 Merci beaucoup pour l'institut, pour m'accueillir aujourd'hui. J'étais honnête, comme je l'ai dit, durant la fête que nous avons évoquée, de s'attendre sous la picture de Jacques Delors, un grand européen européen. Et je veux aussi remercier le frère ambassadeur et le frère ambassé pour faire cette visite possible, ici, et à la Dablen International Book Fair, ce soir. Quand Médinemouche, un frère Giadi, a went into the Jewish Museum in Brussels on May 25, 2014, and killed three people, the first one died of his wounds. I described it as what could be the path to a Europe in 911, at that very time. I don't like to use this kind of parallels, I'm a historian, we know that analogy is not history, but at the same time, I was trying to find the world to deliver a wake-up call that unfortunately went on many deaf ears, but already everything was there. The guy was not an homegrown terrorist, he was not a lone wolf, he had been trained and groomed to Giadi terror in Syria. ISIS or Daesh in its Arab acronym was pervert enough to use him as one of the prison warden. If you understand what I mean physically speaking and torture speaking of French hostages in a place I know well, Aleppo, because the last time I was there, I was not aware, fortunately, that I was hiding 400 meters away from the place where my friends and compatriotes were jailed by Daesh, so this guy had already quite a record. He used his criminal connection in the now and famous neighborhood of Molenbeek in Brussels to achieve this criminal act. And then he went to France, where he was caught in Marseille with many weapons including machine guns, but fortunately for everybody, he didn't go suicide, otherwise he would have perpetrated also a massacre in Marseille. So already we're talking May 2014, everything is there. What changed after that is the dimension, is the number of people involved, is the connection between attacks. And every time the blow is delivered, it's a tragedy, it's a moment of mourning and then we wake up as though it's a nightmare and the nightmare is over. I will have a positive message in the end, but I must start saying that we are in the middle of the nightmare and the nightmare is not going to fade away just by closing our eyes and reopening it. And the nightmare is not something that has been growing in our neighborhood, in our societies, so it's very legitimate to have a public debate about the failures of our policy system, education system, the flaws in our penitential system, but if we had the most perfect system of fall in all the fields, you still will have jihadis. So the issue is over there, it's not here. But because the issue is over there, it has to be confronted in a European way. Because for them Europe is a vast battleground, they don't make distinction of boundaries, of national structure, the only distinction they have is linguistic. Interestingly enough, in Belgium, Flemish jihadis, Flemish-speaking jihadis, work with the Dutch ones, not with their fellow Belgium. And when they are in Syria, they are not in the same camps. Camps are organized by language, which is a big difference with al-Qaeda. Because al-Qaeda, with all its global propaganda, you came to the Madafa, which means the guest house of the Tunisians, of the Moroccans, of the Algerians. While now you have organized the Russian speakers, and by the way, the number of Russian-speaking jihadis now with ISIS is probably similar, if not higher than the number of all European jihadis. Maybe that's something Russia should think about at one moment or another, instead of bombing in Syria at this very time, the people were fighting the jihadis. So you had this May 2014, then you had Charlie Hebdo, hyper-Cachère, and the French police woman killed from 7 to 9 January 2015. Then you had the Bataclan and Saint-Denis in November. Then you had on 22 March, an attack that was not on Brussels, it was an attack on Europe, the airport, but the metro station that is the closest one to the European Parliament and the European institution. And it was very clear that it was an attack on Europe in the very jihadist propaganda. But in the meantime, those people have been striking from San Bernardino, California, to Jakarta, Indonesia. And you don't have one week without a major high-sister attack, the most recent ones having taken place in Baghdad, Iraq, with which time, dozens of casualties. So it's a global outfit that is far more dangerous than Al-Qaeda in its aid. Al-Qaeda, on 9-11, was less than 1,000 members and was stuck, literally, in a place, the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, that is both geopolitical dead-end and a very shallow symbol. You can say horizon, horizon, but basically, you know, it doesn't ring a lot of bells in the potential recruits. While today, you have ISIS that is controlling a territory if you are optimistic the size of Jordan, if you are pessimistic the size of the United Kingdom. With, probably, no figures are fully accurate, 30,000 foreign fighters or something in that dimension, which is very accessible from Europe. I'm 54, I'm not very fit. I was in Jihadiland and back in Paris in 36 hours. And I don't have a support network. Otherwise, you can come back even quicker. And what is most important and very often under study, it's Bilad-e-Sham, it's a country of sham. And sham, which means at the same time Damascus and Syria, the country of sham is Syria as a whole, is very heavily charged in Muslim expectation of the judgment day. I wrote a book about that, Apocalypse in Islam, in 2008. And it was my most toxic book because it's all toxic. It's all about, you know, massacres, genocide, killing of Jews, Christians, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I had one good news. Al-Qaeda was not apocalyptic, what ISIS is. And of course, you know, if you make deradicalization program, if you want to reform justice, if you want, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have a problem in saying, oh, listen, judgment day is not going to happen. And somebody believes that judgment day is going to happen. You can put him into 100 hours of deradicalization program to no avail. We knew that in the Middle Ages in Europe, you know. Just recently, we read L'oeuvre au noir by Marguerite Ursula, where you have people going to minstere in 1534 because they believe judgment day is tomorrow. How can you fight that by debunking the prophecies? And the prophecies say they are going to war against us in Bile of the Sham. And not only they are going to war, but the room. And the room are the orthodox. And the orthodox are the Russians. So thank you, Mr. Poutine. You added a new intensity to prophecies that are already at the core of the recruiting machine. Because ISIS is like a cult, and like all cult, it has to have a coherent vision of the world to the elected few, the chosen few, that will be part of the vanguard, of the self-proclaimed vanguard. In ISIS, you have five categories for the whole humanity. The first category is them. And they call themselves the Muslims. But most of the Muslims, in fact 99% of the Muslims for them are the apostates, are the false Muslims. Then you have the heretics. And the heretics are non-sunni Muslims. And then you have the Jews and the Crusaders, which are basically all of us. And so they consider that this category can take over all the others. And instead of debunking the prophecies the only way you can debunk it, which is inflicting them a fatal blow, we are containing them. I love that word. I've been a diplomat for 20 years. But you cannot contain totalitarian jihadi terrorism. If you don't defeat it, then it will expand. And this is exactly what it is doing now. The problem is that the cognitive dissonance is usually the privilege of the cult. In many sectors of Western leadership you have cognitive dissonance today. I'm not speaking about my country and I'm very proud of my country speaking against this cognitive dissonance. But when you hear people, for instance in DC, saying we are defeating ISIS, we don't live in the same world. We don't live in the same world. Because in the meantime ISIS is recruiting, is expanding, and they think, look, the whole world is against us and we are still winning. So of course the prophecy is being fulfilled if this kind of thing happened. The worst thing that ever happened in the fight against ISIS is the invention of the self-defeating concept of coalition. If you have a coalition, you have a united leadership that fights for a common goal. There is no coalition to fight ISIS. There is no coherence in the operation. Because basically Washington and Moscow don't fight the same war. For Mr. Putin, Mr. Putin is very coherent. He is very coherent. There's nothing called people. People are conspiracy by the CIA, by the Mossad. So if people rebel against the regime, then the regime should treat the people like a foreign threat. This is exactly what he did in Chechnya. This is exactly what he's doing in Syria on behalf of Ispal Assad. So he's not fighting ISIS. He's fighting the people who could fight ISIS and bombing them in Aleppo and in other places. Just one month ago, the last corridor between Turkey and Jihadiland. It's so small places you never heard about but by the way, there was not even a line in the newspaper called Arai. Was taken by the Syrian revolutionaries who are fighting both ISIS and Assad. It was taken for two days because ISIS regrouped its forces and because there is no aerial support to the Syrian revolutionaries who were overwhelmed. Which means that the right line is still functioning. You can still go in and out. So instead of having some kind of priority, maybe the fall of Arai, the closure of this right line is a priority. No, no, we're doing exactly the contrary. We're letting them with their own game because everybody has priorities that are different from the fight of ISIS, against ISIS. The Turks against the Kurds, the Kurds against the Turks. Assad against his own people. The Iranians against their various local rivals. Saudis against Iran and so on and so forth. The American strategy is basically flawed for three reasons. First, he considers the priorities Iraq because they're still healing the wounds and licking all the injuries they got from the fatal and terrible invasion of 2003 that literally opened the gates of the Middle East to Zan al-Qaeda and today ISIS. So they still focus on Iraq. They are apparently unable to grasp the simple fact that I don't know one foreign jihadi who went over there for Iraq. They go there for Syria because of Bilad-e-Sham and because of all the propaganda saying all the Muslims have been abandoned, they have been gassed, they have been massacred and the whole world is looking. This is all propaganda. This is the first time in history that you have some kind of humanitarian jihad. They not only go there, kill people, rape, loot. They believe they're doing it for good, against evil. They are not in the same mindset like the people going to Afghanistan who knew perfectly that they were going there to kill, shoot and rape. No, no. They believe they go there for solidarity. So first, flow of the American strategy focus on Iraq and they're still focusing on Iraq. For them, Syria is a sideshow. Second flow is that in Syria, you don't have to support the local forces, the revolutionary forces who are Arab and Sunnis because if you do that, then you have a problem with Assad, you have a problem with Russia. So, ah, they just discovered the Kurds. The Americans just discovered the Kurds. That is their path to Damascus. And now, they love the Kurds. Our Kurds are wonderful. First, there is one party, they love that. They don't like all these people revolution where you have committee, everybody shouting at each other. In Syria, it would have been already 10 times somebody would have stood up and interrupted me because those people, they have lived under dictatorship for 42 years. They cannot let anybody in the West from, they always have to interfere. So, Americans, they don't like that. And you have this wonderful thing which is really, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know the chief of their special forces or operation, former special forces, have been to Syria but you don't know where. So, they make an announcement saying he has been to Syria but they don't want to say where because everybody know where he's been. He've been with the Kurdish militias. So, it's already tough to swallow all that for Turkey because the same Kurdish militias are putting bomb in Turkey, a NATO ally. So, there is a slight contradiction maybe in doing this with the Kurds. But anyway, no matter what you think about that, I will deliver a blunt reality, the Kurds have reached their limit. They cannot go one meter over. It's finished. Even the last city they conquered, they cleansed it from non-curds. So, believing the Kurds could go down to the Euphrates Valley is just a denial of reality. And the third flow of the US strategy is that one day you can reach an agreement in Russia and that this will cool thing down in Syria. Wow, this is not a cold war. It's a very hot war. And most of the people who are over there are not the pounds of anybody. I do believe that even if Mr. Putin asked very bluntly to Assad to step down, he won't. So, the idea that you can deal by proxy this war is totally out of touch with this reality. And on this reality, ISIS is prospering. Challenge to Europe. Because we have probably 5,000 European jihadis over there. 5,000. There would be 50s that would be already a security issue. 1,000 is just mind-boggling. Because contrary to what the Russians believe, they won't be all killed over there. You know, that was the rationale of the various Arab intelligence services when they sent the extremists to Afghanistan in the 80s. And most of them came back. So, the problem is in front of us, not behind us. First, because of the sheer magnitude of the number, 5,000. What do you do with that? So, there's not one good answer. It has to be a set of answers that involves the various bureaucracies. But there should be a solidarity at the European level to really tackle this issue as a European challenge. I would have loved also NATO to take a lead, but obviously NATO is involved with other things et NATO is not even able to defend Turkey. So, first you have to understand that it's not what we do, but it is what we don't do that makes us more vulnerable. If you take the chronology, when Mr Nemush is attacking the Jewish Museum in Brussels, there's not one bullet fired by any European against ISIS, not one. And even the last attack in Brussels was done while Belgium was not part of the coalition. It is now discussing its return to the coalition. So, first let's stop saying that we attack them so they strike back. No, no, no. It's because we don't attack them enough and we don't strike them enough that they are able to strike back. I'm very confident that ISIS will be defeated, you know? OK, let's put the number at maximum. 60,000 people over there with this territory. If really you have a strategy and a coalition, it can be dealt with pretty rapidly. And we have a precedent. And we have a precedent. In 2001, you had 9-11. Everybody understood it was a global challenge. It was not America. In French, we had this famous editorial, two Americans, we are all Americans. So, we had a real coalition, a real coalition. It was not America against Afghanistan, America against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was a unanimous security council resolution, chapter 7. And it was a coalition with 60 states, each one contributing in its capacity. And what is even more important before going to the coalition, after 9-11, a series of attacks were planned. The US Embassy in Paris. Petrochemical installation in Singapore. Warships in the Gibraltar streets. So all this could have happened if we hadn't gone for the head. And the head was in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The same way the head today is in Raqqa, Syria. So if you just do bombing, it can present certain benefits towards public opinion. Like you see, we are doing what we have to do because we have been attacked and we are striking back. But no war has ever been won by airbombing. Otherwise, the US would have won the war in Vietnam. So you need local forces, not foreign forces. Foreign forces is exactly what ISIS wants. Et si vous vous rappelez, la façon dont les Talibans et l'Al-Qaïda, l'ancien et le safe haven, ont été détruits en octobre, novembre 2011, il n'y avait pas de forces grandes. Il y avait une grande erreur, mais c'était un autre débat. Il y avait localement des forces afghanes qui voulaient libérer leur pays de ce qu'ils ont perçu dans l'Al-Qaïda comme une occupation foreign. De la même manière aujourd'hui, vous avez un nombre signifiant de Syriens qui considèrent l'ISIS comme une occupation, ce qui est pourquoi, d'ailleurs, je sais que ce n'est pas le cas dans l'Islande, mais en France, il y a beaucoup de femmes parce qu'ils veulent qu'ils restent avec les Français, ou les Jihadistes françaises, donc qu'ils ne comprennent pas la clé de ce qui se passe en Syrie, alors que, même si les Jihadistes françaises n'étaient pas un peu conscients, si ils avaient à marier une femme locale d'un tribe local, et qu'ils comprennent ce que l'ISIS est vraiment en train de faire pour la population locale. Donc, vous avez ces troupes de terrain, ces forces locales qui ont acté dans le terrain avec l'intelligence, et vous savez, comme... parce que vous ne devriez pas croire, j'ai un bias avec l'Amérique, j'ai des grands amis et des parcs en Amérique, et une de mes références, et je suis le général David Petraeus, le général David Petraeus, c'était celui qui a vraiment reçu part de l'Irak de l'Al-Qaeda, et d'un coup, après sa députation, ses politiques ont été détruites. Et ce que l'a été le général Petraeus dire, vous savez, les forces locales, elles ont 5 clés plus que nous. Ils drinkent l'eau, ils nourrissent la nourriture, ils connaissent le terrain, ils parlent la langue, et ils ont des accounts pour s'assurer la motivation. Vous savez, ces gens-là, ils sont là en Syrie, mais comme je vous l'ai dit, ils sont formés par les Russes, parce que ces gens ne veulent pas seulement s'assurer l'Isaïs, ils veulent aussi s'assurer l'Assad, et ils se sont restés dans un épaule, dans un battement terrible. En tant que l'Isaïs, dans le contrôle de l'Isaïs, vous avez le plan terroriste, le plan qui va dans l'Europe, et nous allons avoir d'autres tragédies, j'ai peur. Avez-vous de l'Europe propre ou avez-vous de l'experience de votre pays avec la mort des villes et des citoyens dans l'Isaïs, en Tunisie, par exemple, le dernier juin 2015 ? Je ne dis pas que c'est facile, je dis que tous les autres options sont très mauvaises et sont seulement poursuivies l'agony de ce jihadisme qui est allumé sur notre tête. Mais au contraire, il faut comprendre que l'Isaïs est défeuble parce que c'est tout de même profiter de l'erreur des gens qui sont supposés à combattre l'opposé. Et je dis qu'il a besoin de l'expérience européenne parce que n'importe quoi brouillant ou rélevé qui sera en train de faire cette lutte contre l'Isaïs, sera pas utile, mais seulement partial si, dans le pays suivant, le business se passe comme normalement. Parce que immédiatement, ils vont comprendre. Et vous pouvez voir Nemouchi entré en Francfort avant de transiter les choses en Belgique et finir en Francfort. Coulibali, qui attaque l'hyper-cachère en janvier 2015, il probablement boute ses armes de la Belgique. Mais ce qui est encore plus important, il a infiltré ses partenaires de l'Espagne et elle est maintenant en Raca. Elle a été immédiatement transfert à ses quartiers de l'organisation GAD. Donc, je vous promets, je vais terminer sur la note rosie. Le challenge est énorme. C'est un challenge à l'Europe. En orderant à l'adresser, nous avons besoin de plus de l'Europe et plus de l'Europe ne veut pas juste dire plus de l'Europe en armes. Il veut dire quelque chose qui s'appelle une politique. Et la politique est multifaceted. Il tient à interrompre notre relation avec la Russie et l'Amérique, ce qui n'est pas facile. Notre relation avec la Turquie, qui probablement est plus drôle. Mais il tient aussi à interrompre la façon dont nous voulons vivre dans ce monde qui doit être ouvert, tolérant, multiculturel. Et c'est exactement ce que l'ISIS veut détruire. Et c'est probablement aussi pourquoi il va être défeuille. Merci beaucoup.