This New Year’s Eve, global cities will be tightening security around celebrations. Yet some have gone so far as to cancel them outright in response to terrorism fears.

Paris has scrapped its flagship Champs-Élysées concert. Sydney’s Bondi Beach event was called off after two Islamists massacred Jewish families celebrating Hanukkah earlier this month. Towns and cities across Germany have either ramped up security or placed restrictions on celebrations. Some American cities have relocated events, while Tokyo has shelved its popular Shibuya countdown. The pattern is clear: public authorities are increasingly judging that the risk of terrorism is too great for mass celebrations to go ahead.

This is not just risk management — it is a surrender of space. Terrorism traditionally aims to attack not merely bodies, but the feeling of safety within open societies. Historic strikes — predominantly carried out by Islamists — on festive moments underline this symbolic target. The 2025 New Orleans truck attack on Bourbon Street on New Year’s Day, which killed 14 and injured dozens, was carried out during celebrations precisely because crowds represent both vulnerability and defiance. Earlier atrocities — including the 2016 truck attack in a Berlin Christmas market by a failed Tunisian asylum seeker, and the 2017 Istanbul nightclub shooting on New Year’s Eve, which killed 39 — demonstrate that violent actors have long understood this.

The most troubling development may be that terrorism is now achieving its strategic aim without even needing to strike. By forcing cities to preemptively cancel celebrations, extremists have, in effect, imposed fear on public life. The act of anticipation has become their tool of coercion.

This anticipatory policing also places an enormous burden on already-strained security forces. Massive deployments such as the 2,500-officer operation in Sydney this year, alongside harsher security checks and barriers, indicate just how resource-intensive the new normal has become.

Policing a single night of celebration now requires counter-terror units, armed response teams, drones, CCTV monitoring, road closures, overtime pay and military back-up. This year, the cost and logistics involved in terrorism-level security have already led to a cancellation of a Christmas market in Germany — traditionally a cornerstone of national culture. There’s a simple arithmetic at play here: it takes a small number of actors to drag vast public machinery into a defensive posture.

Public festivities are not merely leisure. They are expressions of communal solidarity — a vital part of our culture, tradition and identity. Scaling them back in response to threats without addressing the source of a disproportionate number of attacks and plots — Islamist fundamentalism — penalises us all. Policymakers must tackle the upstream drivers of terror and call it by its name. Anyone who points to Islamist fundamentalism as the problem is warned about “stigmatisation” or accused of bigotry. It’s moral intimidation that chills honest debate.

Instead, community “resilience” programmes proliferate, while Islamist preachers, networks and online ecosystems which radicalise young men remain inadequately confronted across Europe. As a result, we lose public spaces and shared rituals, while the conditions that enable extremists to flourish are for fear of causing “offence”. Unless the Islamist threat is tackled, future years will bring fewer shared moments of collective joy and more reminders that fear has already won.

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Dr Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer and researcher focusing on antisemitism, extremism and defence.

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