CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy writes: "Even considering the usual moral squalor of jihadist violence, Merah’s spree stands out for its depravity. Yet, for some reason, he is still widely revered. Nicole Yardeni, a deputy mayor in the city, tells me that his name is sometimes viewed positively even outside of jihadist circles, as “a symbol of rebellion” against society. After all, Merah is the man “who brought France to its knees”, as one local youth reminded the mother of his first victim. Even at the time of the police manhunt and siege, Facebook posts and pages honouring the gunman attracted thousands of likes, while police prevented people from laying flowers at his apartment. (It goes without saying that the overwhelming majority, Muslim and non-Muslim, were horrified."

"'It means we need to be perfect 100% of the time. They need to be perfect only once,' said Hans-Jakob Schindler, Sr. Director of the Counter Extremism Project, in an interview.
Schindler said terror groups are essentially waiting for the right opportunity to attack western countries.

...'In their eyes, they defeated the international community in Afghanistan,' he said. 'They defeated the international community and French forces, which are withdrawing from West Africa. In the grand scheme of things, the jihadists really feel they have the upper hand right now.'"

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy gave a presentation for the "Jihadism in the West" workshop at the World Summit on Counter-Terrorism: "It’s right that we focus on individuals and attacks, but I think we only focus on individuals and attacks to the exclusion of almost everything else. And I think that leaves us in danger of missing the woods for the trees. So we focus on these individual perpetrators, we look at the thing that happened in their past… instead of moral and intellectual drive behind their actions…”