Deepest condolences to family/friends of all who lost their life in the recent terrorist attack in Paris. The battle against terrorism starts and ends with us all holding to our values and way of life. Any other approach is giving terrorist/ideology a legitimacy they do not deserve and would eventually prove counter productive; let’s not allow them to provoke us into an arbitrary response-that’s exactly their intention-but rather take deliberate/well balanced action in the time/way of our choosing again driven by our own world view. It’ also important that we understand/remember that this battle is going to take time but we should hold firm with our approach and be in no doubt we will prevail. Strength of determination with a clear vision is key for the sake of our future and in memory to all who loose their lives through such cowardly acts.
(Updated 22/04/2017)
Finally, just to say that what is truly disturbing about most of these attacks is that individuals involved have been known to authorities in terms of threat of extremist views/actions, so the system in place ain’t working. A few suggestions to be considered;
- There needs to me a reassessment of the valuation of threat levels and of procedures taken to eliminate risk from the individuals involved.
- There needs to be a reassessment of methods designed to discover threats within communities and reporting them to ensure they are more effective/creative. There must also be consequences for family/friends if there is any degree of collusion or failure to report such risks-lowering the bars if necessary.
- Depending on risk involved individuals may be removed from society (or deported as the case maybe). If this is already applied then lowering the bars for such measures has to be a consideration. We need to remember that by ignoring removal of high risk individuals this in of itself creates threats within communities-particularly vulnerable communities-which prevents the reporting such cases.
All the above suggestions are related to security measures but as we know full well they alone do not fix the inherent problems on the social scope which include important reforms on Immigration/Integration policies. I have written about in multiple posts here. These are difficult/complex issues and it may help to contribute/debate some ideas to fix them, so hope this helps in any way.