this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 79 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is an accurate summary of the situation. We have a social problem, and a pretty bad one at that, not a terrorism or an immigration problem.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

We’re in the endgame of capitalism and fascism, baby.

Best to just keep your head down, vote left (like spitting on a forest fire), and most importantly, stay armed and practice your marksmanship.

It’s going to be a shit future.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Genuine question: Are there any countries that aren’t segregated by income? Because I think that’s been true of everywhere I’ve ever been.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

"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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I hope no one thinks this is the whole explanation, but it's part of history that is not known by many.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

It's a tiny part that doesn't have much relevance today. And it's not a hidden history it was big news for years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I totally agree with you on this. I can somehow sense that the law against Islamic practitioners has been tightened more and more, e.g. regarding hijab, after that. It's like if you cant be us, you can no longer be tolerated; you're not one of us.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.