France has a special relationship with terrorism. It is the only country to draw specific, rather than general, threats from ISIS. It is the only country to take on a terrorist organisation and expel it from a country, and it is the only country to brag recently about having none of its citizens in the hands of hostage-takers.

The United States and its allies, including Australia, have taken a fairly laissez-faire approach towards ISIS, aimed at containing rather than expelling it. Even during my visit to neighbouring Iran in November last year, the general feeling was that the government there did not seriously intend to eradicate ISIS, because it wasn’t in its interest to do so. However, France demonstrated in 2013 that with the right coalition, a great degree of confidence and a certain amount of belief, terrorist armies can be defeated even in remote, hard-to-reach places.

France’s engagement in its former West African colony Mali, alongside Malian and African Union troops, engendered a tremendous amount of hatred against it in the world of Islamist radicalism. At the time, al-Qaeda-linked militants had hijacked a local ethnic rebellion in an attempt to form a state in one of the more remote and poorly governed parts of Africa. The fact that France, a former colonial ruler with a history of brutality in the region, was invited to assist by Mali’s military dictatorship and achieved its aim quickly placed a large dent in the morale and self-belief of those who have faith in radical religious-nationalist ideology.

In the past year, ISIS has shocked the world with its speed and brutality. A neo-colonialist army with soldiers drawn from all corners of the globe, this previously obscure group has managed to dominate many parts of Iraq and Syria through military success, as well as by exploiting its reputation for causing fear and sectarian division. France refers to ISIS by the Arabic acronym “Da’ish”, rather than Islamic State, so as to disassociate the group from Islam. That is something ISIS hates and for this reason it has declared that the “filthy” French hold a special place among its enemies.

While some have considered the attack in Paris to be aimed at Europe, the result of foreign fighters returning from the Middle East or of poor integration policies, the question that remains unanswered is why has France specifically drawn such attention from terrorists? Anti-Muslim groups held huge rallies in Germany at the weekend but it was France that dealt with three impromptu terrorist attacks in December.

Even the target itself, Charlie Hebdo, which had published satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, is a specifically French target. After all, these cartoons were published originally in Denmark in 2005, where the main reaction was protests from the Danish Muslim population, who felt they were being unfairly treated by mainstream Danish society. It was only a few months later, when Charlie Hebdo published these cartoons in a special issue, that outrage boiled in many Muslim countries.

Muslim attitudes towards blasphemy are the same as other religious groups. Additionally, the accusation of blasphemy, particularly insulting the prophet, has a long history of being the result of ulterior motives. The 17th century Armenian chronicler, Arakel of Tabriz, documented a dozen or so Christian “martyrs” in his lifetime in the Ottoman and Iranian empires, the majority of whom were executed when a disgruntled neighbour accused them of insulting the prophet. Similarly, several blasphemy trials in Pakistan over the past decade have boiled down to disputes over land between the accuser and the accused. The fact that a French publisher is the target of this well-organised attack and not the original Danish publisher demonstrates that this justification is window dressing for a deeper dispute between the French and Islamic militants.

Ultimately, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be dragged into pointless debates about whether Islam or Western culture are responsible, since these debates serve the interests of those who benefit from division. As the response to the Martin Place attack last month demonstrated, people are drawn together by their common humanity. Attacks like these are not aimed only at the West, but at anyone who doesn’t accept the ideology of the attackers, whether Muslim or not. Let us not forget that ISIS’s primary aim is to first “purify” Muslims.

Dr James Barry is an Associate Research Fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation, researching the role of Islam in Iranian foreign policy.