A Real Wave of Terror in France

A. J. Liebling, the greatest of both Francophiles and media critics, wrote once that the reporter tells you what he’s seen, the writer the hidden meaning of what he’s seen, and the expert the hidden meaning of what he hasn’t seen. Male pronouns aside, the wisdom remains: not having experienced the ongoing plague of Islamist violence in France as it happened, even the most veteran French hand has a limited sense of what it means. Nonetheless, e-mail and the phone and the press tell something, if not everything, and the wisest things they tell are consistently and notably double. A favorite French idiom rises to mind: grown people ought to be able to count to two, meaning not so much that social issues usually have two sides as that a person must often accept one truth about the world while also accepting a second.

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