Following the massacre in Nice yesterday, I am hearing comments on radio that, together, would have one believe that it could not happen here, that it’s somehow the fault of the French themselves. I think that’s a dangerous dream.

Americans have to get past the Irma la Douce fantasy about France that many still shelter in their hearts. The French do not wile away their days at sidewalk cafes terraces brimming with insouciance. (That means a “devil-may care” attitude.) France is an industrial society pretty much like the US though without most of the inventiveness. Its economic policies for the past twenty years have been stinky. The causes of the French stagnation would sound familiar to any Bernie Sanders supporter. The current government of the Socialist Party differs from the Obama administration in matters of degree only. The same la-la-la Land dream occupies the minds of most of the French Left as of most American liberals. If anything, the French tend to be more realistic because they have had more experience of its failures.

It’s not the case that France has had an open borders policy as I have heard say on conservative radio today. Nevertheless, for historical reasons, France probably has many more Muslims proportionately than the US has. “Probably” because no one knows who is really a Muslim; no one really knows who is really a Catholic. The only thing that’s more or less known is the number of Muslims names. There are many. Most are French citizens by birth.

The current French Minister of Labor has a Muslim name. People with Muslim names are present throughout all levels of French society. They are in banking, in entertainment. The most popular French citizens probably have Muslims names; they are in sports. By and large, such people are well integrated within a mostly religiously indifferent French society. That is, as well as can be done within an economically stagnant society with a permanent unemployment rate of 10%, 20% for the young. How much discrimination there is against people with Muslim names is anyone’s guess. The fact is that immigrants with Muslim names keep trying hard to move to France. Not many try to move to Egypt or even to Saudi Arabia, for example, where the fate of immigrants may be even worse.

This large population with Muslim names is seen from the US as providing a bottomless pool of jihadist recruits. That’s true but it should also be an asset in combating violent jihadism. Thousands of French police personnel have Muslim names. (The police officer murdered outside Charlie Hebdo was one such.) Hundreds if not thousands of police and other security personnel are fluent in diverse dialects of Arabic. This is more, of course, than can be said of their American counterparts.

The French intelligence services have earned the respect of their allies. The country was not caught sleeping after the Bataclan slaughter. It had been under a state of emergency lightly suspending some personal rights. The state of emergency was slated to be removed in the coming days. Perhaps, someone did not want it to stop although it’s hard to believe given how light it was.

As I write on July 15th, there has been no claim by any Islamist organization. The only thing known is that the driver of the truck, the murder weapon, was a person of Tunisian origin who was probably a French citizen. That’s not enough to prove a link to Islamist terrorist organizations. The man was known to the police as a petty criminal (a familiar story). Note that a petty criminal is one who is not very successful, one at the bottom of the criminal pecking order. He was also undergoing a difficult divorce. I speculate that jihadist organizations provide people of Muslim origin undergoing personal difficulties a high-sounding excuse for venting their anger on the innocent many.

If there was indeed an involvement of ISIS or Al Qaida, no reason for the attack on civilians need to be found. They hate Westerners, irrespective of what Westerners actually do. The fact that France has been publicly involved in fighting Islamist terrorism in two theaters – in Iraq next to the US and in Mali may have made it a priority target for jihadists.

With this group assassination the lack of scruples of violent jihadists is confirmed again. Given the number of victims, the circumstance and the location of the crime, there is a 100% certainty that some of the victims have Muslim names. (By the way, the best video of the event was supplied by an Egyptian tourist.) I wonder if this is going to prompt Muslim organizations everywhere, including in the US, to do more than passively deplore the crime. I wonder if this is going to lead to request for energetic surveillance measures involving the breeding marshes of violent jhadists, which are not Lutheran seminaries or Buddhist monasteries. I ask because, under Obama, in this country, we are paralyzed by political correctness as if avoiding bruising the feelings of some was well worth a few hundred blown up civilians here and there.