French view

The excerpt below is from an essay by French philosopher Andre Glucksmann. It's a long but interesting read, and one can hope it, along with the election of Sarkozy, signifies something about changing French attitudes about the threat of terrorism.

But Glucksmann can't help making a French intellectual's typical mistake, which is to portray Islamist terror as nihilistic, an expression of "the will to nothingness." (The idea of pointless annihilation never ceases to have great romantic appeal to French intellectuals.) In fact, Islamist terror is highly purposeful, the point of the spear, in the service of a vision of society that was set out with great specificity in the 7th century. These people have a religiously-fueled program to change the world in particular ways, and terror is just one part of a larger program to achieve that goal. To label it 'fanaticism' is to miss the point, which is that it has a point.

What we are being assaulted by is not madness, but a modern form of tribal warfare. Tribal membership is not a matter of the boundaries of nation states, and those boundaries are of little consequence or interest. The goal of tribal war is generally not to exterminate the other, but to turn him into a subjugated tributary. Islam translates as 'submission to the will of Allah,' and his tribe is charged with enforcing his will among all infidel tribes. This mission from God is about as far from a nihilistic will to nothingness as it's possible to get. If that's what it was, these folks would be blowing themselves up in their own bedrooms in despair. Far from being in despair, they're energized with sanctified purpose. This is ultimately a contest of moral resources, not military hardware.

Byron

Maybe one day, we will view the last century with nostalgia, even if it was dealt Auschwitz and Hiroshima. For today’s terrorism strives to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror. During the cold war, the threat to man was dual: one, between two blocs, involved reciprocal annihilation; the other, terrorist, confined the savage extermination of civilian populations to the interior of each camp. Today, global terrorism eliminates geostrategic borders and traditional taboos. The last seconds of the condemned of Manhattan, of Atocha, and of the London Underground sent us two messages: “Here abandon all hope,” the Dantesque injunction carried by a bomb that wipes the slate clean; and “Here there is no reason why,” the nihilist gospel of SS officers. Hiroshima signified the technical possibility of a desert that approaches closer and closer to the absolute; Auschwitz represented the deliberate and lucid pursuit of total annihilation. The conjunction of these two forms of the will to nothingness looms in the black holes of modern hatred... The various forms of racism, chauvinism, fanaticism, and the apparent rebirth of an aggression that was thought to be a thing of the past surprise us. Should we not be surprised at our surprise? The understandable but wrongheaded choice to sleep peacefully, whatever the price, puts us all in jeopardy.