Mark Krikorian has dedicated a career to warning of the dangers of rapid immigration without assimilation. On Thursday, he got a first-hand taste in France of the possible consequences.
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Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, is vacationing with his family in the Mediterranean resort city of Nice. He said he went out to watch a fireworks show along a boardwalk in celebration of Bastille Day. When he returned to his apartment, he heard a loud commotion about a half-mile away.
“My first thought, obviously, was somebody was shooting or something. And it seemed pretty intense with it being, you know, half a mile away. But because of the Paris attacks, everybody was kind of primed for something like this to happen.”
“People start just screaming, knocking tables over and some windows were broken and that sort of stuff, and it was really hysterical,” he said. “My first thought, obviously, was somebody was shooting or something. And it seemed pretty intense with it being, you know, half a mile away. But because of the Paris attacks, everybody was kind of primed for something like this to happen.”
Krikorian said he initially thought people were overreacting to a relatively small event.
“It turns out to have been a much bigger attack than I thought at first,” he said.
Much bigger.
According to news accounts, the perpetrator drove a truck onto the sidewalk and crashed through a crowd of holiday revelers. Authorities said at least 84 people died and dozens suffered injuries. Police shot the driver to death and discovered a cache of guns and bombs inside the truck.
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“The MO certainly resonates as a jihadist attack,” said Kyle Shideler, director of threat assessment for the Center for Security Policy.
Shideler said the French have taken a hard line over the past couple of years in the wake of several large-scale terrorist attacks.
“It just kind of shows you what a difficult situation they are in with their security because they have let things go this far,” he said.
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Krikorian said it would not surprise him if the attacks were ordered or inspired by the Islamic State or a similar group.
“This is the waves of successive immigration,” he said. “It won’t surprise me at all if this, you know, someone of Muslim background.”
A pair of terrorism experts told LifeZette that Western nations should brace themselves for more attacks.
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“If this turns out to be a jihadi attack, all democratic governments are vulnerable,” said Sebastian Gorka, the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. “They’ve said in their English-language publications that all you have to look for is high concentrations of unarmed citizens. That’s exactly what we’ve seen.”
Gorka recalled that an early edition of Inspire, an English-language al-Qaeda magazine, published a picture of a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The point, he said, is that a committed jihadist does not need guns or bombs to wreak havoc.
“Whether it’s a brick or a knife or poison, the point is that you kill the infidel,” said Gorka, author of “Defeating Jihad.”
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump indicated he would postpone an announcement planned for Friday morning to introduce his running mate, widely reported to be Indiana Gov. Mike Pence. He told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly he would ask Congress for a formal declaration of war.
“This is war,” he said. “If you look at it, it’s war, coming from all different parts. And frankly, it’s war, and we’re dealing with people without uniforms.”
Tawfik Hamid, who runs a website called IslamforPeace.org told LifeZette that he had just finished giving a lecture in Las Vegas about radical Islam and how to confront it when he heard about the Nice attack. He said it is further evidence that the United States and other Western allies are not successfully addressing the dangers of Islamic terrorism.
“It indicates one thing, one word — failure,” he said. “We need to fight radicalism and not just terrorism. Terrorism is just a symptom of the disease … If we don’t address this, it will get worse.
Hamid said the United States needs to pressure its Muslim allies to reform the way Islam is taught in their countries and take other steps to defeat the ideology. He said intense hatred combined with technological advances in weaponry is a lethal mix.
“Instead of dozens, you’ll see an attack that will kill thousands or more,” he said.
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Krikorian, of the immigration think tank, said France has a small refugee population but a fairly substantial number of immigrants. He said those immigrants, and particularly their children, create the conditions for radical Islam to spread and metastasize. The same is true in the United States, he added.
“The original immigrants are comparing their situation to life in the old country, which was terrible,” he said. “So they’re actually more or less satisfied … The problem is when you have kids, they’re not comparing their lives to life in the old country. They’re comparing their lives to other Americans.”
Gorka agreed.
“America is absolutely not immune,” he said. “The only difference between us and Europe is we don’t have the high numbers of unintegrated immigrant communities.”
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