Why the West Started Blaming the Victims of Terrorism

Last Thursday was the tenth anniversary of coordinated attacks by Islamic State on Paris—the most successful of which targeted concertgoers at the Bataclan theater—that killed 130 people and seriously wounded scores more. Although the terrorist assault was not met with large-scale protests calling for France’s destruction, there were those in France itself who claimed that their country “deserved it,” or that such acts of wanton violence were merely “the price of France’s crimes.” Zineb Riboua, then a student at a French university, recalls hearing such comments from professors and classmates: