It's become known as the Aarhus Model, a programme designed in Denmark's second city to dissuade young people from going to fight for al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Thirty travelled to Syria in 2013 but only two so far this year - and only one in 2014. Ahmed is one young man who was convinced, a few years ago, to draw back from the first step on a path that could have ended in jihad.
En démocratie, on ne condamne pas quelqu’un pour ses opinions, mais pour le passage à l’acte. La République française, à partir de 1881, part de la liberté individuelle et pas du contrôle étatique. Elle n’est pas robespierriste, il ne faudrait pas qu’elle le devienne. On oublie que la loi de 1905 sur la séparation des églises et de l’Etat garantit la liberté de pratique religieuse dans l’espace public. Elle impose la neutralité à l’Etat, pas à la société.
The US intelligence community also likens finding a terrorist plot to looking for a needle in a haystack. And, as former NSA director General Keith Alexander said, “you need the haystack to find the needle.” That statement perfectly illustrates the problem with mass surveillance and bulk collection. When you’re looking for the needle, the last thing you want to do is pile lots more hay on it. More specifically, there is no scientific rationale for believing that adding irrelevant data about innocent people makes it easier to find a terrorist attack, and lots of evidence that it does not. You might be adding slightly more signal, but you’re also adding much more noise.
A kneejerk response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre would be familiar: crackdowns, monitoring and curbs on Muslim communities, including racial profiling; wild promises of “punishing” the attackers and taking decisive action to root out terrorists once and for all; ramping up military intervention in Iraq, Syria, Yemen or elsewhere to increase the heat on the terrorists at source, and teach them a lesson.
The problem is that these are tried, tested, and failed strategies that serve largely as useful recruiting sergeants for terrorist networks like IS and al-Qaeda. We are so obsessed with these strategies, despite their abject failure, that while getting rightly worked up at the horrifying atrocities against the West like that just committed in Paris, we are incapable of mustering a similar emotional response to the reports of dozens of civilian casualties due to US-led airstrikes.
Such so-called collateral damage, which includes the “mass destruction of civilian homes” by western bombs according to rebel eyewitnesses on the ground, is not even an accident, but a result of Obama’s deliberate loosening of "near certainty" standards previously adopted to minimise civilian deaths: and is already driving locals into the arms of IS.
We must not fall into the trap of the terrorists themselves – the inability to recognize the suffering of the Other, their wholesale demonization, the acceptance of their indiscriminate destruction as a necessary means to a "greater good." The only way forward is for people of all faith and none to stand together in rejecting the violence perpetrated in our name, whether by state or insurgent.
Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
Personne ne veut voir que la plus grosse fabrique à soldats d'Al Qaeda sur notre territoire, c'est la PRISON. Personne n'a compris que la France n'a pas basculé en 2015, mais il y a dix ans déjà, lors des émeutes. Personne ne veut voir que nous vivons encore les conséquences lointaines de l'immense humiliation coloniale et post-coloniale, et que vos leçons de "civilisation" et de "liberté d'expression" sont de ce fait inaudibles pour certains de ceux qui l'ont subie et la subissent ENCORE.
This is a dangerous moment. Anti-Muslim prejudice is rampant in Europe. The favoured target of Europe’s far-right – like France’s Front National, which currently leads in the opinion polls – is Muslims. France is home to around 5 million Muslims, who disproportionately live in poverty and unemployment, often in ghettoised banlieues. This incident should rightfully horrify, but it will now undoubtedly fuel an already ascendant far-right.
The consequences? More anti-Muslim hatred, more disillusionment among already marginalised young Muslims, more potential recruits for extremist groups.
There is a choice, of course. Norway’s enlightened response could be a model elsewhere in Europe too. It would be the last thing the attackers would want us to do. That, in itself, should give us all pause to think.
Here's a theory. Terrorists aren't offended by cartoons. Not even cartoons that satirise the Prophet Muhammad. They don't care about satire. For all I know they may not even care about the Prophet Muhammad.
Instead, they merely pretend to be offended by cartoons, in order to give themselves a pretext to commit murder. Murder so horrifying, on a pretext so unWestern, that non-Muslims – blinded by grief and rage – turn on Muslims. Blame them. Persecute them. Burn their book, attack their mosques, threaten them in the street, demand their expulsion from Western societies. Actions that, in turn, scare Western Muslims, isolate them, alienate them. And thus drive some of them to support – and even become – terrorists.
Result: terrorists swell their ranks for a civil war they long to provoke non-Muslims into starting.
Ils espèrent aussi que la colère et l’indignation qui emportent la nation trouvera chez certains son expression dans un rejet et une hostilité à l’égard de tous les musulmans de France. Ainsi se creuserait le fossé qu’ils rêvent d’ouvrir entre les musulmans et les autres citoyens.