The Future of Terrorism?

An important question from Joshua Keating at Slate:

Given the amount of damage the Paris attack caused and the international attention it has garnered, the natural question is whether we’ll see more attacks of this type in the future. The director of MI5 warned Thursday that Britain is at risk of what are now being called “Paris-style” attacks. (It’s worth noting intelligence agencies have a habit of hyping threats to justify their own activities and budgets.) As for the United States, al-Qaida has been suggesting for years that the country is “awash with easily obtainable firearms” that could be used in a jihadist attack.

I’d note the anti-gun slant in that last line, but France is conspicuously not awash in firearms, and we all know what happened there last week. Getting the weapons to terror cells in any country might just be the easiest part of urban assault terror ops.

It’s also clear that “Paris-style attacks” are indeed the future of Islamic terror, or that in fact they’re the “right now” of Islamic terror. 9/11 required years of planning and months of training, and most important of all, just the right kind of sick mind to have conceptualized it. That mind has since been splattered across the walls of a third-floor bedroom in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

But the chaos in Syria and Iraq is a hearty training ground for two- or three-man units of urban terror commandos, who don’t require any concepts bigger or sicker than “go shoot up that magazine office” or “go shoot up that shopping mall.”

For more, let’s go to VodkaPundit Commenter “jpb05d” on Friday:

My point here is that four people shut down much of Paris and its environs. It required massive police and military assistance to track, locate, and kill them. Like the Joker said in The Dark Knight:

“Look what I did, to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hm? You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger, will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one, little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!”

The Joker’s point is that we fear anarchy, and we desire civilization and all its comforts. At the same time, its weakness is that when anarchy is introduced, most of us fall to pieces. That’s why he caused so much damage to Gotham in the movie, because of how powerless people felt against him. He attacked structures and institutions in the city, because they were symbols. The terrorists in France attacked symbols, as well. I’m pretty sure they’re not (mad) geniuses on the level the Joker, but they attacked them nonetheless and were pretty successful.

Some Islamists just want to watch the world burn.