USA Today column answers the question, ‘Why France?’

By Lynn R. Mitchell

After the terrorist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris ten months ago followed up by Friday’s terror on the streets that took the lives of over 100 innocent victims and injured hundreds more, attention is once again centered on terrorism as some ask, “Why France?”

France’s longtime head of intelligence, Count Alexandre de Marenches, warned 20 years ago of the danger that faced his country. In the Age of Terrorism, the principal challenge to France is the presence “within our nation of another nation we do not understand, whose language we do not speak, whose customs we do not know, whose hopes and aspirations we do not share,” as noted by David A. Andelman in USA Today.