After convening for the European Union Council in Brussels for the first time since the 13 November Paris attacks, member states’ leaders pledged an ‘uncompromising fight’ against terrorism.
The shocking and brutal murder of 130 people in Paris seems to have galvanised the EU to do something to stop the increasing threat of Daesh on home soil – European soil, on our Continent. But how will that happen exactly? Europe is awash with passports that are being bought and sold and passed from one person to another.
It is clear that all member states must share as much intelligence as humanely possible in terms of tracking militants and their whereabouts. All this being said, we must not fall into the trap of Islamophobia.
Just as that young gent shouted at a man who attacked people with a knife in London, “you ain’t no Muslim bruv”. The people who are perpetrating these attacks on our shores are not the average Muslim. These people are depraved terrorists, and we also have to accept, at some point, that some of them are homegrown.
We need to ask ourselves why this is happened and why youths who were, just up to a few months before, normal kids who enjoyed football, music and their studies. What is so wrong with our society that they feel so completely emarginalised that they find solace in hate preachers and IS recruiters?
EU leaders agreed it was crucial to implement systematic and coordinated border checks at European countries' external frontiers in order to know who is coming and going, and promised to rapidly review proposals by the EU's executive arm to clamp down on the illegal sale of firearms, especially the models of high-powered semi-automatic weapons used by some of the Paris attackers.
British PM David Cameron has labelled it a common threat and that we must face it together and he is right. But one spin off in all this is that while Europe seems to be moving away from a Federalist approach in terms of policy, this might actually drive us in that direction. If Europe is serious about working to secure its borders and to freely share information about any threats, then countries will be working together closer than ever before.
The EU has vowed change, but it is abundantly clear that things have already changed. While it was natural that things would have slowed down in Paris after the attacks and that Belgium was on edge, people have changed. They are more vigilant. While a lot of this rests with the intelligence services, we as people also need to watch for changes in friends or family members. Radicalisation is a very quick process. A person can be turned into a seething mass of hate in just a couple of months. This could very well be the biggest threat that Europe has faced since almost tearing itself apart in World War II. We are all part of the problem and we must all be part of the solution.