RUTHFULLY YOURS

The infiltration of this ideology is reminiscent of the spread of communism and should be defeated similarly — not with weapons, but by exposing its true nature and providing an alternative. The West first must abandon, however, the notion that radical Islam is an internal Muslim issue, any more than communism was a “Russian issue” that “the Russians” needed to solve.

In addition, the views of liberal Muslim scholars, who reject the whole premise of extremist, political Islam, should be supported and widely circulated.

Finally, imams in Western countries must be held to the same standard as members of other professions. They should be required to receive occupational licenses, based on criteria determined by the state, in conjunction with modern Muslims seeking a peaceful life and the ability to integrate into their societies without fear of repercussions at the hands of fundamentalists.

Many imams in the West — citizens of the United States, Canada and other countries — use their pulpits to promote practices that go against democratic values and ultimately lead to terrorism.

Some call on their flock to kill Jews, Christians and “infidel” Muslims who do not adhere either to the strictest interpretation of Islam. Others justify the marriage of grown men to nine-year-old girls. There are those, too, who defend the spousal “right” of husbands to rape their wives.

Contrary to some claims, the type of clerics who preach murder and sexual abuse in North American and European mosques do not suffer from poor socioeconomic conditions and are not mentally unbalanced. Rather, they are loyal followers of an interpretation of Islam that envisions the establishment of a worldwide caliphate governed by sharia law. They deeply believe that the only way to enter Allah’s paradise is to live by the letter of the Quran and the Hadith (the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammed).

It is from such imams, most of whom are graduates of renowned Islamic institutions in the Middle East and Asia, that Muslims in the West have been receiving guidance. Key among these institutions is Al-Azhar, a Cairo-based Sunni center for higher learning, attended by students from all over the world. Its curriculum includes extremist content, such as tenets that killing “apostates” is a Divine obligation; that it is a Muslim’s duty to humiliate female prisoners through sexual abuse; that adulterers should be stoned to death, and that Christians and Jews are the “enemy of God.”

Many imams in the West are graduates of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, a Sunni center for higher learning. Its curriculum includes extremist content, such as tenets that killing “apostates” is a Divine obligation; that it is a Muslim’s duty to humiliate female prisoners through sexual abuse; that adulterers should be stoned to death, and that Christians and Jews are the “enemy of God.” (Image source: Diego Delso/Wikimedia Commons)

Whenever confronted by critics in the West calling them to task for spreading such violent teachings, many imams respond by cloaking their real objectives, saying that the texts should be read in the context of the time that they were written, and by highlighting peaceful and tolerant Quranic verses. Other clerics — those who do not know how to tailor their rhetoric to Western ears — openly admit their religious ideology’s true intentions.

Instead of trying to silence the global voice against his increasingly autocratic governance, and oppressing millions who do not respect him, Erdogan could try to earn respect by having a little mercy on dissidents.

Although there has been no ruling so far that Fethullah Gulen was the mastermind behind the attempted coup, 150,000 people have been purged, and they, their families and perhaps a million Turks are decrying Erdogan’s unjust behavior.

So, officially, they remain “terrorists”, even though they were acquitted of charges of terrorism.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in an odd mood: He is trying to convince the international community that he is not Hitler. Most recently, Erdogan’s government ordered Google to de-list more than 40 URLs that reported about the Turkish government’s recent crackdown on journalists and other critics that compared Turkey’s president to Hitler.

Instead of trying to silence the global voice against his increasingly autocratic governance, and oppressing millions who do not respect him, he could try to earn respect by having a little mercy on dissidents. That is probably too much to expect from someone who once infamously said that “If you pity you will be pitied”.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to convince the international community that he is not Hitler. (Photo by Elif Sogut/Getty Images)

In the aftermath of a failed coup against his government in July 2016, Erdogan has dismissed 150,000 public employees, citing their alleged links with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric in self-exile in Pennsylvania, whom Erdogan claims was the mastermind behind the attempted putsch. The Ankara government also has arrested more than 50,000 people on the same charges.

Although there has been no ruling so far that Gulen was, in fact, the mastermind behind the attempted coup, 150,000 people have been purged, and they, their families and perhaps a million Turks are decrying Erdogan’s unjust behavior. The victims are not only the “Gulenists”: The purge has targeted a wide spectrum of dissidents including anti-Islamist leftists of different views. In just one week in May, Turkey’s Interior Ministry said, 1,284 suspects were detained in “counter-terrorism raids”.

About terrorism and Islamist violence, Christian leaders offer only words of relativism and moral equivalence. Is it possible that after two recent big massacres of Christians, Catholic leaders have not a single word of courage and honor, but only the same offer of the other cheek?

Our secular elites condemn proselytizing only when it is practiced by Christians, never when practiced by Muslims.

In Syria and Iraq, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of places of Christian worship that Islamic fundamentalists have demolished in the past three years. These images, along with the mass decapitations and the rape of the minorities, shock the public, it seems, for one day.

We do not yet know enough about the three terrorists who, saying “This is for Allah!”, killed and wounded so many in London on June 4, but consider these two recent scenes:

Scene one: Manchester, United Kingdom, the “free world”. A British-born Muslim terrorist prays in a former church. All around him, the Christian sites and congregations accepted being turned into Islamic sites. The day after, this terrorist goes on a rampage, murdering 22 concert-goers.

Scene two: Minya, Egypt, the “unfree world”. An Islamist terror group stops a bus full of Christian pilgrims. The terrorists demand that their victims recite the Islamic creed, the shahaada. The Christians refuse to abandon Christianity and become Muslims. The Islamists murder them, one by one.

What do these scenes tell us? Christians resist Islam more in the Middle East than in Europe.

Salman Abedi, the British terrorist who massacred 22 innocent men, women and children at the Manchester Arena, could, every day, enter what was once a beautiful Christian church, consecrated in 1883. It was desecrated in the 1960s, during a great wave of secularization. People still remember the Methodist Church that it was until it was bought by the local Syrian Muslim community to make it a place of Islamic worship, the Didsbury Mosque. One can still see the typical architecture of a church, from the bell tower to the windows. But inside, instead of an altar, Abedi would be headed to the mihrab, the niche in the mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca. The pulpit is still there, but it is no longer used by a Christian pastor. It is used by the imam for the Khutba, the Islamic prayer.

Outside the Didsbury Mosque there is a sign announcing: “Do you want to know more about Islam? Come and socialize”. Such a sign for Christianity would be unthinkable in any European city. Our secular elites condemn proselytizing only when it is practiced by Christians, never when practiced by Muslims. On YouTube, an Islamist organization celebrates “the church converted to a mosque”. Instead of the times for Mass, there is another sign: “Prayer Room for Men”.

A few days after the Manchester attack, Islamists again struck Christians; this time, pilgrims in Egypt. That attack took place after Pope Francis’s trip to Egypt, where he offered the local suffering Christians only a vague condemnation of “every form of hatred in the name of religion”. The head of the Catholic Church evidently did not have the courage to address the question of Islamic fundamentalism, as had his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg.

LONDON—The third terror attack in Britain in as many months laid bare a growing challenge to Europe’s police and intelligence agencies and prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to say tolerance of Islamist extremism in the country had gone too far.

The attack, which killed seven people and was claimed by Islamic State, interrupted the campaigning for national elections for a second time and shook confidence in the country’s counterterrorism strategy, which Mrs. May said would be reviewed.

“Since the emergence of the threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, our country has made significant progress in disrupting plots and protecting the public. But it is time to say enough is enough,” Mrs. May said on Sunday.

Mrs. May warned that more must be done to stop people from becoming radicalized, pointing out that attackers have been inspired by those that have come before, often using unsophisticated means.

She added that in the U.K. there is “too much tolerance” of extremism and more must be done to stamp it out, saying the government will consider lengthier prison sentences for extremist-related offenses.

She took aim at internet companies for what she said was allowing extremism—a “perversion” of the Islamic faith—to flourish online.

“We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet that is precisely what the internet and the big companies that provide internet based services provide,” Mrs. May said.

With voting set for Thursday, campaigning will resume on Monday, with security issues likely to take center stage. For Mrs. May, the issue is a double-edged sword: As a former Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, she knows the issue inside out. But any lapses that emerge from investigations of possible failings by the police or security services could also be laid at her door.

Three knife-wielding men carried out the deadly rampage in the capital Saturday night, plowing a rented white van into pedestrians on London Bridge and then indiscriminately stabbing people in a lively area of pubs and restaurants nearby. In addition to those killed, dozens were injured, with 21 of them in critical condition on Sunday.

Police ended the violence by shooting and killing the assailants just eight minutes after they received the first reports of the bridge incident.

Islamic State on Sunday said on its official Amaq news agency that a “covert unit” had carried out the attack.

Police haven’t released the identities of the three men. At least one of the men was born in Pakistan, a Western security official said. It wasn’t clear when the man came to Britain or whether he had acquired British citizenship. CONTINUE AT SITE

Saturday’s terror attack in the heart of London, Britain’s third murderous assault in 72 days, poses a difficult choice for free societies: Do more to contain this internal Islamist insurgency now, or risk a political backlash that will result in even more draconian limits on civil liberties.

No group had taken responsibility by midday Sunday, but the operation that killed seven and wounded 48 bore the hallmarks of recent jihadist atrocities. The London Bridge area and nearby Borough Market are packed with bars and restaurants popular with tourists and young people. The three alleged perpetrators rammed a van into pedestrians, then began stabbing people before police shot them.

Prime Minister Theresa May said Saturday’s attack wasn’t directly linked to the suicide bombing committed by Salman Abedi at a pop concert in Manchester last month. But the three attacks in succession show why governments must target the threat at its roots, in self-isolating Muslim communities that reject mainstream values and create homegrown or Islamic State-inspired radicals like Abedi.

On this front, Mrs. May is well ahead of many of her European counterparts. The Prime Minister in a speech Sunday morning outlined a new counterterror strategy that puts ideology and Muslim integration at the forefront. The trio of recent attacks in Britain, she said, were “bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism.”

Mrs. May went on to call for a battle of ideas against Islamism and tough love for British Muslims who have failed to confront radicals in their mosques and community centers. Said the Prime Minister: “We need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities, but as one truly United Kingdom.”

Mrs. May suggested this would involve “difficult and often embarrassing conversations” with the Muslim community, and she is right. This has to include an end to political coddling of so-called soft Islamist groups and imams who treat candor about the Islamist threat as anti-Muslim or refuse to identify radicals in their midst.