Welcoming refugees is right response to Paris atrocities

Many people in Europe still feel that Islamist fundamentalism is about a clash of civilisations, pitting Muslims against Christians. This view is distorted because religious fundamentalism results primarily from clashes within a faith, with a self-selected few claiming to possess the ultimate truth and declaring everyone else to be infidels. In their eyes, infidels deserve to be suppressed, tortured and killed. I don’t want to go into more detail now; the comment I wrote in February  and the assessment I wrote in April are still valid, and our Political Islam briefing contains a lot of information on the matter, including contributions by experts from Muslim countries.

What needs to be spelled out now, however, is that turning against Muslims in general and against refugees from Syria in particular is precisely what the ISIS terrorists want us to do. Their ideology is one of apocalyptic violence. Their narrative  is one of Muslims facing enemies everywhere and having to fight back. The EU, its members and the international community must not act in a way that confirms this paranoid world view.  

It makes far more sense to accept refugees from Muslim countries who are fleeing from the terrorists’ violence. We must join forces with moderate Muslims, masses of whom cherish their religion's long traditions of peace and tolerance. No, the ISIS terrorists are not true believers. Their approach is a perversion of a world religion.

Konrad Szymanski, who is to take office as Poland’s next minister for European affairs on Monday, does not seem to understand this. He seems to believe that all Muslim refugees are dangerous simply because they are Muslims. Depressingly, some right-wing Germans agree with him, and their extremist fringe is prone to using violence. There is a crisis of recurrent firebombing. Domestic arsonists, so far, have caused far more damage in Germany than Islamist terrorists.    

Syrians who flee to Europe appreciate our ideas of freedom, rule of law and non-religious (though not anti-religious) government. They fear and hate the fundamentalists. They deserve our solidarity. And by helping these people in a desperate humanitarian situation, the EU can prove to the Muslim world that the ISIS narrative is wrong. In contrast, building fences and turning uprooted persons away would send precisely the kind of message ISIS appreciates. It would confirm the extremists’ us-against-them narrative.

At this point, we know that some of the killers were citizens of France. There are indications that another one may have come to Europe as a Syrian refugee. That must be investigated, but even if it proves out to be true, it will not make much of a difference. If we decided that one or two dangerous terrorists among hundreds of thousands of refugees mean that we cannot accept any refugees at all, we´d do exactly what the murderers wanted. ISIS wants all Muslims who don’t agree with extremist terror to suffer, preferably at the hands of western governments.

The lesson must not be to refuse people who are in need access to our countries, nor to define a largely theoretical upper limit for how many can be accomodated. It must be to restore pragmatical order to migration and asylum proceedings. Of course, European governments must do what they can to monitor potential terrorists, prevent crime and take perpetrators to court. But let’s not forget that some terrorists are not Islamist fundamentalist. Those who set fire asylum shelters in Germany must feel the full force of the law too.