NBC Terrorism Analyst: ‘No Excuse’ For Terrorism, But France Has Islamophobia

NBC News Terrorism Analyst Evan Kohlmann argued that while there was “no excuse” for the terrorist attacks on French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, France should try to deal with its Islamophobia and that “will hopefully help dissuade” potential terrorists on Wednesday’s “PoliticsNation” on MSNBC.

“To be fair, Islamophobia and prejudice against Arabs and Muslims in France is a real problem. I can tell you that, I grew up there. I saw this personally. A lot of my friends were of North African origin and the way that they were treated by the authorities and the police, it created a certain mentality. And the mentality is is that these people were at war with us. And unfortunately, some of the folks that have grown up with that mentality have pushed this to a new level. There is no doubt, there is no excuse for launching an attack on a newspaper office and murdering people, there’s no excuse, there’s no way of justifying that, but it’s also important that the French society realizes as a whole, if it wants to try to prevent these attacks in the future, one method is to try to identify would-be attackers before they launch an attack. Another method is to take away the ideological basis that they’re using to launch this. And t he sympathy that they get is because of the fact, again, there is a problem with Islamophobia in France…We have to try to resolve that issue. Because that will help resolve some of the cleavages and it will hopefully help dissuade some of the people that to have gone Syria and Iraq and elsewhere and who are trying to wage war against their own society. This doesn’t make any sense. But again, as long as there is this problem with Islamophobia in France, they’re always going to have these issues” he stated.

(h/t The Right Scoop)

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