Americans View Paris Attacks With Empathy, Fear and Resolve

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/us/americans-view-paris-attacks-with-empathy-fear-and-resolve.html

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DENVER — It made parents worry for their children studying abroad. It sent a shiver of fear into plans for vacations to France. Cafes and nightclubs in Miami and Los Angeles felt newly vulnerable, not so different from the bloody scenes unfolding on people’s phones and televisions. For Americans accustomed to tuning out foreign conflicts, it brought the world crashing in.

Few terrorist attacks in foreign lands have seized the attention of this country like the carnage in the streets of Paris, a city an ocean away but glittering in the memories of countless American honeymoons, junior years abroad and bucket-list vacations.

In the last week, the attacks have pushed global terrorism and the Islamic State to the front lines of worry for many Americans who have taken to social media in record numbers to track wall-to-wall coverage of a cosmopolitan city transformed into a war zone.

It all felt so familiar, people said in more than three dozen interviews across America — as though it could easily have been a restaurant or bar in their neighborhood.

“It’s incredibly scary,” said Katy Neusteter, who works for an environmental advocacy group in Boulder, Colo., and is flying to Paris next week for a climate conference. She said each new email exchange or videoconference with colleagues now began with a somber mention of the latest unsettling news.

Dorcas Guest-Nelson, a part-time nurse in Phoenix, said that her eldest son, Jay, 20, had just been to Paris and that she had cousins who lived in London.

“I feel France is more similar to us,” she said. “When I think about Africa, I think about coups and genocide, about crazy dictators and who’s in charge. I’m not saying that I wasn’t affected by what happened in Kenya — those were innocent people, too,” she said, referring to the attack in April by Shabab militants that killed 147 people at a Kenyan university. “But France was different,” she said. “It was, like, I could have been there. My son could have been there. I could be the one sitting outside on a cafe and getting sprayed by bullets.”

The attacks shook Americans who know France intimately as well as those who had only seen pictures of the Eiffel Tower.

Across the country, people attended solidarity marches for France, bathed public buildings in the French tricolor and pondered whether they should cancel their travel plans.

In Mississippi, Baptist congregants altered their morning rituals to pray for victims in a place many had never visited. In Utah, public safety officials released a video about how to recognize the eight signs of terrorism.

The attacks are already reshaping debate over immigration and border security, vaulting foreign conflicts to the center of the presidential race. In a poll by Bloomberg Politics taken just after the attacks, Americans said that terrorism and the Islamic State were now the most pressing issues facing the country, replacing their concern about jobs and the economy.

People said they were paying attention now because the Islamic State’s rampage in Paris felt scarier, somehow closer to home, than the yearslong slaughter of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis, the recent suicide bombings in Beirut or the bombing of a Russian passenger jet.

In Raleigh, Miss., Randy Clayton, 51, said the Paris attacks showed the Islamic State to be “really aggressive.” He added, “Right now, I don’t think you can say anywhere that you are safe, with the climate of the world the way it is.”

Mr. Clayton, the pastor of students and family life at the First Baptist Church in Raleigh, was watching the news in an effort to understand how it might affect his family. He said his oldest son was in an honors program at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss., and had been considering signing up for a semester or year of study abroad. “Before, I was really encouraging him to,” said Mr. Clayton. “But my wife and I last night, we were talking about it, and are really not too excited about it.”

Several church members, including the interim pastor, Gerald Gordon, said they were watching the news from Paris intently. They knew that a place like Raleigh would not be on anyone’s list of targets for terrorism. But they did not reject the possibility that other, more populated places in Mississippi might be. Some mentioned the arrest, in August, of two Mississippi State students who authorities said had been trying to join the Islamic State.

“We are very concerned,” said Ann Butler, 58, a fourth-grade science teacher. “Because we just feel like it’s a matter of time before it’s going to happen here. We believe our borders are not secure enough.”

Beth Crumpton, 76, a retired schoolteacher, said that she supported the effort by Gov. Phil Bryant and other governors around the country to block the resettlement of Syrian refugees. “It’s not because I’m a raving rebel from the South,” she said. “It’s because we don’t have time to check them out.”

People had other questions. Where would the Islamic State strike next? Could any American cities be targeted? American officials have said there is no credible intelligence that the Islamic State or any other group is plotting an attack inside the country. Would the attacks lead the United States military deeper into another conflict in the Middle East?

“It will get much worse before it gets better,” said Douglas Whitcomb, the owner of a food service business from Long Island who was visiting his son in Massachusetts. “Because the free world has not adequately come up with a strategy to deal with this. You cannot placate madness.”

Among posts by major Internet and media companies, Paris has been the only news event to register among the year’s Top 20 stories, as measured by likes, shares, and other actions on Facebook and Twitter, according to data from TrackMaven, a marketing analytics tool, that was analyzed by The New York Times. The rest of the top stories of the year were entertainment-related, memes or viral stories. Similarly, viewership of television news spiked the first night of the attacks and stayed high through the week.

Not everyone expressed worry, or was even paying special attention. They had been spectators to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the marathon bombing in Boston, bombings in London and Madrid and too many mass shootings in the United States to list.

In Seattle, Robb Crowe, 54, a social worker, said he was more worried about a rise in muggings and assaults in his Capitol Hill neighborhood. He had avoided learning too much about Paris.

“It’s kind of like, ‘not again,’ ” he said. “There have been so many incidents over the last year, I’m just kind of overwhelmed by it.”

The attacks also stirred anger and hatred. In Englewood, Colo., vandals threw a rock through the sign of Isis Books & Gifts, a 35-year-old business named for the Egyptian god. Muslim groups said they had tallied a rash of threats and vandalism in the days after the attacks, including an Eiffel Tower symbol spray-painted onto the side of a Nebraska mosque.

When members of the Islamic Center of Pflugerville, outside of Austin, Tex., arrived for morning prayers on Monday, they saw pages of the Quran covered with feces littering the entrance. It was the first vandalism there since the mosque opened in a strip mall three years ago.

“We had our guard down,” said Faisal Naeem, a board member at the mosque. “We were like, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ But that concept of an oasis is no longer there.”

Many of the people who felt the most shaken by news of the attacks had European connections. French expatriates said they watched the aftermath of the attacks on French channels on cable TV and scoured social media to see if friends and family were safe. Janet Poth, an owner of a French bistro in Denver, raised three sons in Paris and planned to fly back in two weeks. She said the attacks would not deter her.

“It is a city that I absolutely love,” she said. She had been in France when 12 people were killed in an attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical newspaper. “You’re thinking, ‘Is there going to be a third? Is it going to continue?’ ”

Julie Curtiss, 33, a painter from Paris who now lives in Brooklyn, said the killings deeply unsettled her because the victims were her peers. Last Friday, she anxiously scrolled through Facebook as her friends in the neighborhood of the attack all checked in as safe, except for one classmate. He had gone to the Bataclan concert hall, and died there.

“It feels like the beginning of something bigger, a war that doesn’t have frontiers, something that doesn’t have barriers,” she said.

While travel businesses expressed concern about a decline in tourism, not one person in interviews intended to cancel travel plans to Europe or steer clear of Paris. Richard and Diana Newton, a retired couple who live part of the year in Seattle and part of the year in Spain, and said they were not going to change plans to fly to Spain in February for a three-month stay in Valencia.

“You can’t say to yourself, ‘Hey, I’m going to sit in my chair and watch TV,’ ” Mr. Newton said. “And you don’t stop walking the street because you might get mugged.”