In the frantic media rush for information after the Paris attacks, there was a great deal of inaccurate coverage. It was, for instance, widely reported that the lights on the Eiffel Tower had been turned off as a sign of respect. They had not. They are turned off every night as a matter of course. It was also said that the emotive symbol of the tip of the Eiffel Tower protruding through top of a circle had been designed by celebrated British graffiti artist Banksy. It had not. But the reports of the passports were altogether more serious. Three were discovered near the suicide bombings at the Stade de France football ground. Two were Syrian and one Egyptian. The media response was immediate and, as it turned out, completely wrong. The attackers were obviously from these countries. Well no actually. The Egyptian travel document belonged to a football fan who was seriously injured in the blast from one of the three suicide bombers who had been trying to enter the stadium. And it now turns out that the two Syrian passports were fakes, the like of which are widely available in Turkey. But something very odd happened. The authorities in both Greece and Serbia said that one of the documents belonged to a migrant who had passed through their controls in October. The holder had registered as a refugee. The media drew the immediate conclusion that Daesh (so-called IS) had, as widely feared, been using the tide of human misery fleeing from the Assad dictatorship to infiltrate terrorist killers. Among the big questions that have to be asked about this revelation is why Athens and Belgrade chose to make this information public at a time when speculation was at fever pitch. Another telling point is how both these documents survived, apparently intact, the self-destruction of the suicide bombers who were supposedly carrying them. In their hunger for any tidbit of information, the media did not pause to consider this crucial question. This hysterical reaction has had an important effect. The possibility that at least one of the terrorists had been pretending to be a refugee to gain entry to the European Union, is now burned into people's early shocked memory of the Paris outrage. EU politicians have since been protesting that Syrian migration and terrorism should not be conflated. The French have not yet made any official statement on the passports. And the Greek government has warned against mixing the two issues. But the damage of course has been done. European public opinion, already disturbed by the huge flows of legitimate and illegitimate migrants from Syria (other nationals have been pretending to be Syrian) has been given further cause to fear Muslim refugees. Whether they meant to or not, the reaction of EU leaders to the Stade de France passports in particular and the Paris massacre in general, has stoked the evil fires of Islamophobia. This must be of the greatest concern. If the European Establishment can react with such ignorance and prejudice, it is opening the door to European neo-fascists, not least France's repugnant National Front. Their odious message is that Europe's large Muslim minority poses an existential threat because it does not wish to integrate. For these bigots, the surest proof that Muslims are alien, is that their lives are led and guided by the principles of Islam.
