The Islamist terrorist attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which, so far, has resulted in 12 deaths and many more wounded, should come as no surprise. The satirical weekly has been the target before, having been fire-bombed back in late 2011 after running a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed and its editor has been under police protection for some time. Even though a target of Islamist ire, the magazine has not shied away from running other stories and cartoons offensive to Muslim sensibilities. Just this week it ran a cover story on a new book that imagines a future France in which the country is led by an Islamic party and has a Muslim president who, among other things, bans women from the workplace.
Nor is the attack a surprise in the sense that the Islamist threat in France has been reaching crisis proportions in recent months. According to French president Francois Hollande, this attack follows on several more terrorist plots that French security forces had thwarted over the recent holiday season.
Fueling much of the concern is the rush of hundreds of French Muslims who have left France to go fight with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and who are making their way back to the European continent and the streets of major French cities where Europe’s largest community of Muslims live. Just last year, French police arrested a young Frenchman who had killed three people at a Jewish museum in Brussels and whom, they believed, had been to Syria and back. French prime minister Manuel Valls called this exodus and return of trained Islamists “a phenomenon of unprecedented size.”
No doubt also worrying French officials is that, unlike the recent terrorist attacks in Quebec and Ottawa in October or the one in London in May 2013, the attack on the Paris magazine office Charlie Hebdo was, it appears, well-planned and done with skill.
But what will be something of a surprise to the French is that the attack took place at all. Since the mid-1990s, and after a decade of terrorism on its streets, Paris has not seen a major terrorist attack. As Reuel Gerecht and I wrote in 2007 (“France: Europe’s Counterterrorist Powerhouse”) and I noted in Safety, Liberty and Islamist Terrorism: American and European Approaches to Domestic Counterterrorism, France had been, especially before 9/11, in a “league of its own” when it comes to developing investigative tools, court proceedings, and laws that have allowed French authorities to stay ahead of the terrorist problem. This aggressive stance has of course upset civil libertarians of the French left and right—not unlike here in the U.S. in the wake of the Snowden leaks of the programs of the National Security Agency.
As the U.S. Congress turns this year to the issue of whether to renew, reform, or let die key sections of the Patriot Act on terrorism surveillance, it might want to keep in mind what has just happened in Paris. If a country such as France—with as strong a counterterrorism effort as there is in a liberal democracy—is still vulnerable, it should give some pause to those members who think now is the time to water-down our own counterterrorism efforts.
