A woman wearing an ‘I love Belgium’ T-shirt lights a candle during a vigil for the victims of the Brussels bomb attacks at Trafalgar Square in London. Photo: Reuters

Until CNN came along, we watched international news on Rai Uno. This meant that I grew up with anchor Lily Gruber, tilting her head, dangling her earrings and telling us in that sexy voice of hers that “un altra bomba è scattata” in Northern Ireland, in the Basque region of Spain, in Israel, in Palestine. Her voiceover was superimposed on images of the aftermath: people crying, shouting, carried away by medics. This was the 1980s. Terrorist attacks were part of the daily news routine. But in our minds the attacks were very remote, and we often relegated them to a mutter of “ara dawk reġgħu”.

Then we were not children anymore and September 11 happened. That was different. We watched the attack live on television as it happened, on the city we all knew from the movies. That changed our perspective of terrorist attacks.

Then last year there was Paris. That was closer to home. Paris is only a couple of flight hours away. We knew all the landmarks and we all were vaguely familiar with the arrondissement.

This week there was Brussels. Now, this was home. Although I am not at all enamoured by the drab city, it is a place where we travel to several times a year: my daughter has family there; my Significant Other has family there. We have a multitude of friends who live and work there. God knows how many times I walked through that airport and how many times I walked past the area where the human bomb went off. This time many of us were saying “it could so very easily have been me”.

What can we do? Are we meant to scrap planes? To stop visiting other countries? Are we going to become suspicious of every man or woman we see at the airport pushing a trolley and wearing a glove?

I found the CCTV image of the suicide bombers extremely chilling because the terrorists look as unmenacing as can be; there are no signs of anxiety – could have been going on a holiday. Were they thinking of their last meal? Of the last person they hugged and kissed? Of the scores of people they were going to kill?

Thanks to this image, we will now always be looking over our shoulders and particularly when we’re at the airport we’ll be standing miles apart from people we fear are hiding triggers for their detonators. Which means we will become afraid of one another, because the enemy looks very normal and walks among us. But that was the whole plan all along, wasn’t it?

“The terrorists don’t just want to talk about a war, they hope to provoke, within Europe itself, a civil war,” wrote French journalist Nicolas Hénin in The Guardian this week. He knows the enemy – he spent 10 months as an Isis hostage.

Maybe the media is not helping. Of course, we have a duty to report events, but with 24-hour news channels ‘subdued’ is no longer in our vocabulary. This whole week BBC, Sky News, CNN flashed constantly the words ‘panic’, ‘threat’, ‘menace’ and ‘terror’.

One reporter did a stand-upper while coming up a London tube escalator, to show possible future targets. Great. Just what we needed to make our heart sink further and lock ourselves at home. The Isis chiefs must have watched and wrung their hands with joy. Things got even better for them when the politicians stepped in.

France’s President François Hollande declared “all of Europe has been hit”. David Cameron said an attack on Britain was now “highly likely”. President Barack Obama interrupted his Cuba visit to stand “in solidarity with Belgium” (his solidarity had fizzled out by the next day as he danced and tangoed in front of the cameras in Argentina).

Donald Trump of course declared that “Belgium and France are literally disintegrating”, which made the polls go hysterically in his favour; and in the UK, Ukip’s Nigel Farage thought it was a good idea to use the attacks to plug ‘Brexit’ and claimed that Brussels proves the need to leave Europe. Unwittingly, everyone uttered the soundbites Isis wanted.

Former hostage Hénin wrote: “I can tell them from my experience that this is the sort of approach Isis wants.” His suggestion is the stiff upper lip approach of Jens Stoltenberg, who was the Norwegian prime minister during the 2011 mass shootings by Anders Breivik. Stoltenberg’s response was not to give in to populist pressure and talk of “waging wars”, but instead he called for even more democracy and freedom.

I did a little exercise earlier this week. It is my father’s birthday today; he would have turned 67. I wondered, as I cherished fond memories, whether the world he left in 2008 was any better?

A quick Wiki search shows that, no, not really. There were six suicide bombing attacks that year, leaving hundreds dead and hundreds picking up pieces of a ruined life. This is not the world we want to live in.

But how do we respond to it? The only thing I can think of is that we act with quiet and dignified sympathy, with candles and silences and prayers. And by still booking holidays to European countries in a show of courage. And perhaps by drinking a stiff whisky every time we watch the news and toast to a more sensible humanity. Meanwhile, we plod on.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti