.... Thomson's arguments are already being mustered by officials as evidence for their policy decisions. The author's insistence that deradicalization is almost impossible has become increasingly accepted, including by the government's counter-terrorism establishment that now speaks increasingly of "disengagement."
Thomson is also being cited in dispatches in which French authorities argue for the closure of Salafist mosques. Most of all, the journalist is being called upon to explain how and why France and Europe could have for so long missed the warning signs from homegrown jihadis who nearly always made their intentions perfectly clear. But on this question - which is less about the jihadis themselves and more about the West - he has fewer answers.
"The reality is that no one knows how to solve the problem," Thomson told Slate's French edition. "The horrors have happened. I know that it can shock some to say it, but Europe is condemned to suffer the consequence of the mistakes it made in 2012, 2013, 2014 - to have let hundreds of French leave for Syria and Iraq and create a base there, with terrorist intentions, and to have not seen them leaving, or stopped them from going." [Chicago Tribune] Read more
