RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jihadism loves a weak horse, as no less an authority than Osama Bin Laden reminded us, if we care to listen. What we owe the memory of violent Islam’s many recent victims is to acknowledge the very real war that made them its casualties and respond accordingly.

Those with heads still below the clouds and feet firmly on the ground – or simply with heads not in the sand — should be readily able to accept several fundamental truths about Islam and the West.

First, we are at war. The enemy is a soldier, not a criminal.

Second, the enemy and his motives and methods are in plain sight, not remotely a mystery. What inspires them might be incomprehensible to any sane observer, but the bitter fruits of that inspiration are clear as day.

Third, there are ways to respond other than through vapid hand-wringing, hand holding, candle-lit vigils and impotent head-shaking.

Fourth, it is not too late to act, despite decades of poor decisions in the West.

These truths are clear to me, though plainly not to everyone. There is a broad lack of will to recognise this escalaing war and, more culpable than even that, a refusal to identify an enemy, other than dressing him in palliative euphemism. Why this is so, take your pick. Academics have sought to instill an unshakable deference before “the other”, also infusing with reflexive horror the very thought of standing up for, or even recognising, the existence and virtues of Western values, especially Judeo-Christian ones. There is also queasiness at the thought of being called to fight a war in an age of comfort, endless distractions and, let’s be blunt, spinelessness. Top off that list with a simple lack of understanding of how to fight back and then, to complete the recipe, add the mandatory dash of “tolerance”, which apparently means we must tolerate the intolerant and intolerable.

The sneering green Left likes to brand all who dispute global warming as “climate deniers”, which is funny when you think about it because temperatures have flat-lined for almost 20 years, the IPCC admits its models have been hopelessly out of whack, and every Flanneryesque prediction of doom by roasting or melting inevitably falls on its face. There is nothing there to deny, in other words, except rent-seekers’ press releases.

But Islam’s propensity to inspire murderous assaults, well that is very much “there”. Blood on the streets of Manchester, London and, as of last night, the Melbourne suburb of Brighton, attests to that. Yet here, where the evidence of a palpable threat is beyond dispute, a virulent denialism flourishes. Often it is encouraged and abetted by those most loud in their climate alarmism. The infamous episode of Q&A, in which junketeering warmist Lawrence Krauss cast aspersions on whitegoods by way of dismissing Islamic butchery, provides a priceless example:

TONY JONES: Lawrence, we see that Trump is stepping back from some of his positions. Will he step back on…? He’s obviously got within his administration people who are serious climate science deniers.

LAWRENCE KRAUSS: Yes, he certainly does.

So let us start, first of all, with the Kraussian doctrine of dismissal by diminution. “More chance of being hit by a falling fridge than by terrorism,” the great mind pronounced. Tell that to a Coptic Eqyptian, buddy. True or not — and it most certainly isn’t – you are still left with the fact that such logic is irrelevant and, ultimately, entirely meaningless.

Then there are those who simply cannot see any evil whatsoever in Islam. This is the Religion of Peace™ brigade, the ones who insist the threat starts and ends with those “lone wolves”. They swear there is nothing to see here, shrink from appending the label “terrorist”. That would be simplistic stereotyping, don’t you know. More than that, describing someone as a terrorist poses the obvious question: to what end are little girls being blown up and Saturday night revellers knifed? The answer is so obvious denialists cannot utter it, nor will they sit silent and let others do so. The person who speaks the self-evident truth must be torn down, blitzed with a Twitter storm, made the object of ridicule and shunning.

While it seems hardly believable anyone would think this way, many political “leaders” find it convenient to pay lip service. The protagonists of this line cast the enemy as a “criminal” and support only law-enforcement responses. How long might World War Two have lasted if every Luftwaffe pilot downed over Britain were to have been put on trial, with attendant costs and delays. Fortunately, in those days, the ability to recognise a war and discern its foot soldiers had yet to be eroded by cant and cowardice.

Whether belief in the caliphate or a tendency to jihadism is the core business of any or all forms of Islam or merely the whacky obsession of the very few doesn’t matter in practical terms. There are people with certain beliefs who are eager to kill us, that is what matters and, just at the moment, the only thing that matters. Seemingly, many of their co-religionists either agree with the killers, support them actively or passively, give them cover in the Muslim enclaves in Paris, London, Brussels, Manchester or wherever.

Photo ops, soft words and Iftar dinners at Kirribilli did nothing to curtail the murderous impulses of the man who, last night in Melbourne, staged a lethal ambush in the name of Allah. That creature is dead, as is an innocent desk clerk, and three officers wounded. If our leaders won’t lead, we need better ones.

Terrible attacks in both Manchester and London further underline the fundamentally flawed official response to Islamic terrorism. The official refusal to name the enemy leads to a muddled law-and-order response, focussed on the criminal plans and actions of errant individuals. Yes, the powers-that-be talk incessantly about the so-called ‘war on terror’. But this is a cop out, as they must know in their hearts even as their mouths spill those Religion of Peace™ platitudes.

To wage a real war, you highlight the goals of the enemy, not simply his methods. Just imagine if, instead of assailing the philosophy of Nazism and its plans for domination, Churchill had talked only about the need to wage war only on Stukas, U-boats and the Bismark. Get the point? Terror is the weapon. Militant Islam, implemented in accord with quite specific Koranic instructions, is the hand that wields it.

It seems to me that the ordinary punter “gets it”, whilst “educated” officialdom remains in a fog of stupidity and political correctness.

I suspect that large numbers of ordinary people are sick of efforts by the likes of Malcolm Turnbull and Therese May to describe Islamic terrorists as somehow “un-Islamic”, supposedly guilty of perverting Islam, despite numerous quotations from the sacred texts lending full justification to the jihadis’ mayhem. Of course, neither Turnbull nor May is in any position to propound a corpus of doctrine which would constitute “authentic” peaceful Islam.

Unfortunately and inconveniently, a large percentage of Muslims in the West countries regard Sharia supremacism and violent jihad as authentically Islamic and other Muslims who opt for peaceful integration as un-Islamic. Whether we like it or not, a large number of Muslims in our midst, whether by thought or deed, feel themselves at war with the rest of us.

By trying to pretend that we are not at war, we have sacrificed innocent lives. We should long ago recognised that this is not simply a matter for the police and the criminal justice system. Nor is it any longer a matter of our intelligence services being able to catch terrorists just before they commit mass murder. So far, with the notable exception of the Lindt Cafe siege, Australian intelligence has largely succeeded in foiling large-scale potential terrorist acts. But even the best intelligence service cannot hope this run of luck will continue. Someday, somehow, an Islamic terrorist group will slip through the net. (stop press: last night in Melbourne a Somali-trained disciple of the Prophet killed one person, wounded three police officers and, his one good deed, saved the courts the trouble of dealing with him by succumbing to hail of bullets).

The great tragedy in both Manchester and London is that at least some of the perpetrators were “known” to authorities, as was the perpetrator of Melbourne’s ambush. We have now further learnt that up to 23,000 are, err, “known” to Intelligence authorities in Britain. The problem is that only approximately 3,000 can be monitored at any one time. The rest, including the perpetrators of the latest horrors, were off the intensive watch list for the time being.

Clearly, the reactive police approach favoured in peacetime has failed, and will continue to fail, with more tragic loss of innocent lives.

By contrast, waging war against a named enemy must be necessarily proactive. The following are the essential elements of waging war:

(1) Name our enemy. To the extent that Islam is a spiritual exercise, it can be tolerated. However, to the extent that it is a political ideology, which does not recognise any distinction between the sacred and the secular, it must be fought and defeated. We may choose to identify the enemy as “Sharia Supremacism”. This is the goal for which the terrorists are fighting.

(2) Institute preventive detention. The onus would be on those interned to prove that they pose no threat to life and limb. Those who declare war on our civil society through incitement, association and actions should not expect protection from institutions whose legitimacy they reject.

(3) Those who have chosen to fight for the Islamic State are our enemies. Where possible they should be stripped of Australian citizenship and prevented from returning. Whether they become stateless is their problem not ours. After all, they have chosen to place themselves outside of Australian civil society.

(4) All funding from abroad for mosques, Islamic institutions and associations should be blocked. Saudi funding of Wahhabism in this country and worldwide is an especially pernicious facilitator of global jihad.

(5) All mosques which promote Sharia supremacism to be closed down. Likewise, Islamic associations, such as Hizb Ut-Tahrir should not only be banned but, in addition, its members interned.

(6) Proactive counter-terrorism must inevitably be the responsibility of the specialist military. The police forces have to remain primarily focused on civil law enforcement.

Today we hear that the perpetrator of the latest incident in Melbourne was yet another of those “well known” to police — a fact that underscores the point that the sooner we move away from the stupid delusion that a peacetime criminal justice system can deal with the threat, the safer we will all be.

LONDON—One of three knife-wielding assailants who killed seven people in a weekend terror attack here was known to security services, authorities said Monday. Neighbors said his zeal for Islamic extremism was broadcast to the nation in a television documentary called “The Jihadis Next Door.”

But police said they had no intelligence suggesting the man, Khuram Shazad Butt, a 27-year-old Pakistan-born British citizen, was plotting violence ahead of Saturday’s rampage.

Several neighbors said Butt had appeared in the documentary, which followed radical preachers calling for Islamic law in Britain and was aired early last year. One neighbor said Butt was reported to the police as a potential danger two years ago. Police declined to comment.

On Monday, police also identified a second attacker as Rachid Redouane, 30, who they said had claimed to be Moroccan and Libyan. They said they were working to determine the identity of the third attacker.

Saturday night’s attack in a crowded area of pubs and restaurants was the third by Islamist terrorists this year in the U.K.—and the third involving someone who had come to the attention of security officials but wasn’t deemed threatening enough to be closely monitored or detained before they struck.

“We cannot go on as we are,” British Prime Minister Theresa May said Monday, pledging to take tough new steps against Islamist extremism. She vowed to crack down on online radicalism and said she would consider expanding the powers of the police.

London’s police chief, Cressida Dick, named one thing she didn’t think should be considered: arming regular officers. “I don’t think the public in this country want to live in a place where we are all armed to the teeth,” she told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Monday. CONTINUE AT SITE

The only man I ever met whose ambition was to be a suicide bomber was an inmate at the British prison where I worked as a doctor in the 1990s and 2000s. He was a career criminal of very nasty propensities whose father was Arab and mother English. He had reached his 30s, the age at which criminals usually turn away from crime in favor of something better—in his case the killing of as many infidels as possible, along with himself.

Coming to religion is one reason, or pretext, for abandoning crime. In the prison there was much more Islamic evangelism than Christian. I would find Qurans and Islamic pamphlets in drawers, insinuated there by I knew not whom, but never Bibles or Christian pamphlets.

I interpreted religion as the means prisoners used to rationalize giving up common crime while at the same time not feeling defeated by, or having surrendered to, the society around them—for they knew conversion to Islam gave that society the shudders.

The problem for the security services, however, is that there is no invariable profile, social or psychological, of the Muslim terrorist. Nor is there a kind of economic lever that can be pulled so that, with better material prospects, young Muslims will be less attracted to terrorism. There have, it is true, been no-hopers among the terrorists, but there have also been medical students and doctors. There was nothing (except himself) impeding the recent Manchester bomber from having a normal or even a highly successful career. As Prime Minister Theresa May rightly said after the most recent atrocities in London, what the terrorists have in common is an ideology. She rightly called it evil, but it is also stupid: It makes the Baader-Meinhof Gang look like Aristotle.

An ideology, however stupid, is not easy to destroy; believing six impossible things before breakfast is almost par for the human course. One obvious thing to do would be to strangle the foreign funding of so much Islamist activity in Britain. That is no doubt complicated in many ways, but no British government, solicitous of trade relations, has dared even try. The British economy is precarious, and it is difficult to be strong when your economy is weak.

Instead, we have gone in for what a Dutch friend of mine calls “creative appeasement.” Authorities make concessions even before, one suspects, there have been any demands for them. Thus, a public library in Birmingham, one of the largest known to me, has installed women-only tables, a euphemism for Muslim women only. Whether there was ever a request or demand for sex-segregated seating from Muslims is probably undiscoverable; truth seldom emerges from a public authority. But the justification would almost certainly be that without such tables, Muslim women would not be able to use the library at all. CONTINUE AT SITE

I am an American who has lived in Norway for almost twenty years. I love Norway. There is much that is wonderful about it. But there are some aspects of it, generally institutional, that, when viewed through the eyes of an outsider, can seem, at best, bizarre and comical and, at worst, menacing and malignant.

This, as it happens, was the thrust of Lilyhammer, a terrific, hilarious TV series (2012-14) about Frank Tagliano, a New York mobster (played by Steven van Zandt), who is relocated by the Witness Protection Program to Lillehammer, Norway. In the series, which I reviewed three years ago, both Frank and the viewer are introduced to a wide range of Norwegian customs and cultural practices – ranging from the absurdly expensive and extensive preparation required to acquire a Norwegian driver’s license to dugnad, the tradition whereby people who rent apartments are expected to maintain the public spaces of the building in which they live (as well as its grounds).

Many of the practices Frank encounters come under the category of naive do-gooderism – such as the volunteer night patrols that are trained to respond to gangster criminality with “dialogue.” In one episode, the manager of a day-care center brainwashes small children with a puppet show about “Muriburiland,” an imaginary Communist utopia rich in solidarity and free of the evils of capitalism. As I wrote in my review, Frank “even spends a few days in a Norwegian prison, which he finds surprisingly cushy (‘I should have been arrested a lot sooner!’) and where he and other inmates – and guards – are taught to play the recorder by a hippie lady.”

One institution Frank doesn’t experience is a Norwegian psychiatric ward – which is a shame, because Norway’s approach to mental illness would have made for one of the series’ more instructive episodes. In other countries, it’s understood that if somebody’s suffering from, say, bipolar disorder, he needs medication to keep from getting depressed (and potentially suicidal) as well as from becoming manic (which entails destructive conduct toward one’s family, friends, and finances, and which can also lead to suicide). It’s further understood in other countries that if a bipolar person goes off his meds and has a severe manic or depressive episode, he needs to be hospitalized, kept under lock and key, and medicated until he ceases to be a danger to himself and others.

In this as in so many other ways, however, Norway is special. Among psychologically healthy people, Norwegian law is very clear about who counts as an individual’s next of kin: for example, a spouse trumps a parent, an adult offspring trumps a sibling. But psychotics who are committed to psych wards are permitted to name their own “next of kin” – which has vital repercussions, because the persons treating a patient are only obliged to share information about his treatment and the current state of his health with the designated next of kin, and are prohibited by privacy laws from sharing such information with anyone else. So it is that a psychotic patient may, for example, name as his next of kin his mailman, his garbageman, some celebrity he’s never met, or the self-styled fortune teller in the hospital room next to his – thereby leaving his real next of kin entirely in the dark about how his treatment and condition.

Norway also has something called the “Control Commission” that wields immense power over the lives of mentally ill people and their loved ones. It is the commission, and only the commission, that can order a patient to be held against his will or to be released from commitment (calling “sectioning” in Britain). It also has the authority to determine the specific conditions of such patients’ hospitalization. The commission tends to consist primarily of lawyers and doctors, with a sprinkling of persons in other professions. It is sort of a modern-day Star Chamber whose decisions can only be overruled by a court.

“Who cares whether it’s a perversion of Islam or not?” The subject was terrorism, specifically the attack at London Bridge, and after the politicians had made their usual statements to the effect that this atrocity had nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, or was (at most) a terrible betrayal or perversion or hijacking thereof, several of us expressed the usual outrage over this barefaced lie. But one friend of mine, quoted above, wasn’t having it. “Who,” he asked, “cares?”

It’s a common question, posed routinely by millions of people who sincerely think that focusing on Islam in the wake of terrorist acts only makes things worse. Yes, the politicians may be lying through their teeth when they accuse terrorists of hijacking Islam, but these lies, we’re told, are benign lies, which help to avoid giving unnecessary insult, to prevent increased radicalization, and to preserve social cohesion. Why, then, not just go along with the pretense that the terrorists’ ideology is a perversion of Islam?

Quick answer: It’s a matter of living with the truth. For some of us, that’s important. People who have lived under totalitarian regimes but who now enjoy freedom understand this in a way that suburban American twenty-somethings may not. No, none of us can ever know the whole truth about any subject. But if we live in a free country, we are free to inquire, to study, to struggle for knowledge of the truth, and that is a freedom to be cherished.

Equally precious is our right to articulate the truth and act responsibly upon it. There are whole lives based on lies, whole marriages based on lies, and whole societies based on lies. To study Communist history is to see what kind of society takes shape when people feel compelled to assent to the truth of a proposition that they know to be false. I’ve just begun reading Orlando Figes’s 2007 book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, described on its back cover as “the story of ordinary people in Stalin’s Russia, a world where everyone was afraid to talk and a society spoke in whispers.” A society, in short, of necessary lies and forbidden truths.

I know that that is not the kind of society my friend and most of those who share his views would like to live in. Presumably they believe that universal voluntary assent to a single lie about the subject of Islam would be, on balance, a positive pragmatic act, not a major sacrifice. I could not disagree more. Even if universal assent to a lie begins as voluntary, the assent soon ends up being mandatory and speaking the truth becomes a crime. And freedom, just like that, is lost.

We’ve already seen this grim reality start to take hold in the West, with people like Lars Hedegaard in Denmark, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Ezra Levant in Canada being prosecuted merely for speaking the truth about Islam. I wrote a whole book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), about self-censorship and state censorship in the West on the subject of Islam. This brand of censorship is a phenomenon that emerged, and has spread, with unsettling rapidity. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Western schizophrenia about radical Islam is on full display in Britain, in the aftermath of the latest jihadist atrocity, the third in just the past three months.

Three terrorists rammed a van into a crowd on London Bridge and then went on a stabbing rampage, brutally assaulting pedestrians while braying that each blow was struck “for Allah.” A duly outraged Theresa May donned her prime-minister hat to announce that her government is “leading international efforts to take on and defeat the ideology of Islamist extremism around the world.” She also slipped on her amateur-imam cap, adjusted her rose-tinted glasses, and proclaimed that “Islamist extremism” is an ideology

that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism. It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy, and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.

And what right-thinking Western politico’s post-mass-murder speech would be complete without May’s insistence that this ideology is — all together now! — “a perversion of Islam and a perversion of the truth.”

Sigh.

What does Theresa May know about Islam such that she can decide what is a perversion of it? Precious little, I’d wager. Otherwise, she’d not babble on about “Islamist extremism,” a term right out of the Department of Redundancy Department.

If you are an Islamist in the West, you are, by definition, an extremist. An Islamist is a Muslim who believes Islam requires the imposition of sharia, Islam’s ancient, totalitarian societal system and legal code.

“Islamist” is a term we in the West use in the hope that, because there are Muslims who are tolerant, pro-Western people, it must not be inevitable that Islam itself — or at least some interpretations of Islam — will breed the fundamentalist, literalist, supremacist construction of Islam.

It may be a grave error to adopt this hope, especially since it has been elevated into seemingly incorrigible policy. Does the incontestable existence of moderate Muslim individuals necessarily translate into a coherent, viable doctrine of moderate Islam? Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to take just one very influential Muslim leader, says no: The West’s invocation of “moderate Islam” is “ugly,” he counters, because “Islam is Islam, and that’s it.” Erdogan is a close ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamist organization. If he’s right that there’s just one true Islam, rest assured that it’s not friendly to the West. Erdogan describes the Western call for Muslim migrants to assimilate in their new European societies as “a crime against humanity.”

Yet again it has returned, the sublime and hallowed month of Ramadan – a beautiful and particularly sacred period that was an original part of the magnificent revelation handed down by Allah to the Prophet himself (peace be upon him) in the Holy Quran. Indeed, it has been widely postulated by many of our holiest of men that the precious text of that sacred volume was revealed to the Prophet himself (even more peace be upon him) during the very first Ramadan.

Needless to say, this is an exceedingly special and sanctified period of the year, a period of grace and majesty as well as of prayer and charity – a time during which the eternally beloved people of Allah are encouraged to demonstrate the depth and strength of their faith by engaging in sawm, or fasting, from dawn until sunset, as well as by strictly avoiding the intake of food and beverages, the use of tobacco, and any kind of carnal activity, although the standard acts of incestuous intercourse with minors and, naturally, the brutal sexual violation of the wives and offspring of infidels can be safely pursued per usual. Furthermore, it is to be hoped that the faithful will manifest the great extent of their self-restraint during this period by scheduling such activities as female genital mutilation, wife-beating, and the theologically obligatory honor killing of wives, sisters, and daughters for the hours following sundown – that is to say, after the iftar, the solemn supper taken in the wake of the sinking of the sun below the horizon, and before the suhur, the consecrated common meal that is directed to take place just prior to the rising of the sun.

It is particularly vital that the people of God make a special effort during the holy month of Ramadan not to engage in any act of unkindness, injustice, or insensitivity directed at their fellow believers – although, of course, the tossing of homosexuals from the roofs of buildings, the remorseless stoning to death of rape victims, and the violent execution of apostates may proceed as usual, preferably during the hours of darkness. It it crucial, moreover, to underscore that Ramadan is a time during which the followers of the Prophet are enjoined to take part in even a more extensive and profound degree of spiritual reflection than is their usual practice during the remainder of the year: they are, for instance, called upon to recite the special Ramadan prayers, known as the Tarawih, during the nights of this dearest of months, and even, if they are capable of such an accomplishment, to read prayerfully through the entire Holy Quran from start to finish. All of this contemplative and devout activity, to be sure, should not be permitted to distract the children of Allah from such equally urgent and virtuous tasks as mowing down infidels with cars, trucks, and other vehicles, shooting deadly rockets into the heart of urban areas where civilian non-believers are wont to gather, and committing sundry acts of mass annihilation and bloodshed involving such handy implements as machetes and Kalashnikovs.

As Muslim terrorists rampaged around London, Met police debuted the new “Run, Hide and Tell” program. But instead some Londoners chose to stand and fight. They fought with pint glasses and barstools as the Muslim killers shouting, “This is for Allah” stabbed women in trendy eateries.

Some drivers tried to ram the killers. An unarmed police officer attacked the terrorists with a baton. An off-duty police officer tackled one of the Muslim terrorists. Both men were severely wounded.

Other unarmed police officers ran away.

Met counter-terrorism chief Mark Rowley sympathetically noted that, “If someone acts on instinct and perhaps decides to fight because they have no choice, we would never criticise them for that.”

It was kind of him not to criticize those Londoners who reacted with their base instincts and tried to fight the Muslim killers instead of running, hiding and telling, then reemerging for a vigil or a concert.

After the Manchester Arena attack, Rowley had urged, “Enjoy yourselves. We can’t let the terrorists win by dissuading us from going about our normal business.”

Going about our normal business has become the highest form of courage. Run, Hide and Deny.

Ariana Grande’s manager described her upcoming Manchester concert as representing, “courage, bravery and defiance in the face of fear”. “We’re going to go shopping’ – How defiant Londoners refused to bow to terrorists,” an article at The Independent boasts. Courage, bravery and defiance used to be found on the beaches of Normandy. Now they come from attending a concert or trying on a new blouse.

Londoners took Rowley’s advice. And then they found themselves running and hiding from Muslim killers. Video shows cringing diners lying on the floor of “London’s Coolest Bierkeller” as frantic Met police scream, “Get down”. In the Black & Blue Restaurant, the first “modern American steakhouse” in the city, some hid under the tables. Four friends jammed inside a toilet stall while the screams went on outside. A woman barricaded the door while other diners fled through the back.

“The religion is the problem; the scripture is the problem. We should do nothing to give it an ounce of credibility. Sharia law lovers, fundamentalist Imams, jihadis, terrorists and the Johnny-come-lately ISIS are mere symptoms.”

You’re more likely to be killed by a refrigerator than Islamic terror, proffers Lawrence Krauss, favoured guest of the ABC. What a joke! Extremism is the creeping lifeblood of The Prophet’s gospel. It crept on 9/11. It crept in Manchester. It crept in London. And it will creep again tomorrow.

Yet another barbaric Islamic terrorist attack in London so shortly after Manchester. Now following: praise to the first responders, more armed police on the streets, flowers and candles. As to effective action to counter the source of the problem; rest assured there will be none.

Shock and horror, British intelligence sources report that there are 23,000 Muslims with extremist tendencies living in the UK. Be really shocked. Anyone who thinks that this is not the tip of the iceberg has not kept up with surveys on the religio-medieval attitudes of Muslims living in the West.

We know that our elites have not kept up. They are locked in a bubble of denialism. They believe all religions to be intrinsically peaceful and that this most particularly applies to the Religion of Peace™. “A great religion,” they are also apt to call it. That’s right, a great religion of peace whose very scripture is regularly invoked by base murderers of men, women and children.

By extension, the Islamic nature of atrocity after atrocity is disguised for as long as is credulously possible. The insanity defence is trotted out if at all credible. To ask why insane Baptists don’t regularly go on killing sprees risks brings accusations of Islamophobia. “Islamophobia” is, in a word, mightier than the sword in hamstringing the enemy; to wit us.

When the obvious perpetrators can no longer be obfuscated, perfidious perspective takes over. This takes two forms.

One takes the form of claiming that Islamic terrorists kill more Muslims than they do non-Muslims. True or false, this is monumentally beside the point. Killing in the name of religion is killing in the name of religion, whether the victims are less-than-devout Muslims, Muslims of the ‘wrong’ sect, or ‘infidels’. It is no consolation to Christians facing beheading in the Middle East to know that ISIS is not solely singling them out.

A second is more invidious: we are told, with a straight face, that the chance of being killed by a variety of accidents involving mundane objects or natural causes is far higher than being killed by [Islamic unstated] terrorism. Presumably this is meant to make us shrug fatalistically when the next Allahu Akbar rings out and mutilated bodies are strewn about a street.

“You’re more likely to be killed by a refrigerator,” smugly proffers Lawrence Krauss, US cosmologist, professional atheist, global warmist, Trump-basher, and pop-over guest on the ABC. He was probably speaking hyperbolically, but that made his remark no less callously insensitive to victims of terrorism and their families. And, unfortunately, his resort to the length of odds to downplay maiming and killing is all too common among apologists for Islamic barbarism.

It isn’t necessary to say this among rational people, but insidiously those of unsound mind have got themselves a public platform. So, to be crystal; young girls at a concert having their bodies peppered with bolts and nails, people being mowed down with trucks, or blown up, or shot, or stabbed, or decapitated, is not remotely in the same ballpark as accidents or illnesses, however more frequently such accidents and illnesses take lives.

If you don’t get that, you are an idiot; and a particularly useful one. In other words, you are an apologist for the Religion of Peace™; which, with your help, is busying itself undermining Western civilisation.

And replacing it with what? With nothing good is the right answer. Speaking of Islam (“Mohammedanism”) Mr Churchill was unflattering to say the least. “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world,” he wrote in 1899, after listing its litany of defects. Was he prescient? Was he right?