Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

Responsibility is being assigned with a velvet glove and a steel fist. Gijs de Vries frames Islamist fundamentalism as a problem best solved from within Islam, but the phrasing quietly shifts the burden away from states and security institutions and onto a category of citizens: "moderate Muslims". It reads like empowerment while functioning as deputization. The "key" is not intelligence-sharing, foreign policy, policing, or deradicalization programs run by governments; it is supposedly held by a group defined primarily by what they are not.

The subtext is a familiar post-9/11 European political move: reassure a nervous public that the threat has an internal counterweight, while insisting that the counterweight prove itself. "From the Islamist community" implicitly treats Islamism as a community rather than an ideology, blurring the line between extremists and the broader Muslim public. That ambiguity is politically useful. It allows leaders to call for partnership without naming the harder work of protecting civil liberties, preventing discrimination, and avoiding policies that inflame grievance while claiming to fight it.

De Vries, associated with EU-level counterterrorism coordination, is speaking from the technocratic center: consensus language meant to sound pragmatic, not punitive. Yet it contains a quiet ultimatum. If "moderates" are the key, then any failure to prevent terrorism can be read as their failure to police their own. The line tries to recruit moral authority against extremism, but it risks reinforcing the very "us vs. them" logic that extremist narratives feed on.