Irish here (to give a context for a long time this place was synonymous with terrorism)
Quite a lot of Europeans scoffed at Americans in early 00s pointing (rightly) at the overreaction that followed such as {invading Iraq|Patriot Act|TSA crap|Further rise of the military industrial complex} for highly questionable reasons was.
It took much smaller (yet equally as appalling attacks as 9/11) in Spain, UK and France for most of European countries to go down similar paths as US when it comes to surveillance and the rise of the police states.
It seems to me that Islamic Extremism (while highly dangerous to everyone including Muslims themselves as ISIS have illustrated) is being used by politicians as:
1. A way to grab more power over the population
2. Not to appear as "weak"
So nutcase authoritarians following middle age teachings and stupidity are leading to rise of police/surveillance states which could be easily co-opted once the infrastructure is in place to result in what essentially is fascist / Orwellian places to live.
Ouch :(
An analogy would be a virus leading to an overreaction from white cells weakening/killing the host.
edit: What solution might I present to Islamism? Given an educated population the choice between living in prosperous and free countries and medieval backwater is a nobrainer. So the answer lies with education, economics and freedom. Quite alot of Muslims already go to great lengths to live in Europe/USA tho unfortunately the extremists pray on segregation and race and economic inequalities to drive their wedge and spread their virus.
I doubt it has nothing to do with Islam.
The real problem is that this is power for "free". They can do this because the population (except a few hackers, pirates and other freaks) doesn't care..
And I can't think in any way to change that. In fact, it's easy to see how it's going to grow worse.
Not the person you're replying to but I'll answer anyway. The theory that the Charlie Hebdo attacks was a false flag attack was raised by Paul Craig Roberts of the Reagan administration.[1]
I find it a pretty incredible claim, but it's coming from a somewhat credible source regardless. Coupled with the fact that we do know false flag operations have been used and planned for use in the past, it's not hard to see why it's a theory given weight to.
The point raised in your link about "Why would Muslims be more outraged by cartoons in a Paris magazine than by hundreds of thousands of Muslims killed by Washington and its French and NATO vassals in seven countries during the past 14 years?" doesn't make sense considering the recent attack in Copenhagen, a planned assault against Jylland-Posten from a few years back, and the murder attempt of one of the Danish cartoonist. Unless you want to believe they were all false flag operations, but that's really going far.
I'll also point out that the Hyper Casher gunman was linked to the Kouachi (and even gave a TV interview).
The timing of the suicide, on the other hand, is certainly odd.
The claim would be a little more credible if there wasn't already a history of street demonstrations around the world calling for this type of attack (to say nothing of the celebrations afterward) and multiple threats of violence against the staff... also if he didn't drag a few 9/11-truther allusions into the matter.
