PARIS AND THE FUTURE OF TERROR

The volcanic explosion of hate, death, slaughter of the innocents, sadism, guts and gore erupted and spilled out onto the streets of Gay Paris to the accompaniment of the ISIS manifesto spewing out its paranoid rationale for its psychopathic, seemingly inexplicable behavior, namely France’s leadership role in the “Crusader Campaign” against the Islamic State and daring “to curse our prophet”. The bare measurable statistics - over 130 dead and 350 wounded and a city defiled by those who purport to be holy. The immeasurable sequela of this abomination are vast and it  will be regarded as a watershed event in world politics, comparable only to the 9/11 evil in America. The cold reality of terrorism is that relatively tiny numbers of individuals in this asymmetric digital social media saturated computerized shrunken planet can wreak havoc on communities. The French attack will result in far reaching consequences and assumptions as to the threat ISIS proposes. It will also result in hysteria which the media will heighten in their own unique irresponsible way.

ISIS - A WORLD POWER?

The first consequence of the Paris attack especially in the wake of the crashing of the Russian passenger jet in the Sinai and the Beirut suicide bombing is that the new world power kid on the block is ISIS. The assumption is that the newly found Caliphate, with about 30,000 soldiers in its army, loosely made up of ever changing chunks of Iraq and Syria is akin to the Soviet Union, America, Europe and China. That they have a plan to takeover the world which has been masterminded in their capitol Raqqua that is slowly being put into motion by their operatives in Western States and other Shia and Arab Gulf States. 

The talk of the integrity of the USA, for example, being in peril is really such nonsense and no evidence for this hypothesis exists anywhere. Firstly, in terms of conventional war ISIS haven’t one plane, one warhead and their arena of action is where it is  - the Middle East. Israel has not considered it to be part of the existential threat against it and heavens knows Netanyahu doesn’t hold back. Bibi is not dreaming of mixing in the fight that is essentially an internecine struggle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. ISIS outside of the theater of war in the Middle East is pure and simply a terrorist organization that can effect the most dastardly destructive disruptive cowardly deeds but in spite of the Paris massacre and tragedy the French Parliament are not going to hand over power to them anymore than the American Congress told Al Qaeda they were calling it quits as they had the U. S of A beat following 9/11.

ISIS would love to gain status by an on the ground fight with the USA and or Russia so it can truly carry out its fantasy of taking on the infidels. Thus far in spite of the hawks screaming at him Obama has wisely kept his distance. Real world power foot soldiers will give ISIS the prestige it craves to establish itself as The Muslim power.

So ISIS is not a world power. It has however two areas of operations - its central headquarters the new Caliphate and the terrorists that ally themselves to the movement on the international scene.

ISIS IN MIDDLE EAST - ISIS CENTRAL-  THE CALIPHATE

ISIS is unlike Al Qaeda that had an infrastructure, a hierarchical chain of command and initially the protecsia of the Taliban, and inhabited Afghanistan where they were not under constant attack by countries in the region and world powers. Al Qaeda was a firmly established group that had won a war throwing the Soviets out of Afghanistan with the help of the West.  None of this reality pertains to ISIS. What ISIS has got going for it is that it operates in vulnerable weak and/or despotic countries and has a radical brutal philosophy to give it an identity and a purpose. Their manifesto is carved out of a bloodthirsty interpretation of Islam and receives a worldwide circulation through the social media which as it can reach everybody and anybody anywhere anytime is its greatest recruiting tool. The one arena that ISIS has mastered and manipulated is the internet via social media and YouTube. The grotesque videos, that it professionally produces and that outrage the world, hone into the minuscule audience that it is aimed at. It does need to recruit millions it just needs thousands from a pool of 1.6 billion Muslims. Their priority at the moment, as a fledgling country, is immigrant recruits who will fight for their cause and their chunk of land. 

ISIS INTERNATIONAL

Almost as a byproduct there are going to be supporters and recruits that are nationals of other countries. Here the numbers in the “army divisions” can be in the single digits. They can effect deeds that they claim are in support of ISIS and more importantly the ISIS Central leadership can claim ownership of their obscenities such as the Parisian attack.

While exact details are still unclear there were reported to be seven terrorists involved in the Parisian attacks and a further nine that were involved in a shoot out with French security a few days later. One might have been a refugee from Syria as a passport, which the CIA believes is fake, seems to indicate this. There are a number of French and Belgian nationals where the attack is thought to have been masterminded. The Belgian authorities believe that the brain behind the attack is Abdel Hamid Abaaoud who was one of the leaders of a cell of returned Jihadi fighters from Syria which was largely smashed by the Belgian Security police in a shoot out some time back. It is uncertain whether he was killed in the subsequent shoot out.

So that is the full extent of the ISIS army in Paris, plus a couple of thugs who may still be on the run, who have declared war on France! There is no evidence that this was orchestrated from ISIS Central. The incendiaries may have won the first battle but Jay. H. Ell hardly thinks they will win the war. This has not stopped the media hyperbole as to the strengths of ISIS in all the world capitols - nowhere more is this more evident than in the USA where it is election season. Moreover it allows ISIS Central to feed on the fanciful descriptions of its newly attained power. They have just threatened to attack, yes to attack, Washington.

THE COUNTER TO ISIS

ISIS Central

So there are really two distinct conflicts - one in the Middle East, ISIS Central, and another in the rest of the world, ISIS International. Of course they are linked but mainly by the internet. If ISIS is removed as a power in the Middle East that will not stop the terrorist phenomenon in the world. There are apparently a tiny but nevertheless tremendously significant number of disaffected deranged individuals who will latch onto the terrorist movement du jour that have morphed as fighters for ISIS.

In the Middle East in the struggle against ISIS Central the allied plan should not deviate from providing air cover and logistical support for the locals. Now if Jay H. Ell was the Commander in Chief, the Kurds would be getting far more support than they are getting. Take the line from Israel who are in the area and if Bibi isn’t sending ground troops no one else should. Essentially this is a Muslim battle which the Gulf States and Egypt should be bearing the bulk of the fighting as should be Iran who have the most to lose. Obviously the issue is complicated what with Syria unraveling. However, the line is the same there - nothing will be achieved by mixing in with ground troops. This lesson does not need to relearned at the cost of lives.

The hell that is going to ascend on ISIS Central will make them wish that they had never claimed the Paris branch of ISIS International as their own. This attack is just too big to let go much as 9/11 sowed the seeds of Al Qaeda’s destruction, who were by far a tougher nut to crack than will be ISIS Central. Also taking on Russia in the same month will bring down the gates of hell on them.

The prognosis for the new Islamic State sucks and whatever time it takes they will be reduced to bands of marauding terrorists. As Obama keeps cautioning eradicating this bunch totally will be a long long process. Their scary videos of them marching around hugging each other, teaching children how to kill, shooting ammunition into the air and savagely executing infidels in jump suits will not get them past the radar surrounding sovereign countries.

ISIS International

Now ISIS International is an internal security problem for each country and for intelligence cooperation between nations. The objective here is to flush out some hundreds of  fundamentalist Jihardi thugs and for the profilers who think this is a piece of cake there are over a billion and a half Muslims. It is hard to believe that the Paris massacre participants were missed by the internal and international intelligence. It has to be getting harder and harder for these miscreants to escape detection. In the wake of Paris the world needs to prepare itself for more intrusions into privacy. 

The Muslim community itself has been hammered. They are being asked to take a much more active role in the detection of these angels of death. The social media is awash with Islamic condemnation of the events yet the perception remains that there isn’t a concerted enough effort by religious groups to denounce and ferret out these cells. Particularly there are allegations against radical clerics. Rightly or wrongly the Muslim leadership, political, religious and the NGO’s have to get a coordinated act together. Till this is done the xenophobia will continue apace. If they don’t act they make the task of the rational voices harder and harder to curb the excesses of the naysayers.

HUMANITARIAN AND POLITICAL SEQUELS

The immediate casualty of the Parisian apocalypse is the plight of the Syrian refugees. In a mixture of anger, fear, xenophobia and prejudice the stop button has been pressed. Already a hot button issue in European countries the contagion has spread to the USA where Governor after Governor has refused to accept them. To date Obama has been extremely conservative in his approach only offering to accept 10,000 and these have been slowly filtering in. 

Ironically they have all been vetted up the ying yang as most have been in refugee camps for years. However this is election season and with the confrontations in the Middle East and the recent terrorist atrocities their status will become a front and center issue. Maybe The Donald will want to build a wall to keep them out. It is sobering to note that since 9/11 three quarters of a million refugee immigrants have come to America and according to CNN very few if any have been involved in terror. The Boston bomber brothers incidentally came to the USA as tots and were radicalized here and as Americans citizens. However reason is not going to dictate behavior as fear and xenophobia are the order of the day. 

For practical purposes the issue of refugees is of far greater import in Europe where Angela Merkel’s go ahead for a total of 800,000 fugitives has just received a rejuvenated heft to be halted. Many are forecasting that the whole Paris incident has now hastened her political demise with the newly formed group, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident, organizing a mass  protest meeting in Germany. 

The same angry sentiments are felt everywhere in Europe - France’s far right leader Marine Le Pen has careered in and upped her anti immigrant rhetoric that has been on the boil since the Charlie Hebdo incident. With the French elections only three weeks away she has called for an immediate halt on the influx of the refugees. She reminds all that one of the gunmen, Ahmed Al -Mohammed was purportedly, “among the mass of immigrants who flow into Europe each day”. A fuming French Premier Hollande needs no spurring on and is already forecasting that France’s borders face a return to barbed wire. The EU’s plan to divvy up 160,000 displaced is lying in tatters, facing outright rejection and court challenges while the UK has the same refrain to call a halt till there can be security checks.

Netanyahu was not slow to point out the double standard that exists between the world response to their own home grown terrorism and their, at best, disinterest to what the Israelis go through almost on a day to day basis. Sweden and the South African government were quick to couple their condemnation of the event with the Palestinian plight making one wonder if the world’s problems can ever be solved with this selective morality. 

The thread running through this all is a ninety degree turn to the right as a food fest of xenophobia spreads like a contagion. The extreme right wing are becoming main stream. Al Jazeera, an Arab media company that is considered to have a voice of moderation, pointed out that all religions have biblical texts exhorting violence and that crimes committed in the name of Jesus are so vast and heinous that it would take volumes just to highlight them and that the Jews are responsible for the world’s most longest and brutal occupation. However, this tack is not going to win friends and influence people in this climate. They also point out that the biggest victims of all this violence are Muslims themselves and the Hindus in India are responsible for the largest scale discrimination and massacres in the modern day.  

The only focus at the moment is the savagery and brutality evinced in the name of Allah which is then coupled with women abuse and other Sharia law barbarism that Islam ostensibly supports. Any ifs, ands and buts merely anger the critics. While Al Jazeera may be ringing their hands in frustration none of this will cut any ice till those associated with Islam, across the board, move determinedly so that it is obvious to all but the bigots that the Islamist Jihardi terrorism is to them what Nazi Germany was to the World. Invoking the Crusades and simplifying the Israeli situation thereby exhibiting bias will not help the cause of normalizing relations and attitudes between civilizations of all persuasions. 

FUTURE OF TERRORISM

State sponsored terrorism will eventually die on the vine. Al Qaeda under the Taliban has been reduced to a pale shadow as will eventually the whole caliphate of ISIS. There sources of income will be cut off as they are systematically bombed. 

As far as countries where the international arm of ISIS is supposedly operating these acts will continue as there will sadly always be the deranged and estranged to effect them. Paris is likely to be followed by copycat attempts and ongoing scares in the near future. (The media are keeping this all going by highlighting threats that are on the internet every other day as if they are part and parcel of the great tide of ISIS frontal assault on the world). There are unhinged in every society that turn their anger outward in the most dastardly and cowardly way. When ISIS collapses those who wish to alienate themselves with the terrorist moment du jour will do so and obviously they will be embraced as army members of the new psychopathic group they purport to represent. 

Ironically the country that feels they have the external threats under control, the USA, are not much fussed by the almost weekly terrorist carnage in schools, malls and cinemas, unleashed by the unstable, who have unhindered access to arsenals, as they are not considered to be external acts of terrorism. The same crowd who are screaming for screening in depth of the refugees don't believe that simple background checks are necessary for those that purchase arsenals in the USA.

So the future of terror seems assured - certainly the homegrown variety. As this piece is written it is alive and well throughout the world. What is beyond doubt is that they will not overturn existing governments.

There are no winners in any of this as essential values such as peace and understanding between all peoples receive yet another setback because of the actions of just a few and the response of many.