If there’s one country that knows how Britain feels in the wake of last week’s suicide bombing in Manchester, it’s France. Similar horror has been visited on the French several times in the past five years with nearly 250 slaughtered at the hands of Islamic extremists, so the French are all too familiar with the grief, the rage and the shock still being felt across the Channel.
But not Britain’s incomprehension. At first, maybe, when Mohammed Merah shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren in a Toulouse playground five years ago, but since the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered in January 2015 the French have understood what is going on.
The Islamists are waging an ideological war on the West, one that has little to do with foreign policy, colonial legacies or social deprivation, or any other excuse routinely trotted out. They kill because of an ideology that seeks no compromise in its quest for a caliphate in Europe.
That the French now realise this is in no small part because of a political scientist called Gilles Kepel, the most incisive and certainly the most courageous (his work has earned him a place on an Isis death list) of all French writers when it comes to Islamism.
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