NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: ISIS Members Posing as Refugees Planned Paris-Style Attack on Düsseldorf.
It will be pointed out—and is true—that only a tiny fraction of Europe’s migrant population represent this kind of threat. But with machine guns and bombs, just a few bad actors can kill hundreds. If there is another attack like Paris, European public opinion will not coldly calculate the statistical relationship between refugees and terrorists. Unlike their elites, who derive a psychic benefit from seeing their countries be so generous, the European public sees this not as the “cost” of an otherwise-desirable “refugees welcome” policy, but an added downside to a situation that increasingly they deplore to begin with.
Europe’s elite has an unspoken but increasingly clear plan for dealing with all of this: give the security services wide latitude (often much wider than their counterparts have in the U.S.) to chase down the bad guys, don’t say anything more than is absolutely necessary to the public that suggests that immigrants or Islam might have anything to do with it, police the public square and keep the far-right down (including online), and pray it all passes quietly. The main focus is to prevent a backlash against Muslims and/or immigrants on the one hand, while preventing terror on the other—two concerns seen as balanced poles to be avoided.
But there’s a problem—or rather two. Firstly, as long as Europe doesn’t have answers either to the root of the refugee problem—Syria and Libya—or to the enforcement situation at its borders (other than “pray Erdogan doesn’t alter the deal any further), then the elites have no real idea how long this will persist, while the strain wears away on the fabric of European politics. And the second is that, as an older generation of terrorists once said, “[R]emember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
That’s the problem with playing defense.