RUTHFULLY YOURS

Evil has many faces. The recent mass shootings in Las Vegas and in the church in Sutherland Springs in Texas are stark reminders of that. The motives of Stephen Paddock and Devin Kelley remain unclear at this stage. Whether they will ever be brought to light in a conclusive way I don’t know.

The explanation of mental illness is often a first port of call in these kinds of cases. For the most part, that seems to me to be superficial. Anyone who callously murders men, women and children as though they are vermin is undoubtedly unbalanced. This is true whether or not they’ve ever been treated or incarcerated for mental illness. The question to be answered is what else is going on?

Sometimes, the ‘what else’ is clear. When the IRA planted bombs in public places no-one was in doubt about motive, even if those culpable were certifiable maniacs. Motive is central to closure as it is often to prevention.

Motive can come down to personal aggrievement. Disturbingly, that might have been the case for Paddock and Kelley. That remains to be unravelled. What did not require unravelling was the motive of IRA bombers. They openly stated their motive. Equally, those who massacre in the name of Allah are not shy about their motive. And here perspective is required to confound the news cycle.

Those who kill for idiosyncratic personal reasons are in a quite different and much less threatening category than those who systematically kill for a cause. Kelley’s church shooting on November 5, in which he killed 26 people and injured another 20, is horrific on any scale. However, it should not at all supplant in our minds Sayfullo Saipov mowing down cyclists in a rented truck in Lower Manhattan on October 31, killing eight and injuring eleven.

The reason is clear. Saipov’s crime is one of over 30,000 similarly motivated crimes since 9/11. All of these crimes are acts of Islamic terrorism. All form part of a global jihad committed to the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate. This is international serial killing on steroids.

It requires no unravelling of motive. Simply read the Koran. What it requires is resolute combatting. But how? Our political leaders are quislings. Most of them anyway.

Witness the governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, and the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, talking mindlessly about gun control after Saipov mowed down cyclists with truck, not an AK47. Why guns? Well you can’t ban trucks and progressive etiquette insists you can never blame Muslims. That leaves you with dissembling about guns.

The difficulty of facing up to threatening facts is that you have to do something about them. If Muslims are committing acts of terror, as they surely are, just maybe you have to curtail Muslim immigration and look very hard at mosques and other places where Muslims congregate. That’s too hard. Dissembling is more palatable. The threat is buried. Muslims pour in unabated.

Saipov, for example, came to the United States from (Islamic) Uzbekistan in 2010 with a green card, won under a Diversity Visa lottery program. In other words, he was chosen out of a hat. He drove for a living. Yes, the United States apparently needs to import drivers from Uzbekistan. He was allowed bring in family and, they, in turn, subsequently brought in family. According to reports, twenty-three people attached to the 29-year-old Muslim entered the United States.

None of this would be believable in countries where the evolutionary imperative of self-preservation trumped diversity and political correctness. Unfortunately, self-preservation is no longer uppermost among large swathes of Western populations; and particularly among the political classes. National borders have become passé for those on the left and commercially inconvenient for those whose patriotism comes a distant second to money.

Instead of resolute action to protect homelands we have appeasement warnings about Islamophobia and expressions of faux defiance: ‘they won’t win and we will not be deterred’ and the like. Here’s a wake-up call: they are winning. They are killing some of us, keeping Western appeasers and Islamic apologists in business; and, much more conclusively, outbreeding all of us.

Bill de Blasio, an appeaser and apologist without peer, talks about the need to vet immigrants – provided account is not taken of where they came from or which religion they follow. Thus, we can’t be seen to be focusing on Italians in hunting down the Mafia? It is beyond parody.

Jake Tapper on CNN, clearly one of a legion of media dummies, appeared mystified about what might have caused Saipov to mow people down. He actually said on air that Allahu Akbar is “a phrase of beauty in some circumstances.” Mark Steyn satirically pictured Tapper and his companions diving under the table at their favourite restaurant upon someone entering through the doors uttering this phrase of beauty.

Don’t you also love this mantra of us keeping calm and carrying on regardless of terrorism. What possible consolation does it offer to the families of those dead or mutilated to know that those unaffected will continue to go about their business as if nothing had happened?

Of course, a number of those carrying on will be the next ones to be dead. Presumably, the powers that be think that this an acceptable cost of diversity; for bringing in people reared in dysfunctional Islamic cultures. I doubt they would make this calculation, if they put themselves and their families in the position of those killed or with legs blown off.

Those people running in Boston, or dancing in Orlando, or a strolling down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, or attending a pop concert in Manchester, or cycling in New York are victims of Muslim terrorists alright. However, they are also victims of politicians (and the media) wilfully refusing to face up to the Islamic threat.

I have an idea. Instead of calmly carrying on, let’s rage at this affront to our lives and liberties, to our values and civilisation. Let’s understand that we are in a religious war which we need to win for the sake of our children and for theirs and theirs in turn. The principal enemy is the ideology. It is Islam as a body of unholy scripture.

And let’s not forget the buzz word of recent years: “radicalisation.” Oh, of course, they say, he was radicalised. There he is productive and assimilated one day, radicalised over the internet, probably by ISIS, the next. What fatuous piffle! Islamic barbarity has a very long history stretching over fourteen centuries. These fanatics do not need the internet, nor ISIS Johnny-come-latelies, to want to kill infidels.

Their holy books tell them to. The Koran tells them to. The Sunna of Mohammed tells them to. Their radical preachers, preaching in their mosques, straight from their holy books, tell them to. It is their religion stupid! That is their cause and their motive.

Peter Smith, a frequent Quadrant Online contributor, is the author of Bad Economics