Mass murder and moral blindness

n response to the Nairobi atrocity, in which the Somali Islamic terrorist outfit al Shabab murdered at least 62 people in a shopping mall and injured at least 170 after separating out the non-Muslims and then killing them, the British Prime Minister David Cameron said:

‘These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion - they don’t. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don’t represent Islam or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.’

Oh dear.

You know what he’s trying to say. He’s trying to make the necessary point that countless Muslims in Britain and elsewhere abhor such attacks. It is indeed important not to tar all Muslims with the same murderous brush. But the rest of his statement is simply false. Not just false, but also potentially lethal.

All attacks by Islamic terrorist groups are very explicitly made in the name of a religion. The perpetrators may recite Koranic verses, scream ‘Allahu akhbar’, declare they are acting in the name of God, proclaim Islamic holy war or single out non-Muslims for slaughter. These characteristics are all clues that such people act in the name of a religion.

The specific causes for which Islamic terrorist groups commit mass murder vary from country to country – Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Israel, al Qaeda incursions in the Horn of Africa, and so on. But they all have one thing in common. They are all carried out in the name of Islam. This is another clue that such people act in the name of a religion.

The jihad against ‘unbelievers’ has deep roots in Islamic theology and is mandated in all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. This too is another clue that such terrorists act in the name of a religion.

If none of these facts convinces, then the terrible events of this week should surely show them all too clearly to be true. For on the same day as the Nairobi atrocity, Taleban human bombs blew up a church in Peshawar, killing 81 Christian worshippers and wounding about 140.

There was no local political ‘grievance’ behind this attack – merely the desire to murder as many Christians as possible on the basis that these were ‘enemies of Islam’.

This terrible atrocity follows countless attacks by Islamists on Christians in Africa: forcing them to flee their homes, converting them at gunpoint or burning them alive in their churches. What an amazing coincidence, Prime Minister, that the Nairobi attackers and the Peshawar bombers and similar persecutors of Christians in the Third World, no to mention al Qaeda and other similar groups attacking the west, are all waging the same holy war in the name of the same religion!

Mr Cameron’s mistake is to articulate the absurd non-sequitur parroted by so many in the British ruling class: that because many Muslims do not endorse Islamic terrorism, ergo such terrorism is not truly perpetrated in the name of Islam. This is as nonsensical as saying that because many Christians were the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, the Spanish Inquisition could not have been truly perpetrated in the name of Christianity; or that because most Jews are not ultra-Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox are not truly Jews; or even that because most women are not man-hating feminists, man-hating feminists are not really women.

And this confusion is lethal. Those who cannot even bring themselves to call the force that is attacking them by its proper name will be defeated by that force. The Islamists know that; which is why such a reaction guarantees more such attacks. Moral blindness and mass murder are locked in a fatal embrace like a drowning couple in a whirlpool.