How news organisations around the world have responded to Paris attacks
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Version 0 of 1. As the world struggles for answers after the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed at 129 people and injured 352, major news organisations and their writers have contributed analysis and suggestions. Some have called for a swift and harsh reply in the form of military engagements, others have urged caution. Many more have urged people not to allow the attacks to divide us. Below are a few of the op-eds to have been published. Related: The Guardian view on defeating Isis: a common enemy must be met with common resolve | Editorial The Guardian To answer Isis’s declaration of war – if it was indeed that – would be to compliment the group, to grant it dignity and accord it the status of a state, reads the Guardian editorial on Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. “It confronts that murderous organisation on terms of its choosing rather than ours,” it says. The editorial, which can be read in full here, urges “consideration and thought” despite how unpopular that can be, and says the moral case for Europe to remain a place of refuge is unaltered by the attacks. “If we feel European values are in danger, then the last way to defend those values is by dismantling them.” The core of the answer to Syria is diplomatic, it continues, urging the nations which came together in Vienna to seize the moment “for the sake of Syria, for the sake of the innocent dead of Paris, for the sake of our common future”. John Sawers in the Financial Times There will be another attack, although likely not in France, writes John Sawers, the chair of Macro Advisory Partners and the former chief of MI6, for the Financial Times. Isis wants continuing turmoil to boost its territory and resources and build up its caliphate, and it wants to create further terror and division as a means of recruitment, according to Sawers. In explaining why France was a target for this attack, Sawer writes the country had been at the forefront of opposition to Islamist extremists in the Sahel and in Syria, and had a Muslim community which was “not well-integrated” and felt more involved in Arab conflicts “which has made them more susceptible to Isis rhetoric”. “Some ask if there was a failure of intelligence that could have prevented the atrocity. We do not yet know. It was a complex, well-planned attack by skilled operatives. Of course, some were known to the French security services — it would be much more alarming if they were all ‘clean skins’. We need to know how they planned, how they communicated, where they trained and what traces they left ahead of Friday.” The New York Times More European and Middle Eastern countries must be persuaded to join the operation against Isis, reads a New York Times editorial. The attacks in Paris and Beirut and the apparent downing of a Russian jet over the Sinai peninsula “show a new phase in the Islamic State’s war against the west, a readiness to strike far beyond areas it controls in Iraq, Syria, and increasingly, Libya”, it says. These sort of attacks are difficult to anticipate and each one intensifies those seeking to demonise Muslim people in Europe. This was “no doubt a major goal” of the attacks, it says. “The Islamic State must be crushed, but that requires patience, determination and the coordination of strategies and goals that has been sorely lacking among countries involved in the war on Isis, especially the United States and Russia.” It concludes: “Isis has demonstrated that there is no limit to its reach, and no nation is really safe until they all come together to defeat this scourge.” Related: Paris attack victims: lives cut cruelly short during night of terror The Washington Post The attacks by Isis on Paris, Beirut and in the Sinai were aimed at “everyone who aspires to modernity and cherishes a free and open society,” writes the Washington Post editorial board. It urges the French to heed the lessons learned and mistakes made by the US after the attacks of 11 September 2001. “The nation did not give in to grief, despair or doubt about what it stands for, and we are confident neither will the French,” it says. “We hope the French will realize, without making the mistakes the United States made in the first stages of its fight against al-Qaeda, that the west gains nothing if it sacrifices the rule of law.” The editorial says the US president, Barack Obama, has made little progress on his vow to “degrade and destroy” Isis. Like the Financial Times, the Post suggests this will not be the last of Isis’s attacks “as long as the Islamic State enjoys its sanctuary”. The Wall Street Journal “The Paris attack is in some ways even more alarming than 9/11,” writes the Wall Street Journal. “Airplane hijackings have largely been stopped through enhanced security. Paris suggests that Islamic State has embarked on a strategy of urban unconventional warfare wherever it is able across the west.” The editorial, headlined “Wake up, Mr President”, takes Obama to task for the actions of his administration in the “war on terror”. It calls on him to reverse his decision to close Guantánamo Bay, to increase surveillance both domestically and internationally, and to order the Pentagon to roll back Isis from all its territory within months. “Kurds and Sunni Arabs will provide most of the fighters if the US supplies the firepower, intelligence and political leadership,” it says. The Times In an editorial headlined “Nous sommes tous Français”, the Times writes that jjhadis have a lethal aversion to not just western governments but to modernity itself, and the two attacks this year on France show “no purely defensive strategy can prevail”. The western alliance has the responsibility to “take the war to those who have declared it” with a thoughtful, sober and ruthless response. “That means an intelligent use of soft power and technology to disrupt the efforts of jihadists to organise and recruit. It also requires an intensification of what has so far been an inadequate and restricted use of military force against Islamic State.” The editorial warns against giving power to far-right groups which have capitalised on anti-Muslim sentiment. “It would be a tragic turn of fate, intensifying a humanitarian catastrophe, if the people fleeing from Assad’s tyranny and Islamic State’s terror were the victims also of a turn in European electoral politics to xenophobic parties of the far right.” The Times calls for embedding special forces with the Iraqi security forces, with the Kurds and with the Free Syrian Army when they go into battle, and for western allies to pool intelligence resources. “It will be a long struggle, in which the institutions of civil society (not least schools and mosques) need every support to counter the creed of extremists. Ultimately, the record of every jihadist group that wins influence is so destructive of the people it claims to represent that it is eventually scattered … In the broadest as well as the literal sense, France’s allies must stand and declare: Aux armes, citoyens.” Boris Johnson in the Telegraph “It is plainly no use hoping that the problem of Daesh-inspired terrorism is going away, writes Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, for the Telegraph. “As we deliberate on how to respond, it is essential to be cautious, and to be pragmatic – and yet to use every weapon at our disposal.” Johnson calls on Britain to work with families and “[come] down hard” on parents who allow their kids to go online and access jihadi propaganda. He also levels accusations at the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose “bean spilling” “taught some of the nastiest people on the planet how to avoid being caught”. “I am afraid that I have less and less sympathy with those who oppose the new surveillance powers that the government would like to give the security services,” he says. The mayor also looks at military options and, while “no choice looks attractive; no plan is perfect”, he asks: “Is doing nothing any better?” Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept Glenn Greenwald, prompted by accusations – such as Johnson’s – that the Snowden revelations enabled the attack, warns against scapegoating whistleblowers for acts of terrorism. Greenwald writes in the Intercept that exploiting people’s emotions about Paris by blaming Snowden distracts from looking at who empowered Isis. “There’s the desperation to prevent people from asking how and why Isis was able to spring up seemingly out of nowhere and be so powerful, able to blow up a Russian passenger plane, a market in Beirut, and the streets of Paris in a single week,” he says. “That’s the one question western officials are most desperate not to be asked, so directing people’s ire to Edward Snowden and Apple is beneficial in the extreme.” Jon Snow for Channel 4 There appeared to be a pause in the terrorist threat in Europe, after Madrid and London, the Channel 4 news anchor, Jon Snow writes. “But Syria’s descent into unimaginable carnage and the accompanying rise of Isis and their deliberate strategy to terrorise through deed and propaganda are a game-changer.” Snow directs readers’ attention to Saudi Arabia. “The causes of this spread of terrorism are complex, but one aspect we have to tackle head on — its ideological roots in Wahhabi Islam, the official religion of Saudi Arabia. “The house of Saud rules at the mercy of the clerics, some of whom see jihadism as a legitimate method of advancing their religion. The state in Saudi Arabia may not directly fund Isis, but the fundamentals of the Saudi state and society mean many of its people do.” Snow urges open discussion about “one of the gravest threats to our world and our way of life, since rise of the Nazism”, with everyone involved and affected. “Airstrikes will not resolve what many Muslim scholars regard as a deep and insidious distortion of religious belief.” Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker Adam Gopnik examines the philosophy present in the atrocities of the Paris attacks and urges the city’s citizens not to allow the events to change them. Related: The men who attacked Paris: profile of a terror cell He refers to the late philosopher André Glucksmann, memorialised at Père Lachaise cemetery just last week, who had written that “modern terrorism, including Islamic terrorism, is nihilist before it is religious and even before it is political”. “Certainly, the communiqué in French from Isis, taking responsibility for the mass murders – the blind assaults on the stadium, the rock concert, the cafes, none of them exactly haunts of the wealthy – had, for all its apparent political logic, a deeper ring of unleashed rage and blood madness, down to the ancient fury at the existence of Paris as a place of pleasure,” Gopnik writes. “‘Targeting the capital of prostitution and obscenity … Paris shook under their feet, and its streets were tight upon them,’ the group boasted. ‘The result of these attacks,’ the statement said, ‘was the death of no less than 100 Crusaders.’ People sitting on the terrace of a Cambodian restaurant – Crusaders, indeed.” Gopnik notes in the people of France – as in the people of New York after 9/11 – “a will not to be annihilated, not to be turned by terrorism into a citizenry that can no longer recognise itself. “New Yorkers learned that you can live your lives or your fears, and that it is always wiser to live your lives.” |