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From the outset it was obvious to seasoned observers who massacred more than 130 Russians at a concert hall Moscow on Friday evening. It wasn’t, as some in the Kremlin claimed, Ukraine. What would they stand to gain from such indiscriminate slaughter?
The people who opened fire in the Crocus City Hall cleaved to the same ideology as those who have this century murdered thousands of innocent men, women and children in New York, Bali, Madrid, London, Brussels, Paris, Manchester and Nice. According to reports, the group that carried out the Moscow attack is known as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) and it has a reputation for “extreme brutality.”
Despite the fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, Putin is still trying to implicate Ukraine
What Islamist group doesn’t have such a reputation? Al-Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Congo’s Allied Democratic Forces all get a kick out of killing without mercy. Those who suffer most are Muslims, murdered in towns and villages across Africa and the Middle East.
Friday’s atrocity in Moscow was as indiscriminate as Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, and just as savage as the series of co-ordinated strikes against Paris in November 2015 that left 130 dead. The men who carried out these massacres had no political aims and no wish to sit round a negotiating table. They had only one ambition: a global caliphate, as outlined by the Islamic State a decade ago. Actually, they had two ambitions: the second was to die for their belief. As one Islamic State fighter told John Simpson of the BBC in 2015: “We are men who love death as much as you love life.”
One man who dreamed of such a caliphate was a Briton called Khalid Masood. On March 22, 2017 he killed five people in Westminster before he was shot dead by a policeman, an attack that was celebrated by the Islamic State.
London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan marked the seventh anniversary of the Westminster atrocity on Friday with a tweet: “Today we remember the victims who were killed seven years ago in the Westminster terrorist attack,” he said. “London will never forget the innocent people who lost their lives on this day in March 2017.”
For what cause did these six innocent people lose their lives? Was it English nationalism? Zionism? Hindu extremism? Khan didn’t have the honesty to mention Islamism. In that he’s not alone. Prime ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson have also in recent years lacked the courage to name the West’s most implacable foe.
Rishi Sunak did namecheck Islamism in a speech outside 10 Downing Street at the start of this month. But in the same breath he bracketed the ideology with far-right extremism. Evidently, he believes both pose a clear and present danger to Great Britain.
France and Germany have also been talking up the danger in recent months from the far-right. Why? The resurgence in antisemitism that has swept through London, Paris and Berlin in recent years is not being driven by men named John, Jean and Franz. The men and women marching through the British capital each week chanting hate are not skinheads with Union Flags tattooed into their arms.
Despite the fact that Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Friday’s attack, Putin is still trying to implicate Ukraine, claiming that the terrorists “tried to hide and moved towards Ukraine, where, previously, a window had been prepared for them to cross the border.”
Mock the president but he’s just as delusional as a generation of Western leaders who are too weak to confront the truth: it is not Russia or China or North Korea that poses the greatest danger to our way of life. It is the ideology of Islamism, for it has crossed our borders and is now moving freely among us, spreading through schools, universities and households.
This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.
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