Yuval Steinitz
Yuval SteinitzTomer Neuberg/Flash 90

Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz (Likud) on Wednesday morning warned that if Europe hopes to defeat the Islamist terror attacking it, it must change.

Speaking to Army Radio about the lethal Islamic State (ISIS) bombings in Brussels the day before in which 34 people were murdered, he said, "if Europe wants to fight terror, and it is not fighting terror, it has to change."

"The terror threatens the entire non-Muslim world, the entire Western world - us, Europe, the United States," he said.

Steinitz expressed his disappointment that "Europe didn't wake up. Because what we heard from Europe yesterday is the response: 'we won't change.' We should have heard: 'we will change.' The response of the European Union was: 'we will not give up on our values,' and that's completely fine, but basically, the subtext is 'we will stay as we were.'"

"Europe cannot make do with just policing and preventative steps. It must fight terror with active intelligence, to a large extent like we are doing (in Israel), by investing resources with a minimal harm to the freedom of the individual, the right to privacy and the rights of the citizen."

He suggested that Europe begin by targeting the sources of incitement in the continent, by "closing mosques, arresting imams who incite to terror and hatred against non-Muslims."

Secondly, he called for the immediate implementation of a control system for gathering intelligence which "has a certain aspect of intelligence breaching into the domain of the individual."

"They still haven't established in Europe organizations like the FBI and the Shabak (Israeli Security Agency), which monitor the state internally in order to prevent these kinds of groupings and to nip them in the bud," he said regarding the terror cells.

Steinitz said Israel "has a lot to contribute to Europe. Unfortunately we have dozens of years of experience. We don't have absolute success - we did not succeed in wiping out the terror, but we have great success. We succeeded in preventing it from becoming a lot more significant."

He said the terror in Europe and the terror attacks plaguing Israel are two sides of the same coin.

"This is a stream with different factions. Here they emphasize more the need to 'liberate Palestine,' there they emphasize attacking the crusaders, the Christians and eventually reaching the Islamization of Europe."

"It all stems from the same worldview that posits: Islam is supreme, Islam needs to rule, there is no place for infidels. For radical Islam we, the Europeans and also moderate Muslims are the infidels," he concluded.