WASHINGTON — In the days after the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, France declared “war” on terrorism, 10,000 French paramilitary police took to the streets and U.S. conservatives chided President Obama for not leading this new war against jihadists.
Sorry, but this war-on-terror mobilization is the wrong response to the Charlie Hebdo tragedy.
What’s a convincing counterterrorism message? Listen to Malek Merabet, a Frenchman of Algerian descent who eulogized his brother Ahmed, a policeman slain in the Paris attacks. He said after the funeral: “My brother was Muslim, and he was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims. They are terrorists, that’s it.”
After the Paris tragedy, terrorism analysts found links to al-Qaeda in Yemen and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But rather than seeing this as a directed conspiracy, it may be more useful to analyze the street-gang and prison connections of Said and Cherif Kouachi, the Charlie Hebdo gunmen, and Amedy Coulibaly, the man who attacked the Kosher deli.
“The role of religion in all of this is dangerously exaggerated,” says a former State Department official who’s now organizing private-sector efforts to counter extremism. “When we get stuck in a religious debate we are never going to win, we miss the point, which is that extremists are offering young people a sense of belonging, an outlet for adventure, and some kind of enhanced status. To combat this, we have to appeal to them as young people more than we have to appeal to them as Muslims.”