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?
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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.
There are less terrorist attacks in France than mass shootings in the USA, per year, per capita.
So, no, it doesn’t have a problem.
“It has less X than the US has shootings” means almost nothing as a statement. Thats not a metric for if its a problem or not
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.
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.
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.
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?
