Do we face an interminable assault of Islamist terror, of massive changes in our Western way of life brought on by no sense of safety anyplace? Will the sense instead be that jihadists are persistently after us and could someday indulge in the murderous elimination of whole cities?
What we have in these questions are not exaggerations, but real possibilities, and what we need is real awareness, real leadership, real resolve. That’s the message of what happened in Paris, not because it was the first or worst terror attack in the West, but because we were once again reminded of what we had better not forget. For instance:
We in the West are in this together, if far from exclusively. Radical Muslims have scorching hatred for anything Western and a religious conviction that a caliphate should rule all. We know none of us is immune from attack, and this we also know: Our nationalistic differences are nothing next to a cultural unity seen in a small but telling way when the terrorists killed 129 in Paris: A major target was a concert featuring an American band.
The Islamic State is a determined, technologically able menace that has victims every direction you look. It needs to be eradicated, but that would not be the end of the story any more than the diminution of al-Qaida was. The threat consists of fanatical, apocalyptic, self-sacrificing jihadists who can get new leaders when some are killed or form new organizations when some are crushed.
