Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-06-07-Speech-2-036"
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"en.20050607.5.2-036"2
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"Mr President, I have been the victim of terrorism. At the television station which I manage in Athens, I have been on the receiving end of two bomb attacks. The station was burnt to the ground and it is a terrible thing to see people surrounded by flames trying to save themselves. I have also been attacked in my home. I drive around in an armoured car with security. I sleep with an Uzi under my pillow. It is terrible to know that you can be attacked at any moment.
However, we must admit that terrorism has already won its first victories against democracy. What are these victories? The television cameras, the telephone tapping, the reductions in human rights and the biometric passports which are entering our lives. All these are victories by terrorism, insofar as we are cutting back on democracy.
People use terrorism in order to impose global control. They feed it. When we say that terrorists are usually Islamic fundamentalists and then people go and urinate and spit on the Koran, are they not feeding Islamic fundamentalism? We therefore have to look at it from the other side. It is no good looking at terrorism from the benches of the European Parliament. We need to look at terrorism from inside the caves in Afghanistan and from how someone there sees it, so that we can at some point have a communication code and resolve the issue. Why does a millionaire prince not live in the casinos of London, why does he not live in the Bahamas and not in the lap, for example, of beautiful women, but goes to live and die in a cave? We have to see it as it is. Is it fanaticism? That is the easy answer. But what feeds this fanaticism? Were we always so honest in the past? Did we not have these areas of the planet enslaved for years? Was our ally in the hunt for terrorists not guilty of the worst ethnic cleansing in centuries when it wiped out an entire race, the Red Indians? Did it not base its progress on torturing and enslaving the Negroes?
Perhaps we too are not quite so correct? What is our stand today? Do we not have a one-sided stand on the Middle East? What are we going to collect? Now we say that Gaddafi, who brought down a Pan American aeroplane and killed dozens of people, is our friend because he has changed policy; at the same time, however, we hound Castro, who has not brought down any aeroplanes. We say that the dictator in Pakistan is good because he is our friend, but we say that another dictator is bad and we wage war on him. We therefore need to look at how honest we are on the subject of terrorism. We need to look at what is happening. We need to keep our ears open, because as long as we keep taking aspirins, we shall continue to have a headache. We need to look at what is causing the headache. So we need to open our eyes and stop this one-sided policy. We need to give more incentives, more opportunities to these nations in order to reduce fundamentalism, in order to reduce terrorism. That is the solution."@en1
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