Paris attacks shows us no one is safe in this dangerous world

They came at Paris again on Friday night, came at innocents in a concert hall and in restaurants and outside the Stade de France, a soccer stadium filled with a crowd that included the president of the country watching France play Germany, came at Paris like mean, crazy shooters coming through the front door of one of our schools. Or suicide bombers at the controls of commercial airplanes coming at us from the sky.

Their death toll in Paris was not ours on Sept. 11, of course. The pictures we saw through the night from Paris were not the pictures we saw here after the worst attack we have ever had on American soil. But across the terrible long night in Paris, and into Saturday morning, the world was brought back to that New York City morning 14 years ago.

And everyone here thought the exact same thing about Paris, one of the capitals of Western civilization: That it was Paris this time because of an attack claimed by ISIS — an organization that President Obama somehow said on television Friday morning had been “contained” — but could just as easily have been us.

“It could have been New York on the Fourth of July,” Rep. Pete King, who twice chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security, said Saturday morning.

King was referring to June arrests in New York and New Jersey of men with ties to ISIS, a Hudson County (N.J.) man named Alaa Saadeh among them, and a resident of Queens named Munther Omar Saleh, arrested a couple of weeks before Saadeh for allegedly conspiring to create a pressure-cooker bomb to be detonated at a New York City landmark.

“There’s a reason why the FBI and the (NYPD) Joint Terrorism Task Force were working overtime in late June,” King said.

And then referencing what President Obama had said about ISIS to George Stephanopolous on “Good Morning America” Pete King added, “I don’t want to make this partisan, but there is a delusional element in thinking that somehow we’ve contained these people.”

ISIS keeps coming, we know that, as if everything they have done so far, with televised executions and Russian planes blown out of the sky, is somehow just preamble. A week when there is great celebration in this country because we take out one of theirs, a masked executioner from the gates of hell known as Jihadi John, now ends with these innocent people slaughtered in Paris. And who knows how many more die on Friday night if the suicide bombers outside Stade de France somehow had gotten inside?

Once again, as people live their lives on a Friday night in Paris, we hear restaurants and concert halls and sports events referred to the way we now refer to schools in America, every time a different kind of terrorism is leveled at them:

We hear them referred to as “soft targets.” But that is what the world is now. A world that is all soft targets.

“It could have been New York on the Fourth of July,” Rep. Pete King, who twice chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security, said.

“They don’t want to hit Army barracks,” King said. “They want to hit people who think they’re safe.”

Only they were no more safe in Paris on Friday night than children and teachers were at Sandy Hook Elementary, no more safe than the dead of Aurora, Colo., were in a movie theater. No more safe than nearly 3,000 innocents were in the north and south towers.

“Where do you even fight this war?” Raymond Kelly asked on Saturday morning. “The problem has metastasized. They did this in Paris with eight people. What was it in Mumbai (when Islamic militants once murdered 164 people in coordinated attacks), 10? The simplicity of these attacks is what’s so frightening. They go into that concert hall with AK-47s. That’s not sophisticated modern weaponry. It’s a rifle. Pull the trigger. You want to make a bomb? Go on the Internet.”

Then Kelly, who kept New York City safe as police commissioner for 12 years in a Sept. 11 world, who wrote his own book on counterterrorism because the old one was written for a world that stopped existing when the first plane hit one of our buildings, said the same thing to me that King had said an hour before:

“Of course what happened in Paris could happen here. I’m frankly surprised that there hasn’t been more of this around the world.”

Kelly paused and said, “There is no end to this.” And by the way? Kelly probably found it amusing to hear Mayor de Blasio praising Kelly’s counterterrorism efforts after de Blasio was praised last year for closing down Kelly’s demographic unit, at this time, in a city as diverse and potentially dangerous as this one.

We were just reminded again on Friday night how right Kelly is. There is no end of this. The enemy comes from everywhere. We aren’t safe in restaurants and concert halls and even a soccer stadium, because no one is safe. This is the dangerous world we present to our children, and their children. A world of soft targets.