Abstract
A thorny debate persists as to the causes of the attacks that affected France since 2015. One view is that France is being attacked because of the secular and liberal values it embodies. According to a second thesis, France is attacked in response to its interventionist foreign policy. Our contribution proposes to respond to this debate via a behavioral, statistical and comparative analysis of attacks in the name of the Islamic State around the world from 2013 to 2019. Our analyses reveal that countries with liberal values (right to blasphemy, tradition of press caricature, and tolerance of homosexuality) are on average not subject to an increased number of attacks. Conversely, countries involved in air strikes in Iraq or Syria are significantly more affected. A temporal analysis confirms the causal effect of military strikes on attacks, and not the opposite effect.