In Our View: We Are All Parisians

French President Francois Hollande has called it “an act of war.” Yet the perpetrator has no organized government, no diplomatic envoys, no standing army against which to target the response.

Such is the nature of the ongoing battle against global terrorism and against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a battle that was delivered Friday upon a city that serves as a symbol of civilized society. Coordinated attacks in Paris left at least 129 dead and 352 wounded or injured, striking at locales designed to disrupt the comfort of normalcy. Restaurants. Crowded city streets. A soccer stadium. A concert hall where an American rock band was playing.

They are the kind of locations that millions of Americans inhabit in their own cities on a typical Friday night. The kind of locations abhorred by Islamic extremists: venues where men and women freely share sports, music and food together. They are the kind of targets that remind us the only thing standing between civilization and barbarism is vigilance on the part of citizens.

Hollande said the attacks were “against France, against the values that we defend everywhere in the world, against what we are: a free country that means something to the entire planet.” He vowed that his nation would respond, using “all necessary means, and on all terrains, inside and outside, in coordination with our allies, who are, themselves, targeted by this terrorist threat.”

The attacks will steel the resolve of France to combat this barbarism, as they should the rest of the world. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in this country, French officials responded with Nous sommes tous Américains — we are all Americans. Today, nous sommes tous Parisiens. President Obama said: “This is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”

Those values must, in the end, be triumphant. Yet the path to such triumph is unclear. The ideology that creates terrorists willing to murder innocent revelers while wearing suicide vests and preparing to go to their own death is anathema to civilized thinking, pointing out the difficulty of the fight. How do you combat such barbarism? It is not possible to kill all ISIS adherents without merely reinforcing their ideology for future generations. It is not possible to root out all the sycophants within our countries, people who lay in wait to violently announce their hate.

ISIS has branched out to spreading international terrorism, claiming responsibility for the downing of a Russian airliner, a bombing in Lebanon that killed 40 people, and now the coordinated attacks in Paris. But the disjointed guerilla operations call for new methods of combating the scourge, eschewing the strategies inherent in traditional wars.

International coalitions must be formed among civilized nations with the common cause of preserving free societies. Vigilance by citizens — in the United States and elsewhere — must be utmost in a shared fight against those determined to undermine a particular way of life. But efforts to take the fight to the terrorists or prevent potential terrorists from entering the country should not trump the knowledge that, indeed, potential terrorists already reside within our borders. Or that, indeed, Islamic extremists are actively recruiting through social media.

Modern terrorism knows no borders, boundaries, or limits. Nor does the grief that it produces. We share that grief with the French, aware that only our resolve and diligence can keep us safe.