We face a three-headed monster

[Valin]

Boston Globe:

Niall Ferguson

Nov. 23 2015

 

It is usual for horror to be followed by hysteria. The unusual thing about the Paris massacre on Nov. 13 is that the most hysterical reactions have been thousands of miles from the scene of carnage.

 

American politicians appear to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson compared refugees to dogs. Rival Donald Trump vaguely threatened to do “things . . . that we never thought would happen in this country.”

 

Yet mental disturbance is sometimes more dangerous when it is repressed. “The terrible events in Paris” were a “setback,” declared a haggard and at times wild-eyed President Obama in a press conference that was painful to watch. Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that January’s mass murder of staff at the magazine Charlie Hebdo had, if not “legitimacy,” then at least a “rationale” because the magazine had made people “really angry.”

 

Let’s come off the prescription meds. The world faces three distinct threats: an epidemic of jihadist violence, most of it in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia; uncontrolled mass migration from these places to Europe; and the emergence of a “fifth column” of Islamic extremists within nearly all Western societies, including the United States. We must take care to distinguish each component of this terrifying trifecta.

 

What links the three threats together is the fact that at least six of the Paris terrorists spent time in Syria; and at least two of them were able to use the refugee route through Greece to return to France undetected. But that does not mean that the Syrian war or the immigration crisis were necessary for the Paris attacks to happen. Young Muslims are getting radicalized all over the Western world without going anywhere near Syria. Americans who think they can make themselves safer by excluding refugees are missing the point. The Tsarnaev brothers, who were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, were little different from the Abdeslam brothers, who helped carry out the Paris attacks.

 

The ancient Greeks believed that the gates of Hades were guarded by a monstrous three-headed dog. Like Cerberus, the monster we confront today has three heads: rampant jihadism, uncontrolled mass migration, and homegrown extremists. To defeat it, we shall need to keep our own heads very clear indeed.