It was a careful choice of words, Bernard Lewis being nothing if not careful. In 2004, the West audibly gasped when its preeminent scholar of Islam famously told the German newspaper Die Welt,“Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” if not sooner.
Listen carefully. He did not say that Muslims will be the majority population in what is still recognizably Europe. No, Professor Lewis said “Europe will be Islamic.”
We are not talking about Muslims here. We are talking about Islam. Lots of individual Muslims desire peaceful coexistence, even assimilation. But Islam’s aim is to prevail. So, yet again this week, Lewis’s foreboding has been brought to the fore by a jihadist mass-murder attack, this time in London.
As we go to press, five innocent people are dead after Khalid Masood, a terrorist acting on unambiguous scriptural commands to war against non-Muslims, rammed his rental Hyundai SUV into dozens of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, many of them tourists taking in the iconic views of Parliament. About 50 people suffered injuries, some of them grave, so the death toll may yet rise.
Masood, a burly 52-year-old weightlifter with a long criminal record that included vicious stabbings, then crashed the car through the gate at Westminster Palace, home of the West’s most venerable democratic legislature. He alighted brandishing two long knives, which he used to kill Keith Palmer, a police officer who, pursuant to British policy, was unarmed despite being assigned to provide security at one of the world’s foremost terror targets. Masood was finally shot dead by a protection officer attached to England’s defense minister.
There immediately began the ritual media pondering over Masood’s motive. Yes, what could it possibly have been?
I’m going to stick with the patently obvious.
Masood was born as Adrian Russell Ajao on Christmas Day, 1964, in Kent county, just outside London. His 17-year-old single mother remarried two years later, and he was known as Adrian Elms (his stepfather’s surname) until converting to Islam when he was about 40. Prior to that point, while fathering three children with his wife, he had several arrests, some for violent attacks. During at least one of the resulting stints in prison, like many inmates, he began indoctrination into Islam.