RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week a fifteen-year-old Muslim, Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad, went to a police station in New South Wales and shot dead a civilian police employee, Curtis Cheng. After the murder, the young murderer was, according to an eyewitness, “dancing joyously.” Outside the station, he waved his gun at police and screamed “Allahu akbar” at them before he was killed in the ensuing gunfight.

In the wake of this jihad murder, Australian officials have behaved in an utterly predictable manner – one that we have seen many, many times before in Western countries, and that we will doubtless see many more times as well: they rushed to profess ignorance of the killer’s motives and above all, to defend Islam.

None of these officials are Muslims. They have all just been thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that to look too closely at the motivating ideology behind murders like that of Curtis Cheng would be “hateful” and “bigoted.”

And so Pat Gooley from the New South Wales Police Association said: “We are used to being under threat. What’s really concerning police is there’s no rhyme or reason to these current terror threats.”

No rhyme or reason? Have you ever heard of jihad, Mr. Gooley? Evidently not.

Other police officials, meanwhile, made themselves busy ensuring that Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad’s jihad murder doesn’t lead anyone to think there is anything amiss with the Muslim community. The murder “was doubly shocking because it was perpetrated by a 15-year-old boy and it underlines the importance of families, communities, leaders being very aware of whether young people are becoming radicalised,” said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, complacently assuming that Muslim “families, communities, leaders” in Australia are against this “radicalization” — but where is the evidence of that?

Turnbull also said: “We must not vilify or blame the entire Muslim community with the actions of what is, in truth, a very, very small percentage of violent extremist individuals. The Muslim community are our absolutely necessary partners in combating this type of violent extremism.”

When has the Muslim community in Australia or elsewhere in the West genuinely acted like partners in combating this type of violent extremism? And we must indeed not vilify or blame the entire Muslim community, but can we not call upon them to institute honest, transparent and inspectable programs in mosques and Islamic schools that teach against this understanding of Islam that they ostensibly reject and oppose?

Meanwhile, opposition leader Bill Shorten said: “Our thoughts are also with the family of the alleged young perpetrator. Like all Australians, they will be struggling to comprehend how someone so young could be part of such a terrible crime.” How does he know his family wasn’t involved? Has he carried out an investigation? He assumes that the family taught young Farhad Jabar Khalil Mohammad the true, peaceful Islam, but that he was then “radicalized on the Internet” — but why was his family’s true, peaceful Islam not able to withstand the challenge from the twisted, hijacked Internet Islam?

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird said that he and others were trying to understand “how someone so young could commit such a hideous crime.” He might wish to look into Islam’s teachings about jihad, but he won’t. He also said: “We cannot let actions such as this divide us. We cannot let hate overtake us. We have to come together and I’m sure that’s what we’ll see from this city and state.”

Indeed, we must not let hate overtake us, as it overtook Curtis Cheng. But can we do that by refusing to examine the ideology that led to his murder? By “hate,” Baird means “honest investigation into the texts and teachings of Islam that incite attacks such as this one, and the prevalence of such teachings in the Muslim community.”

And that’s the problem: every time there is another jihad attack or foiled jihad plot in the free world, our leaders just circle the wagons, trot out their Religion-of-Peace cliches again, warn us against “Islamophobia,” and refuse to look into the genuine root causes of the problem.

It’s a sure-fire path to societal suicide.