IN A STATEMENT PUBLISHED in its online
magazine, Dabiq, this February, the militant group the Islamic State warned
that “Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two
choices.” Weeks earlier, a massacre had occurred at the Paris offices of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The attack stunned French society,
while bringing to the surface already latent tensions between French Muslims
and their fellow citizens. While ISIS initially endorsed the killings on purely
religious grounds, calling the murdered cartoonists blasphemers, in Dabiq the
group offered another, more chilling rationale for its support.
The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group
said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,”
representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said,
Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own
societies.
Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their
fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon
be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and
thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the
group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.
Last Friday, at roughly 9:20 p.m. local
time in Paris, the Islamic State delivered on that threat. A group of young Muslim
men pledging allegiance to the group, armed with firearms and explosives,
carried out a series of coordinated bombing and shooting attacks on civilians
in the heart of the city.
