Roundup: International community rife with challenges one year after Charlie Hebdo attack

The international community is still, if not more, rife with challenges in its fight against terrorism one year after the shocking newsroom massacre at the premises of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Adding oil to the fire for Europe today are controversy and dilemma in its refugee policies in the face of flooding immigrants from the Middle East where regimes were paralyzed or toppled in the Arab Spring.

Many countries are on high alert against terrorist threat on Thursday -- the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Tension is obvious in Paris as a man wearing a fake explosives vest and wielding a butcher's knife was shot to death by police.

The man shot dead in Paris was shouting extremist slogans and waving the knife at officers outside a police station. The prosecutor's office said he was carrying a document with an emblem of the Islamic State group and "an unequivocal claim of responsibility in Arabic."

The news jolted France with a new dose of fear as people marked a year of terror since the Charlie Hebdo attack on Jan. 7, 2015. France also suffered a series of attacks on Nov. 13 last year on cafes, restaurants, a sports stadium and a music hall that left 130 people dead. The Islamic State group had claimed responsibility for all the killings there.

WORLD NOT SAFER

The international community is obviously not safer. Frequent reports on possible attempts of terrorist attacks led to tightened security in public squares across the globe as people gathered to usher in the new year.

In New York, thousands of police watched over a bustling Times Square. In Germany's southern city of Munich, stations were evacuated over an imminent terror threat. In London, around 3,000 officers were deployed across the center of the city. In Italy, fireworks were banned in towns and cities amid fears that loud explosions could spark panic.

Tension could be felt in other parts of the world, too. In Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, officers had just foiled detailed plans for an alleged New Year suicide attack.

Turkish police detained two Islamic State suspects allegedly planning attacks in the center of the capital city of Ankara.

In Moscow, even the Red Square was closed off, where tens of thousands of revelers traditionally gather to usher in the new year.

DIVISIONS WIDER IN EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

The Islamic militants, including those of the IS group, staged many deadly attacks across almost the whole world over the past year.

The European Union has stepped up checks on its citizens travelling abroad and is seeking more data on passenger travel.

While it is necessary to deal with terrorism firmly, efforts aimed at boosting security often served to deepen divisions in the increasingly multi-ethnic societies of Europe and galvanize radicalization of some citizens in countries both in Europe and elsewhere.

In headline news in the United Kingdom on Thursday, media named a masked militant who was shown directing the killing of five men in an IS propaganda video as Siddhartha Dhar, a Londoner who once sold inflatable bouncy castle toys, though he was not officially identified.

There have been discussions on how he slipped out of the country in September 2014 while on a police bail. Authorities reportedly failed to ask him to surrender his passport in time. He turned up in Syria weeks later, leading to questions over the shoddy security in the U.K.

VICIOUS SPIRAL

There have been calls for solidarity in dealing with terrorism with a firm hand. However, the international community has not turned safer but has, instead, suffered from an increasingly worrying tide of terrorism.

In France, President Francois Hollande recently paid respects to fallen security forces saluting their valor in protecting the French "way of life," which he said terrorists wanted to attack.

In the Paris neighborhood where the attempted attack happened on Thursday, officers ordered for the roads to be blocked and shops closed. Subway stations in the area was also closed and bus service halted.

Some of the residents had to wait for the barricaded street to reopen. One of them said that they no longer have a sense of safety.

"It is a vicious spiral where the efforts to fight terrorism led to more terrorism and galvanized the growth of the new terrorism," Zheng Yongnian, a renowned scholar and director of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore, said in an article published recently.

He said that while it is necessary to stand united in the fight against terrorism, some of the Western countries have adopted double standards. It is a question of integrating the different cultural traditions while the current anti-terror strategy of relying on the state forces to curb the growth of terrorism should be called into question, he said.

Some observers have said that the Western powers have adopted double standards to justify whatever way of fighting terrorism on their part and used the fight against terrorism to promote their interests.

Even politicians in the United States have come to realize that the international community has not been safer than it was before the toppling and paralyzing of some of the regimes in the Middle East, though few would admit it.

Ted Cruz, a Republic presidential candidate, said in a media interview in December that there has been "a consistent mistake in foreign policy." The United States got "involved in toppling Middle Eastern governments, and it ends up benefiting the bad guys," he said. Endi