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Whether, practically speaking, this will prove to be effective remains to be seen. But it is, to a substantial degree, their fight even more than it’s ours.
By the way: When I was in Istanbul a few weeks back, the Paris massacres were fresh and on everybody’s mind — the killings took place while my wife and I were aboard a plane nearing Amsterdam — and they came up in many sessions of the conference in which I was participating.
The Turks were wholeheartedly condemnatory of the Paris murders, but they couldn’t help but wonder why people in the West had had so little to say about the Ankara suicide bombings of a month before, which were almost certainly the work of ISIS and which had killed more than a hundred people at a train station in the Turkish capital.
People who want to make this simply a war between the West and a monolithically evil Islam overlook the fact that — the brutal oppression of Christians and Yazidis and others notwithstanding — most of the victims of radical Islamist violence have been, and continue to be, Muslims. One estimate that I’ve recently seen puts the figure at 70%.
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