by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Tesla program
PBS ran a Frontline special, a
sort of follow-up to their previous show on the rise of ISIS, about “Terror in
Europe,” how the European Union became vulnerable to radical Islamic terror (a
name that for some reason itself has become controversial — as I’m writing this
I’ve just watched the third and, blessedly, last Presidential debate this year
between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and once again Trump couldn’t resist
getting in a blast against Clinton and President Obama for not using the words
“radical Islamic terror”) with particular emphasis on the horrific attacks in
Paris on November 13, 2015 and at the airport in Brussels on March 22, 2016.
The show was produced and directed by Ricardo Pollack but largely based on
reporting by European journalist Sebastian Rotella, and what seemed odd about
the show is that it took a schizoid vision towards how Europe should respond to
terrorism. At one point Pollack and Rotella seemed to be faulting Europe for
its open borders, which allow terror suspects to move untraced not only from
one European Union country to another but to leave for terror hot spots like
Syria and Yemen and then come back to Europe with no one the wiser. At other
points they seemed to be faulting the various EU countries for not being more united, and in particular for having
separate national intelligence services that don’t coordinate with each other.
Those who think the U.S. should be even tougher in the “war on terror” and more
inclined to forgo civil rights in the hunt against terrorists will fine plenty
of ammunition in this program. One thing Pollack and Rotella seemed especially
anxious to prove was that the Paris attacks were well coordinated and stemmed
from ISIS’s central base in Raqqa, Syria — they weren’t just isolated attacks
by individuals inspired by ISIS and recruited online but not connected to the
big terror leadership in Raqqa. The show traced the leadership of the Paris
attacks to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, who was a boyishly handsome young man (virtually
all these terrorists are boyishly
handsome young men) who was for some reason wearing a watchcap with the logo
“Thermo Foam” on the stock photo they had of him, but the bizarre networks
between him and other suspected terrorists got a bit hard to follow after a
while. The main message of this movie appeared to be that the terrorists aren’t
going away any time soon and European nations are going to have to do a lot
more coordination with each other to stop them — at a time when the fear of
terrorism, and particularly the fear that terrorists will take advantage of
Europe’s relatively open borders to sneak in and plan and carry out horrific
attacks, is one of the main issues that led to the “Brexit” (Britain’s vote to
leave the EU) and may encourage other countries to secede from the EU as well.
