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Join Daniel Pipes on a trip to Israel's Negev desert, ​with side visits to explore​ the recent Gaza war. For more information, please click here. Dear Reader: I am helping Juan Sánchez, a PhD Marketing student at the University of Valencia in Spain, by alerting you to his research on the relationship between Internet activity and political participation. Filling his online survey requires about 10 minutes of your time. If you are willing to do so, please click here. Also, I appeared on Newsmax, January ​ 29 to discuss the ISIS hostages and related topics. Click here to view the segment. Yours sincerely, Daniel Pipes 3 French Soldiers, 3 Sitting Ducks by Daniel Pipes Israel Hayom February 4, 2015 http://www.danielpipes.org/15482/french-soldiers-sitting-ducks Share: Be the first of your friends to like this. Comes the news that another Islamist immigrant from Mali named Coulibaly has attacked another Jewish institution in France. The first one, Amedy Coulibaly, murdered four Jews at a kosher store in Paris on Jan. 9; this second one injured three soldiers yesterday as they protected a Jewish community center in Nice. Two soldiers on Jan. 20 stand outside the Jewish museum in Brussels where an Islamist killed four people in May 2014. Police say Moussa Coulibaly, about 30 years old, with a record of theft and violence, and apparently not related to Amedy, pulled a knife about 8 inches long out of a bag, injuring one soldier in the chin, one in the cheek, and one in the forearm. Coincidentally, I left Nice about four hours before this attack and had passed by that Jewish center a few days earlier, in the course of a tour of Muslim-majority areas in ten cities across France and Belgium. Those travels brought me repeatedly in proximity to the heavily armed soldiers who protect Jewish institutions and prompted several skeptical conclusions on my part about their presence: They are soldiers, not police, and so not trained to be alert to street problems. They tend to get distracted by their smartphones or pretty girls passing by. They clutch their assault rifles across their bodies, which leaves them vulnerable to someone driving by and shooting at them. As confirmed by today's attack, the ostensible protection they offer actually provokes Islamists and other antisemites. They are only posted temporarily to the Jewish institutions in the aftermath of the Hyper Cacher attack a month ago and before long will leave. They protect only the institutions themselves, not the people who come and go to them, who remain as vulnerable as ever. Two soldiers on Jan. 30 stand near the Grand Synagogue in Marseille. In short, the soldiers are sitting ducks whose deployment does little to protect the Jewish community or solve the larger problem of Islamist violence. But it does offer another instance of emotionally satisfying "security theater" which temporarily gives everyone a constructive sense of doing something. In contrast, the Kabbalah Center in Montpellier, France, did not have visible protection on Feb. 1. A real solution will require much deeper and longer-range steps that concern national identity, immigration policy, integration efforts, and effective policing. Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2015 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved. Related Topics:  Counter-terrorism, Muslims in Europe This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.

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