Ten years ago today Europe was reeling after a series of coordinated attacks by radical Muslims left 134 dead and 400 more injured across the city of Paris. The most devastating attack was at the Bataclan theater where Islamic terrorists took 1500 concert-goers hostage and ultimately left ninety dead and hundreds more wounded. These attacks were positioned almost exactly at the midpoint between the January 2015 terror attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris and the July 2016 martyrdom of Fr Jacque Hamel, a Catholic priest beheaded while celebrating mass in a nearly empty Normandy church.
This stretch of outrageous and very public attacks were, unfortunately, not the only Islamic terror attacks in France or in Europe over those months. There were many more to follow in Belgium, Germany, and France. But the brazen, organized, and graphic nature of these attacks should have awakened an obviously vulnerable West to the very real threat of Islamic terror. It did not.
What has happened in the intervening years is a refusal to embrace the fact that what motivates these attacks is a certain set of values wholly incompatible with the West. The situation in France has only worsened with 56% of the nation’s Muslims reporting extreme antisemitic views and nearly 20% expressing sympathy with Hamas, an international terrorist organization.
This is not to say that Muslims are not capable of living as peaceful and productive citizens in the West, but it does mean that we failed to demand certain concessions from many immigrants as they moved into the West.
The elite narrative that comes from both the left and the right as they wring their hands in Brussels, Paris, London, and Washington does not acknowledge that the values that we now call “Western values” or “humane values” have a very clear source. It is no accident that it is where the Judeo-Christian tradition informed the moral vocabulary of the people that a unique civilization, with political discourse focused on the rights of individuals, emerged. There are confined examples of very noble and humane historical moments in other parts of the world, but not even a single example of a sustained, durable civilization with the same openness as the modern West.
There are legitimate critiques of the West and the empires and political units that have been constituted within it. But the arc of history is toward more freedom, more recognition of the dignity of the individual, and more justice. The British Empire collapsed, in part, because it dedicated so much of its resources to the eradication of the North Atlantic slave trade that it had developed. In America, hundreds of thousands died to eradicate the evil scourge of slavery. Tens of millions died in order to topple the genocidal Nazi regime of mid-century Germany, and hundreds of millions focused their energies on freeing hundreds of millions more from living under the bootheel of Communism in the late 20th Century.
The values that animated these valiant and sacrificial movements toward a more just society are rooted in the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. This is emphatically not a theological or doctrinal claim, but an historical one. When this historical fact is either rejected or dismissed then the only remaining claim is that Western values are rootless. They are preferences, and any person from any social or moral milieu need only be convinced that by embracing these values he or she will experience economic prosperity and domestic tranquility. This is simply not true.
When one rejects the fundamental equality of women, for example, there is no way to reach the conclusion that women are due the same legal and social protections as men enjoy. If one adopts the view that homosexuality should be punishable by death or exile, why should we be surprised when they argue that society’s laws must dictate this end.
Islamic terrorists are not merely wreaking havoc and acting out violently because they are frustrated by a lack of economic opportunity in the West or because of the vestiges of mercantilism and colonialism in their native homelands. These are people who honestly believe that a way of life more akin to life in Afghanistan is more pleasing to God than the way of life that has become synonymous with Western societies.
The deaths of the hundreds and now thousands of victims of Islamic terror, including the 134 who died ten years ago today in Paris, cannot be wasted. It is time to make sure that the West only remains hospitable to those who embrace the values of the West not as a mere preference, but as a prerequisite for citizenship. The West need not be dominated by religiously observant Jews and Christians to accomplish this, but we must recognize that a disdain for the source of the substance of our social cohesion and the common vocabulary of our morality will only further compromise our ability to resist those who seek to destroy it. We must muster the courage to admit the mistakes that were made at the point when social integration was assumed, but not required and find ways to rectify that quickly.
Trey Dimsdale is the president of the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation.
