Time to Recognize the Truth Behind Europe's Endless Terror

Robert W. Merry

Security, Europe

Read your Samuel Huntington.

France has a problem. The problem is too many Muslims in a society that many Muslims despise. The centuries-long conflict between Islam and the West is ongoing, and it erupts intermittently on French soil in the form of the Charlie Hebdo shooting of January 2015 (twelve dead), the multiple Paris attacks of November 2015 (130 dead, 368 wounded), and now the truck attack in Nice (eighty-four dead so far, and more than one hundred injured).

As of this writing, we don’t know who perpetrated the Nice slaughter, but in the other two instances (and numerous lesser attacks), the killers were people, or their offspring, welcomed into Western society from Islamic lands. The two Islamist gunmen at Charlie Hebdo were French Muslims of Algerian descent. Those responsible for the massacre of November 2015 were all EU citizens, and French citizens helped organize the carnage. Some had been fighting in Syria and returned to Europe as ersatz refugees.

President Obama wants us to think this carnage has nothing to do with the essential culture of Islam, which he insists is peaceful at its core and poses no threat in itself to the nations or the peoples of the West. It is just these twisted people who distort Islam to their own nefarious aims that we have to be concerned with. He takes a lot of criticism for refusing to utter the words “radical Islamic terrorism” or other derivations of that concept. But he insists that his use of such words would only exacerbate the problem, casting aspersions on peaceful Muslims and diminishing their willingness to help control the malefactors.

This is fatuous. In any population of Muslims within the West, a proportion will harbor Islamist sentiments, will despise the West as a morally inferior civilization that has, however, dominated many lands of Islam through a superior technology of warfare. I have quoted in these spaces the words of the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington on all this, and I do so again because they capture so powerfully the essence of what we face.