by closing its borders to migrants, said
Michel Claise in La Libre Belgique
(Belgium). News that at least one,
and possibly two, of the eight terrorists
who rampaged through Paris
earlier this month, killing 130 people,
may have entered Europe through
Greece by posing as Syrian refugees
has prompted panicked xenophobia
on social media. Far-right agitators
are shrieking that all refugees must
be barred, “as if they could all be
terrorists exploiting migration to
enter Europe on the sly.” The idea
is ridiculous. The hundreds of thousands
of migrants who are making the perilous journey across
the Mediterranean to Europe are escaping war and devastation,
and many are fleeing the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria—the
very group that perpetrated the Paris attacks. In fact, most of the
ISIS terrorists who struck the French capital were homegrown
extremists from Belgium and France, European jihadists whose
barbarity helped create this tide of refugees.
To scapegoat the refugees would be a betrayal of European values,
said Philip Jones in the Irish Examiner (Ireland). Of course
we’re afraid. Paris traumatized us all. But it’s precisely in our
time of fear that we must “stand resolute as one indelible, united
European citizenry.” If we let this tragedy “change how we treat
other people, in particular those who are suffering,” then we will
have conceded the fight to the terrorists. France, at least, is leading
the way. In the wake of the attacks, French President François
Hollande actually raised the number
of Syrian refugees his country has
pledged to accept from 24,000 to
30,000. “Our country has the duty
to respect this commitment,” he said.
“France must remain itself.”
Yet we can’t pretend the migration
wave poses no threat, said Berthold
Kohler in the Frankfurter All ge meine
Zeitung (Germany). It’s true that
most of the terrorists who attacked
Paris were Europeans, raised in the
Muslim neighborhoods of European
cities, in a kind of “parallel world”
where jihadist sympathies reign. But
that’s precisely the problem. The hundreds of thousands of Muslims
now arriving on our shores will live, most likely, in those
same neighborhoods, and surely “not all of them are pacifists.”
The pool of potential radicals will be much larger. In Germany,
the government says it plans training and education programs to
integrate the new arrivals and indoctrinate them with German
values. But what guarantee is there that such a program will
work any better than past efforts in France or Belgium, where
integration has clearly failed?
Take care that such suspicions do not become self-fulfilling,
said Helmut Müller in the Salzburger Nachrichten (Austria). If
Muslim migrants “meet with rejection and are marginalized in
the countries they are resettled in,” they will be “all the more
susceptible to the message of the radical Islamists.” Integrating
these new arrivals is Europe’s greatest challenge—and its duty.
