Bill Angel
Gold Member
Excerpt from Paris attack came after months of unprecedented threat - CNN.com
The situation in France brings to mind observations made by
Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:
But no country faces a greater terrorist threat than France, with support for ISIS running deep among disenfranchised immigrant communities in the rundown, crime-ridden banlieues that surround many French cities....
In the years after 9/11, France was held up as a model by many for its "assimilationist" agenda and its zero tolerance of extremist radical preachers. Britain, by contrast, was criticized for a "multicultural" approach that for too long offered political refuge to extremists from around the world.
But by the late 2000s, Islamist extremism had also become a significant problem in France. Although French leaders paid lip service to assimilation, the concept was only theoretical for young unemployed Muslims living in impoverished banlieues whose socioeconomic grievances were more acute than their counterparts in the United Kingdom.
The situation in France brings to mind observations made by
Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:
If we really think about it, there were two Reigns of Terror; in one people were murdered in hot and passionate violence; in the other they died because people were heartless and did not care. One Reign of Terror lasted a few months; the other had lasted for a thousand years; one killed a thousand people, the other killed a hundred million people. However, we only feel horror at the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. But how bad is a quick execution, if you compare it to the slow misery of living and dying with hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery is big enough to contain all the bodies from that short Reign of Terror, but the whole country of France isn't big enough to hold the bodies from the other terror. We are taught to think of that short Terror as a truly dreadful thing that should never have happened: but none of us are taught to recognise the other terror as the real terror and to feel pity for those people.