Why, for the second time, Paris has been attacked by the Islamist terrorists? Is France uniquely vulnerable to these attacks?

Ironically, one of the reasons for the increased attacks is the military successes France, United Stated, other countries and local fighters are scoring against ISIS’s core in Syria and Iraq and the consequences suffered by ISIS’s key provinces such as that in Libya.

ISIS, which had long trumpeted its success in establishing the now-shrinking caliphate, needs victories to compensate for these major losses.

The another reason why specifically European nations face several types of terror threats from ISIS is unprecedented number of fighters—more than 5,000—that Europe has exported to Iraq and Syria to fight under the banners of ISIS and other jihadi groups.

France is no more vulnerable than other countries to terror attacks. Yes, it has experienced some truly horrible incidents such as the Bataclan incident. But such episodes are dotted around Europe and have affected Britain, Spain, and Germany for instance. One reason for the vulnerability that all countries share is that it's often difficult to attribute a specific incident to ISIS with certainty. What seems to be the case much of the time is that an individual who is sympathetic to their aims and is at a bad point in their life decides to act against a society they feel - perhaps with justification - has treated them badly, and respond to that decision with a violent act. When that act is carried out by someone who is not white, it's more likely to be declared terrorism - compare for example with the number of white on black attacks in America where the killer is never declared to be a terrorist despite holding extreme right views and being a member of an organisation dedicated to undemocratic aims. The other thing that happens in the aftermath of so-called terrorist incidents is that ISIS claims that they were responsible, though it's frequently impossible to generate a link between ISIS and the perpetrator of the attack. And France is no more vulnerable to such episodes than ohter countries.

Sadly France has been the victim of a series of lone wolf attacks in recent years.

At first, i want to talk about how France has seen a surge of attacks on Jews and Jewish sites, including the January 9, 2015 hostage attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris that killed four Jews. Several victims of Islamist-inspired lone wolf operations were Jewish, including four of the seven victims from the March 2012 shooting spree in southern France. Increasingly, Jewish businesses and sites have become targets of extremist attacks.

Second we wont forget how French nationals have been victims of Islamic-extremist attacks abroad. In 1983, Hezbollah targeted the American and French Marine Barracks, killing 58 French service members and 241 Americans. In 2002, French expatriates were the victims of the bombing of a French naval defense contractor’s bus in Karachi and an attack on a Limburg supertanker off Aden. In recent years, French civilians and service members have been kidnapped and murdered in Afghanistan, Algeria, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Yemen.(according to New York Times).

And what is intresting is that when responding to the question of policies they considered to be most effective in dealing with countries that permit extremism, most of the French respondents favor imposing tough economic sanctions against a country that allows extremism. Finally, compared to other European countries, most French respondents (52 percent) believe that fighting Islamist extremism should be a top priority.