“We wanted to protect our Western values and we chose parties which disregard them instead”

Today, on 7 January 2030, 15 years to the day after that a terrorist attack was carried towards Charlie Hebdo, we commemorate the infamous birthday of the beginning of a long series of terrorist attacks within Europe. The Western World was chocked by this attack against its values of democracy, freedom of speech and religious freedom, and was appalled by the next ones. From 2015 to 2018, 203 bomb attacks occured in Europe making 6000 victims, as we all know. As a result, extremist right parties seduced quickly the population because of the fear, promising them a “solution” to the problem: to close the European borders and to expulse muslim people, “guilties” of this chaos.

We, the people, elected those extremist right governments everywhere on the old continent a decade ago. We wanted to protect our Western values and we chose parties which disregard them instead. We should have learned from our history that electing authoritarian regimes in a climate of insecurity has never been a solution and led to many crimes against humanity. Obviously, that is what happened. After their victory in the 2019 European Elections with 80 % of votes and the coalition of the different European extremist right parties (the Big Change, as the New Order likes to call it), they renamed the EU with “New Order” and quickly broke all their promises: they promised order and security but they established fear, they swore to keep freedom of speech but they began to censor the media and to arrest politic opponents (it is the reason why this newspaper is clandestine), they said they would only expulse muslims but they deported them and killed them in extermination camps.

How did we get into this mess? What could have been done to avoid this awful situation? In the European Union, we were living peacefully with everyone, respecting each other. After the first attacks in France, we should have reacted differently, there was our mistake. First, we should have realized that the population needed to be more comforted: the media was only spreading fear all day long with tragic news, which increased people‘s stress . Then, we should have improved our integration system. Indeed, most terrorists were European people who failed with integrating themselves and felt rejected from society. They were looking for recognition and they were manipulated by some fanatics.We should have given more priorities to helping new immigrantimmigrants or people on the margins of society. Moreover, in terms of education, we should have organized more meetings, discussions and seminaries about tolerance, freedom of religion and speech in schools. Why did we not invite an Imam to each school in order to tell young muslim students not to fall into radicalism and to remind them the true message of love of their religion? But also in order to remind non-muslim people that terrorists are not muslims, that Islam does not support these barbaric acts and that they do not have to draw a parallel between muslims and terrorists. We also should have insisted on the advantages of multiculturalism which allows our society to take the best of each culture and which helps change our mentalities. Finaly, our governments should have had a better control on ISIS‘ internet propaganda and on Jihadists who fought in Syria and Irak and who were back in Europe. As a matter of fact, many young people have been endoctrinated with internet because ISIS‘ videos were accessible on the internet. There was also a lack of supervision of the Jihadists in Europe because of lack of financial ressources.

But nothing is lost, we still can change our society. Let‘s fight for our freedom, let‘s fight for justice and let‘s fight against this authoritarian society in which we live, in the same way as the French did during the French Revolution! Share this newspaper with your friends and relatives because it is by changing the mentalities that we can change a society… Not alone, but all together.

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