We, yes all the people fortunate enough to live in a decent country, have all watched and felt the threat of IS these last days. Paris was victim of an attack that was so well coordinated, it couldn’t have possibly been organised from inside Europe without being stopped by the police and security forces. We hope this is true at least.

We all feel the threat and say to each other: the show must go on. Then we say: our revenge on these terrorists is to actually live the good life again, have more fun, go to stadiums anyway, eat out as usual.... This is where we are being fooled. We are being led to believe by the Western propaganda machine, which has our politicians as conscripts, that nothing must change, more of the same in our lifestyle, and more of the same of their marauding in other people’s lives. The attacks on Syria must be intensified, they say.

But the truth of the matter is, we are obeying fools who are enforcing mouth guards on us so we speak out less against their misbehaviour and their profiteering. We are obeying fools who are leading us into believing that the enemy is at the border. Well, I beg to differ. The enemy is actually being voted to the houses of parliament all over Europe.

The politicians are enforcing more laws that justify spying and limiting our freedom of expression, only to serve a hidden agenda. They are limiting the journalists’ functions to that of a mouthpiece for them as they claim to want more freedom in controlling possible radical cells.

Pounding the hell out of cultures and countries will not buy us peace. Attacking the refugees fleeing our own mistakes is not going to stop terrorist attacks

The US-led coalition, including the UK and France who are intent on offsetting the next attack, have had the guts to put forward to us a story saying that, because Saddam Hussein was a very outrageously psychopath, he cannot be the proud owner of a couple of weapons. In 2002 and 2003, you couldn’t switch on any of the mainstream international news channels without being flooded by mostly US politicians pouring their sensitive hearts out to us on how dangerous and heartless Hussein was being to his people. The propaganda got so intense we were converted to believing we should, at all costs, attack this villain, and that he was guilty of all the attrocities, in many minds even of 9/11, single-handedly.

So Iraq, what was previously called the jewel of the Middle East, a country with the best literacy rates and health system in the region, a country with the best educational system in the Middle East, was torn apart, razed to the ground, its people killed indiscriminately, its infrastructure demolished. Yes the coalition did all this. Donald Rumsfield famously came out to tell us to stop fretting about it so much. H e said: “We don’t do body counts on other people.” That meant the Iraqis were not worth counting, in his esteemed and so democratic mind.

This was much more than what happened in Paris of course, this was a billion times more than that. The US-led coalition is really good at bringing things down; not as good in rebuilding of course. Iraq is still razed to the ground, still being bombarded on a daily basis by our coalition and now President Barack Obama is talking about boots on the ground once again.

After the mayhem ensued, there was a vacuum of all sorts in ravaged Iraq. A country with real people living in it, not a PSP country, people with families, with history, with pride. A country of fathers and mothers, kids, cousins, projects and dreams. A country full of restaurants and cafes, stadiums and health centres, universities and schools. So, the vacuum was political, structural, bereft of security, you name it, it was empty. Only some coffers were filling up fast, coffers of the upper elite, the politicians, the banks, the US teams of mercenaries (no, this was not state-sponsored terrorism, just private security personnel ). If only it could go on forever.

So the US-led coalition decided it had to put its own preferred gentleman on top of this busted country, and it was Al-Maliki. He was liked by none of the representatives forming Parliament at the time, except his own tiny party, but there he was. American education: check. He was like a boulder in the face of democracy, but then the slogans all touted ‘democratic’ and so he stayed.

In the meantime, the ex-Baath Party that Hussein led and used to rule Iraq felt left out and wanted the good old days back. So came to be the IS which would have otherwise remained a sub-group of Al-Qaeeda. It had occasion to flourish – by the US dollar, no less. At this point it was a minority group, exclusively operating within the Iraqi borders. But in 2004, Al-Baghdadi, the then leader of IS met Baathist militants at a prison camp, and a marriage took place. The insurgents became IS, they grew out of Al-Qaeda, they started their campaign of terror, and the rest is history... the non-history that nobody seems to report.

IS exported itself into eastern Syria and seized oil wells and a huge voided area in Iraq. It started collecting taxes from the people there, it set up a government system, a judicial system, a social security system and is now the worst case of rebel organisations we have seen in history, outdoing the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

We also know that the US-led coalition tried to fight IS without boots on the ground, as they claim, although hidden boots are all over the Middle East. So the policy they chose was to back those who fought their enemy with finance, training and weaponry. What they did not realise, time and time again repeating the same minimally reported mistakes, was that they were actually seeing their supplies ending in the hands of IS.

So what we actually saw happening was the rich wolf who wrongfully attacked a sovereign state created and sustained its own enemy. Then the same wolf tried to abate this enemy by supplying the enemy of its enemy with more dollars, training and weaponry, and these supplies were dispersed among both the enemies of the enemies and the friends of the enemies... and so on.

None of the politicians, leaders and financiers who are taking part in this bloodbath have yet ever been accused formally of their crimes. Ok, yes, a courageous Iraqi threw a boot at President George Bush once, not that it stopped the war or started another, and he ended up in prison for a while – no, not Bush, the Iraqi.

The guilty ones, the hands behind the Paris attack are not the Muslim communities who so immediately issued condemning statements as if they should. The guilty ones sit in the seats of power, tell us to weep while they go bomb some more innocent Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni and Libyan people to stop IS, and hoodwink us into thinking they do this in our interest.

Pounding the hell out of cultures and countries will not buy us peace. Attacking the refugees fleeing our own mistakes is not going to stop terrorist attacks. What goes around, comes around. The Paris victims would not want more of the same. They would want peace and the cost of peace is to change our supremacist policies and have an honest evaluation of our leaders and their doings.

As we cry for the victims, lets work for their sake and for ours. Lets stop the outpour of those ‘freedom bombs’ signed ‘From Paris with love’ because they are actually killers of children who are not being counted, just killed.

Caroline Gatt is a Maltese Muslim and stay-at-home mum.