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Echoes of the Nice massacre

July 18th, 2016

Commentators agree that in our age no society is fully sheltered from terrorist attacks. But they sharply disagree on the causes.

In Magyar Nemzet, Csaba Lukács thinks that by tolerating unfettered immigration over the past decades, France has created an unmanageable problem. It is now producing and reproducing masses of frustrated unskilled unemployed and bored youth who hate their country. He fears that other European countries are also in for a similar future as a result of the most recent wave of immigration. Today’s refugees are the frustrated citizens of tomorrow, he claims. We are at war, Lukács suggests and even if we have the best police in the world, and even if we could post an anti-terrorist agent on each street corner, we would still be unable to defend everything and everyone.

In its front-page editorial, Népszabadság finds it difficult to explain what happened and even more difficult for societies to protect themselves against terrorism. The authors acknowledge that it would be a mistake to identify the horrific crimes of terrorism with religion, but calls on Islamic clerics to face the fact that merciless mass killings are being perpetrated in the name of their religion. ’They have a responsibility to act’. One solution would be to make more consistent efforts to integrate immigrants into our societies, Népszabadság continues, and cautions against identifying migrants with terrorists. The problem is, the left-wing daily concludes, that we have no means to prevent such vile acts from being repeated.

In the latest of his notoriously hot tempered columns in Magyar Hírlap, Zsolt Bayer says that the Tunisian perpetrator of last week’s act of terror in Nice should either never have been allowed to settle in France in the first place, or should have been expelled a long time ago. He blames ’politicians’ for having had another idea – that of colonising this man’s  land first, then withdrawing from his country, only later to interfere in its institutional setup. He believes that the end result is that it is all too late, and nothing can prevent further terror attacks from happening. But in a concluding outburst, Bayer calls on all potential perpetrators to get out of his sight, take those politicians with them and ‘’be cursed forever’.

On Index, Szabolcs Dull believes President Hollande of France is personally responsible for what happened and has further diminished his chances of being re-elected next year. He was personally warned by the president of the region of the French Riviera that policing on Bastille day was insufficient. In addition he could have read in the press, even if he hadn’t been told by his secret services, that the Islamic state was planning attacks in French and Italian seaside resorts. The many thousand people who took part in the celebrations in Nice could not have suspected that the authorities would let them attend without making sure that their safety was reasonably guaranteed. Instead a huge truck was allowed to rush into the crowd. A terrorist attack, when properly handled, usually helps increase the popularity of national leaders, but this time Mr Hollande should not cherish such hopes, Dull concludes.

 

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