It seems like France stands out among terrorist attacks in the news. Is it because they are more likely to be critical of Muslim culture than other European nations? Is it because there is a security failure allowing terrorist to come in and organize better?
France certainly has a social problem, with immigrant-descended populations often living precariously in crime-ridden banlieues, relatively isolated from the "indigenous" French people. These are great conditions to breed extremism.
But I'm not sure you could go so far as to say that there's really a terrorism problem. Of course any terrorist attack will be a huge thing in the news, but looking at the bigger picture, it still happens rather rarely and France is overall a pretty safe country.
France has a social classes problem. There is class segregation everywhere. If you are poor you live in a neighborhood where everyone is poor and since everyone is poor there isn’t enough money to invest in the neighborhood. So these neighborhoods are neglected. As a result many poor youths are unable to climb the social ladder and thus some will end up living a life of crime. And so it happens that many migrants who came to France and Western Europe as a whole were poor. Since Western Europe wanted cheap labor. Sweden has the same problems as France with their migrants. Since many cities in Sweden are also segregated along the classes.
Saw a documentary about Vienna the other day. They have state sponsored housing that is cheap or free and nice to look at and situated together in rich neighbourhoods to work against segregation.
Don't know if this is the case for all of Vienna or Austria.
Eastern Europe in general can be like that. You can have grandmas living next door to rich families.
That is slowly changing, however, as the rich move to secluded spots in the countryside, middle class moves to the suburbs and the super poor move to the dachas. The flats in the cities are still getting more expensive somehow.
But it does allow for a statement to be quantified and compared. So now on to the most dehumanising post I've ever written...
Current French population is 65 million, and USA is 340 million. So USA is 5.23x larger.
Since 2000, 292 people in France have been killed due to terrorist acts, according to this handy Wikipedia page. 90 of which were at the Bataclan, with 131 people being killed that weekend in the most deadly terrorist attack in French history.
That gives the equivalent of 1,527 people, over nearly 24 years, or about 64 people a year.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, in the USA 2,006 people - excluding perpetrators - have been killed...since 1st January, 2021, giving a staggering 668 people per year.
(I would go back further, but unfortunately their data export appears to max out at 2000 incidents.)
So, regardless of your thoughts or feelings about gun violence in America, France's "terrorist problem" - including the worst attack they have ever faced - is less than a tenth of that.
Does this excuse or justify any of the cowardly fucks who killed innocent people? No, of course not. Fuck them all.
But it does highlight the size, and I hope gives people a reason to pause and think about just who is peddling the line, and just who seeks to benefit from demonising overwhelmingly peaceful minority groups.
It's almost like white nationalism is the bigger threat. Funny that.
You are right, but we also don't have a "terrorist problem".
There are mostly mentally ill people killing someone every 6 months because of being made believe idiotic things, which of cours is a tragedy. 3000 death in the circulation (cars n stuff), hundreds women beaten to death in no-terrorist ways, ...
Extreme right (Le Pen) loves it though because blaming all societys problems on one "type of population" is sadly what works, they (the Le Pen family) have been doing it for decades and decades.
What even are you on about ?? We have no colonies left. There are a few French "enclaves" left out of the mainland, but they are isolated, forgotten about (in a bad way sadly, shit is tough there) and absolutely not a source of immigration.
Mali(Chad, Mauritania, Niger) may not officially be French anymore, but let's not forget French soldiers spent a good decade at war with Jihadist groups in the Sahel, which made them extremely unpopular with a lot of people.
France has also been quite interventionist in other countries in the region, like Cote d'Ivoire.
Also, technically speaking, France doen have a handful of colonial regions, 2 million people live in them.
Alright, the real reason why you see terrorism in France more than others, is from what we in Denmark call the Muhammad Crisis.
A Danish satire drawing of Muhammad with a bomb was published in a Danish newspaper. The papers HQ got attacked. A small one, but still significant in Denmark.
France newspaper L'Equipe then reprinted the drawing more than once as a protest for free speech. After that France became a prime target for these kind of terrorists.
The driving terrorism in Nice, bombings in Paris and at L'Equipes HQ, it all happened after that.
This created alot of bad blood between these cultures, and that long going hate is what keeps France a prime target.
To blame the terrorist attacks France has suffered on a cartoon by a niche newspaper is a rather blinded look at the situation, and ignores pretty much everything about the state of the world in the past few hundred years as well as modern times.
I hope no one walks away thinking this comment is correct.
L'équipe ? The sport journal read by football circle jerkers ?
You probably meant Charly Hebdo.
And France is a though subject, it is historically a welcoming country for northern Africa and Muslim population (former protectorat or colonies, same language) but France partly failed mixing its population with the boom of huge ugly suburbs in the 60/70s. They ended up being poor class zone, that became foreigners zones, that became forgotten by politics leading to their population growing poorer and angry (with a right to be). Some of those were targeted by extremism advocate as they make a good place to cultivate anger and recruit new peoples.
So France is often a target because it is historically close to Muslim populations of Africa and often the final destination when migrating to Europe because it has good social security and no language barrier, unlike Italy, Greece or UK where you have to learn a new language. France is also still very present in Africa (language, industry, politics even money bills for some) so maybe if you ask a poor lost angry boy to name one Euro country, he will probably say France.
Then of course Charly drawing Muhammad or the gov forbidding religious clothes in schools was just another easy justification to attack the country.
The Hebdo drawing wasn't light hearted fun though, it was right wingers trying to wind up religious people. Obviously there's never any excuse for murder but publicly attacking a whole religion will upset a lot of people, and things can lead on from that.
Her clothing wasn't tasteful, though. It was a woman's attempt to wind up men. Obviously there's no excuse for rape, but wearing clothing in public designed to be provocative will attract attention from a lot of people, and things can lead on from that.
They were not right winger by any way, quite the opposite, they were100% anticlerical far left. Maybe stop talking about something you know nothing about?