Each year of commemoration since the attacks committed by the Islamic State in Paris on November 13, 2015, in the Bataclan performance hall and on the terraces of eastern Paris, takes us back to the darkest hours that the French capital has known in decades. While we thought we were safe from the murderous turpitudes of the war of the worlds which is tearing the planet apart, a band of young people addicted to jihadist adrenaline and speeches of hatred and violence, came to strike on French soil. France became the symbol of the impure, impious, colonialist, imperialist land, on behalf of all Europeans and even Westerners.
Proud as we were to believe ourselves protected, we emerged overnight from our lethargy, having forgotten one thing: that all these worlds are precisely interconnected, in unfortunate globalization, and that we were like other countries which experience violence on a daily basis on an ideological seismic fault where our detractors had acted and decreed that we are part of the process of violence.
The French flag – blue, white, red – would now be drowned in red. These young delinquents who committed the irreparable ten years ago were certainly armed ideologically, some would say spiritually or religiously, to take action and avenge the Muslim “world” for everything that France would have done to it. In reality, a group of nickel-plated feet, passed through the prison box, for small acts of common law, and who left the prison world pumped up by recruiters and dangerous radicalized individuals, who only had to turn them against us.
Each year of commemoration takes us back to our idealistic wish of “never again”
Each year of commemoration takes us back to precisely what we were doing that day, where and with whom. We must invite everyone to remember this moment, like that of September 11. Where were we? I say this all the more feverishly because I personally experienced November 13, 2015 as repeat of a certain form of global tragedy. I was in Poland, returning to Krakow, and had spent a full day in the ruins of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Far from being a literary trick, the invocation of this experience is necessary to show all the absurdity of human vengeance and the theater of the absurd of human dramaturgy. Even when we go there, we still cannot understand the why and how: how did we get here? What drives individuals to defend a fight and take revenge on innocent people? The Jews sent to Poland were just as innocent as the young people who came to the Bataclan to have fun at a concert. Ten years later, the inexplicable continues to reign supreme.
Each year of commemoration takes us back to our idealistic wish of “never again” when we know that anything can happen again tomorrow. Not an act for the moment organized in a paramilitary manner by the Abaaoud network, and which struck in Paris then in Brussels in March 2016, but because the reservoir of hatred and violence against the country, the State, the police and political personnel has probably never been so full. The overflow of frustration, bitterness, and incivility overflows. The jihadist recruiters had enough to draw on historical resentments to galvanize the anti-French feeling of these individuals. France is the country of secularism that should be destroyed because it is perceived as Islamophobic, the country of refuge for the largest number of Jews in Europe considered too Zionist and anti-Palestinian, the country of late colonization which traumatized generations of immigrant descendants and which should be avenged, etc.
Nothing that germinated in these people’s heads has been resolved
It is precisely because we are still here to be able to bear witness to this tragic moment which tore France and the French apart, that we must have the intimate obligation to remember all the victims, to understand without excusing, and to try to learn lessons from it. But what lessons can we draw in the face of terrorism in general, and without undermining the tragedy experienced by France, on the surge in generalized violence, the unprecedented radicalization of thousands of individuals in all directions on both religious and political levels, in a world today that is increasingly polarized, and when Daesh has since fallen, making it impossible to prevent the massification of isolated acts?
A decade later, the threat in Europe has multiplied: despite a series of radicalization prevention programs carried out especially between 2015 and 2018, the ocean of risks to deal with has become endless: threats from various Islamist currents, the ultra-right, the extreme left, eco-warriors, incels, madmen and psychopaths, etc. At the same time, the State is weakening: both authority and sanction. The most worrying thing is that some deranged people are ready to act without fear of the consequences for themselves and even less for society. Many radicalized people imprisoned before 2018 have already been released: who can know if they will not act again when we know that there is more than 60% recidivism after leaving prison in France?
That the issue of mental health in France has become one of the greatest threats, even more accentuated after the pandemic, and that some are using “profitable causes” like jihadism or other civilizational shields to strike our societies? That we have drowned the Islamist danger in the midst of all the other causes, while on a global scale, there still remains a major threat starting in Muslim countries, from the Sahel to the Maghreb, through the Middle East, Central Asia and the AfPak region to Southeast Asia?
The jihadist threat is no longer concentrated on a protected territory, but on the contrary completely diffuse
Paris is an epiphenomenon in the middle of this hateful and spiteful magma. It is a symbol because we are supposed to be this flagship country of liberty, equality and fraternity. Many present on French soil refute it. These are the young people who struck on “November 13”: those who were born on French soil, who were poorly integrated or who did not want to seize the chance offered to them by a country freer than for many their country of origin. And there, our fear still lies: thinking like many that the threat is only exogenous, while thousands of individuals are ready to secede and separatism to turn against their own country. In previous wars, individuals attacked their neighbors, not their co-religionists. Our concern must remain all the more acute, ten years after the Paris attacks, as nothing that germinated in the heads of these people has been resolved. What is happening in the suburbs as in certain cities in France is still just as worrying. The jihadist threat is no longer concentrated on a protected territory, but on the contrary is now completely diffuse with regular calls from different centers of Islamist hatred to strike France.
*Sébastien Boussois is a doctor in political science, consultant and researcher in geopolitics, scientific collaborator CNAM Paris and director of the IGE (European Geopolitical Institute).
