On an April afternoon this year, I found myself seated next to a couple from the Middle East — the wife in hijab and the husband sporting a heavy beard — in a cafe in Venice, touted as the oldest cafe in the world. As expected in any oldest-of-its-kind establishment, the place was brimming with tourists from around the world. 

Soon, a couple from Australia, judging by their accent, took the last empty table and the elderly man struck up a conversation with the man from the Middle East. “Don’t you get suspicious looks with your beard like that?” he asked, apparently in reference to the jihadist terrorists who sport heavy beards. I thought it was a rather offensive question that betrayed the man’s prejudices, but the man from the Middle East who said he was traveling through Europe just laughed it off with “Yeah, I am used to it.”

Earlier this month on a flight to Frankfurt, I was seated next to a man who had moved from Poland to Germany more than a decade ago. Small talk ensued over tiny trays of so-so dinner and after the requisite exchanges about what the visitor found interesting about Korea, we got around to talking about the refugee crisis in Europe.

I discovered that not everyone in Germany was enthralled with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open invitation to the refugees. The overriding concern among those opposed to it was that if the refugees do not assimilate and adapt to the new society, they would be disruptive to the way of life of the natives. There were also concerns that many of the refugees were economic refugees, trying to enter Europe to make a better living. It was not hard to detect a hint of wariness in the voice of the man seated next to me.

When I woke up last Saturday morning to more than a dozen news alerts on my cellphone screen, I knew something terrible had happened. As more details of the horror wrought on Paris on Friday night by Islamic State terrorists emerged throughout the day, my thoughts first turned to the hundreds of innocent lives that were forever changed by the brutal attacks.

“They had done nothing to deserve this. The people in the Bataclan Concert Hall only wanted to see a rock band perform. Diners at the Cambodian restaurant and the nearby bar were out with their friends and families, unwinding on a Friday evening. They were just going about their lives when they were killed,” I thought to myself angrily.

Then fear set in. I had been in Luxembourg the previous week attending a colloquium on crisis reporting organized by the Asia-Europe Foundation and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation where 25 journalists from Europe and Asia discussed, among other things reporting on the Charlie Hebdo incident as well as how to report on a crisis when you are smack in the middle of it. I had transited at Frankfurt and Paris. I imagined the possibility that the Charles de Gaulle airport could have been attacked by terrorists while I waited for my flight back home. I told my friend planning a trip to London and Moscow perhaps she should cancel it.

It was only later in the day that my thoughts turned to the refugees, who would now certainly find it more difficult to enter Europe, and the Muslims in Paris and around the world who would face even more prejudices, if not outright attacks, although they have nothing to do with the Paris terrorist attacks. In fact, Muslims communities are also victims of the attacks in that the terrorists are extremist Islamic militants who invoke the name of Allah.

In the days since the attack, it has been reported that several of the terrorists held French and Belgian citizenships. They were young people from immigrant families who became radicalized, went to Syria to train as militants and returned to their homelands to carry out acts of terror. Most of them were marginalized, economically deprived youths who thought that the IS had the answer when their lives seemed to have hit a wall.

There is no way that the deaths and destruction wrought by these terrorists can ever be excused. However, there needs to be some soul searching as to why those youths became radicalized. Molenbeek, an area in Brussels that has become a hotbed of Islamic terrorists in recent years, is a poor, decrepit neighborhood of immigrant families. There are pockets of poor Paris neighborhoods with heavy Muslim immigrant populations where unemployed youths need to find a vent for their frustrations and resentments, a vent they find, unfortunately, in IS.

It is estimated that the total number of multicultural family members in Korea would reach some 1 million by 2020. The Education Ministry data shows that students from multicultural families total more than 82,500, accounting for 1.4 percent of all students from kindergarten to high school.

As Koreans watch the news about the Paris terrorist attacks, seemingly a world away, we would do well to remember that our society also needs to embrace the growing population of multicultural families and migrant workers. The country must make sure that these children who are Korean citizens are well integrated into society and that they receive equal treatment and do not face prejudice and discrimination. 

By Kim Hoo-ran

Kim Hoo-ran is an editorial writer at The Korea Herald. She can be reached at khooran@heraldcorp.com. — Ed.