3.1 Islamic Terrorism
3.1 Islamic Terrorism
Islamic terrorism is industrial-scale and continual:
There have been over 34,000 terror attacks inspired by the Islamic faith across the globe since the Twin Towers plane attacks in the US on September 11, 2001. This represents one Islamic terrorist attack every five days, on average.
According to a report from an organization founded by former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair (a Muslim appeaser and fervent multiculturalist), there were 7,841 Islamic terrorist attacks in 48 countries in 2017, resulting in 84,000 deaths (including a tiny minority of terrorists killed in counter-terrorist efforts).
Muslim terrorists have killed more than 460 people in Europe since 2014.
Yet left and liberal circles have kept their critical political mute button pressed whilst all we get is entirely predictable fretting about the ‘greater danger’ of ‘Islamophobia’. No awkward questions about the ideology of multiculturalism, which promotes Islamic immigration, are to be asked. The New Left’s Identity politics, centres around ‘anti-racist’ ‘Diversity’ for all non-white identity group and must therefore include head-lopping Muslims and their supportive head-nodding ‘moderate’ brethren in the victim class. The New Left rushes to the uncritical defence of Islam after every Muslim terrorist atrocity in the West by bomb, gun, knife or motor vehicle.
Centrist Western governments and liberal-Left activists seek to absolve the Muslim perpetrators, and their motivating religion, of any responsibility for terrorism. The routine response to Islamic terrorism includes the following elements.
Ritual mourning and grieving: We are enjoined to just hold hands, light candles, lay wreaths and say ‘Je Suis Charlie’. Sometimes, Western authorities put on their angry face and say ‘enough is enough’ but they don’t mean it. This standard response of futile lamentation combines empty gestural politics with naivety. It promotes political passivity instead of resolute action like a ban on Muslim immigration, which can never be contemplated as it would be abominably ‘racist’.
Non-religious dysfunction: Islamic terrorism is explained away as being anything but terrorism by Muslims – it is instead, just a mental health malfunction, or a rebellion by alienated youth, or the bitterness of the immigrant experience, or the behaviour of criminals who aren’t really religious at all. If this is so, however, why is it that only Muslims who are so mentally disturbed, or alienated, or socially deprived, or criminally-minded, or political grudge-bearing, that they turn to terrorism as a response? There must, however, be something egregiously unwholesome about the Muslim faith that predisposes the dysfunctional Muslim to terrorist eruptions (accompanied by a distinct lack of outrage from their fellow believers) and that sports the phenomena of the highly educated, high-achieving Muslim (engineer, doctor, etc.) and non-dysfunctional Muslim engaging in carefully-planned to terrorism.
Foreign Policy ‘Blowback’: Where a political response to terrorism is allowed it is usually framed as terrorism being an understandable response to the legacy of abusive colonialism or to fresh Western imperialist foreign policy in the Middle East. This explanation has some legitimacy but, on its own, is far too simplistic. Western meddling in the Middle East in recent decades, has certainly had an influence on the contemporary rise of Islamic terrorism but the Western invasions have been more a catalyst than a cause of Islamic terrorism. US-led wars in Asia, Latin America and Central America, by contrast, did not result in such terrorist ‘blowback’ - only Muslim countries opted for the terrorist response. Further, if it is possible for non-Muslim countries, like Northern Ireland for example, to overcome decades of bitter religious/colonial division and its related terrorism, and to pursue non-terrorist political struggle, why can not Islamic countries do likewise? Muslims are sentient adults, and they have free will, yet Muslims are consciously choosing violence as their go-to response. A final hurdle which trips up the ‘foreign policy blowback’ runner is terrorism in and against non-Western countries by local Islamist terrorists (e.g. African countries) where colonial oppression is not a factor.
Reframing the Statistical Perspective: To downplay the degree of the threat of terrorism in The West, we are lectured on how we’re more likely to die from natural disasters or mundane causes, such as getting out of the bath, than to be a victim of terror, so we should all calm down and see Muslim terrorism in a non-alarmist statistical perspective. What little Muslim terrorism there is, we are told, means we should accept that it is a minor irritant, a random hazard not worth worrying about or responding. This calming statistical refuge, however, strips terrorism of its conscious, murderous ideological intent: terrorists set out to kill us or challenge our basic liberal, democratic, civilised values. Bathtubs don’t. The progressive Left, however, wishes to statistically reframe terrorism as just a random accidental hazard of low-order magnitude, and so the folly continues of letting in more and more people of whom a sizeable proportion wish us dead.
Muslim-on-Muslim Terrorism: It is sometimes pointed out that Muslim terrorists kill many more Muslims (think Shia vs Sunni, for starters) than they do non-Muslims and thus the Islamic terrorist can not be primarily motivated by anti-Western animus. This body-count relativism, however, is beside the point - whether the victims are Western ‘infidels’, atheist former Muslims, less-than-devout Muslims, or Muslims of the ‘wrong’ sect, Islamic terrorism is still terrorism in the name of religion (or one brand of it), one religion in particular.
‘Nothing to do with Islam’: The mandatory, go-to response of choice, however, is to trot out the weasel phrase, ‘nothing to do with Islam’, to infer that Islam, mainstream Islam, ‘moderate’ Islam is a ‘Religion of Peace’, a ‘Great Faith’, and therefore to be absolved of any responsibility for terrorism by its aberrational fringe:
We are reminded, terminologically, that there is no such thing as ‘Islamic terrorism’ – it is, at best, ‘Islamist’ terrorism, a perversion which arises from a deviant reading of Islam and adhered to by only a tiny number of jihadis.
We are reassured that no true Muslim commits or sympathises with terrorist atrocities, only ‘extremists’ or those mysteriously ‘radicalised’ (by some creed unknown) do so. The BBC carries this linguistic pettifogging to absurd lengths by requiring its reporters and presenters to preface ‘so-called’ to every mention of ‘Islamic State’ to emphasise their multiculturalist-dictated view of the disconnect between Islam and terrorism: This nonsense is shattered, however, by the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism themselves who are perfectly clear about their religious motivations in their battle cry (‘Allahu Akbar’ – ‘Allah is Greatest’).
Or, perhaps, the murderers are described, generically, as ‘terrorists’ but you would be wrong to speculate that the murderers’ names might be some variant of Mohammad because that would be to jump to an ‘Islamophobic’ conclusion that the terrorist outrage has something to do with Islam.
‘Islamophobia’: Any critical reference to the Islamic nature of Islamic terrorism (or any concern raised about any other Islamic cultural or social practice) automatically triggers a response from the multicultural establishment, and the identitarian Left, about the danger of ‘Islamophobia’. As a concept and term, ‘Islamophobia’ first gained currency in 1997 when newly minted by the Runnymede Trust, one of Britain’s leading race-equality think-tanks, to demonise criticism of Islam. The term was latched onto by the Muslim Brotherhood (the political-cum- paramilitary wing of the Islamic terrorist project).
The Runnymede Trust defines ‘Islamophobia’ as any utterance or suggestion that Islam is in any way ‘inferior to the West’, or is ‘unresponsive to change’. The Metropolitan Police in Britain have, indeed, adopted this definition for their operations which target ‘hate-speech’ crimes, adding their own definitional twists to sweep up any view of Islam which suggests it is ‘static’, ‘separate’, ‘other’, ‘irrational’, ‘sexist’ or ‘aggressive’, or is a ‘political ideology’. Such views, however, are entirely legitimate, secularist, and defensible views of the politico-religious theory and practice of Islam yet, to preserve Muslims from ‘offence’ and to ring-fence Islam from criticism, they are treated as criminal acts of hatred caused by a pathological, irrational phobia.
The aim and effect of the ‘Islamophobia’ gambit is to chill open discussion about Islam and its values. Criminally charging people for mocking Islam or for arguing that Western liberal, or, indeed, socialist, values are superior to Islamic values, is designed to dissuade any others who share those beliefs from speaking out. When the multiculturalist authorities have powers to prosecute ‘hate speech’, or media hegemony to promulgate the ‘Islamophobia’ charge at will, then they don’t need to resort to Kalashnikovs to silence cartoonists or otherwise threaten or dismiss critics of Islam.
Islam now enjoys the same kind of moral and legal protection from blasphemy and ridicule that Christianity once did. ‘Islamophobia’ should more accurately be called ‘Islamo-awareness’ to indicate a rational assessment of the dangers and retrograde practices of Islam.
Right-wing terrorism is just as bad
The tiny number of sporadic cases of retaliatory attacks against Muslims in the West are afforded no such excuses. Not only are police and politicians much quicker to describe attacks against Muslims as terrorism by right-wingers and ‘Islamophobes’, eager to name and shame those responsible as racist, Muslim-hating, tabloid-reading, white people whose actions are rarely attributed to mental health issues, or the isolated work of lone individuals acting up. Horrible incidents perpetrated by non-Muslims against Muslims are gleefully welcomed by the Muslim-sensitive Left because it licenses them, in recourse to ‘what-about-ism’, to argue that it is ‘racist or ‘Islamophobic’ to suggest that only radical Muslims can behave badly.
Never can it be suggested that the best way to stop angry, vengeful white men driving vans into Muslim pedestrians is for intolerant Muslims to stop driving vans into non-Muslims (or knifing them, or shooting them, or groping and raping them, etc.) and for Western governments to drastically limit Muslim immigration. Such suggestions are far too politically incorrect.