The Horror in Paris

At the Wall Street Journal, "Europe’s worst attack since Madrid requires a new antiterror resolve":

Paris endured one of the worst terror assaults in history Friday night, with scores murdered in coordinated attacks at multiple sites, including a restaurant, a concert hall, a soccer stadium and the Les Halles food market. President François Hollande declared a national state of emergency and closed France’s borders. “This is horror,” he said in a televised address. It’s also our world today.

Though no group had claimed responsibility for the attacks, Islamic State (ISIS) didn’t wait long to celebrate. “O crusaders we are coming to you with bombs and rifles,” tweeted one unofficial ISIS propagandist, according to the Vocativ news site. “Wait for us.” Witnesses report hearing cries of “Allahu Akbar” along with gunfire. A woman at the Bataclan concert hall told the Journal that the attackers wore black-and-white kaffiyehs as they sprayed the crowd with gunfire. One hundred mostly young people are reported to have died in the hall.

Big cities are vulnerable targets, as the world learned with the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. There nine Islamic terrorists murdered 164 people in two hotels, a cafe, a train station and a Jewish center. They shut down a city of 18 million people in minutes.

According to one report, a terrorist captured by French police at the concert hall claimed the attacks were in retaliation for France’s participation in attacks on ISIS targets in Syria. If so, the political calculation may be to reprise al Qaeda’s 2004 train bombings in Madrid, on the eve of a Spanish election. The attacks, which left 191 commuters dead, led to the defeat of José María Aznar’s conservative Partido Popular, which supported the war in Iraq, and the election of the antiwar Socialists.

We doubt the French will draw the same lesson when it comes to fighting ISIS in Syria or anywhere else. The jihadist war against France is decades-old. France’s domestic intelligence services have spent years attempting to keep track of an ever-expanding list of radical French Islamists, and nobody should be surprised if Friday’s attackers turn out to be names on that list. Paris would not be out of bounds to consider some combination of preventive detentions and, if necessary, renditions to foreign countries. Civil libertarians will object, but civil liberty is also a function of security, and right now Paris has neither.

These attacks are another dreadful reminder that the West’s collective failure swiftly to defeat ISIS in its Syrian and Iraqi heartland has allowed this jihadist infection to spread—into Afghanistan, Turkey, Sinai and North Africa...

That's for sure.

The battlefield's creeping west, and with alacrity.

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