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Frank
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Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition.
For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’
Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.’ Calling Jews ‘pigs and monkeys’, the Tunisian immigrant shared helpfully: ‘Hitler, may God be exalted, was burning them, the Jews. Did you know?’
Aiming to kill as many Jews ‘as possible’ and emulating Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the architect of the 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris, Saadaoui assured the undercover officer: ‘These matters of running someone over with a car or using a knife is ineffective, what is needed is an automatic gun. We want to do the same as what Abaaoud done, God willing. We must run rivers of their impure blood.’ He relished the image: ‘The schools I showed you, their gathering. We open fire on them, young, old, women, elderly, the whole lot, killing them all. Killing them all.’
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The modern confection ‘Islamist’ is meant to wall off the vast Muslim majority – nice, benevolent, friendly Muslims who love their western brothers and sisters and wouldn’t hurt a fly – from the teensy minority of theologically misguided Muslims who are actually dangerous. The intention – nay, the injunction, to journalists and readers alike – is to insulate the friendly Muslims. from any stigma that might otherwise attach to innocent adherents of their faith just because so many of their co-religionists keep ploughing vehicles into Christmas markets, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and blowing stuff up.
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Has Saadaoui’s naked loathing of Jews no canonical roots in Islam? I’m no expert on Islam – I’m not an ‘Islamist’ in the archaic sense of the word – and rather than read the Quran cover to cover I’d put an ice pick through my eye. (Ditto the Bible, to be fair.) But I have read excerpts, and they’re not subtle. By now, most of us have tripped across this infamous hadith: ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say: “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, s.okill him.”’ The texts are anti-Semitic, and so, if you believe the polls, is the better part of the international Muslim community. Pew Research had 78 per cent of Pakistani nationals and 95 per cent of Egyptians holding unfavourable views of Jews back in 2010. After the outcry over Gaza, those percentages will have risen further.
And is Islam really a religion of peace? Historically, it’s a religion of conquest. It’s often violent (ask Salman Rushdie); the punishment for apostasy is death. Doctrinally, Islam unabashedly aims for the whole world to become Muslim. Why, supposedly everyone is born Muslim. Eventually the scales will fall from the outsiders’ eyes and they’ll realise they’ve been Muslims all along. But before they get with the programme, the faith is overtly hostile to infidels. Live-and-let-live this ain’t. Sure, most Muslims aren’t stocking up on 1,200 rounds of ammunition, but is there no relationship between Islam and the Muslim extremists who take the creed’s contempt for unbelievers up a level?
Though American progressives disparage ‘Christian nationalism’, no one refers to ‘Christianist nationalism’, the better to distinguish friendly Christian patriots from the Jesus people who want to violate the constitution’s ban on an established church. That’s because no one is worried about Christians, who therefore don’t warrant a special cordoning-off suffix for their fringe. The odd mass murder is labelled ‘white supremacist’, but ‘Christian terrorism’, much less ‘Christianist terrorism’, is not really a thing.
That’s my problem with ‘Islamist’: it’s fearful. The prissy adjective treats Islam and its scarily touchy sensibilities with kid gloves. And it’s dishonest. It’s denying there’s any connection between Islam the faith as properly understood and terrorist acts, when 75 per cent of British terrorism investigations involving radical Islam can’t be an accident. And it lets some Muslims, who often at least passively support anti-western and anti-Semitic violence, off the hook.
Lionel Shriver
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