Leadership Quote by Gijs de Vries

The line tries to do two things at once: reassure and alarm. By opening with "We are familiar with terrorism", de Vries offers the listener a foothold, implying experience, institutional memory, maybe even competence. Then he yanks that footing away. The real subject isn’t terrorism as such, but a rebranding of threat: "indiscriminate, cross-border, religiously motivated". Each adjective narrows the moral and policy frame, moving the audience from a problem of policing to one of civilizational risk.

The subtext is bureaucratic but potent: yesterday’s tools won’t suffice. "New" isn’t a descriptive flourish; it’s an authorization. It licenses expanded surveillance, transnational intelligence sharing, tougher border regimes, and the political patience required for long, messy security campaigns. In the post-9/11 European context de Vries operated in, the EU was still negotiating what a shared security identity looked like. Calling this strain of violence "new" helps justify why Brussels should have a role at all, and why member states should cede some discretion.

The sentence also smuggles in an argument about legitimacy. "Indiscriminate" casts the perpetrators as beyond negotiation; "religiously motivated" hints at irrationality; "cross-border" makes sovereignty feel porous. It’s an efficient rhetorical pipeline from fear to coordination: if the threat ignores borders and targets anyone, the response must be collective, preemptive, and unromantic about trade-offs. The risk, of course, is that the category flattens motives and contexts into a single ominous template, turning "new" into a permanent emergency rather than a moment to be understood.