Paris terror attacks: No shock about this evil massacre

Spare me the empty talk of politicians talking of their “shock” and “resolve” over the Paris massacre. Spare me the weasel words of our new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who yesterday could not bring himself to even whisper the word “Islam”.

But, no, here we go again with the same evasions, this time after more than 120 Parisians were slaughtered by Islamists for not being Muslim enough.

“This is an attack … on all humanity,” declared Turnbull from Berlin. Er, no, it wasn’t.

This was an utterly inevitable attack by Islamists on the French — indeed the West — for not submitting to their brand of faith.

Rescuers evacuate an injured person near the Bataclan concert hall. Picture: AFP
And how Paris has been punished this year. In January Islamists slaughtered journalists at the Charlie Hebdo magazine for mocking Islam. Another jihadist murdered shoppers at a Jewish supermarket for being, well, Jewish. And now this latest slaughter, for what excuse hardly matters. Not submitting to the Islamic State? To al-Qaeda?

Whatever. The excuse changes but the target remains the same. It’s “us” — Westerners and others deemed not sufficiently Muslim. Witnesses yesterday reported some of the eight or more terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” — Allah is the greatest — as they shot diners at a fashionably multicultural restaurant.

But “Muslim” and “Islam” are words Turnbull could not bring himself to utter yesterday in his video message. The closest he came was to suggest the slaughter had “the hallmarks of a Daesh exercise by ISIL” — what politicians call the Islamic State when they don’t want to say “Islamic”.

True, Turnbull added we were in “a global struggle for freedom against those who seek to … assert some form of religious tyranny” — but which religion precisely? And that’s what he shies from.

In fact, we face an enemy that can quote the Koran to licence their murder — passages such as this: “Kill the polytheists wherever you find them.” Or this, explaining the Islamic State’s liking for decapitation: “He the Exalted said: ‘So when you meet those who disbelieve (in battle), strike (their) necks’.”

Only when we accept this truth can we contemplate what it will take to save us from more horrors of the kind in Paris. Only then will we realise what our politicians do not dare openly discuss.

We will realise that Muslim leaders here must vigorously reinterpret Islam to make it safe, and their refusal to do so makes them dangerously complicit. We will realise that the fault of any terrorist attack lies not in us but in the terrorists, who cannot be appeased and whose apologists’ cries of victimhood must not be indulged.

And only then will we accept that Muslim immigration must stop until the jihadist winds blow out.

Take yesterday’s attackers. I’m betting most of the eight we know of were Muslims raised in France.

Yet Europe has allowed one million more Muslims to illegally cross its borders in just 10 months, most young men. This is the kind of self-defence we must discuss.

The sentimental slop served up by Turnbull yesterday is a joke: “When the French people left the stadium after that shocking attack they were not cowed; they sang their national anthem proudly and that is how all free people should respond to these assaults.”

We should respond by singing more? Dear God. Yes, I admit, such frank talk can alienate moderate Muslims, and risks encouraging racists.

But far more dangerous is to keep any policies and attitudes likely to lead to a new terrorist attack. Watch fresh recruits now rush to join the Islamic State, thrilled by this slaughter. Watch Europe’s ultra-Right grow in the panic.

Yet the honest speech we need to avert more bloodshed is exactly not what we’ve got from leaders such as Turnbull and Barack Obama. How this attack has exposed both.

On the very morning of the day the terrorists struck, Obama appeared on television to boast he’d managed to “completely decapitate” the Islamic State. “We have contained them,” he claimed.Turnbull was as bad. Just hours before the bloodshed, he gave former prime minister Tony Abbott yet another whack for supposedly being too gung ho about terrorism, especially for last month warning European leaders to shut their borders to illegal immigrants.

As a well-briefed Fairfax reporter gloated, previewing Turnbull’s meeting with the German chancellor, “there will be no ‘lecture’ to Ms Merkel about the lessons from Australia’s policy of turning back asylum seeker boats”.

And as a News Corp correspondent duly reported: “Malcolm Turnbull has delivered a slapdown to Tony Abbott for lecturing European leaders over their refugee policies”. But then the shooting started.

Fact: we are in a war, and what we need now is an honest account of the threat and how best to fight it. End the evasion. The alternative to honesty is more death.

Fact: we are in a war, and what we need now is an honest account of the threat and how best to fight it. End the evasion. The alternative to honesty is more death.