Read on the conference in Paris dedicated to struggle with terrorism.

Published in France and Israel.

I greet your conference, the need for which is absolutely evident. The appalling crime, committed in Spain, confirmed this necessity once again. Why? I’ll try to set forth point by point the way I see today’s Europe.

1. To a greater or to a lesser extent, the level of anti-semitism increases in all the European countries.

2. Against such a background, the public opinion is being formed that Israel and the USA are terrorist states.

3. According to the European Union poll, the majority of people consider that the threat to their peace comes from Israel.

4. They reject a right to defense to Israel and, moreover, a right to exist. The fact that Israel returns a blow for every act of terrorism, irritates the mass-media and the society most of all.

5. The mass-media ignore the fact that it was not Israel that generated shakhidism, which took lives of hundreds of Israeli, Americans and many other people from different countries. They ignore, that shakhidism is a transmissible disease, that it is spreading around the world like a plague.

6. Shakhids are dumb victims of the heads of terrorist Palestinian organizations and their so called “spiritual” leaders who send for death hundreds of deceived young men, nearly children. That is what they must be tried for. And if the trial is not possible, they must be annihilated for the crimes, that should be qualified as compulsion for suicide. The mass character of these crimes, aimed usually at peaceful people, entitle us to call them crimes against humanity.

All these facts are evident, but millions of people in Europe and America seem to have lost the ability to take in the reality. As a result, there appeared a new strange and frightful phenomenon – spiritual suicidal shakhidism of the Europeans — they refuse to resist. It was vividly demonstrated by Spain. Shocked by the events of March 11, it called off its contingent from Iraq. By doing so it psychologically prepared Europe to suicidal decision not to resist terrorism.

Loss of the feeling of danger, false hope of the European Community, its intellectual and political leaders, that the present situation will be solved by itself and won’t touch Europe, nourish the growing anti-semitism. In spite of ceaseless terror of Hamas, Fatkh, Al-Aksa’s martyrs and others, the reckless support of these Palestinians and Arafat is based on this feeling.

It seems that Europe caught Russia’s eternal disease – it makes one and the same mistake over and over again. Europe has forgotten the words, pronounced by Chamberlen in 1938 when he returned from Munchen after the meeting with the German Fuhrer, the words that everyone who heard them and the following generations should remember: “I bring you peace”.

With these words about PEACE the second world war started. Now the third one (!) is going on – on September 11, 2001 the USA and Europe were given a dare. The USA and the coalition took this dare, they were forced to be at war. Destruction of Al-Kaeda and annihilation of Saddam’s regime were necessary to preserve the Afghan and Iraqi nations and the civilization in which we exist, we – the Europeans and the Americans, — and which is by right called European one. However many mistakes were made during the Iraqi war – and the number of them has increased the last year – the historical necessity of these wars is indisputable. And all of us living on the both coasts of the Atlantic ocean, will be in mortal danger till Europe doesn’t overcome its negativism towards the USA and Israel.

P.S. But a war is a terrible phenomenon. It is always harmful for any army, even for the one that wages a just war. The democratic society has a right to demand from the leaders of their countries and from their armies the most merciful attitude towards the peaceful people living on the territories where the military operations are being waged. They has to demand, that the attitude towards the prostrated, captives and injured should be within the principles of the international conventions and humanity. The violation of these principles must be condemned and those who are guilty must be punished. That is what the USA and Britain are doing now.

Yelena Bonner May 11, 2004