Jihad Academy: Our mistakes against the Islamic State, by Nicolas Hénin

By dint of repeating that the worst is always certain, it ends up happening. The terrorist threat has caught up with us. Whether through the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or the non-intervention in Syria since 2011, we have fueled radicalization. And we continue to feed it, by our diplomatic compromises with dictators, by our refusal to hear the suffering of the people, by our incapacity to produce a counter-discourse. What is the responsibility of our societies in the making of these new jihadists? How are they formed? How did we play into the game of the Islamic State and relay its propaganda to allow it to recruit within our neighborhoods ever more candidates ready to fight in the name of a fantasized Islam? Nicolas Hénin delivers here a plea against the West which, by its errors or its inaction, contributed to the fiasco. With tracks, too, to try to repair what is still possible.