Stimulus, Response

Thanks, ISIS, I really wanted my birthday to be forever associated with an atrocity.

Terrorism is violence with a political agenda, where the actual victims don't matter so long as the attack provokes the desired response.  Klansmen lynch an African-American to cow the rest of a town's black population, the Soviet Union puts on show trials to create an atmosphere of fear and paranoia even within the party leadership, al-Qaeda blows up a symbol of America's wealth and global prominence to simultaneously make America look weak and it look strong, and so forth.

But the attacks in France - well, they're only the latest attacks in France, and they're different from the ones that came before.  The attack on Charlie Hebdo, that was retaliation for satire, because when someone mocks your religion the only logical answer is to travel across the planet and kill them.  The attack on a kosher supermarket, you can link that to French support for Israel, and I guess ISIS was hoping that killing Jews would make the French less inclined to protecting the rest.  But the attacks in Paris on Friday, they weren't that specific.  A concert, a football game, even random people enjoying the weekend - this wasn't an attack on a symbolic target, this was more like an attack on the French themselves.

It's still terrorism, of course.  But it's an imprecise, unpredictable terrorism, like a white supremacist who doesn't target "uppity" African-Americans but instead picks a dark-skinned target at random.  You're not safe even if you keep your head down, you're in danger simply for being black.  Or in this case, French.

The other alarming thing is that, as I said, terrorism is meant to bring about a certain response, and the French response may be going according to ISIS' plan.  The French president is talking about being at "war," apparently having learned nothing from the presidency of George W. Bush.  French police are being given expanded powers to defend against terrorist threats, and the idiots at Fox News were positively excited about this, citing the French experience in Algeria aas proof that the country can crack down on malcontents.  No mention of "enhanced interrogation techniques," oddly enough, but like I said - morons.  And France is also launching air strikes in Syria now, because the ones the US have been doing for the past year have accomplished so much.

Or in other words, France has now bought into the ISIS narrative of a war between Islam and the West, even though President Hollande tried to explain that he didn't consider it a war between "civilizations" - I don't think that's going to do him much good when ISIS' PR machine spins his comments.  France will now be cracking down on its Muslim minority population, at a time when many are already feeling alienated as they try to reconcile their beliefs with modern Western society, thus giving them even more incentive to turn to ISIS and similar extremist groups.  And France is now militarily engaged in the Middle East, so ISIS can highlight how it's fighting with those "crusaders" to distract from how often it kills Muslims for not being Arab enough or Arabs for not being Muslim enough.  Just by launching the attacks in Paris, ISIS was able to display its power to potential recruits, and the magnitude of the French retaliation only makes them look like more of a credible threat.

So if France is doing everything wrong, what's the proper response to something like the 11/13 attacks?  You can't not respond, can you?

It's the dilemma of a kid seeking negative attention - if you respond you give him what he wants, but if you don't discourage him to continue he'll keep causing trouble.  But it's useful to have a sense of perspective about these things.  As tragic and horrible any terrorist attack is, you have to remember that they're rare, especially when compared to the more mundane dangers of modern life.  For instance, between 2001 and 2013, a total of 3,380 Americans died from acts of terror, a statistic which includes the extraordinarily lethal World Trade Center attacks.  In the same period, firearms killed 406,496 people on American soil.  So which is the bigger problem, the global specter of Islamic terror, or the fact that America is a trigger-happy society armed to the teeth?

Terrorism gets our attention because it's intended to get our attention - it's about creating a spectacle, building an atmosphere of fear, proving your might when in reality the fact that a group needs to resort to terrorism in the first place shows that they don't have the power to get what they want through conventional means.  Treating it as something more than violent crime, or heaven forbid casting aside your liberal values and transforming your society to wage "war" on it, is a way of conceding defeat. 

You fight spectacular, fearsome terrorism through inconspicuous, boring methods, the same you would use to deal with any other criminal organization.  And you don't expect to "win" against terrorism at any point, it's a tactic, not an enemy that can be defeated.  You can close your borders, but you'll still be in danger from home-grown extremists.  You can bomb ISIS out of Syria, but some other group will eventually take their place.  You can brutally crack down on potential converts within your borders, and now you have replaced the potential threat of insurgent terror with the more certain danger of state terror.

And you'll still lose more citizens due to traffic accidents, illness, or violent neighbors than to what you devoted so much time and energy to combating.