“The Paris attack was a horrific surprise orchestrated by France’s enemies. It wasn’t a “wake-up call” unless you believe its ultimate author was France itself.”
“According to the French government, the Islamic State perpetrated Friday’s attacks. Rubio, however, said what occurred in Paris is a “clash of civilizations.””
“But ISIS isn’t a civilization. In parts of Iraq and Syria, it’s a self-declared, though unrecognized, state. Elsewhere, it’s a network of terrorist groups linked by a common ideology. “Civilizations” are cultural groupings. In calling the Paris attack a “clash of civilizations,” Rubio evoked Samuel Huntington’s famed 1993 Foreign Affairs essay of the same name. In that essay, Huntington defined “civilization” as “the broadest level of cultural identity people have.” And he suggested that the world contains “seven or eight” major ones: “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.””
“George W. Bush said America was at war with an ideology that had “hijacked Islam” in the same way Nazism had hijacked Germany or communism had hijacked Russia. Barack Obama has argued that even this assessment gives violent jihadists a stature they don’t deserve. Rubio, by contrast, is going far beyond Bush. And he’s doing exactly what the Islamic State wants: He’s equating ISIS with Islam itself.”
“Then there’s the end of Rubio’s statement: “[T]hey do not hate us because we have military assets in the Middle East. They hate us because of our values. They hate us because young girls here go to school. They hate us because women drive. They hate us because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs. They hate us because we’re a tolerant society.” This is simply false. The Islamic State may hate tolerance, liberty, and women’s rights. But that’s not why its cadres attacked Paris.”
““For more than a decade,” notes the Georgetown University and Brookings Institution terrorism expert Daniel Byman, the Islamic State “focused first and foremost on its immediate theater of operations.””
“The obvious answer is that the Islamic State fights those who block its path to power, whether they are liberal democracies or not.”
“That’s also how it sees France, which in September expanded its air strikes against ISIS from Iraq to Syria. Just last week, France announced it was sending an aircraft carrier to launch raids against the organization from the Persian Gulf. ISIS specifically cited France’s participation in the “Crusader campaign” in Syria in its statement claiming responsibility for the Paris attacks.”
“To be sure, the Islamic State doesn’t only define its enemies militarily. Its statement of responsibility also referenced those in France who “dare to curse our Prophet,” a reference to the attacks this January, claimed by al-Qaeda’s Yemen branch, against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons poking fun at the Prophet Muhammad. But as repulsive as the Hebdo attack was, it still wasn’t motivated, as Rubio suggests, by hatred of liberal democracy per se. Had the jihadists merely wanted to strike at tolerance and free speech, they could have attacked any French university, bookstore, library, or publication. The assailants, Said and Cherif Kouachi, chose Charlie Hebdo because, in their twisted worldview, mocking Muhammad represents a form of war against Islam. In Cherif’s words, “We defend the prophet.””
“Obviously, explaining the Islamic State’s attacks does not in any way justify them. Only a totalitarian sees cartoons as an act of war.”
“And viewing Friday’s attacks as a response to French foreign policy, as opposed to French liberalism, does not make French foreign policy wrong. It was the Islamic State’s genocidal attacks on the minority Yazidi sect in August 2014 that drew the United States and its European allies into the war against the group in the first place. Both morally and strategically, limiting—and ultimately eliminating—the Islamic State’s nightmarish dominion over millions of human beings justifies war.”
“a just war is still a war”