Resist the Urge for Retribution After #ParisAttacks

So argues neorealist scholar (and infamous anti-Israel political scientist) Stephen Walt, at Foreign Policy, "Don’t Give ISIS What It Wants":

When a shocking event like the Paris attacks occurs, we know how the world will respond. There will be dismay, an outpouring of solidarity and sympathy, defiant speeches by politicians, and a media frenzy. Unfortunately, these familiar reactions give the perpetrators some of what they want: attention for their cause and the possibility their targets will do something that unwittingly helps advance the perpetrators’ radical aims.

What is most needed in such moments is not anger, outrage, or finger-pointing, but calm resolution, cool heads, and careful thought. What happened in Paris is an untold tragedy for the victims and deeply offensive to all we hold dear, but we must respond with our heads and not just our hearts. Here are five lessons to bear in mind as we reassess the dangers and search for an effective response.

No. 1: Keep the threat in perspective.

The sudden and violent deaths of some 130 innocent people in a peaceful city invariably grips our attention. But an event like this cannot shake the foundations of society unless we let it. The deaths in Paris last Friday, Nov. 13, are tragic, but these and similar incidents pale in comparison with the carnage and inhumanity Europe suffered from either 1914 to 1918 or 1939 to 1945. For all its current troubles, Europe today is richer, freer, safer, more open, more equal, and more stable than it has been since any other time in its history, and those achievements must not be surrendered. If France or its neighbors turn their backs on what has been built in Europe over the past 60 years, it will be a victory the attackers would welcome but most emphatically do not deserve.

Let us also remember that other cities and societies have experienced similar events yet are thriving today. New York, Oslo, London, Boston, Madrid, Paris, Ankara, and several other cities have faced costly terrorist attacks in recent years, yet one visits them today and finds communities that have rebuilt and recovered and are doing just fine. As we mourn the dead, we should take comfort in knowing that terrorism is a weapon of the weak and thus can have only a limited material impact on its targets. The City of Light will be here and thriving long after those who ordered these attacks are gone and mostly forgotten...

Keep reading.

What's amazing to me is how strikingly identical is the so-called neorealist take on the terror threat to the Democrat Party's failed appeasement policies. We can just keep shrugging our shoulders, saying that these massive terrorist attacks aren't really a threat to our existential values (much less our survival), all the while deploying rank partisan attacks on the so-called "Islamophobes" who've been right on the terror threat time and time again. Walt links, for example, to this hit piece on the counter-jihad right, "America’s leading Islamophobes spreading fear, bigotry and misinformation."

Walt's a far-left partisan hack all dressed up in scholarly garb, ensconced at Harvard's Kennedy School, spewing crap like this that's fundamentally no different from the antiwar bilge scraping the bottom of the far left-wing fever swamps.

It's true that terror attacks like Paris on Friday the 13th are unlike the threat of a strategic nuclear attack during the Cold War. But over time, the refusal of Western states to stand up to the Islamic invaders will undoubtedly result in increasing decline, decay, and ultimate disintegration and destruction. Western societies, enfeebled by Utopian feel-goodism, will simply give up the fight altogether, and then be run over soon enough by the violent Muslim hordes from the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond. See my post on Niall Ferguson, "After the Fall of the Roman Empire, #ParisAttacks Should Be Warning to the West." Europe's on the leading edge of the Western collapse. Perhaps America's "splendid isolation" behind our natural ocean defenses, will buy us some time. But decline is a state of mind more than anything else. So we won't be that far behind Europe so long as progressive (regressive) types like Walt, and his presidential hero Obama, hold sway over politics, culture, and ideas.