By now the world knows about the latest atrocity carried out in Paris by jihad terrorists. The wholesale murder of the staff of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo including its editor 'Charb,' Stephane Charbonnier. The murders at the magazine, the shooting of a female police officer, a car bomb exploding at a local synagogue, a gunman invading a kosher supermarket filled with women and children and killing four shoppers and wounding a number of others..these have all been covered by the media and digested by the world at large.
For a couple of days, this made headlines, but by now the world has processed it. And it is last week's news,because to really focus on it would mean we'd have to actually do something about it.
Beslan, 9/11, Boston, Bali, Mumbai, London, Itamar, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Fort Hood, Sydney, a never ending list..and those are just the ones we notice,because they're either in the West, or involve the murder of Westerners. The ones that don't barely rate a mention. In Nigeria last week for instance, Boko Haram, who have already pledged their support and allegiance to Islamic State attacked the city of Baga, near Lake Chad. The known death toll from that one attack alone is over 2,000. And it may go higher, once the final figures come in.
Chant with me, why don't you..'black lives matter!' Except when they're murdered by Muslim terrorists.
I wonder if it has occurred to many of us how much our society has normalized terrorism committed by Islamist fascists? The limitations to our freedoms we've already accepted without complaint? The millions in additional tax dollars we're forced to spend? The handcuffs we've put on ourselves and the forces we enlist to protect us because we're unwilling to be honest?
We have become acclimated to accepting Islamist terrorism as the norm, as business as usual. We've been doing it for so long it barely moves us, let alone raises the revulsion and the resolve to stop it, the normal reaction. Instead, we hide behind inane rhetoric, insipid and cowardly rationalizations and yes, hash tags.
If we were really all Charlie Hebdo, or Theo Van Gogh, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Molly Norris, or Kurt Westergaard, or Drummer Lee Rigby, or Daniel Pearl or the Fogel Family, this would have ended long ago, because we would have risen up en masse to demand that the political class do something to stop this once and for all.
We haven't. We simply ingest the latest atrocity and continue to sleepwalk. After a few words from our sponsor, of course. And the usual 'Muslims fear backlash' stories, although somehow that backlash never seems to occur.
A case in point is the recent 'Unity rally' in Paris. No one, of course, would dare call it a rally against Islamist fascism, a rally against 'radical Islam' or even a rally against terrorism. No, it was all about unity, with signs saying 'Je suis Charlie' and flags and forty world leaders marching together in the streets of Paris. Nice, until you look behind the facade.
Among the participants was the Emir of Qatar which openly funds terrorism. Also at the rally was Turkish PM Ahmet Davutoglu, who country has more journalists in jail than any other NATO member for what's labeled as 'un-Turkish sentiments', whose Islamist government is a haven for Hamas. It is also the country where at least one of the killers, Hayat Boumeddiene was allowed to enter France freely via a ticket from Istanbul to Spain and the country from which she was allowed to escape back to Syria.
And of course, Palestine's unelected Dictator Mahmoud Abbas was there too. Yes, Abbas, the Holocaust denier with his history of terrorism as Arafat's second in command, Abbas who is allied with the genocidal Hamas in a unity government. Interesting how that came about.
Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu had wanted to show up in Paris to take part as one of the world leaders involved. You would think he'd be a natural participant, given Israel's history of combating Islamist terrorism, and especially since about a third of the victims of the attacks were Jews.
But the Israeli PM was told outright by the French government that he was persona non grata and unwelcome, since his presence was deemed 'divisive' and would 'make having the rally difficult.'
After mulling it over for a day, Netanyahu simply told the French he was coming anyway. My sources differ on whether Abbas had already been expressly invited (the Palestinian Authority insists he was, and a private meeting between Abbas and Holland scheduled the next day seems to bear this out) or whether he was invited simply out of spite towards Netanyahu,but the fact remains that the leader of a democracy with a free press and an admirable record fighting exactly the forces responsible for last weeks' carnage was insulted and initially shunned while nations that finance and support terrorism and rigidly repress any criticism were courted and invited.
I doubt having Abbas there went a long way towards reassuring French Jews.
President Obama, for once, made the right choice in avoiding this farce although for all the wrong reasons. Because nothing is going to change, at least in the near term.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls made a brave speech about France waging “a war against terrorism, against jihadism, against radical Islam, against everything that is aimed at breaking fraternity, freedom, solidarity.”
But Socialist François Hollande is France's president and the one with power, and he most definitely did not echo Valls' sentiments. Neither did President Obama or Attorney General Eric Holder, whom was present in Paris but pointedly did not attend the rally.
France's Socialist government and President Hollande in particular are hugely unpopular in France, although he got a slight boost in popularity from last weeks' events that will soon fade as things return to normal.The Socialist's election victory, in part, occurred because they carried the Muslim vote almost in a bloc.At this point, they need all the political support they can muster, so rest assured that Prime Minister Valls likely received a quiet spanking at the Élysée Palace and no 'war' is going to be declared just now.
To win a war, you first have to be willing to name your enemy and be honest about his motivations. In spite of the perpetrators murdering people while yelling 'Allahu akbar!' and 'the Prophet has been avenged', most of Europe as well as the Obama Administration were quick to say this had nothing to do with Islam. Even PM Valls referred to 'radical Islam,' and other apologists on the Left like our president referred to the perpetrators as 'radicals' who are 'distorting a peaceful religion. Others referred to them as fanatics, or as simply insane.
They aren't any of those things. They're Islamists engaged in jihad, with their actions justified by a fairly mainstream reading of the Qu'ran, even if many Muslims don't act on it - yet.
But that reading, the 'radicalization' the political class mentions every once and a while has gained precedence in the west and is directly attributable to the policies they and their willing tools have promulgated in Europe and America.
They have appeased Islamism and empowered it at every turn. They have imported huge numbers of Muslim immigrants,many of whom come with a culture that despises western freedom into our countries without bothering to ask the citizens they ostensibly represent and have increasingly not insisted on these new migrants to assimilate or respect the western culture of the host country. Instead, they have pushed 'multiculturalism' to force western culture to twist like a pretzel to appease and accommodate something that is essentially incompatible.
They've allowed and continued to allow the cancer of Islamism to grow. turning a blind eye to Islamist mosques being constructed with foreign money, to radical imams imported to promulgate jihad and in America, subversive groups like CAIR, MPAC, The Islamic Trust of North America(ITNA) the MSA and similar Muslim Brotherhood front groups to be funded and nurtured. They've been doing it for years.
The Obama Administration has even protected such groups when they were clearly involved in money laundering and material aid to officially designated terrorist entities.
Contrary to being 'crazy' or fanatic, in action these warriors of jihad are calm, deliberate and well trained as you can see from the video below. And savage, executing a badly wounded policeman whom was no threat to them as he begged for his life.
And even that shows deliberation, The policeman in question happened to be Muslim and undoubtedly mentioned it in an attempt to survive. He was shot dead in this video, reproduced worldwide, to send a message to other Muslims. Terrorism is a tactic, not a madness and this killing along with all of the others last week was tactical, not mindless butchery.
Yes, it is about Islam, although not about all Muslims. Does any rational person still doubt it? Ahmad Harqan is an Egyptian civil rights activist raised this question on a popular TV show..'What is ISIS doing now that the Prophet Mohammed and his followers didn't do?'
For his outspokenness, Hargan narrowly escaped being assassinated and was later jailed briefly for blasphemy under article 98 in the Egyptian penal code,but his point is a valid one. All one needs to do is consult the Qu'ran and read what it says and the Hadiths, the recording of Mohamed's life, times and sayings by his followers.
To themselves and to a significant number of Muslims, Islamic State is merely following in Mohammed's footsteps. Until we understand that and obtain new political leadership that understands that and is willing to act on it seriously, we will continue to wallow in this sordid, self-defeating funk as the attacks continue to grow and get more serious.
It's time we awakened.
