SuppliedMatthieu de Rorthais’ Facebook profile picture is the cover of Oasis’ 1995 album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”
Described by his sister as a “music enthusiast,” the 32-year-old’s favourite groups included Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and Metallica. Ironically and tragically, it was this love of music that led him to Paris’ Bataclan Theatre, where he lost his life in what became the deadliest attack on French soil since World War II.
On Nov. 13, a series of terrorist attacks orchestrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) occurred at six locations across Paris. The attacks, which included mass shootings, suicide bombings and hostage-taking, culminated in the death of 130 civilians, 89 of which occurred at the Bataclan during a concert by the band Eagles of Death Metal.
In the hours following the attacks, de Rorthais’ family and close friends — including a former instructor at the University of Alberta, who wished to remain anonymous — frantically turned to social media in hopes of finding a reunion they would never get.
Andréa Hayes, a French instructor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, said de Rorthais’ death has “devastated” her friend and former colleague.
“(The attack was) far enough away to let it slip by and not react or do anything about it,” Hayes said. “It’s important to be pulled in closer, to have that personal link. I want to make people realize it isn’t … a number they keep repeating.”
ISIL stated their motive for the attack was retaliation against French involvement in the Syrian and Iraqi Civil Wars. According to Travel Canada, French national security has been on “high alert” since the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January of this year, which was carried out by Al-Qaeda extremists and resulted in 12 deaths.
For Will Schultz, a master’s student in the Department of Sociology specializing in terrorist radicalization, the Paris attack was not a “game-changer,” though it was “one of the nastier terrorist incidents we’ve seen since 9/11.”
“It really has put the question of terrorism back into the mainstream,” Schultz said. “Now people are actively afraid of being victims of terrorism, even though it’s quite unlikely.”
“What terrorism does is increase fear, and when people are afraid, they might not necessarily act logically.”
French authorities stated the ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, was able to enter Europe as a Syrian refugee. Security concerns have swept the Western world and most notably the United States, whose House of Representatives passed legislation to deny entry to 10,000 Syrian refugees on Nov. 19.
But Mojtaba Mahdavi, a political science professor and affiliate at the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, said the first people to benefit from these “exclusionary policies” will not be Westerners, but ISIL.
“If you have more politicians talking about exclusion, if you exclude more immigrants, more Muslims, more ordinary people, these people will be recruited by ISIL, and this is exactly what they want,” Mahdavi said.
French president Francois Hollande has called for a union of global powers to “mobilize and destroy” ISIL. Mahdavi said Western forces should rethink this policy of retribution, as ISIL’s “Pandora’s box of terrorism” was first opened as a result of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.
“How many times do we want to repeat the same mistake?” Mahdavi said. “First Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Libya, then Syria … we (create) extremists for the sake of geopolitics or self-interest, and the victims are ordinary people.”
Hayes said it is her hope that U of A students remember de Rorthais, and the other “ordinary people” who fell victim to the Paris attacks, as a face rather than a statistic.
“These were people just like the people sitting next to you in Starbucks … people who went to a concert or went to get a bite to eat and were living their lives, and something happened. And a lot of these people were your age.”
