Joshua Keating
It’s not as if no one was thinking about security issues when Paris was awarded this summer’s Olympics back in 2017. Just two years earlier, the French capital had been the scene of one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history, when Islamic State gunmen killed more than 130 people. That attack came only a few months after a massacre at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Then-French President François Hollande said that when he was lobbying for the Olympics in 2016, he was asked by International Olympic Committee officials “whether Paris would be able to organize safe Games.” He made the case that not only would Paris be ready, but an Olympics in the City of Light would be the “most beautiful answer we could give to fundamentalism.”
Seven years later, the Olympics are finally coming to Paris in a very different era with a very different landscape of security threats. While the attention of governments and the media has largely shifted away from terrorist groups like ISIS, the group and its affiliates have demonstrated they can continue to carry out major attacks, including a horrific recent one in Moscow with a death toll similar to what Paris suffered in 2015. The Olympics also take place against the backdrop of the October 7 attacks, Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, and a global surge in antisemitism, France very much included.
No comments:
Post a Comment