Fintan O’Toole: Babbling commentary is music to the ears of Islamic State

If you go to a funeral, you know what to say to the chief mourners: “I’m sorry for your trouble.” It’s a necessary cliche. Words are not up to the job, especially if the person died suddenly or tragically or too young. Without the ritual formula, you might start to babble incoherently or to mumble inadvertently insulting banalities. So you stick to the short, simple and well-tested phrase.

But when confronted with an atrocity as shocking as that perpetrated by Islamic State in Paris last weekend, it is not enough to say we are sorry for the terrible, irredeemable trouble that has been brought on hundreds of innocent families.

Or at least there is a cohort of professionals – journalists, security analysts, columnists, experts, academics – for whom it is not enough. There is a dark hole of horror that must be filled. The 24-hour news channels, the newspaper special supplements and the talk shows abhor the vacuum of stunned silence.

Some of it can be filled with real information. But there is also an immediate demand for understanding, for some language that is at least shaped like an answer. The problem is that, like mourners who can’t stick to the ritual decencies at a funeral, too many commentators end up babbling. We say foolish things. They are usually well meant, but they are dangerously inadequate.

Here are five silly things repeatedly said or written in the days after the Paris massacres:

1 “Paris will never the same again.” But Paris will be the same. Terrorist atrocities change forever the lives of the bereaved and the survivors. They do not change the lives of big cities.

Dublin was not irreversibly changed by the horrific bombings in 1974. London was not fundamentally changed by the 7/7 atrocities in 2005. The bombings that killed more people (191) in Madrid on March 11th, 2004 than the Paris attacks (129) did not alter the nature of the Spanish capital. Even New York was not really transformed by the 9/11 atrocities.

By the middle of this week, daily life in Paris was already returning to normal. This is what cities do: they carry on. The daily rush of life pauses, frozen in shock, and then it unfreezes and resumes as before.

Human beings are extraordinarily good at reimposing “normality” even after the most shattering disruptions. And it is important to say this. The idea that Paris will never be the same again flatters the murderers. They want, perhaps need, to believe their vile acts have an impact at the level of eternity. They don’t. They are sad and dirty footnotes.

2 “Senseless acts of violence.” Why do we think murders are somehow more repugnant if they are irrational? Is rational murder nicer?

The Paris massacres are many things – disgusting, indefensible, appallingly cruel – but they are not senseless. They were carefully planned and entirely purposeful. They are part of a strategy to polarise western societies into extremist Islamism and extremist xenophobia. It matters that we understand that strategy so we do not end up inadvertently fulfilling it.

3 The attacks are a “result of the US invasion of Iraq”. Nobody could deny that the invasion of Iraq and its subsequent interaction with the implosion of Syria are important factors in the attacks. But 9/11 happened before the Iraq invasion. There is no simple line between the folly and criminality of the Iraq invasion and Paris last Friday night.

Saudi Arabia has been promoting an extremist version of Islam, similar ideologically to that of Islamic State, for decades. The corrupt tyrannies of secular regimes in the Middle East, the running sore of Palestine, the hysterical misogyny of a threatened patriarchy, the alienation of Muslim minorities in European cities, the emergence of Sunni/Shia sectarian conflict: there are many interlocking causes of the development of jihadist terrorism. Oversimplification is satisfying but futile.

4 The attacks are part of a “war on fun” because they targeted young people having a night out. Terrorists have repeatedly attacked restaurants, cafes, markets, bars, beaches, cinemas and other places where people gather in Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Bali, Kenya, Mumbai and elsewhere. Why? Because they’re soft targets where you can kill a lot of people quickly and efficiently.

The IRA massacred 21 people enjoying a night out in Birmingham pubs in 1974, many of them very young (the youngest was 17). Was that a “war on fun”? Or was it rather the zealots of a fanatical and murderous ideology looking for the easiest opportunities to give it expression?

The Paris attacks are no more a war on fun than the Madrid and London train bombings were a war on transport. Their horror should not be subsumed into a narrative that feeds the killers’ ludicrous image of themselves as austere Puritans wreaking godly vengeance on sinners.

5 The Paris attacks "threaten western civilisation". The highly intelligent historian Niall Ferguson, for example, wrote a staggeringly silly piece in the Sunday Times suggesting the attacks were comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire and "the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night" were entirely reminiscent of the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410 AD. This hysteria exactly mirrors the hyperinflated apocalyptic rhetoric of Islamic State itself.

Need it even be said that it is nonsense? “Western civilisation”, if we must call it that, has had to struggle with one terrorist threat or another – fascist, anarchist, communist, nationalist, white supremacist, Islamist – almost continually over the last 50 years.

Even when the official response has been incompetent and ill-judged, none of those terror groups has achieved its specific aims, still less destroyed an entire civilisation. Each in turn has been seen off, as Islamic State will be. In any case, Islamic State’s main threat is not to “western civilisation”, it is to other Muslims. Last year, in Iraq alone, it murdered over 10,000 Muslim civilians. The night before Paris, Islamic State killed 43 innocent people in Beirut. Are these deaths less important because they didn’t threaten “western civilisation”?

This nonsense is not harmless. It gratifies the terrorists by telling them just what they want to hear. In essence, Islamic State is a gang, albeit a particularly virulent, opportunistic, well-funded, amoral and ambitious gang. It does what gangs do: gives misogynistic young men the freedom to live out fantasies of murder, rape , plunder and power, with the bonus of a cod-religious sanction.

Such gangs are familiar both from history and from contemporary life: crusaders, mercenaries, Bloods, Zetas, the various “armies” that have ravaged large parts of Africa. They inflict immense suffering on innocent people, as Islamic State will do before it eventually runs out of resources and recruits. We have to take them very seriously indeed.

What we don’t have to do is to puff up their lethal vanity still further by telling them they can change us forever, that they are the agents of an inevitable vengeance for the West’s follies or that our civilisation is so fragile that a few pathetic lost boys with guns in their hands and hate in their hearts can bring it to its knees.