Unheeded Signals

By Daniela Gross

“We thought we could get away with a million people walking on Paris’s boulevards, last January, after the manslaughter at Charlie Hebdo, all together, all of us repeating ‘Je suis Charlie’, and later forgetting, removing what happened, apologizing[…]. Then it happened in Copenhagen, where an armed commando attacked a convention regarding the freedom of expression: again we pretended that nothing had happened. We pretended that nothing was happening also in Canada, when the Parliament went under siege. But Canada was far away, as was also Australia. Isis seemed so remote. And what could ever happen in Italy? Certainly not that a Jew would be stabbed in Milan, in front of a kosher restaurant, as kosher as the supermarket where, after the manslaughter at the magazine which dared to publish the cartoons about Muhammad, another massacre hit French Jews. Now, the apocalypse […]. But it was really so unpredictable?”

So, the journalist Pierluigi Battista harshly criticized, on the Corriere della Sera in a long essay titled “Unheeded Signals”, the indifference that accompanied the escalation of terroristic attacks all around the world. Europe was under siege, he wrote, and all of us ignored what was going on. “Instead, it was possible to understand. It would be enough to pretend that nothing was happening. It would be enough to understand why they [the terrorists] want to hit London, Amsterdam, Paris. And Milan, in front of a kosher pizzeria.”