Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

De Vries is doing the political tightrope walk that defined the post-9/11 era in Europe: naming a threat without indicting a population. The sentence is engineered to be both a firewall and a bridge. “Violent radicals” isolates agency and culpability; “do not legitimately represent” delegitimizes not only their actions but their claim to speak for Islam; “overwhelming majority” is the blunt statistical cudgel meant to drown out the megaphone effect of terror.

The intent is practical: keep counterterror policy from metastasizing into civilizational panic. As a European politician, de Vries is also speaking to two anxious audiences at once: non-Muslim voters who fear “Islam” as a single block, and Muslim citizens who are tired of being treated like footnotes to extremists’ headlines. The subtext is an argument about social cohesion: if you let radicals define the group, you make integration impossible and you hand extremists their favorite narrative, that the West will never accept Muslims as full members.

The word “legitimately” does extra work. It implies radicals may claim representation, even succeed at branding, but that their authority is counterfeit. That’s a quiet rebuke to media and political forces that amplify the loudest, worst actors because they are narratively convenient. In context, the line reads as a preemptive strike against collective blame: a reminder that terrorism thrives on binaries, and democracies help it along when they start speaking in them.