Nice attack: A problem of assimilation

Dubai - Since the beginning of last year, France has been in the cross hairs of terrorists. On wovember 13, terrorists targeted a concert venue, a football stadium and terrace restaurants in Paris, killing at least 130 people.

Nice, a city of 350,000, has a history as a flamboyant, aristocratic resort but is also a gritty metropolis. It has seen dozens of its Muslim residents travel to Syria to fight, a path taken by previous Daesh attackers in Europe.

"Neither the place nor the date are coincidental," a former French intelligence agent and security consultant, Claude Moniquet, told France-Info, noting the terrorist presence in Nice and the fact that July 14 marks France's revolution.
"Tragic paradox that the subject of Nice attack was the people celebrating liberty, equality and fraternity," European Council President Donald Tusk said on Twitter.   
Since the beginning of last year, France has been in the cross hairs of terrorists. On wovember 13, terrorists targeted a concert venue, a football stadium and terrace restaurants in Paris, killing at least 130 people.
CNN reasoned that before the Nice massacre, previous attacks shared one connection: Extremists claimed responsibility for them.
Thursday's attack at the heart at of a city considered a tourist hotspot for its beautiful beaches and vibrant crowds left a stunned nation asking: why France again?
CNN quoted experts as saying previous terror attacks have been by terrorists from disenfranchised communities. "You have a very large disaffected North African community. They are French citizens now ... but they've been excluded from French society," Robert Baer, a former CIA operative, told CNN's Don Lemon.
"I went to school in France ... I worked there and they are really totally excluded," Baer added.
"And it keeps getting worse since attacks in Paris because they are using profiling and they are stopping people who look like Arabs on trains and buses, checking their IDs which we don't even do in this country. The French have been very aggressive ... radicalisation of people of North African origin is actually picking up rather than lessening," CNN quoted Baer as saying.
Tom Fuentes, a former FBI assistant director who served on the executive board of Interpol, told CNN homegrown terrorism is a major concern in Europe. "We have third generation immigrants that came there from Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia ... and even when their children are born in France and their children's children are born in France, they don't consider themselves French," he said.
"These immigrant populations stay in confined neighbourhoods and only assimilate with each other and aren't accepted into the general population."
reporters@khaleejtimes.com