Charlie Hebdo: Obama Still Doesn’t Get It

The limited recognition of the attacks on the part of American officials partly stems from their struggle to admit that terrorism can also be a domestic ill.

As planned, John Kerry, the French-speaking and Francophile U.S. secretary of state, did what was necessary on Friday in Paris to demonstrate U.S. solidarity following the barbaric terrorist attacks that struck France. He exchanged a firm hug with François Hollande in the courtyard of the Elysée, laid a wreath of flowers at the Hyper Cacher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes and another in front of the building of Charlie Hebdo, and even paused to read the moving anonymous messages posted in front of the door.

It was absolutely imperative to overshadow the absence at the Jan. 11 march of a representative that was high-level enough for a friendship with a country that, from Lafayette to Afghanistan, has always been on America’s side. Yet North American editorialists took note of just how much Barack Obama had been bothered by what happened in Paris. While he did the very minimum to recognize the attacks, going to the French Embassy and signing a vibrant “Vive la France!” in the book of condolences, he has remained virtually silent about something that has been provoking an unprecedented surge of solidarity all over the world. Admittedly, it was clear that the irreverent drawings of Charlie Hebdo’s caricaturists, in making fun of religions without any form of restraint, could force the president of a country where people ask God to “bless America” at the end of every speech to remain discreet in his outpourings of solidarity.

A Formal Statement

However, the hostage taking at the Porte de Vincennes and the deliberate murdering of French people because they were Jewish should have immediately sparked outrage at the White House. There again, we had to content ourselves with a formal statement made by the president’s spokesperson.

It’s likely that what just happened in Paris troubles the agenda that Obama set at the moment of his re-election in 2012, which may explain why he’s wide off the mark. As Washington Post editorialist Charles Krauthammer reminds us that, for Obama “the war [on terror] has already ended … with bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda ‘on the run.’” The editorialist continues, saying, in essence, that Obama is dealing with the consequences of this, after calling into question the principal elements of the authorization Congress gave in 2001, which provided for the unrestricted use of armed forces in the fight against terrorism. Likewise, he’s trying to accelerate the freeing of the last remaining prisoners at Guantanamo. Five more were released this week.

Sleeper-cell Terrorism: The New Mutation

However, after the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher supermarket, isn’t it more difficult today to proclaim that the war is over? Moreover, after the first phase, Sept. 11 — an attack organized, mounted and directed outside of the U.S. with terrorists coming from other countries — we have moved on to another stage: the lone wolf and automatically controlled kamikaze stage, without any obvious connections, other than ideological, to al-Qaida or the Islamic State. However, there again, they were foreigners in the country where they were operating. With the attacks in Paris, we have entered into a new phase: that of sleeper-cell terrorism, which involves killers who have likely been more superficially fanaticized in Islam than their predecessors.

Moreover, these are men who have been immersed in organized crime, which provided them with arms, munitions and the money to purchase them. Last but not least, these are terrorists who were born, raised and had always lived in the country where they operate. They were from housing projects where communitarianism is getting worse and worse.

More precisely, these areas strongly resemble existing areas in the United States. This explains Barack Obama’s last statement, made on Friday while he was hosting David Cameron at the White House, in which Obama wanted to show Americans that their country was not at risk to this new form of endogenous terrorism that had just cropped up in Paris: “Our biggest advantage,” said Obama, “is that our Muslim populations, they feel themselves to be Americans. There are parts of Europe in which that’s not the case.”

Certainly, jihad hopefuls in Syria and Iraq, whose dangerousness upon their return home Europe rightly fears, are not, for the time being, coming in very large numbers from the USA, but the precedent set by Nidal Malik Hasan, a major in the U.S. military who, in 2009, killed 13 people and injured 30 when he opened fire with an automatic weapon at Fort Hood while yelling out “Allah Akbar,” shows that Obama should display more modesty in his comparisons and implicit condemnations.