Terrorists
are the right wing’s best friends.
By Donald Kaul
When Paris suffered attacks that killed 17 last January — at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket — it responded with great class.
Parisians filled the streets, locked arm-in-arm in solidarity
against terrorism. Leaders from throughout Europe (but not, alas, President
Barack Obama) joined them in a show of support.
And two days after the demonstration, Socialist Prime Minister
Manuel Valls gave a memorable speech to the French National Assembly supporting
the government’s declared “war on terrorism” but calling for the nation to
maintain its principles of religious tolerance and separation of church and
state.
At which point the deputies stood and gave him an ovation, then
broke into La Marseillaise. It was a wonderful moment. (The French
have a great national
anthem and they use it like a sword.)
I doubt that moment will be repeated any time soon. The November
13 attacks in Paris ushered the entire world through yet another door, into a
darker place.
It is a place of fear. If a handful of lightly armed terrorists
can bring one of the world’s great cities to its knees in a single evening,
killing 129 and injuring hundreds more, then who among us is safe?
It was, in a sense, more ominous than the 9/11 attacks which,
while more costly in blood and treasure, seemed almost unrepeatable. We were
caught unawares and took steps to ensure that we wouldn’t be again. The bad guys
got lucky.
How can we protect ourselves against an insidious, almost
invisible army that takes advantage of the best qualities of western society —
its openness, its tolerance — to do it grievous harm?
French President François Hollande responded immediately by
sending warplanes to bomb ISIS strongholds in Syria. I’m sure they killed some
people, maybe even some terrorists. I can understand the response. You have to do something.
But that’s not much of something. Bombs won’t cut it.
The diabolical thing about this enemy is that it doesn’t present
much of a target. For all the talk of establishing a caliphate, it doesn’t have
a navy or an air force or even artillery worthy of the name. It works in small,
secretive networks and kills in numbers greatly disproportionate to its
military strength.
We call them terrorists for a reason: They terrify us.
Politically, they’re the best friends the right wing ever had.
French National Front Leader Marine Le Pen, who has long
advocated closing the doors to immigration, is having her “I told you so”
moment.
As are the anti-immigrant Republicans here. They’re lining up in
favor of not allowing Muslim refugees fleeing the conflict in their home
country sanctuary in ours. At least two dozen Republican governors have said they would
refuse such refugees.
The Democrats, including Obama, have presented a far more
reasonable response — not all refugees are terrorists, stay the course,
blah-blah — which sounds weak in the heated atmosphere of a presidential
campaign.
Even Donald Trump’s lunatic ravings against the invasion of
Mexican rapists and drug dealers sound almost reasonable now.
“Here’s the problem,” said Marco Rubio, for once not mentioning that his father was a
bartender and his mother was a cleaning lady. “You allow 10,000 people in. And
9,999 of them are innocent people feeling oppression. And one of them is a
well-trained ISIS fighter.”
That sort of logic is more appealing now, when we have Islamic
militants on our television screens promising to come get us.
So is the dismissal of the revelations of Edward Snowden on the
universal surveillance we’re being subjected to. More surveillance? Sounds
safer. Bring it on.
The real question is how all of this will affect our elections
next year.
Will it inspire a sense of seriousness in the electorate that
has been lacking so far? Or will it bend things toward the hardliners who want
to hole up in Fortress America?
We’ll see.
OtherWords
columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org.