New French terror attack reveals major systemic problems

New French terror attack reveals major systemic problems

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Another day, another unhappy wannabe jihadist monkey-bar training camper takes his frustrations out on innocent bystanders in France.

On Saturday night, in a really busy tourist area of downtown Paris near the Eiffel Tower, a 26-year-old man allegedly attacked and killed a German tourist with a knife and hammer. Fleeing police, the suspect injured two more people, one identified as an English tourist, before ultimately coming face to face with police and trying to play the “hidden explosives under my coat” card right before being tased.

The suspect, identified by authorities as “Armand R.”, born in the swanky Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine to parents of foreign origin, had been under careful monitoring by French intelligence. Clearly not careful enough.

This guy had already been convicted of planning a similar attack in the French business district of La Défense. The result? A four- year “prison” term, which usually means either barely serving any actual jail time, or else being radicalized further in prison. So it’s hardly any wonder that it wasn’t too long before he would don the universal symbol for sanity — a medical face mask — and take to the internet with a two-minute video extolling his support for ISIS right before this latest attack.

That’s like singing the praises of Blockbuster video rentals in the era of Netflix-style streaming. Who even talks about ISIS anymore? The last time anyone even bothered paying them any attention was back when they served as a convenient excuse for invading Syria to oust President Bachar al-Assad. Apparently this guy never got the memo. The suspect also dropped the excuse to police that he was fed up with killings of Muslims in places like Afghanistan and Gaza, according to the interior minister.

French authorities say that the suspect has been under psychiatric and neurological care while living with Mom and Dad, who are presumably supposed to keep an eye on junior. It’s like the new diktat imposed by the government since last summer’s youth riots sparked when a police officer shot and killed a teenager named Nahel M when he failed to obey a traffic stop. At the time, French President Emmanuel Macron blamed video games, told French parents that they’d be held responsible for any scenery-chewing by their unruly brats, and said that “it’s not the state’s job to act in their place.” Which really just makes the state the ultimate Final Boss of lax parenting.

Is French intelligence just expected to handle the growing number of potential future terrorists by stalking them like they’re on an endless jihadist safari, waiting for them to mess up like this guy did — twice — while only being able to stop him from doing actual harm once? Those aren’t great odds, particularly for someone already on their radar. What about those who aren’t?

The French government knows that it has a growing problem on its hands. Which is why back in October, it decided that it wants a law to start expediting deportations of known radicalized foreigners, in light of other attacks that have taken place on French soil since the events of October 7 in Israel and Gaza.

The problem is that most of the 5,100 individuals currently being babysat by French intelligence are actual citizens, so where are they going to be expelled to — some French overseas island paradise? In some cases the attackers are also minors, like the migrant kids arrested for killing a 16-year- old French boy and injuring eight others at a village hall dance party in southeastern France in late November.

Successive French governments’ migration policies continue to overwhelm the country’s capacity to mitigate risk, and then they exacerbate the situation by meddling in foreign conflicts and taking sides, indulging foreign interest lobby groups’ hungry for score-settling. If you’re going to open your doors to the entire world, then expect to import all of its various conflicts onto your own soil, then maybe you’re jeopardizing your own people’s freedom to then take sides, if only because the flip-side of political pandering is outrage by the group involved in a foreign conflict that isn’t being pandered to — and the end-result is typically a ratcheted-up security state.

France is now trying to put this particular genie back into the bottle. It’s too little, too late. Other Western countries have gone down this same road. It’s why, for example, Canada currently finds itself in a diplomatic spat with India over allowing Sikh exiles to plot against the Indian government from Canadian soil — only to end up having to contend with retributive assassinations right in its own backyard.

And with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Western favorite, Israel, is planning to carry out assassinations of Hamas leaders around the world after the Gaza war, or that another favorite, Ukraine, is already carrying out targeted killings of those considered to be Russian “collaborators”, as reported by the Washington Post last year, it’s only a matter of time until Western nations get caught up in even more blowback from the unintended consequences of their own misguided policies.