France Reaped What It Sowed In Paris Attack

by JASmius



Probably not what Frenchies want to hear or read today, when they're momentarily galvanized by the jihadist massacre at the offices of anti-religious publication Charlie Hedbo, but it must be acknowledged that Alan Dershowitz has a, well, deadly valid point:

While France is reeling from the terrorist massacre of twelve people at the Paris offices of a satirical magazine, the country is also "one of the worst … when it comes to rewarding terrorism," lawyer and author Alan Dershowitz told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on Newsmax TV Wednesday.

"They play with everybody. They reward every terrorist," Dershowitz said of the French.

"They've never been part of the international campaign against terrorism. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution."

"I hate to pile on when they're suffering like this, but you have to understand how bad France has been historically in the war against terrorism," he said.

As I like, and never seem to run out of opportunities, to point out, life is all, or at least mostly, about incentives.  President Ronald Reagan used to say that if you subsidize something, you'll get more of it, and if you tax something, you'll get less of it.  Correspondingly, if a country rewards jihadism, it will embolden devout Muslims, make them believe that they can impose Sharia everywhere, on everyone, convince them that they're the "strong horse," and the result will be escalating asymmetric warfare in its territory, on its streets, aimed at its people, and eventual all-out war.  Whereas if a people resist the cultural imperialism and encroachments of fundamentalist Islam, believe in their own culture and values, and resolve to do what it takes to beat back the invaders, jihadists will "go dark" and dormant - never away altogether, and they'll never give up, because they're in the clash of civilizations for the long haul - but their threat to the West will be kept far from existential.

Three guesses where France resides on that continuum, and the first two don't count:

Dershowitz said that the attack should come as no surprise, given Europe's history of tolerating Islamic terrorism.

"We have tolerated extreme Islamic terrorism from the very beginning," he said, describing the Palestinian state as "born in terrorism," with the assent of governments including France and Germany.

"When the Israeli athletes were murdered in Munich [in 1972], most European countries freed them when they came to their country," said Dershowitz. "Germany let them go, and most European countries have freed terrorists. It shouldn't surprise anybody. In Europe, they've never fought terror."

Historically, Europe has had no stomach for fighting of any kind for at least the past century.  For the hundred years following the Napoleonic Wars, there had been no general conflict on "the Continent," and thus no German or Frenchman or Brit had seen the impact upon warfare of the Industrial Revolution.  Then they took a four-year snootful of it in World War I, and that apparently was what it took to finally turn Euros into mewling pacifists, unable and unwilling to defend themselves and even their Christian cultural identity.  The Western democracies stood passively by and allowed the rise of German Nazism, which plunged the entire planet into a Second World War, which so depleted them that they'd have been easily overrun and conquered by the triumphant Soviet Union if not for American protection.  And today creeping Islamicization, fueled by the constant, low-level threat and conflict of terrorism, combined with its own self-inflicted de-Christianization, has dhimmized Western Europe and even the United States.

In short, Westerners have emptied out their own culture, gutted it, no longer believe in it, are even hostile to it, and tried to fill up the resulting vacuum with materialism and hedonism and the false ethos of "tolerance".  Whereas Islamic Fundamentalists have no such cultural crisis of confidence; they know exactly who they are, what they believe, the demon "god" they serve, and they are given every indication by Western "infidels" that the Global Caliphate is not just inevitable but in the very near term as well.  Consequently, whether as part of an organized attack and campaign, a la al Qaeda or Hezbollah or Hamas or ISIS, or in "lone wolf/me, myself, and Allah" fashion, every Muslim on the planet has abundant confidence that they can grab an AK-47, stroll right down the streets of a city like Paris, and terminate a publication like Charlie Hedbo with extreme prejudice - or nerve-gas a metropolitan subway, or fly hijacked airliners into skyscrapers, or irradiate or incinerate an entire city.

Can they really be said to be wrong about that conclusion?  Mr. Dershowitz justifiably wonders about that:

It is not clear what kind of attack or carnage it will take for Europe to say, in effect, this time is different, and commit fully to fighting violent Islamic extremism, said Dershowitz. 

"We've said that every time there's been a terrorist attack and it just doesn't happen," he said.

It's a fair question.  Here is an enemy every bit as virulently evil as the Nazis or Soviets ever were effectively occupying Europe, conquering it not as an invading army but through immigration from the inside, but because the level of direct warfare is so diffuse, the stratospheric level of European passivity is never crossed.  Euros, in other words, forgot how to fight, had martial spirit and prowess blown out of them in the trenches of the Marne and the Somme and Verdun, creating the irony of their having to relearn them in the glowing ashes of London or Berlin or Paris.

And maybe not even then.  Case in point: Would you believe that French police had to flee the Charlie Hedbo scene because they were unarmed?:

Several Paris police officers who came into contact with the armed terrorists who slaughtered ten journalists at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, retreated from the gunmen because they were unarmed, according to an eyewitness.

“Three policemen had arrived on bikes but had to leave because the men were armed, obviously,” Benoit Bringer, who works on the same floor as Charlie Hebdo’s offices, told France Info radio, according to the Guardian. “Then the attackers took off in a car.”

CBS News also reported — citing a reporter with Britain’s Telegraph newspaper — that the two officers were apparently unarmed.

Paris police officers have the option of carrying firearms, though many choose not to.

You know what you call an unarmed policeman?  Skeet.  Or a "dunsel," defined as a part which serves no useful purpose.  What is the motto painted on the fenders of most American police cars?  "To protect and to serve".  How in the name of Charles de Gaulle can French law enforcement officers protect anybody if they aren't packing?  With kind wishes and pleasant dreams?  The picture of unarmed French police riding up on their little bicycles to counter a hail of Muslim machine gun bullets by honking their little handle horns sounds like something out of a Benny Hill skit.  And as a result, several Paris cops were among the Charlie Hedbo death toll.

And leftwingnuts wonder why we don't take them seriously.  Here's a clue, boys and girls: Because you have a comprehensive death wish and appear bound and determined to take the rest of us down with you, while you think you'll somehow be exempted from it.

This is precisely why reality has to be told as it is, bluntly, with the bark on; which Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) did yesterday:

I think the President of the United States is undercutting the president of Egypt. We’re in a religious war. These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted. The President of the United States tip-toes around the threats we face, and he is trying to diminish the religious aspect of this war. Why? I don’t know. And he is not engaging the enemy in an aggressive fashion, which makes it more likely we’ll get attacked. What he’s doing is pretending to want to destroy ISIS when in fact, he’s trying to get out of office without having to commit American ground forces to do the job as part of a team in the region, because he made a campaign promise. His campaign promises, Hugh, are getting a lot of people killed.

…this is not a cartoon problem. Our way of life doesn’t fit into their scheme of how the world should be. If you stopped talk[ing] about radical Islam, if you never did a cartoon again, that’s not enough. What people need to get is they can’t be accommodated. They can’t be negotiated with. They have to be eventually destroyed. [emphasis added]

Now square that circle another Dershowitz observation:

Dershowitz also said that radical Islam enjoys support from "millions of people" in the Muslim world "who support terrorism, who will be applauding what happened today."

"Not tens, hundreds or thousands," he said, "but millions will be supporting what happened today. It's very, very big problem. The reason it has so many supporters is because it works. Terrorism works. It achieves the goals and results. Palestinians would not be getting a state today if it wasn't for their terrorists." [emphases added]

With every retreat, with every concession, with every peace feeler, with every accommodation, we grow the enemy's ranks, ensure larger, more widespread, more devastating war, and hasten the likelihood of our own final defeat.

Kind of like World War II with nuclear weapons.

And France was conquered in that war.

Will it - or we - survive the current one?