'Dangerous moment' for Europe

The sophisticated, military-style strike on Wednesday on a French newspaper known for satirising Islam staggered a continent already seething with anti-immigrant sentiment in some quarters, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France's National Front.

"This is a dangerous moment for European societies," said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College London. "With increasing radicalisation among supporters of jihadist organisations and the white working class increasingly feeling disenfranchised and uncoupled from elites, things are coming to a head."

Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam and radicalism, called the Paris assault, the most deadly terrorist attack on French soil since the Algerian war ended in the early 1960s, "a quantitative and therefore qualitative turning point," noting the target and the number of victims. "This was a maximum-impact attack," he said. "They did this to shock the public, and in that sense they succeeded."

Anti-immigrant attitudes have been on the rise in recent years in Europe, propelled in part by a moribund economy and high unemployment, as well as increasing immigration and more porous borders. The growing resentments have lifted the fortunes of established parties like the UK Independence Party in Britain and the National Front, as well as lesser-known groups like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West, which assembled 18,000 marchers in Dresden, Germany, on Monday.

In Sweden, where there have been three recent attacks on mosques, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist Sweden Democrats Party has been getting about 15 per cent support in recent public opinion polls.

Paris was traumatised by the attack, with widespread fears of another. "We feel less and less safe," said Didier Cantat, 34, standing outside the police barriers at the scene. "If it happened today, it will happen again, maybe even worse."

Cantat spoke for many when he said the attacks could fuel greater anti-immigrant sentiment. "We are told Islam is for God, for peace," he said. "But when you see this other Islam, with the jihadists, I don't see peace, I see hatred. So people can't tell which is the real Islam."

The weekly, Charlie Hebdo, in its raucous, vulgar and sometimes commercially driven effort to offend every Islamic piety, including the figure of the Prophet Muhammad, became a symbol of an aggressive French secularism that saw its truest enemy in the rise of conservative Islam in France, which is estimated to have the largest Muslim population in Europe.

On Wednesday, Islamic radicals struck back. "This secular atheism is an act of war in this context," said Andrew Hussey, a Paris-based professor of postcolonial studies. Professor Hussey is the author of The French Intifada, which describes the tangled relations between France and its Muslims, still marked by colonialism and the Algerian war.

"Politically, the official left in France has been in denial of the conflict between France and the Arab world," Professor Hussey said. "But the French in general sense it."

The attack left some Muslims fearing a backlash. "Some people when they think terrorism, think Muslims," said Arnaud N'Goma, 26, as he took a cigarette break outside the bank where he works. Samir Elatrassi, 27, concurred, saying that "Islamophobia is going to increase more and more. When some people see these kinds of terrorists, they conflate them with other Muslims. And it's the extreme right that's going to benefit from this."

The German interior minister, Thomas de Maziere, told reporters on Wednesday: "The situation is serious. There is reason for worry, and for precautions, but not for panic."

With each terrorist attack, however, the acceptability of anti-immigrant policies seems to reach deeper into the mainstream. In Britain, for example, which also has a large Muslim population, the UK Independence Party has called for a British exit from the European Union and sharp controls on immigration, emphasizing what it sees as dangers to British values and identity. The mainstream parties have competed in promising more controls on immigration, too.

"Large parts of the European public are latently anti-Muslim, and increasing mobilization of these forces is now reaching into the center of society," Mr. Neumann said. "If we see more of these incidents, and I think we will, we will see a further polarization of these European societies in the years to come."

Those who will suffer the most from such a backlash, he said, are the Muslim populations of Europe, "the ordinary normal Muslims who are trying to live their lives in Europe."

Nowhere in Europe are the tensions greater than in constitutionally secular France, with as many as six million Muslims, a painful colonial history in Algeria, Syria and North Africa, and a militarily bold foreign policy. That history has been aggravated by a period of governmental and economic weakness, when France seems incapable of serious structural, social and economic reform.

The mood of failure and paralysis is widespread in France. The Charlie Hebdo attack came on the publication day of a contentious new novel, Submission, by Michel Houellebecq, which describes the victory of Islam in France and the gradual collaboration of the society with its new rulers from within. Houellebecq, like the well-known caricaturists and editors who were killed at Charlie Hebdo, has been a symbol of French artistic liberty and license, and his publishers, Flammarion, were reported to be concerned that he and they could be another target.

©2015 The New York Times News Service