French attack raises doubts about Hollande

By Nicholas Vanocur

The Socialist president rallied the French after the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. This time, he'll have to explain why his security services failed.

When Islamist terrorists struck France five months ago, President François Hollande seized on a rare moment of national unity to preside over a massive peace rally in defense of free speech — a move that earned him his biggest ever one-month gain in opinion polls.
That scenario will not be repeated in the wake of Friday’s gruesome attack in Isère.
This time, the mood is less one of palpable relief after a collective trial than of anger, sadness and exasperation, all centered
around a question: How could a well-equipped intelligence community let yet another known Islamist radical strike on French soil, so soon and in such barbaric fashion?
The pattern is worrying. As was the case when two armed men attacked the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in January, or when one of their acolytes took hostages at a kosher supermarket near Paris — or when Mohamed Merah went on a killing spree in Toulouse three years ago — the perpetrators were all known to police, to varying decrees.
Each time, intelligence case officers charged with monitoring hundreds of radicalized individuals knew the subjects but either lost track of them, were led astray by manipulative subjects, or simply missed the cues of an imminent attack.
The failure appears more galling after Prime Minister Manuel Valls pledged in January to invest billions of taxpayer euros to beef up internal security and hire thousands of new intelligence officers to combat terrorism and counteract jihadi ideology.
Other measures designed to thwart terrorism, including a poorly funded de-radicalization scheme, anti-jihad propaganda online and plans to improve training for imams, have not discouraged dozens more French youths from seeking to join Islamist groups in Syria — nor did they prevent Friday’s fresh outbreak of horror.
Already deeply unpopular and facing a presidential election in two years, Hollande will now have to fend off pointed questions about his government’s security record from opponents on the right, including far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
It will be harder for him to counter arguments that far tougher medicine is needed to combat terrorism. Among the distinctly anti-European proposals being floated today in France: a full shutdown of the country’s open borders, a ban on the building of new mosques and more freedom-killing surveillance to detect radical Islamists.
Hollande and Valls will benefit from their positions of authority as the French seek reassurance after a tragedy. But unlike in January, when the attacks opened an opportunity to reaffirm the values of free speech and tolerance, this time France’s Socialist leaders will be on the defensive to explain why their counter-terrorism isn’t yielding the desired results.
In coming days the questions are likely to focus on a few distinct themes:

Intelligence failures

French police sources have said the 35-year-old man of Moroccan origin who is in their custody was known to the DGSI internal security service.
That suggests he was being monitored for radical Islamist activity, and may have had contacts with a group outside of France. In the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo, all three assailants either claimed a direct link to a foreign terrorist organization, as was the case with kosher supermarket hostage taker Ahmedy Coulibaly with Al Qaeda in Yemen, or to be acting in one’s name, as with the Kouachi brothers who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
As more details emerge of Friday’s attack, and the suspect’s affiliation with the Islamic State is clarified, political opponents are sure to ask why French intelligence failed to intervene on time, or why they seemed so poorly prepared. Indeed, for hours police had no experts on hand to decipher the Arabic script on a scarf found at the scene.
When Nicolas Sarkozy was president, Hollande himself questioned intelligence failures after a series of terrorist attacks in Toulouse in 2012. It had emerged that the same DGSI service had recently questioned the perpetrator, Mohamed Merah, about a series of trips he had made to Pakistan and the Palestinian territories, but lost track of him after his return. Hollande called that a “failure” at the time and demanded answers from Sarkozy’s government.
Now Hollande faces the same questions, and they will resonate even more loudly because his government enacted a series of anti-terrorism measures in the wake of the January attacks on Charlie Hebdo. Indeed Hollande and his tough-talking prime minister Valls will have to explain why the security apparatus failed again, despite moves to invest billions of euros to beef up security, recruit thousands of new intelligence officers and pay for slick anti-jihad propaganda campaigns.
A new surveillance bill designed to pick up on communication between potential terrorists was only approved by parliament, too late for the victim of the Air Products attack. Now the field is open for Hollande’s far-right opponents like Marine Le Pen to holler for more radical solutions to fight terrorism: shutting down borders, expelling Islamist radicals from France, and stripping dual nationals suspected of lslamist activity of their passports.

Rampant radicalism

The suspect appears to have been an employee of the victim, a 50-year-old manager at the site. The attacker was injured in the blast and arrested, and his wife was later taken into custody as well, according to media reports citing security sources.
All the terrorists in recent attacks have been French citizens from immigrant backgrounds who embraced a radical form of Islam, to one degree or another, and there is a strong likelihood investigations will turn up the same profile in the Isère episode.
Fresh details will refocus minds on the problem of Islamist radicalization in France, which has a larger Muslim minority than any other European country, has suffered more domestic attacks than any of its neighbors in the past decade, and provides more volunteers for jihad in Syria than any Western nation.
Hollande’s response to remote indoctrination by groups like ISIS has been inadequate. Inhibited by a strict secular tradition, the government has balked at recruiting moderate Muslim preachers to fight radicalization — an approach that has yielded results in other countries — and devoted scanty resources to anti-jihad programs.
Parents who worry their children may be becoming radicalized can now call a hotline to seek government help. But there are too few social workers and religious experts talking radicals back from the brink, and the state’s main response has been repressive — slapping ever heavier prison sentences on anyone convicted of aiding or seeking to join terrorist groups.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told a Jewish group in June that he wanted tougher laws to combat religious indoctrination in a country where authorities estimate that more than 1,100 people are involved in jihadist circles. After Friday’s attack, whose beheading brought to mind the Islamic State’s sadistic execution videos, he and Hollande may have to explain why they haven’t done everything in their power to check the spread of Islamist ideology on what is clearly a fertile breeding ground.

Authority still trumps

But while Hollande may struggle to explain why his security services failed, recent history suggests that French voters tend to overlook such controversy and rally instead behind authority in such circumstances.
After the attacks in January, when Hollande and other leaders led a procession in a massive “Je Suis Charlie” march, the president’s personal approval score jumped by a whopping 19 percent in one poll, only to fall back into the pits the following month.
This time Hollande, who faces a presidential election in two years, will not get the same bump as there is little chance of yet another dramatic upswell of patriotic feelings. But to many, he and Valls will still look like the most reassuring political leaders in the room, notably when compared to untested quantities like Marine Le Pen.