My speech in PACE on the very important topic . "Terrorist attacks in Paris:together for a democratic response
Dear colleagues,
The Charlie Hebdo attacks as the history will remember them, did not come out of the blue and will not go with its perpetrators into their unmarked graves. They came from somewhere and some time - somewhere in future, distant or near, they will come to hunt and haunt us again. Again and again, until we put an end to the blind ignorance that we practice and in which we hide in comfort. The attacks in the heart of Paris and in the Jewish market were not an isolated incident, and indeed were not a challenge to the free speech or our values. They were a challenge to our religions – Christian or Jewish, a challenge to our identities, a challenge to our history, the great Revolutions of France, Germany and any other one of the age of enlightenment. They were a challenge to our own very existence and we have to understand it. By raising our pens in the air as a symbol of a defiant free speech, we exhibit our ignorance towards the globality and scale of the threat that is on the tracks of carnage from now on. The problem, the great problem we face is not the radicalization of our own European citizens itself, but the cause of that radicalization itself. Initially a peaceful population and part of our public life, the European sunni muslim communities in France, Germany, UK, Belgum, and anywhere else get more and more radicalized by the appealing and dangerous ideas being imported from the Gulf at a much faster pace than the oil itself. And from that point on – these citizens of ours, who we knew as normal people, turn into evil, go fight in the most cowardly battles in the deserts of Syria and Iraq, and bring the war with them back to our streets.
Ironically enough, it is the same freedom of speech and all other freedoms that we enjoy, that allow the hate speech and the hateful and ignorant teachings of ibn-Wahhab find a fertile ground in our lands, in our streets, in our suburbs.
By letting the British preacher Anjem Chowdary speak in the streets of London, by granting the Turksih preachers of Germany the right to freely spread whatever they want, by allowing the double-faced north-African clerics of France say one thing in French and another – in Arabic, we risk with our own freedom of speech and not only. We, the Europeans, have to understand, that the moderate followers of Islam are easy prey for the hunters of the radical teachings if left unchecked. This may seem unEuropean, unFrench, unCivilized, but in order to defend our Europeanism, our Frenchness and our Civilization, we have to restrain and monitor the access of our populations to the intolerant speech, which, by being free, is depriving ourselves from our own freedom of speech and our own freedom to live.
It is obvious, that we prefer to fight the methastases rather than looking into the cause of the cancer. A cancer that now grows fast and that has all the potential to drive us into the grave using our own values and tools – the ultimate freedom to speak and teach anything, anywhere and to anybody. This has to stop and has to stop now. And if it doesn’t, we will be other Charlies, who do not draw caricatures, but are in coffins covered with them. If it doesn’t stop today, there will be no tomorrow. The tomorrow of Europe is bright, it should be bright and we have to do everything to make it happen.
