“In _____, a group of ____heavily armed men dressed in black entered _______ and killed _____ people. The attackers were filmed shouting “Allahu akbar!”
At a press conference, President _____ said: “We condemn this criminal act by extremists and their attempt to justify their acts of violence in the name of a peaceful religion will not succeed.” We equally condemn those who seek to use this atrocity as a pretext for Islamophobic hate crimes .”
This is how the book Heretic: Why Islam Needs Immediate Reform by former Muslim, former atheist and current Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali begins. The gap in the name of the place, the number of murderers and the number of victims must be large number of similar cases. The reader can fill in the blanks with the most recent case in the news.
After recalling several attacks, the author writes that for more than thirteen years she has been making a simple argument in response to terrorist attacks like this: “I argue that it is foolish to insist that acts of violence such as ours What leaders usually do is fail.” Many radical Islamists may distance themselves from the religious ideals that inspire them. We must recognize that they are driven by a political ideology, an ideology with roots in Islam itself, in the holy book of the Quran and in the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad described in the Hadith.”
The former Muslim says in every word what Western progressives and their leaders are desperate to deny: “I make my position clear in the simplest terms possible: Islam is not a peaceful religion.”
In contrast to multicultural sensibilities offended by this kind of “insensitive” argument, Hirsi Ali in his book “debunks the idea that Islamic violence has no roots in social, economic or political conditions or even in theological errors , but rather in…”the foundational texts of Islam itself.” For defending this, she was silenced, angered and humiliated not only by Muslims but also by some progressive activists and Western apologists of Islam.
For several reasons, part of the West is more willing to be subjugated by Islam and suffer under the sword of Muhammad than to accept this statement. Proof of this is that Hirsi Ali’s statements provoked such strong criticism that it appeared that she was the perpetrator of acts of violence: “Because today it seems to be a crime to speak the truth about Islam,” explains Ali. “’Hate speech’ is the modern term for heresy. And in the current climate, anything that makes Muslims uncomfortable is labeled hate.”
In this context, it is not appropriate to review the book mentioned above, which I recommend as a timely and important read. I quoted your initial thesis only as an introduction to the last attack on December 2nd in Paris near the Eiffel Tower.
A 26yearold man killed a young GermanFilipino tourist with a knife and then attacked two other people with a hammer. Just like the Hamas terrorists when they shot young people with machine guns at the rave party in Israel, and like so many other terrorists, the murderer Armand RajabpourMiyandoab shouted “Allahu Akbar” before stabbing his victim.
But the murderer’s real name is not Armand. In this document the man is identified as Iman RajabpourMiyandoab. A police source confirmed to the press that the terrorist’s first name was changed in 2003, when he was six years old.
Iman, or Armand, is the son of Iranian parents, converted to Islam in his youth and planned a terrorist attack in 2016, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. The French attacker of Iranian origin was linked to several terrorists, including the murderers of Samuel Paty (a teacher killed on October 16, 2020 near the ConflansSainte school) and Jacques Hamel (a priest killed on October 26). October 2020 the throat was cut). ). July 2016, at the end of a mass in front of three nuns and some parishioners).
Armand also maintained contact with a French jihadist who traveled to Syria and was a former member of the Forsane Alizza group, a terrorist cell that was disbanded in 2012 and advocated armed jihad and wanted to “establish a caliphate” in France.
This latest attack is also in the context of the IsraelHamas war. According to French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, the killer not only shouted “Allahu akbar” but also told police that he did not tolerate the deaths of Muslims in Gaza.
According to a report in the newspaper Le Figaro, the German tourist killed in Paris is the 274th victim of an Islamic attack in France since 2012, a period in which there were 26 deadly Islamic attacks, eight of them after 2020.
Here is the macabre list:
2012: 3 fatal attacks (7 dead)
2015: 6 fatal attacks (150 dead)
2016: 3 fatal attacks (89 dead)
2017: 2 fatal attacks (3 deaths)
2018: 3 fatal attacks (10 dead)
2019: 1 fatal attack (4 deaths)
2020: 4 fatal attacks (7 deaths)
2021: 1 fatal attack (1 death)
2022: 1 fatal attack (1 death)
2023: 2 fatal attacks (2 deaths)
The French media understandably reported the events extensively. The editorial director of the newspaper Le Figaro, Vincent Trémolent de Villers, wrote in an editorial on December 3rd:
“France is a country where there is a risk of dying from a stab wound at any time and anywhere. […] Migration negligence, cultural decay, systemic crime, atmospheric jihadism and weakness of the judiciary are interrelated. In this France, the executioner sues as a victim, and the collateral damage of the great multicultural project is quickly forgotten. Who remembers the young women whose throats were cut at Saint Charles train station six years ago? Or the man who was murdered by a Sudanese refugee when he opened the window while in total confinement?”
However, the coordinator of the leftwing extremist party La France insoumise, Manuel Bompard, is not concerned with preventing new Islamist terrorist attacks, but rather with not giving them an inappropriate interpretation: “I see clearly that, for example, the question of the madness of this individual seems to be completely removed from the question and it seems to me, however, that this is one of the questions that needs to be examined after this tragedy,” noted the Insoumise coordinator.
For Bompard, the knife attack in which a German tourist died in Paris was merely the act of “an obviously unbalanced person” to whom “no general political significance could be attributed.”
JeanLuc Mélenchon, leader of La France insoumise, also limited his reflections to the murderer’s psychiatric profile, without mentioning his terrorist motives. It was just a man with psychiatric disorders who stopped his drug treatment: “It is time to become aware of the consequences of the collapse of the psychiatric system!” Care, supervision and medical accommodation are urgently needed to deal with the consequences of this type of people to reduce the damage caused,” the threetime presidential candidate added.
Shortly before the attack, the attacker, who is on the police list of Islamic radicalization, claimed responsibility for the attack and in a video condemned the news, the government and the murder of innocent Muslims. At the time of the murder he shouted “Allahu Akbar”. Nevertheless, a political aspect attempts to separate the crime from the Islamic question.
Let’s return to the book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, written in 2015. I leave it to her, who knows Islam much better than me, to conclude this article:
“For nearly a decade and a half, we have had policies and pronouncements based on the assumption that terrorism and extremism can and should be distinguished from Islam. In the wake of terrorist attacks around the world, Western leaders are quick to declare that the problem has nothing to do with Islam itself. Because Islam is a peaceful religion.
But what if this premise is completely wrong? Because it is not just AlQaeda and IS that show the violent face of Islamic faith and practice. It is also Pakistan, where any statement criticizing the Prophet or Islam is considered blasphemy and punishable by death. It is Saudi Arabia, where churches and synagogues are banned and beheading is a legitimate form of punishment, so much so that in August 2014 there was almost one beheading per day. It is Iran, where stoning is an acceptable punishment and homosexuals are hanged for their “crime.” It is Brunei where the Sultan reintroduces Islamic Sharia law and the death penalty for homosexuality. […]
Even today we try to argue that the violence is the work of a handful of insane extremists. We resort to medical metaphors and try to define the phenomenon as a kind of foreign body in the religious environment in which it spreads. And we pretend to believe that we have extremists who are just as evil as the jihadists.”