I don’t think I have ever recommended the same author as the read of the day twice in a row. But yesterday Spengler brought a meaningful framework to Turkey’s attempted coup, and today he puts the Nice massacre in perspective, making absolute sense by looking at important factors other observers ignore. Writing in Asia Times as David P. Goldman, he deduces that Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a known criminal, was allowed to stay in France because he was a snitch for the police.

Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

Of course! It makes sense. You have to know something about the Muslim community and about the way police agencies really work to infer this. But with this in mind, the terrorists have sent a message to Muslims living in Western countries.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.

The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished.  The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The message is, in bin Laden’s term, that Islam is the strong horse, and degenerate, weak Western Modernity is the weak horse.

With Nice, the jihadists scored a major victory, presaging many more acts of terror.

Spengler has a solution to the dilemma. I encourage readers to read the whole thing to weigh his argument.