cause, and many of them are known to authorities, like the three terrorists in the Charlie Hebdo and kosher market killings. Some pundits are offering the excuse that there are just too many such people for intelligence to effectively track them and prevent the attacks.
If that’s true, then the situation is incredibly dire, because it would indicate that our resources have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of terrorists already in the West.
But I don’t buy it. We certainly could allocate more resources to the task. What’s more, those three terrorists weren’t just sympathizers; two of them had previously been in the prison system for terrorist activities, and had received sentences that were a mere slap on the wrist. Why is the French justice system so lenient on terrorists? Why weren’t they still in prison?
It’s not as though this leniency was unknown, either. Here’s a 2002 article by Theordore Dalrymple that talks about (among other things) the breakdown of the French criminal justice system and its almost complete lack of punishment, deterrence, accountability for out-of-control youths from the Muslim enclaves of France. And the perpetrators, both petit and grand, are well aware of it:
Several things struck me about the incident [of trying to steal from parking meters]: the youths’ sense of invulnerability in broad daylight; the indifference to their behavior of large numbers of people who would never dream of behaving in the same way; that only the elderly tried to do anything about the situation, though physically least suited to do so. Could it be that only they had a view of right and wrong clear enough to wish to intervene? That everyone younger than they thought something like: “Refugees . . . hard life . . . very poor . . . too young to know right from wrong and anyway never taught . . . no choice for them . . . punishment cruel and useless”? The real criminals, indeed, were the drivers whose coins filled the parking meters: were they not polluting the world with their cars?
Another motive for inaction was that, had the youths been arrested, nothing would have happened to them. They would have been back on the streets within the hour. Who would risk a screwdriver in the liver to safeguard the parking meters of Paris for an hour?
The laxisme of the French criminal justice system is now notorious. Judges often make remarks indicating their sympathy for the criminals they are trying (based upon the usual generalizations about how society, not the criminal, is to blame); and the day before I witnessed the scene on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, 8,000 police had marched to protest the release from prison on bail of an infamous career armed robber and suspected murderer before his trial for yet another armed robbery, in the course of which he shot someone in the head. Out on bail before this trial, he then burgled a house. Surprised by the police, he and his accomplices shot two of them dead and seriously wounded a third. He was also under strong suspicion of having committed a quadruple murder a few days previously, in which a couple who owned a restaurant, and two of their employees, were shot dead in front of the owners’ nine-year-old daughter.
The left-leaning Libération, one of the two daily newspapers the French intelligentsia reads, dismissed the marchers, referring with disdainful sarcaé¨m to la fié¨vre flicardiaire””cop fever. The paper would no doubt have regarded the murder of a single journalist””that is to say, of a full human being””differently, let alone the murder of two journalists or six; and of course no one in the newspaper acknowledged that an effective police force is as vital a guarantee of personal freedom as a free press, and that the thin blue line that separates man from brutality is exactly that: thin. This is not a decent thing for an intellectual to say, however true it might be.
Remember, the article was written back in 2002. More:
A kind of anti-society has grown up in [the low-income immigrant Muslim communities]””a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust””greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years””is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.
Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti””BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme.
And Dalrymple issued the following warning:
Whether France was wise to have permitted the mass immigration of people culturally very different from its own population to solve a temporary labor shortage and to assuage its own abstract liberal conscience is disputable: there are now an estimated 8 or 9 million people of North and West African origin in France, twice the number in 1975””and at least 5 million of them are Muslims. Demographic projections (though projections are not predictions) suggest that their descendants will number 35 million before this century is out, more than a third of the likely total population of France.
Indisputably, however, France has handled the resultant situation in the worst possible way. Unless it assimilates these millions successfully, its future will be grim. But it has separated and isolated immigrants and their descendants geographically into dehumanizing ghettos; it has pursued economic policies to promote unemployment and create dependence among them, with all the inevitable psychological consequences; it has flattered the repellent and worthless culture that they have developed; and it has withdrawn the protection of the law from them, allowing them to create their own lawless order.
No one should underestimate the danger that this failure poses, not only for France but also for the world. The inhabitants of the cités are exceptionally well armed. When the professional robbers among them raid a bank or an armored car delivering cash, they do so with bazookas and rocket launchers, and dress in paramilitary uniforms. From time to time, the police discover whole arsenals of Kalashnikovs in the cités.
So, rocket launchers and the rest were already common back in 2002. In the intervening years we’ve seen the growth of groups like ISIS, with their internet presence. They have a great deal of outreach in France, and it is obviously effective. The Charlie Hebdo terrorists were radicalized in that way, along with countless others. You can’t that say we—and France—weren’t warned.
