Gijs de Vries Quotes, Sayings, Remarks, Thoughts and Speeches
Gijs de Vries Quotes and Sayings
- 1
Europe has a long and tragic history of mostly domestic terrorism.
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- 2
I have never come across a technology that doesn't change. This is inevitable. You have to adapt your systems as technology develops.
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- 3
I remain optimistic. What we've seen in Europe and the rest of the world is that freedom has a much stronger attraction than radical fundamentalism.
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- 4
If information ends up in the wrong hands, the lives of people very often are immediately at risk.
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- 5
If you combat an international phenomenon, it is indispensable to share information internationally.
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- 6
If you exchange information internationally, you must strengthen data protection. Those are two sides of the same coin.
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- 7
In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.
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- 8
In situations of military conflict, civil strife, lawlessness, bad governance, and human rights violations, terrorists find it easier to hide, train and prepare their attacks.
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- 9
In the fight against terrorism, national agencies keep full control over their police forces, security and intelligence agencies and judicial authorities.
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- 10
Indiscriminate attacks on civilians ought, under all circumstances, to be illegal in war as in peacetime.
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- 11
It's important that we work very closely with moderate Muslim forces locally, nationally and internationally.
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- 12
Look at Iraq; look at Afghanistan, where at great personal physical risk people have gone to the polls and have rejected the appeal from Bin Laden and his allies to stay at home.
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- 13
Muslim organisations tend to have a low level of organisation. The communities in Europe are quite diverse.
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- 14
Our strategy should be to strengthen the hand of moderate Muslims.
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- 15
Police forces collect information to be used in a public court to get people convicted. Security services gather information that does not necessarily lead to people being prosecuted and in many cases needs to remain confidential.
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- 16
Terrorists always have the advantage of surprise.
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- 17
Terrorists have failed in what is arguably al Qaida's most important objective - to trigger revolutions.
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- 18
Terrorists have failed to trigger mass conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe. We should draw strength from that fact.
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- 19
The central role in the fight against terrorism is with national authorities.
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- 20
The European Borders Agency in Warsaw has been created to help border forces in Europe cooperate more.
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- 21
The idea is to have global standards. There is so much travel that if you just had a regional standard, it would probably ultimately have to be changed.
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- 22
The key to tackling Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism from the Islamist community is in the hands of moderate Muslims.
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- 23
The majority of the world's Muslims do not believe that terrorism is a legitimate strategy or that Islam is incompatible with democracy.
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- 24
The violent radicals do not legitimately represent the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims.
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- 25
There are no automatic links between poverty and terrorism. Among millions of poor people in the world, only a few turn to terrorism.
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- 26
There is a series of sectors which could be severely disrupted by terrorist attacks, particularly if they were to happen in several member states simultaneously.
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- 27
Ultimately, freedom and democracy are stronger than fear and tyranny.
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- 28
We are familiar with terrorism. But indiscriminate, cross-border, religiously motivated terrorism is new.
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- 29
We have an integrated picture of the threat from outside and from within that is provided not only to our foreign ministers but also to our justice and interior ministers.
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- 30
We remain vulnerable. There is no such thing as 100 percent security against terrorism.
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- 31
We still lack a global definition of terrorism.
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- 32
We're still stymied by the old stand-off between those who wish to fight terrorism and resistance fighters.
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- 33
You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services.
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