A New Type of Terror

A New Type of Terror

By: Erreh Svaia

“Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.”

Jurgen Habermas

Just a few days ago, the French Secret Services were announcing that terrorist attacks on Europe, and in French soil specially, were about to take a new form, from "lone wolf" suicide  shootings, into something more dangerous and lethal, possibly bomb cars, or time bombs, so now after the Nice attack days ago, with approximately 80 deaths and 100 wounded on Bastille Day, it has been confirmed that there is a new modus operandi, more mundane and cheaper than guns and hand explosives, in which a truck is simply drove against a multitude, and although ISIS has vindicated the attack, it’s getting really hard to know if ISIS is truly behind the horrendous act or simply being opportunistic, as French services reported, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31 year old man, French citizen of Tunisian origin, was the man driving the truck, supposedly full of weapons and explosives, and responsible for the killings; French authorities are denying Lahouaiej's connections with ISIS or radical Islam, something contrary to what commonly happens in the USA, where almost every shooting is immediately linked to Islam, in Europe, this is not convenient at all, as attacks seems to be used in order to get population anxious over Muslims and Muslims reaction towards this anxiety by getting more radicalized.

These days France is broken in many ways, economic, with a stalled growth, debt and  unemployment raising, politically, as the Socialist Party of Francois Hollande, in power, looks unable to come with solutions for the inner crisis, the center, led by ex-president Nicholas Sarkozy is unable to escape from accusations of corruption, the far right represented by the highly xenophobic and Euroskeptic National Front, a party suspected of being financially backed by the Kremlin, as if that wasn't enough, France is also socially broken with protests against its recent labor reforms, which society feels are being too much inclined towards neo liberalism, while Hollande's government is accused of spending thousands of Euros a month in presidential haircuts, all these while French government dissolves with power struggles between Hollande, Prime minister Manuel Valls and Economy and Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron, who recently quit the Socialist Party in order to start his own political adventure in a project a project which seems to be linked to antiestablishment parties like Podemos in Spain, the Five Star Movement in Italy or Syriza in Greece.   

Finally is becoming quite a subject the true reasons why France has become recently such a preferred target for Islamic extremists attacks, the reason could be reduced into two, one being the center Illustration values like freedom, contrary to the totalitarian nature of radical Islam, the other, the laicism prevailing rate in French society, explained by controversial writer Michel Houellebecq on his prophetic novel Submission, in which he wrote that it was easier to turn a Christian into a Muslim, because the Christian already believed in one god, while an atheist was hard because an atheist didn't believe in gods.

The strategy this time for France seems to be able to unlink the “lone wolf” acts in order to disarticulate the propagandistic nature of ISIS, and instead of causing bigger paranoia and increasing fear towards Muslims and refugees, make clear that people who are performing this type of attacks are not exactly fundamentalists, but disturbed young people, making it clear that the menace is not coming from the outside with trained terrorist part of a big and violent organization invading the country, but from French citizens within.