I’m a Christian, I’m a Jew, I’m a Muslim!

Nearly a week ago, Paris was gripped in terror when three terrorists, identified as Cherif Kouachi and his brother Said Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly attacked the Charlie Hebdo Magazine during an editorial meeting in what has been called the first terror attack in Paris, killing 12 people.

In hot pursuit operations against these terrors, French police cornered the Kouachi brothers in a printing shop and killed them… while at the same time, Amedy Coulibaly held a number of hostages inside a Jewish Kosher grocery and killed another four hostages as the French police attacked the grocery and killed Coulibaly. All in all, 17 people were killed in this three-day reign of terror by three men and one woman who hasn’t been caught and considered armed and dangerous. French authorities believe that she is now in Syria.

Last Sunday, CNN, BBC, Al Jazzera and Fox News focused their TV coverage on the massive Million March in Paris, which was joined by French President Francois Hollande, Germany’s Angela Merkel, England’s David Cameron, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, Spain’s Mariano Rajoy, Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority among many leaders of their countries. It was indeed a march of solidarity for the French that the world has never seen.

It only shows that this unity march wasn’t just for France, but for the whole of Europe as well. A million people trooped the streets of Paris (public transportation was reportedly given free of charge to all people in Paris) and at the Place de la République demonstrators waved French and many other flags of Europe and several climbed the Statue of the Republic, a symbol of the French Revolution, and wielded an inflated pencil, symbolizing solidarity with the fallen cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, the weekly magazine that was attacked last week.

Many signs appeared declaring, “I am Charlie, I am Jewish, I am a Christian and I am a Muslim” and all these went viral in social media. That unity march called “Standing with France” by CNN also showed solidarity for Freedom of the Press. As a working member of the press, let me say it here that I find Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures of poor taste and often offensive. But then, it didn’t just focus on Islam but even had caricatures of the Pope and the clergy. And we stand by its right to express itself even through a caricature. So in a way, this terror attack was aimed at press freedom all over the world that extremists want to silence with guns.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared last Saturday that France was at “war” with radical Islam, which is why at least 40 world leaders joined the Unity Rally in Paris. In truth, the war against terror began when on Sept. 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda suicide terrorists commandeered four American airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon. The 4th plane failed on its mission perhaps to crash at the White House or the US Congress because its passengers rose up to stop the suicide terrorists. But there was no Million Man march against Al Qaeda during 9/11.

In short this war on terror is now on its 15th year if we use 9/11 as our date of reckoning.

In fairness to Muslims, one of the policemen who was killed by the terrorists in Paris was a Muslim, while a Jew named Philippe Braham who worked in an IT consulting firm whose brother was a Rabbi in the synagogue, was also killed by the terrorists. The problem that the world has to solve is what to do with radical Islam.

So the big question remains… will this Unity March stop the senseless killings by ISIS and Al Qaeda? Meanwhile, suicide bombers continue in Pakistan, Iraq and Syria. While I fully agree that solidarity would help us destroy the world’s enemies…this is still a pipe dream. We may have learned from the French, these famous words, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. But because of radical Islam… there is no world peace. Even Russia has trained a separatist group to try to break up Ukraine.

In the Philippines, we’ve seen a four decades old insurgency by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), our homegrown terrorists that continue to rampage in our countryside because too many of our politicians play around with the communists or their allied front organizations.

Frankly speaking if we Filipinos only came up with a united front against Communism, we can defeat them in less than a year. Alas, we failed in what the late President Ramon Magsaysay once quipped in order to stop the communist insurgency with his four “F’s”: Find, ‘em, Fool, ‘em, Fight ‘em and Finish ‘em and offer them the hand of peace. But even today, the Aquino regime is “friendly” to those allied front organizations supporting our homegrown terrorists. Therefore we must all unite to fight this evil scourge.

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