Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2015-11-25-Speech-3-019-000"
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"en.20151125.7.3-019-000"2
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"Mr President, on Friday 13 November I was with other Conservatives and Reformists in Tunisia, where we were taking part in a conference on building a Muslim democratic movement. We knew then, as we saw the pictures coming in from Paris, as we shared the grief of the people of Paris and of France, that it could all happen again in Tunisia – and sadly that is what came to pass overnight. Our solidarity should be not only with the people of France but also with the people of Tunisia and with all the victims of terrorism and Daesh.
These are all important debates that we will have in the months ahead. But today, whether you believe in a United States of Europe or whether you believe in a Europe of nation states, we should all unite to state a simple message: we will not surrender to hatred. We will not surrender to intolerance. We will not surrender our freedoms. You can attack us, you can injure us, but you will never break us.
One of the terrorists involved in the Paris attacks spent his nights drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis, and another never went to the mosque. Two British terrorists ordered a book before they fled to Syria last year. The name of that book:
. Yet all these terrorists claim to be carrying out these acts in the name of Islam, and are prepared to slaughter innocent people on a Friday night in Paris – people eating dinner, watching a rock band, just going about their own business.
It could have been in any of our cities. It could have been aimed at any of us but, sadly, there is method to their madness. Firstly, they hope to inspire copycat attacks and recruit more terrorists. Fortunately, the vast majority of Muslims will not fall for this. Secondly, even though most victims of Daesh attacks are in fact Muslims, they want, through these attacks on our cities, to provoke a backlash – to convince Muslims that Islam is despised in the West. We all need to come together to show them that they will not succeed.
In the aftermath of the attacks there have been the inevitable statements about the incompatibility between Islam and Western democracy. We may even hear some of that in this Chamber today. But let us be inspired by the words of Antoine Leiris, who lost his wife, Hélène, in the Bataclan. He told the terrorists: ‘I will not give you the gift of hating you.’ How brave he must have been to write those words to people who had just murdered his wife – to people who had shattered his life, to people with a love for death, who attacked a city known for its love of life. It is at times like this that our humanity must become stronger and not descend into a spiral of hatred and blame. We need to come together to learn the lessons, to strengthen our resolve and to develop our response – a response that must be measured and proportionate. For if, every time they attack us, we erode our freedoms, there may eventually be no freedoms to defend.
The balance between security and liberty will always be hotly debated, but we should debate this delicate balance without accusations, without any of the insults I see flying across this Chamber, and without questioning political opponents’ determination to fight terrorism, because this whole House needs to come together to agree on clear and tangible measures to strengthen our protection, such as introducing the passenger name record system by the end of the year. The ECR rapporteur, Timothy Kirkhope, will deliver on this, working with all the other Groups and also addressing the concerns about civil liberties.
Better sharing of intelligence between national agencies is another such requirement. This does not mean we need an EU intelligence agency; the answer is not always more Europe. The answer is to build trust between the agencies of the nation states to make sure they share the intelligence that they have. Stronger external borders – building on last week’s Home Affairs Council – are also essential, because so long as the EU’s external borders are weakened, there will be calls for its internal borders to be strengthened.
However, we should not pretend that every terrorist crosses borders to come into the EU. Many, sadly, were born and were radicalised in EU Member States – some searching for an identity or a sense of belonging, others radicalised in prison; some violent individuals looking for a new cause, others vulnerable and fooled into believing in a violent shortcut to paradise in a world of temptation.
Better integration must be part of the solution, for where there are young people who feel that they do not belong to the country in which they live, where they are ghettoised, ISIS/Daesh will see them as potential recruits."@en1
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"Islam for Dummies"1
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