“We are at the highest level of elevation of the terrorist threat.” This concerning assertion from one of the main officials of Uclat, the French Unit for the Coordination of the Fight Against Terrorism, seems to confirm the credibility of the information transmitted to Paris by the American intelligence services. France, like its closest European neighbors, could become the target of “suicide or bomb attacks,” planned by branches of Al-Qaida’s jihadist organization. Fears that cannot be minimized in light of recent threats of kidnapping or attempted targeted assassinations against French nationals in Algeria and Afghanistan, two countries where our compatriots are particularly exposed due to their traditional economic presence in the former and their military commitment alongside NATO in the latter.
Nevertheless, just like their European partners, what the French services fear most proceeds from another scenario: the isolated initiative – and therefore more difficult to detect – of an individual determined to commit a deadly attack at the cost of their life in the name of a cause to which they identify without structurally belonging to the organization that claims it. Great Britain and, more recently, Germany have thus discovered with astonishment that nationals by birth, most of them freshly converted to radical Islam, or foreigners seemingly well “integrated” into European culture, were capable of committing criminal acts in reference to an imported religious ideology. “Integrated.” A word that disturbs in the political current events. The trial in the Court of Assizes of the alleged financier of the 1995 attacks in Paris should be an occasion to recall the case of Khaled Kelkal, identified as the main suspect in the Paris-Lyon TGV bomb case and shot by gendarmes in September of the same year. Interviewed a few months earlier by a Canadian sociologist as part of his study, he had explained that he did not “identify with the different values of the Republic” but referred to the sole – obviously very personal – interpretation of the Quran.
If necessary, the laws intended to strengthen integration procedures are obviously not enough to spark the desire “to live together” and to belong to a “community of destiny.” Acceptance of the French model – all the more successful when it is desired – also relies on a set of representations that function as a pole of attraction, and whose economic dimension is not negligible. We can understand that growth is not forthcoming. Just like the efforts required in terms of special retirement schemes, medical co-payments, and working hours. But at a time when everyone is called upon to make a salutary effort for the country at their level, the State should be wary of financial scandals that could taint the credibility of its actions: the suspicions of insider trading weighing on several executives of the EADS firm with passive complicity from the administration, as well as the questions surrounding the dubious financial transactions of the Union of Industries and Metallurgical Trades, are enough to trigger incomprehension and anger among the youngest and the most disadvantaged. And constitute fertile ground for all renunciations and the most extremist ideological or religious recoveries.
