TERRORISM IN EUROPE

Intro: President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position

THE INSTINCTIVE RESPONSE on horrors such as those that have taken place in France and Germany in recent days is to look for a pattern, a narrative that might go some way to explain the inexplicable.

The brutal and bloody murder of an 86-year-old priest in Normandy invites such thinking, since it follows years of attacks on Christians in the Middle East: first by al-Qaeda and then by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Is radical Islam seeking a war with Christianity?

The very suggestion or notion of such a conflict between faiths would delight followers of ISIL, but it is hard to reconcile with that group’s dreadful persecution of fellow Muslims. ISIL has killed many more Muslims than it has Christians or Jews.

Or are the Islamists targeting Western liberal values more broadly, seeking to reinstate the Islamic Caliphate that once existed across the Middle East and parts of Southern Europe?

If so, that end has been poorly served by the enormity and mayhem in Normandy and Bavaria, lands that were never home to Muslims in the middle ages and which have only come to have Muslim residents as a result of those liberal Western values.

Seeking some kind of explanation for the evil that has been perpetrated is perfectly natural, but we should not impute too much calculation or design to those individuals who carry out such heinous crimes.

Whilst we may look for explanations the truth is there is no rationale or logic, nor any coherent argument in explaining away why Europe is suffering such appalling atrocities on its streets. These are the acts of inadequate and disturbed individuals with a nihilistic desire to destroy anything that challenges them and their ill-formed and warped idea of the world.

We must harden our defences against such acts, but we should be wary of the idea that those acts represent a clash of cultures – for that suggests some sort of parity between irrational extremist ideology on the one hand and a civilisation of shared traditions developed over thousands of years on the other.

President François Hollande of France may think that declaring war on the extremists will shore up his own fragile political position. Such a response, however, also risks validating the arguments of Marine Le Pen’s National Front (i.e. that the French establishment has failed to face up to the existential threat of terrorism).

Security and intelligence operations should be reviewed in the face of these latest attacks, particularly as the numerous intelligence agencies that operate in France are highly dysfunctional and disjointed. Great care must be taken not to dignify the attackers or their pathetic dreams of grandeur. They are murderers only deserving of contempt.