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Germany, France and Austria want to take more decisive action against Islamist terrorism. The main concern is to “protect the external border” of the European Union, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) said on Tuesday after a video conference with French President Emmanuel Macron, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and other EU representatives. Citizens of the Schengen area, on the other hand, “do not have to adapt to further controls.”
“The threat posed by terrorism is a European reality to which we must find a swift and coordinated response,” Macron said. The president also called for the protection of Schenex’s external borders to be strengthened. France had recently been hit by several Islamist-motivated attacks: in Nice, a man killed three people in a church; previously, a teacher had been killed in the street by a young Islamist near Paris.
Merkel said she welcomed the discussion with European partners. It is not about turning Islam against Christianity. It condemns any kind of extremism, Merkel said. However, you have to know who enters and leaves the Schengen zone.
However, these are not large-scale border controls within the EU. On the contrary, the external borders of the Schengen zone should be more strictly controlled. At first it was not known what measures the heads of state were planning.
“We have to act severely against Islamist threats and the underlying ideology and properly secure the external borders of the EU,” Austrian Foreign Minister Kurz said on Twitter.
Bottom line: Islamist threats as “time bombs”
The chancellor called for strict action against radical Islamists who have returned from abroad. “We have thousands of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ who survived the combat mission in Syria, Iraq and for ISIS and have either returned or failed to communicate,” Kurz said. “Many of them are in prison, some have already been released and the sad truth is that most of those in prison will be released in the next few years.”
Islamist threats are “time bombs”. “If we want to protect all of our freedom, then we have to restrict the freedom of these people,” Kurz said.
In Vienna, four people were last killed in an Islamist-motivated terrorist attack and others were injured, some seriously. The 20-year-old perpetrator had a criminal record for attempting to join the “Islamic State” terrorist militia and had been treated in a probation program.
