After Paris, now what?

There have been reams of eloquent opinion columns written about the Paris tragedies which makes it extremely difficult to write anything which will not come across as a platitude or a mere lame, probably inadequate, repetition of what has already been said. 

But it almost seems facetious to write about what in comparison are First World Problems: the new bus fares, the PN re-shuffle, and even the Spring hunting referendum. They all shrivel into triteness in comparison. The truth is that in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo execution-style killings I could not bring myself to muster enough interest in any local issue. 

They were a despondent few days, with fresh horror being thrown at us every time we read or heard the news and I could readily identify with those who said they had stopped watching altogether because they just didn’t want to know. On Friday during the hostage crisis and nationwide manhunt for the killers, I veered wildly between wishing I had a mindless job flipping burgers at some fast food joint, and being unable to stop following the news compulsively.

Without correct official information, speculation and conjecture will flourish and I can only see a continued rise of xenophobia as could be seen following the story about migrants queuing overnight to obtain their ID cards.

But now on Sunday as I am writing this, I watch the millions of people who have gathered in Paris, together with world leaders, to march in solidarity with this city which has just endured a horrific week of terrorism, and I am letting myself believe that the human spirit will prevail and that hatred against different cultures will not.  That is not an easy thing to do after reading the inevitable backlash following the terrorist attacks.  Everywhere I go people mutter loudly about the infiltration of Muslims in our country, citing example of how they have “taken over” and how Malta “will be next.”

The fear is felt across the board by the way, and cuts through social class and political beliefs, so let us not assume that only one segment or another shares this sentiment. It is a fear shared throughout Europe, as anti-immigrant attitudes particularly in Germany, have escalated following the Charlie Hebdo killings.

I am not saying they are wrong to feel fear either; yes, of course, it is unnerving to think that freedom of movement means we have no way of knowing who is entering our country and whether those who come here (even from EU countries) have ties with terrorist organizations.

This is why, rather than just run-of-the-mill political statements condemning what happened, we need to be told by the government what measures are in place to ensure national security and to put people’s minds at rest on this issue. Without correct official information, speculation and conjecture will flourish and I can only see a continued rise of xenophobia as could be seen following the story about migrants queuing overnight to obtain their ID cards.  

Lack of information also leads to skewed or deliberate misinformation. For example, I was recently told that Muslim patrols have taken over certain parts of London and are enforcing Sharia law on non-believers in the streets, telling them they could not drink and that women had to be modestly dressed.  It is true that some converts to Islam were harassing people in this way in 2013, however they were immediately jailed and banned by a judge from continuing with this illegal behaviour.

In other words, they were stopped and I could not find anything to indicate that the Muslim patrols still exist – and yet there is the persistent belief that they do. 

what restored the shattered American psyche after 9/11 was the belief that the country could pull through it together precisely because its very foundations were built on the fact that it was one big melting pot.

In the aftermath of Paris, what I have also seen is that liberals are being blamed for being too soft and lenient, and for promoting multiculturalism. I have lost count of how many times I have read “we told you so” by those who almost seem to be gloating that they have been proved right.

But if multiculturalism is the enemy then countries like the US, where practically everyone’s roots can be traced back to immigration from a foreign land, should have imploded long ago.

Yet even after 9/11, the worst terrorist attack ever carried out on US soil, what eventually restored the shattered American psyche was the belief that the country could pull through it together precisely because its very foundations were built on the fact that it was one big melting pot.

The enemy is and has always been, extremism, in whatever shape, form, religion or ethnicity which uses violence and terrorism to get its way or to eradicate those who do not agree with it. The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, the Brigate Rosse, the IRA – if you think of any extremist group in the past which has resorted to terrorism, there has always been the same common element. 

It is easy to fall into despair and hopelessness that nothing can be done to stem it, but idealistic as it may sound, the millions who marched in France yesterday gave me a flicker of hope. “The terrorists want two things: they want to scare us and they want to divide us,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said yesterday. “We must do the opposite: We must stand up and we must stay united.”