Why France? France has a large population of North African and Middle Eastern extraction. Religion is deemed irrelevant. France’s secularism has moved on from being a policy to being a blindfold, so it doesn’t collect census information on religion. For a true picture, consider that France’s top Mahometan official recently offered to take over the country’s redundant Catholic churches to meet a demand for 5,000 new mosques. The problem facing the security services is not the proportion of his followers who may be terrorists. That proportion may well be unchanged, year on year. It’s that as the absolute number behind that proportion increases, so the strain on the security services also increases.
It’s a statistical certainty that militants with potential or actual Jihadi sympathies are entering Europe every day.
The security services now have far
more potential Jihadis on French soil than they’re resourced to keep under surveillance. Managing that risk is, well, risky. It’s not polite to mention it, but it’s there nevertheless. A spectacular 9/11-style attack on France is now regarded by some experts as inevitable.
Government-by-advertising is starting to fail. The idea that well-placed words and pictures can get us out of the domain of reflection and into that of sentiment has worked in every previous crisis, but… An increasing number of people are now questioning whether their ruling elites are taking care of their best interests, and whether the taxes they collect are legitimate.
Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe described the legacy of the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit on climate change as the realisation that our
“leaders are not looking after us… we are not cared for at the level of our very survival”. No, you guessed right there and don’t sound so shocked. So do we want a State that from Brussels downwards regulates everything
but the fundamentals, neglecting the real issues of movement and resources and ideology that underpin our security?
A lot is written about the accumulating critical mass of terrorists in Europe but much less about the accumulating critical mass of ordinary folk who are asking such questions.
Once it forms, things could get perhaps too interesting.