Between Parkland and France: Vigilance, not Rallies, is the Key(And a bit of heroism)

Across America, and elsewhere in the world, people are naturally rallying against violence in the society, especially mass murders perpetrated by gunmen. The events were precipitated by by the Parkland school mass shooting in which 17 young, innocent and fantastic lives were lost and since then several measures have been put in place to prevent a future recurrence. The state of Florida has raise the age at which people are legally allowed to possess weapons and President Trump is seriously, for once, mulling the banning of bump stocks, devices that enable semi-automatic guns to be converted to far deadlier assault weapons.
Heinous gunmen like Nikolas Cruz are pretty on our minds now but to underscore the overall danger our societies increasingly face, terrorists struck again in France yesterday, a lone gunman wreaking havoc in the south of France. By the time the Islamist gunman, Redouane Lakdim, was shot dead in a supermarket, another three innocent souls had been lost. A police officer was to later die of injuries sustained in the whole sordid ordeal.
The focus is now on guns but, as the events in France have shown, eventually our attention will have to eventually settle on people, on ourselves. Controlling gun possession is not the ultimate solution, and in this, the National Rifle Association is right. France do not have a gun culture as we have in America but it did not prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons and killing people in scores. A determined mass murderer will always obtain his weapons. Imagine a boy who had just dropped his sister at school coming back home, delving into his cache of arms and then embarking on a shooting spree. It was an act a more vigilant mother could have stopped. Or a more observant sister or sibling. This may sound a bit awkward but the duty of protecting our own societies will ultimately have to fall on us. Perhaps those two fantastic individuals who tried to alert the police and the FBI about Nikolas Cruz realized this. But, in truth, if the security agencies are not being negligent as in the case of the Florida school shooting, several other factors exist that will make it difficult to stop a felon intent on terror. Redouane was well known to the authorities in France but the country, as in most advanced western societies, are hampered by the liberal values they hold. In essence, such countries are eventually victims of their own sophistication. The contest soon ensues between giving up these values and making the most of the security difficulties entailed in retaining them. It is the uncertainties that naturally crop up in the contest that terrorists ruthlessly exploit. Laws in France, Belgium and other western societies go to elaborate lengths to protect the basic rights of their citizens. It is easy for those not acquainted with such societies to think such standards, tenets that really form the foundations of  those countries, to be laced with too much saccharine. Why guarantee the rights of a potential terrorist when he in fact has sold the same rights to the Islamic State? But it is really a vital ingredient of their culture and security agents have to live with the hindrances they portend.
But even if the police are always alive to their duties and the laws could be tweaked to stymie the rights of a budding terrorist, the facts remain that western societies are always very large, very sophisticated. Security agents are always going to be stretched and real duties of protecting our societies from mass murderers and societies will have to fall on mothers, grandmothers, sisters, siblings, friends, acquaintances and so on.
And if we are lucky, on brave and intrepid folks who are the antithesis of Deputy Sheriff Scot Petersen, Resource Officer at the M.S. Douglas High School, who had all the reason on earth to intervene while the shooting was going on but did nothing and went home. Folks like the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, who was sorely responsible for limiting the damage the Islamist terrorist could have wreaked yesterday. He was more than just a hero. He was obviously that, by taking all the risks he took. But foremost, he was a thorough gentleman. By agreeing to swap himself for the woman held by the gunman, a lady in distress, he has observed all the rules of gentlemanly chivalry. President Emmanuel Macron could have added more when hailing him a hero.

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 1

President Trump's most coherent foreign policies are on his lips, so it is a huge wonder that he is presently tongue-tied as Turkey sends tanks and troops to attack the only slice of influence the US has left in Syria: the sliver of territories controlled by Kurds in the eastern margins of the country. Putin and his Iranian allies call all the shots now in wider Syria, committing men and materiel to underline an influence growing by leaps and bounds every hour while the US has been hiding in the deserts of eastern Syria. Right from Obama, the country didn't even have a plan A in Syria, not to talk of a plan B or C. In other words, Russia had a focus it was going to enforce with a trenchant ruthlessness now yielding immense results while the US simply did not know what to do, looking back fearfully at an American public that had grown so weary of war.
But the US was lucky, so to say. It did not have to move in thousands of troops or an aircraft carrier brimming with warplanes. Like in Afghanistan during the invasion, all it needed on ground was a proxy army. And no proxy army could ever be more reliable than the Kurds, sturdy individuals with fighting skills and resilience that easily put to flight the famed capabilities of the Northern Alliance. Their heroics in Kobane is well known, a battle that showed everyone that the Islamic State was not an invincible evil horde before which every resistance must melt. The Islamic State impaled itself on the chimneys of Kobane and once they were defeated there, their days were numbered, just as Nazi Germany days were numbered after Stalingrad. The Kurds, under their YPG militia, were to later play the crucial role in driving the IS out of their fiefdoms in Raqqa, Manbij and several other towns and territories in eastern parts of the country, aided by Arab allies and US airstrikes. Without the Kurds, maybe IS would have been defeated but there was little doubt it would have been a very protracted conflict: infinitely sapping on morale and public opinion.
Faithful and largely peaceable individuals the pugnacious, rabble-rousing Erdogan now label as terrorists despite the fact that not a single instance of terrorism on Turkish soil, whether tenuous or even contrived, has ever been linked to the YPG. The border crossings now controlled by the YPG used to be manned by the evil IS fighters and not a single shot was fired by Turkey into Syrian territory then. Naturally, Erdogan would be more comfy with Daesh. Convoys of trucks laden with fuel stolen from Syrian oilfields were crossing the Turkish border in broad daylight on a daily basis, driven by IS terrorists while they held sway in areas now controlled by Kurds. Perhaps Erdogan feared a bullet would ignite one of the trucks and set off a fearsome conflagration.
So it is easy to understand Erdogan's contrived animosity towards the Syrian Kurds. What is far more nebulous is the US silence and inaction. Save for a couple of rhetorics that do not even qualify for a whimper, Trump and his Secretary, Tillerson, have watched with soporific eyes as Turkey rolls its tanks deeper and deeper into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria.