It’s becoming a new Christmastime tradition: Islamic jihadist attacks on non-Muslim celebrations. We all now know of Bondi Beach, Australia, after two jihadists murdered 15 Hanukkah celebration attendees there on Sunday. The perps, father-son duo Sajid Akram, 50, and Naveed Akram, 24, were reportedly inspired by the Islamic State. (Apparently, dad and lad had rather unique ideas about a “bonding” experience.)
Don’t expect such people to be deported, though, before actually doing violence. This is despite the fact that Australia did deport pro-Western journalist Katie Hopkins — for “Islamophobia.”
Meanwhile, German police just detained five men in connection with a plot to replicate last year’s Magdeburg Christmas market attack. An “Islamist motive” is “suspected,” and one of the arrestees, an Egyptian man, is an imam (a Muslim religious leader).
The authorities detained another man as well, also in Magdeburg, for plotting a separate Christmas attack on large crowds. The suspect, a 21-year-old Tajik, entered Germany last year on a visa for an au pair(!) stay. He was training to be a nursing specialist. In other words, he’s another “hard-working” immigrant who we’re told enriches your country — except for the whole killing-people thing.
Then, just yesterday a bit farther east, a 19-year-old university student was arrested in Poland for planning a Christmas-market attack. The teen tried contacting the Islamic State, say the authorities, and was “very fascinated by Islam.” (Rumor holds that he still is.)
Interestingly, there have been recent reports of a Christian resurgence among Gen Z men, with many converting to Catholicism. For some reason, however, we don’t hear about any of them mounting terrorist attacks while shouting, “Christ is King!”
“All Religions Are Equal”?
Cherry-picked? Irrelevant? Globe & Mail columnist Doug Saunders may insist so. After all, he dismissed a 2017 London jihadist attack, tweeting of the perpetrator, “Not Muslim by background.”
“The question is where extremists are coming from,” he continued — “in UK, often Christian families.”
It was apparently irrelevant to Saunders that the 2017 London attacker, one Khalid Masood, had converted to Islam. But does he apply this thinking generally?
For example, the liberal journalist probably isn’t fond of Republican Ronald Reagan and his policies. So does he blame Democrats for them because Reagan came from a Democratic family and was one well into adulthood?
Of course, the above are just anecdotes. This is why a major German study of 45,000 youths, released in 2010, is relevant here. It found that increasing religiosity among Christian youths made them less violent. Among Muslim youths, however, increasing religiosity made them more violent.
Explanation? Could it be that not all “religiosity” is created equal?
After all, someone who’s not a relativist could get a crazy idea. He may first consider the good reason why different ideologies — e.g., conservatism, liberalism, libertarian, communism, Nazism — aren’t all morally equal. That is, they espouse different values.
He then may realize that the same is true of religion. Since different faiths espouse different values, they can’t all be morally equal. For they could only be so if all values were equal — and that notion is moral relativism.
If relativism is reality, though, then cherishing life couldn’t be any better than destroying it. And this, of course, would justify Christmas-market attacks. “Hey, don’t impose your values on me, infidel!”
Tale of the Tape
Perhaps no one has to tell this to journalist Daniel Greenfield. After commenting Tuesday on the planned recent Christmas jihadism, he presented part of a list of such plots he compiled in 2018. As he relates:
On the second day of Christmas, the only things stirring in some apartments in Frankfurt, Germany, were some Muslim refugees, the German cops smashing through the door and the chemicals in their kitchen bomb labs which they had been plotting to use to commit mass murder a year before 9/11.
The massive Al Qaeda terror plot in Strasbourg targeting the cathedral, Christmas market, possibly a synagogue and European Parliament building would have brought together Muslims from Spain, Germany and the UK in a grandiose plot that might have included the use of nerve gas and bombs.
“This cathedral is Allah’s enemy,” the Algerian Muslim refugee narrated as he watched the cheerful shoppers outside the Strasbourg Cathedral.
In 2016, the Kindergarten bomber, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy, had planted a nail bomb in the Christmas market in the German city of Ludwigshafen.
That same year, a North Africa Muslim refugee drove a truck into the Berlin Christmas market killing 12 and injuring 56 until it came to a halt on a trail of blood with its back wheel resting against a market stand boasting of the “magic of Christmas”.
And then there were the alleged failed Christmas bomb plots in the UK and Belgium. A total of 29 lone wolves were busted in Christmas terror plots in the UK, Australia, Brussels and France.
One of those plots was centered once again on Strasbourg with the arrests coming five days before the opening of its famed Christmas market. The seven arrests were announced in Strasbourg and Marseille preventing, what was described as, “a long-planned terror attack.”
A Reason Why?
All this raises a question: Harking back to the German study, why should increasing Muslim religiosity breed violence?
American Catholic priest Mario Alexis Portella has his answer.
“Islam justifies killing and war in its sacred texts,” he stated in a mostly ignored 2018 interview.
Mere sectarian prejudice?
Well, know that these “sacred” texts include not just the Koran; it’s actually just 16 percent of the Islamic canon. The majority comprises the Hadiths and Sira. Know this, too:
Altogether, this “Islamic Trilogy” contains a reported 327,547 words devoted to political violence. (Such words constitute 67 percent of the Sira.)
This is 9.6 times as many as the Old Testament; the New Testament has zero. What’s more, the biblical injunctions prescribing violence applied only to the given times and places. The violent Islamic injunctions apply to all times and all places.
Actions Trump Words
Yet there’s still more to it because, as is said, virtues (and vices) are caught more than they’re taught. People don’t follow ideas.
People follow people.
Now consider that Christians may use as a guide for behavior, “What would Jesus do?” (WWJD). Likewise, Muslims view Mohamed as a role model, as “the Perfect Man.” But there’s a profound difference.
Jesus is known as the Prince of Peace. Mohamed, however, was a warlord who launched close to 30 military campaigns, many of which he led himself. He was a caravan raider (a bandit) and captured, traded in, and owned slaves; he ordered massacres, used torture, and had dissidents assassinated. He also was a polygamist and made it lawful for masters to have sexual relations with female captives.
In fairness, though, as with Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan, Mohamed was largely a man of his time and place. Thus could we let him rest in peace and put his memory to bed — except for one thing.
More than a billion people worldwide won’t. This brings us to the real point.
If someone said Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan was “the Perfect Man” and used him as his role model, would you turn your back on that person?
What is, though, the West’s response? It’s turning its back on its own culture. Reacting to jihadist threats, many Christmas markets in Europe and the United States have reportedly been restricted or closed. And one market in Britain has been taken over by a Muslim group — and renamed the “Winter Market.”
For this, too, you can thank immigration, immigrationists, and that great sinner by omission: the Westerner’s man in the mirror.
