The knife attack in Paris on Monday should have been shocking. Three women were attacked in broad daylight near Porte de Clichy by a man armed with two large kitchen knives.
Two were seriously injured. Video footage showed bystanders intervening with remarkable courage, using a suitcase and other objects to disarm and restrain the attacker before an off-duty police officer took him into custody.
Yet the most troubling feature of the episode may be how quickly it risks becoming another entry in Europe’s growing catalogue of public violence: a brief eruption of horror, a flurry of official statements, an investigation into motive and, before long, a collective turning of the page.
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When apprehended, the suspect was reported to have said: “It is Allah who commanded me.” French authorities have stressed that his remarks appeared incoherent, and the precise motive remains under investigation. The national anti-terrorist prosecutor’s office is assessing whether the case warrants a formal terrorism inquiry. Those distinctions matter. A reported statement, however alarming, is not a substitute for evidence, and neither Islam nor Europe’s Muslim communities should be held responsible for the actions of an individual.
But neither should the words be dismissed merely because they are inconvenient.
They demand serious examination, particularly because the Paris attack occurred only days after the fatal assault on Berlin’s Pride celebrations. In that case, police identified the suspected perpetrator as someone known to them as part of the Islamist scene. The attack left one person dead and many others injured, turning an event intended to celebrate freedom and inclusion into a scene of terror.
The proximity of the two incidents is difficult to ignore. Berlin and Paris are among Europe’s most open, cosmopolitan and politically confident cities. Both regard public life, cultural diversity and individual liberty as defining strengths. Yet both have again been confronted by violence that appears, at minimum, to raise questions about ideological extremism and the vulnerability of public spaces.
Europe must resist two equal and opposite temptations. The first is collective suspicion: the crude and unjust assumption that the crimes of extremists can be attributed to entire religious or ethnic communities. That would betray the principles Europe claims to defend and would hand extremists the social division they seek.
The second is denial: the instinct to treat every episode as wholly disconnected, every warning sign as an unfortunate coincidence and every discussion of Islamist extremism as evidence of prejudice.
A mature democracy should be capable of rejecting both.
The Paris case may yet prove to have a motive unrelated to organised terrorism. Investigators must be allowed to establish the facts without political pressure. But the alleged declaration that “Allah commanded me” cannot simply be filed away as an incoherent remark before its meaning has been properly tested. If religious ideology played a role, the public deserves candour. If it did not, that too should be stated clearly.
The larger concern is that Europe is becoming accustomed to a recurring sequence. An attack occurs. Police respond. Political leaders express solidarity. Questions are raised about intelligence failures, radicalisation, mental health or missed warning signs. Then attention moves elsewhere until the next incident restarts the cycle.
What once seemed exceptional increasingly appears routine.
That is not because Europeans have become indifferent to suffering. The courage displayed by ordinary people in Paris offers powerful evidence to the contrary. Those who confronted an armed attacker did not wait for official instructions. They acted to protect strangers at considerable personal risk. Their response represented the best of civic society.
But public courage cannot compensate indefinitely for institutional complacency.
The Berlin attack also raises difficult questions about how known extremists are assessed, monitored and managed. A society that identifies an individual as a potential danger but fails to prevent violence must examine not only the individual’s actions, but the systems intended to protect the public.
Europe’s leaders should therefore avoid the familiar choice between empty reassurance and inflammatory rhetoric. Neither will make citizens safer. What is required is a more rigorous approach: better intelligence-sharing, stronger monitoring of credible extremist threats, effective intervention programmes and a willingness to acknowledge ideological motives when evidence establishes them.
This is not a call for panic. Nor is it an argument that Europe’s cities are uniquely unsafe. It is an argument against numbness.
The danger is not only that attacks will continue. It is that they will become so frequent, and the official response so predictable, that citizens will begin to regard them as an unavoidable feature of modern European life.
That would be a profound failure.
The Paris attacker was stopped by members of the public. Berlin’s victims were caught in an assault on a celebration of freedom. In both cases, Europe was reminded that openness requires protection and that tolerance does not mean refusing to confront intolerance.
The facts of the Paris investigation must be allowed to emerge. But the broader question is already clear: how many more warnings will Europe absorb before it accepts that what once seemed exceptional is beginning to look like the new norm?
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