Even after the Paris atrocities, the West still isn’t joining up the dots. The free world was shocked by 9/11, shocked by the 7/7 London bombings, shocked by the 2008 onslaught in Mumbai, shocked by January’s Paris massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket.
Now it is shocked by Isis, which it presents as “nihilists”. So they just happen to be the same type of nihilists as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Jaysh al-Islam and Boko Haram.
By an amazing coincidence, these all just happen to have the same aim: to spread Islam through holy war using the same tactics of shootings, stabbings, beheadings, disembowelling and human bomb attacks.
Theresa May fatuously said of the Paris attacks that they had “nothing to do with Islam”. David Cameron inched towards realism by saying on Monday night it was “not good enough” to “deny any connection between the religion of Islam and the extremist”. Yet on other occasions he says Islamic terror is a “perversion” of the religion.
Such contortions are an attempt to avoid lumping all Muslims together. But Islam is simply what Muslims practise.
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Not the way I would go about saying it, but she gets at the heart of the matter which too many Western leaders are avoiding
Hillary Clinton also says Islamist violence has nothing to do with Muslims. It’s one thing to point out correctly that the majority of Muslims in our country do not support or commit violent jihad, but it’s simply idiotic to say that jihad is not Islamic. It is just as Islamic as are our peaceful neighbors, and it is for Muslims and Islam as a movement to find a way to stop this from within.
Meanwhile, it is reasonable and prudent to continue surveillance on Muslims with violent tendencies and to insist on reliable background checks before admitting more Muslims as refugees. Where reliable background checks cannot be done, which is the case now, it would be far better to provide for Muslim refugees in majority-Muslim countries.
And the refusal to consider Middle Eastern Christians as especially at-risk populations and to refuse to expedite their transfer to safer areas (i.e. non-Muslim areas) beggars belief.