As I was traveling to Europe this summer, it struck me what especially distinguishes Israeli from European ‎security measures: Israeli security is about dealing with the harsh reality. European security relies largely on wishful thinking ‎and denial.‎

Take airports for example. Airport security has been an issue since Arab ‎terrorists began hijacking airplanes in the 1970s. It is very far from being a new issue. Israeli ‎airports, as a consequence, are the safest in the world. European airports generally are among the least ‎safe, because in most cases anyone can enter from the street and blow himself up, as happened in ‎Brussels in March. In that coordinated, three-pronged attack, 32 civilians were killed.

I find it astounding that even after ‎Brussels, anyone can still enter an airport in Europe without seeing any visibly armed security or without undergoing any kind of security check until reaching the departure hall. Do European airport authorities ‎seriously believe that what happened in Brussels could not and will not happen again?‎

Of course not. But there is an official mantra that has been repeated ad nauseam as European leaders continue to maintain their denial about the nature of Islamic terrorism: We ‎must continue business as usual or the terrorists will have won.‎

This mantra is complete nonsense. Continuing “business as usual” in the security realm does nothing but ‎ensure the continued success rate of Islamic terrorist attacks and the loss of more innocent lives. ‎European leaders bleat that they will not compromise their hard-won freedoms and that it would be exactly what the ‎‎terrorists want. They could not be more wrong. Islamic terrorists want to terrorize and destroy ‎Western civilization in order to build a caliphate. Having ease of access to that which they wish to destroy ‎only makes their mission that much easier. The continued easy and unimpeded access to airports, ‎train stations and shopping malls without the slightest security measures just makes Europe the ‎dream destination for Islamic terrorists. Mantras and “narratives” persist, and in the meantime, people ‎are getting killed.‎

Not that this bothers some of the biggest actors in the mainstream media, who work ceaselessly to keep the narratives going, no matter how damning the facts. In Israel, ‎we are naturally preoccupied with the generally deeply biased way in which mainstream media reports ‎terrorist attacks happening here in Israel. It is interesting — in a depressing way — that some ‎of the worst “offenders,” such as the BBC, have begun reporting in exactly the same way on the Islamic ‎terrorism occurring around the world. Incredibly, the BBC News headline after a Syrian suicide bomber detonated himself in Germany was “Syrian migrant dies in German blast.” Reuters did a similar thing when it headlined ‎the news, “Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast.” Who needs satire when ‎news outlets provide it themselves?‎

Of course, European political leaders do not make the job of journalists any easier by continuing to deny ‎the Islamic nature of these many terrorist attacks, frantically searching for anything that will confirm that ‎it was just a “lone wolf,” someone who was mentally ill, someone who had been bullied as a child, ‎or whatever else will absolve the authorities of finally proclaiming that the emperor is stark naked. But ‎then again, a journalist’s most sacred duty is to reveal what the authorities aim to conceal, not to do their ‎bidding. Most mainstream journalists fail abysmally at that.

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel. Twitter @judithbergman. This article was originally published by Israel Hayom. 

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