Attack demands closer vetting of refugees, not wholesale ban

By Pascal Bruckner

Saturday, Nov. 21, 2015 | 2 a.m.

The response of France, and the West, must be stripped of all sentimentality.

What happened in Paris on Nov. 13-14 is the stuff of nightmare or fiction, including for those who witnessed it. The Paris of concerts, of cafe terraces; Paris, the theater of a happy and carefree younger generation, became a scene from a bad crime series.

As has been said, war has been declared on us. This is a war carried on by a few determined people, ready to die, who can rise up anywhere. The disproportion is stupefying: seven or eight people can terrorize entire crowds. We are not afraid of death, the jihadists proclaim, as a way of declaring their superiority.

But it is life they fear, and so they ceaselessly trample it, slander it, destroy it and prepare candidates for martyrdom from the cradle.

Our crime is to exist; we are guilty of living in free and egalitarian societies. The true motor of fundamentalism is not so much fastidious respect for tradition (which would be akin to rigor) as fear of an existence based on autonomy, perpetual innovation and the dislocation of authority. To tolerate the West would be to come to terms with the progress of reason, free thought and individualism — and women’s rights.

Hence these new generations of Islamic converts born in Europe, these blue-eyed emirs, without a place in their own societies, who search for reassurance in rigid rules. For those who stab, who shower passers-by with bullets, there is the conviction of winning salvation by murder, in a dimension that is at once apocalyptic and nihilistic. These young men are certain they live in the end times: a dark eschatology persuades them to hasten the coming of the Last Day by carnage. A great bath of blood will purify sinful humanity and prepare its return to the primordial caliphate.

What, then, is to be done?

We change nothing of our habits; we live as if terrorism did not exist, going about our jobs with the usual nonchalance. We counter the assassins with the disdain of the civilized. Domestically, we suspend the constitutional rights of imprisoned jihadists and gather them in internment camps, as has been proposed. We subject all people flagged as terrorism suspects to preventive incarceration and take away the freedom of the 3,000 people within our borders listed as potentially dangerous Islamists. We neutralize the militants who have returned from Syria, unceremoniously expel questionable imams and preachers of hatred, and close Salafist mosques.

The soft-headed would like us to pay for our interventions in Muslim countries. This is utter foolishness. Besides the fact that these interventions saved Muslim lives — Sarajevo liberated by NATO in 1995 is a good example — it is precisely in Syria, where our interventions until now have been quite limited, that the Islamic State has achieved its greatest success.

France should take on a larger role in the international coalition that includes the United States, Russia, Iraq and Iran to conduct a massive bombardment of Mosul and Rakka, the two capitals of ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. We must spread terrorism in the fiefdom of the terrorists; they must be gradually smothered and given no respite until they are eradicated.

To this should be added another imperative: to give massive assistance, including heavy weapons, to the Kurds in Erbil as well as in the north of Syria, because they are the only ones at present to have won two decisive victories over the Islamic State — at Kobani and at Sinjar.

Finally, there are the 1 million refugees who have entered Europe in recent months, among whom there is no doubt a tiny but decisive percentage who have infiltrated on behalf of ISIS or al-Qaida, and who are waiting for the opportunity to strike.

This is what Angela Merkel, in her ostentatious generosity, has refused to see: harsh toward the Greeks in June, she welcomed the Syrians in August, demonstrating an entirely imperial charity. A month later, once the enthusiasm and silliness had passed, she had to go meet Turkish autocrat Erdogan at Canossa, bending to the will of the hidden godfather of ISIS, an active member of the Muslim brotherhood who dreams of the Islamic domination of Europe and of the recreation of the Ottoman Empire.

The exporting of violence into the streets of Paris, London and Berlin thus comes about through these columns of refugees, in which, among the exhausted children and adults, a few war-hardened jihadists are hidden.

We will have to establish a conditional hospitality, stripped of all sentimentality, in which every candidacy will be carefully examined — a policy subject to the immediate closing of the borders as necessary. The assassins have won a first round and have brought in an ample harvest of corpses. It is our duty to destroy the assassins.

Pascal Bruckner is a French writer and philosopher whose latest book is “The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.” He wrote this for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, and it was shared with the Sun via insidesources.com.