Terrific summing up by Gideon Lichfield of Quartz:

But as the outrage dissolves and the mourning ends, the question will remain: What is the right relationship between free speech and a free society? Freedom of speech is never absolute. There are restrictions for hate speech, libel, state secrets, and so on. A blanket insistence on free speech at all costs is no less dogmatic than a blanket insistence on sharia law. Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire was arguably racist and deliberately provocative. What we are defending when we defend its journalists is not their right to publish without limits, but their right not to get killed for doing it.

American graphic journalist Joe Sacco addressed this elegantly in a cartoon published on Friday. After affirming—and exercising—his right to vilify Muslims, Jews, black people, and anyone else, he wrote, “But perhaps when we tire of holding up our middle finger we can try to think about why the world is the way it is and what it is about Muslims in this time and place that makes them unable to laugh off a mere image. And if we answer, ‘Because something is deeply wrong with them’—certainly something was deeply wrong with the killers—then let us drive them from their homes and into the sea… for that is going to be far easier than sorting out how we fit in each other’s world.”

And then there’s Simon Jenkins, who at the moment is a fountain of good sense. For example:

Today’s French terrorists want a similarly hysterical response. They want another twist in the thumbscrew of the surveillance state. They want the media to be told to back off. They want new laws, new controls, new additions to the agenda of illiberalism. They know that in most western nations, including Britain, there exists a burgeoning industry of illiberal bureaucrats with empires to build. This industry may be careful of public safety, but it is careless of the comfort and standing it offers the terrorist. There will now be cries from the security services and parliament for more powers and more surveillance.

Few would be so foolish as to want any group, in this case journalists, to be left unprotected from acts such as those that have occurred in Paris. Huge resources have already been allocated to forestalling terrorist acts, and that is appropriate. But these acts are crimes and should be treated as such. They are for assiduous policing, at which Britain has so far been reasonably successful. They are not for constitutional deterioration.

Only weakened and failing states treat these crimes as acts of war. Only they send their leaders diving into bunkers and summoning up ever darker arts of civil control, now even the crudities of revived torture. Such leaders cannot accept that such outrages will always occur, everywhere. They refuse to respect limits to what a free society can do to prevent them.

Well, yes, but what we’re overlooking here is the role that Western media and electorates play in all this. One of the reasons why politicians react so irrationally to atrocities is because they fear that they will be crucified by the mass media and its readership if they are not seen to react theatrically, promise new measures, increased resources, more surveillance, etc. It seems that cool heads garner no votes, or editorial plaudits either.

From Joe Stiglitz

Those who thought that the euro could not survive have been repeatedly proven wrong. But the critics have been right about one thing: unless the structure of the eurozone is reformed, and austerity reversed, Europe will not recover.

The drama in Europe is far from over. One of the EU’s strengths is the vitality of its democracies. But the euro took away from citizens – especially in the crisis countries – any say over their economic destiny. Repeatedly, voters have thrown out incumbents, dissatisfied with the direction of the economy – only to have the new government continue on the same course dictated from Brussels, Frankfurt, and Berlin.

But for how long can this continue? And how will voters react? Throughout Europe, we have seen the alarming growth of extreme nationalist parties, running counter to the Enlightenment values that have made Europe so successful. In some places, large separatist movements are rising.

Now Greece is posing yet another test for Europe. The decline in Greek GDP since 2010 is far worse than that which confronted America during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Youth unemployment is over 50%…

Stay tuned.

The terrible thing about atrocities is that they cause us to lose our judgement just when we need it most. We saw it with 9/11 — but, interestingly, much less with the 7/7 bombings in London. The events in Paris are terrible, but they took place in a context, and it will be the context that decides what happens in the coming months and years.

That’s why it was good to see Adam Shatz’s piece in the LRB today:

Already, anyone who dares to examine the causes of the massacre, the reasons the Kouachi brothers drifted into jihadist violence, is being warned that to do so is to excuse the real culprit, radical Islam: ‘an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades’, as George Packer wrote on the New Yorker blog. Packer says this is no time to talk about the problem of integration in France, or about the wars the West has waged in the Middle East for the last two decades. Radical Islam, and only radical Islam, is to blame for the atrocities. We are in what the New Yorker critic George Trow called the ‘context of no context’, where jihadi atrocities can be safely laid at the door of an evil ideology, and any talk of pre-emptive war, torture and racism amounts to apologia for atrocities.

We have been here before: the 11 September attacks led many liberal intellectuals to become laptop bombardiers, and to smear those, such as Susan Sontag, who reminded readers that American policies in the Middle East had not won us many friends. The slogan ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’ expresses a peculiar nostalgia for 11 September, for the moment before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, before Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, before all the things that did so much to tarnish America’s image and to muddy the battle lines. In saying ‘je suis Charlie Hebdo’, we can feel innocent again. Thanks to the massacre in Paris, we can forget the Senate torture report, and rally in defence of the West in good conscience.

The other interesting fallout of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity is that Sam Huntingdon’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis will get a new lease of life.

The great Irish second-row forward, Willie John McBride, was famous for his strategy of “getting your retaliation in first”. Now the head of one of Britain’s security agencies has adapted the idea for modern circumstances: get your excuses in early.

The head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has called for new powers to help fight Islamist extremism, warning of a dangerous imbalance between increasing numbers of terrorist plots against the UK and a drop in the capabilities of intelligence services to snoop on communications.

Parker described the Paris attack as “a terrible reminder of the intentions of those who wish us harm” and said he had spoken to his French counterparts to offer help.

Speaking to an invited audience at MI5 headquarters, he said the threat level to Britain had worsened and Islamist extremist groups in Syria and Iraq were directly trying to orchestrate attacks on the UK. An attack on the UK was “highly likely” and MI5 could not give a guarantee it would be able to stop it, he said.

“Strikingly, working with our partners, we have stopped three UK terrorist plots in recent months alone,” he said. “Deaths would certainly have resulted otherwise. Although we and our partners try our utmost, we know that we cannot hope to stop everything.”

The hidden agenda of the speech is, of course, to ensure that surveillance capabilities of the security and intelligence agencies are not constrained by any namby-pamby concerns about privacy and civil liberties. (The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament is currently completing an investigation following the Snowden revelations. Having given evidence to the inquiry, I do not expect much change, but senior securocrats never leave anything to chance.)

Parker’s speech has had the desired impact on UK media — respectful, overly-credulous media coverage, with the BBC Today Programme asserting that we are all “nervous” as a result of what’s happened in Paris. Sir Malcolm Rifkind — the Chairman of the ISC Committee and Parker’s ostensible overseer — added his voice to the chorus, asserting that the two Paris attackers must have been communicating with Yemen; the implication was that these communications ought to have been monitored and intercepted. Which led one to wonder how Rifkind knew this. But his message was clear: don’t mess with our surveillance capabilities.

So far, the fallout from the Charlie Hebdo massacre has followed the standard pattern: terrorist atrocity –> outrage –> massive publicity –> calls for more surveillance and more resources for intelligence agencies. One wonders when it will occur to people that this is a positive feedback loop (aka a vicious circle). Given the statistical probability that there will be more atrocities, and that the security services will miss some of them (as the MI5 chief predicts), we’re heading for a full-blown national security state. In which case Bin Laden will have won, hands down.

Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result”. Maybe it’d be worth trying a different approach to these terrorist threats. As Paul Bernal puts it:

If the resources – time, money, energy, intelligence – currently put into mass surveillance systems that are unproven, have huge and damaging side-effect, and are even potentially counterproductive, were, instead, devoted to a more intelligent, targeted approach, it might even be that counterterrorism is more effective. We should be looking for new ways, not going down paths that are costly in both financial and human terms.

The fundamental problem is that terrorism, by its very nature, is hard to deal with. That’s something we have to face up to – and not try to look for silver bullets. No amount of technology, no level of surveillance, will solve that fundamental problem. We shouldn’t pretend that it can.