Paris endured one of the worst terror assaults in history Friday night, with scores murdered in coordinated attacks at multiple sites, including a restaurant, a concert hall, a soccer stadium and the Les Halles food market. President François Hollande declared a national state of emergency and closed France’s borders. “This is horror,” he said in a televised address. It’s also our world today.
Though no group had claimed responsibility for the attacks, Islamic State (ISIS) didn’t wait long to celebrate. “O crusaders we are coming to you with bombs and rifles,” tweeted one unofficial ISIS propagandist, according to the Vocativ news site. “Wait for us.” Witnesses report hearing cries of “Allahu Akbar” along with gunfire. A woman at the Bataclan concert hall told the Journal that the attackers wore black-and-white kaffiyehs as they sprayed the crowd with gunfire. One hundred mostly young people are reported to have died in the hall.
Big cities are vulnerable targets, as the world learned with the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. There nine Islamic terrorists murdered 164 people in two hotels, a cafe, a train station and a Jewish center. They shut down a city of 18 million people in minutes.
According to one report, a terrorist captured by French police at the concert hall claimed the attacks were in retaliation for France’s participation in attacks on ISIS targets in Syria. If so, the political calculation may be to reprise al Qaeda’s 2004 train bombings in Madrid, on the eve of a Spanish election. The attacks, which left 191 commuters dead, led to the defeat of José María Aznar’s conservative Partido Popular, which supported the war in Iraq, and the election of the antiwar Socialists.
We doubt the French will draw the same lesson when it comes to fighting ISIS in Syria or anywhere else. The jihadist war against France is decades-old. France’s domestic intelligence services have spent years attempting to keep track of an ever-expanding list of radical French Islamists, and nobody should be surprised if Friday’s attackers turn out to be names on that list. Paris would not be out of bounds to consider some combination of preventive detentions and, if necessary, renditions to foreign countries. Civil libertarians will object, but civil liberty is also a function of security, and right now Paris has neither.
These attacks are another dreadful reminder that the West’s collective failure swiftly to defeat ISIS in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland has allowed this jihadist infection to spread—into Afghanistan, Turkey, Sinai and North Africa. France has been a full partner with the U.S. in the campaign of air strikes against ISIS, most recently against its oil fields.
Yet despite this week’s battlefield successes—retaking the strategic city of Sinjar in northern Iraq by Kurdish forces and the apparent killing of “Jihadi John” in Syria—the campaign has moved far too slowly. After Paris, it needs to accelerate, and Mr. Hollande has the credibility to press the point with a reluctant President Obama.
This is the second time this year that the people of Paris have been subjected to security lockdowns amid rampaging jihadists. In January they attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, along with a kosher supermarket—both targets that reflect France’s commitment to freedom of thought and conscience. On Friday France’s freedom of association was under assault, a fresh reminder that what’s ultimately at stake isn’t French Middle East policy. It’s French liberty. What’s needed now is a renewed sense of purpose to destroy the barbarians at the gate.
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-horror-in-paris-1447466102?mod=djemMER
Photo: Armed police officers go on foot patrol around the Saint-German neighbourhood in Paris, France on November 14. PHOTO: IAN LANGSDON/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY