THE MASSACRE IN BARCELONA: A COMMENT

"A van driver deliberately zigzagged into a crowd enjoying a sunny afternoon on Barcelona’s main pedestrian mall Thursday, killing at least 13 people and leaving 80 lying bloodied on the pavement. It was the worst terrorist attack in Spain since 2004, and was at least the sixth time in the past few years that assailants using vehicles as deadly weapons have struck a European city. The police cordoned off the Plaza de Cataluña and Las Ramblas in the heart of Barcelona, both tourist destinations, and began a chaotic pursuit for the people who carried out the attack. Two people were later arrested, including a Moroccan man whose identification documents had been used to rent the van. But the Barcelona police said neither was believed to be the driver, who remained at large. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault, which shattered a peaceful summer afternoon in one of Europe’s most picturesque cities. President Trump and other Western leaders quickly condemned the attack and pledged cooperation".

ANNE-SOPHIE BOLON, PALKO KARASZ and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr, "Van Hits Pedestrians in Deadly Barcelona Terror Attack". The New York Times. 17 August 2017, in www.nytimes.com.

"Most organised human societies are plagued by terrorism. Within any structured system there will be a political spectrum, and at the ends of this spectrum there will be extremes populated by people who feel the rest of the society is not hearing a political message they need to be awoken to. Last week, Jonathan Evans, the former head of the UK security service MI5, said he believes that Britain will have to confront Islamist terrorism for at least another 20 years. And the reality is that once we have dealt with that strain of the virus, it will simply morph into a new form. To get to the origins of violent Islamist terrorism, one has to go back far beyond the spectacular attacks on the US on September 11 2001 to 1979, a year that rocked the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the siege at the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a group of fanatics all showed the violent force of fundamentalist ideas and their power to upend the established order. These three events showed how violent political movements inspired by Islamic theology could threaten superpowers. This was the lesson drawn by the architects of al-Qaeda’s confrontation with the west that culminated on 9/11. Isis is in many ways simply an evolution from that. The attacks on New York and Washington DC almost 16 years ago were not the first time that terrorism had been visited on the west, of course. Before 9/11, Europe had endured successive waves of terrorist violence. Those responsible included right and leftwing groupuscules, separatist outfits such as the IRA and Eta, Middle Eastern networks often linked to the intelligence services of hostile states, and (in the case of France in particular) violent Islamists linked to Algeria and the conflict in Bosnia".

Raffaello Pantucci, "Terrorism will always be with us". The Financial Times. 15 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

The easy cynicism of the bient-pensant liberal, post-enlightenment intelligentsia on the subject of terrorism can be seen on full display in Mr. Pantucci's commentary of two days ago 1. To-day of course we have been forcible reminded that while it is easy (nay far too easy) for bien-pensant commentators like Mr. Pantucci to state that 'terrorism will always be with us', the brutality of that cynicism is exposed for what it is by the events of Barcelona. Of course the sheer mendacity of Mr. Pantucci's comments and those like them are exposed by the fact that people like him would never in a hundred-years, nay a thousand-years state that (to give some easy examples): 'racism will always be with us', 'sexism will always be with us', 'inequality will always be with us', et cetera, et cetera. As per the gist of Mr. Pantucci's argument, it contains aspects which are both accurate and inaccurate. Where Mr. Pantucci's argument is truthful and empirically verifiable, is in his contention that the Muslim extremist violence of the past twenty some years are per se, nothing new. And that Western societies have had problems with terrorism since the early 1970's. Indeed it would be accurate to state that even the numbers killed by Muslim terrorists were to remain at the elevated level of years 2015 and 2016, it would still not come to more than half the total number of attacks and deaths that Europe saw in the 1970's and 1980's 2. Where however Mr. Pantucci's arguments is in erratum, is his thesis that one type of terrorism inevitably replaces another. History shows that this is in fact erroneous. Viz: prior to 1969-1970, terrorism was a non-existent problem in the Western World. Similarly, in the case of Western Europe, terrorist attacks and deaths went down remarkably as old political conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country were settled or began to be settled. And then for approximately ten-years, European figures on terrorist attacks and deaths by the same went down greatly. In the case of the United States, the number of terrorist attacks and deaths from the same went down drastically from the late 1970's to a low point in 1994. Thereafter with the rise of Muslim extremism and violence in Western societies, does the figures go higher. Of course it is good to be reminded that comparing absolute numbers of deaths from the 1970's and the 1980's with those of the past ten to fifteen years is something akin to a mugs game due to the fact that many injuries which thirty or forty years ago, resulted in someone dying would to-day, due to advances in medicine, merely result in injury and prolonged hospitalization. My larger point herein, aside from exposing the fallacious arguments of Mr. Pantucci and those like him, is to show that Muslim terrorism is both extraordinary (in its violence and its evilness) and yet treatable. It does not require that our Western societies be cowed in fear and craven-like appeasement to those elements who engage in such violence. What our societies need to do is to tackle the problem of Muslim violence head-on with iron gloves. Engage and try to support, 'moderate Muslims' (insofar as they exist) and deport, banish, and drive-out of our societies those Muslims, many of them economic migrants or 'refugees', who engage and or support violence, extremism and or engage in it. What Western societies need is to restore faith in itself. In its basic and fundamental beliefs and verities: Christianity, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, neighborliness even. Au fond, Western society of fifty or forty years ago, were in the mots of George Orwell, akin to a family (albeit in his words: "A family with the wrong members in control") 3. What is needed and required, via a strict control of third-world immigration is to endeavor to return to those halcyon feelings and day before it is too late.

1. See for a similar type of argument. Not as cynical of course: Martin Wolf, "Overreaction to the terrorist threat is the perpetrators’ prize". The Financial Times. 29 June 2017 in www.ft.com.

2. Data Team, "Terrorist atrocities in western Europe". The Economist. 23 March 2017, in www.economist.com.

3. George Orwell. The Lion and the Unicorn. Part One: England your England. (1940).