IT HAPPENED TOMORROW The Only Possible Defense

By Guido Vitale

It is a terrible shame that the workers of death who came to murder the young people at the Bataclan, at a restaurant, or at the stadium, had no idea. They sowed unspeakable pain, but they will not succeed at felling the masts of this ship called Paris. The Nazis did not succeed, and neither will they.

To us is left the task of acknowledging the true face of terrorism that we find ourselves having to confront.

We already knew of its profoundly anti-Semitic cast, and now we know how the Bataclan has been for some time in the sights of certain activists who have hidden behind the convenient cover of defending the rights of Palestinians in order to advance their project of destruction and death. We knew that they hate Jews and want to stifle the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Now we know, and can no longer ignore, that which we should have known all along. These people intend to issue a deadly threat to the entire democratic world, to the entire civilization of Europe, because anti-Jewish hatred is never an end in itself; rather, it constitutes a form of rejection and profound incapacity to accept life, love, liberty, and culture.

Anyone who wishes to continue to listen to music, to go freely to the stadium, to take a walk, to eat in a restaurant, to study, or to love in the face of this declaration of war, must take a decisive stand and rebuff even the smallest instance of anti-Semitic hate. This is the best, perhaps the only, possible defense of those values that make Europe and Paris beautiful: those values that allow us to be together.