Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

"Strengthen the hand" is the kind of velvet-glove phrasing politicians reach for when they want to sound pragmatic while smuggling in a whole architecture of power. It implies a contest already underway inside Muslim communities, with "moderates" cast as embattled allies and the state positioned as the dealer who can slip them better cards. The metaphor matters: it turns theology, identity, and civic belonging into a strategic game - and it quietly asks the public to accept intervention, funding, partnerships, or surveillance as common-sense tools of stabilization.

The subtext is as much about Western anxiety as it is about Islam. "Moderate Muslims" reads like a reassuring category for non-Muslim audiences, a way to separate "good" from "bad" without naming the messy realities: political grievance, discrimination, foreign policy blowback, socioeconomic exclusion. It also flattens Muslims into a security problem to be managed, not citizens with diverse views who might disagree with the government for perfectly ordinary democratic reasons.

Contextually, de Vries sits in the post-9/11 European policy world, where counterterrorism language migrated into integration debates. The line signals a shift from chasing perpetrators to shaping communities: empower certain voices, marginalize others, create "partners" who validate the state's approach. That can be effective, but it is also risky. The moment government starts picking religious winners, "moderation" can look like compliance, and the people you claim to help inherit suspicion from both sides: co-opted by the state, policed by extremists.