Islamic Terrorism is Motivated by Religion, Not Retribution

Islamic Terrorism is Motivated by Religion, Not Retribution

"[Imagine] that your vocal criticisms of Neo-Nazism were met with ceaseless complaints that Neo-Nazi ideology is entirely incidental to the actions of Neo-Nazi terrorists, and that their behaviour is instead semi-legitimate recompense for the invasion of Normandy or the firebombing of Dresden? Could you imagine being told that your criticisms of this ideology were invalidated by the fact that the country in which you happen to currently reside had supplied arms, created power vacuums, and otherwise assisted its growth, both directly and indirectly via its geopolitical policies? Could you imagine being told that we only have ourselves to blame, and that holding Neo-Nazi terrorists responsible for their own actions is a form of bigotry or intolerance?...

Just as Islamic terrorism predates the existence of the United States as a country, Islamic anti-Semitism predates the existence of the Israeli state. David Aaronovitch’s documentary Blaming the Jews sets out a damning case against Islamic attitudes towards Jewish people which go far beyond grievances about contested land, and which often find themselves embedded in Islamic religious texts...

When anti-Semitic cartoons are published in the Muslim world, as they so often are, we do not see Jews clad in black fatigues marching into the headquarters of the publication and gunning down the cartoonists with AK-47s whilst screaming about restoring religious honour.

Vietnamese Americans venting their frustrations over the My Lai Massacre by hijacking jetliners crammed with civilians and slamming them into heavily populated skyscrapers whilst bellowing religious exclamations, are likewise conspicuously absent.

Similarly, there is a noticeable lack of Japanese Americans marching into concert halls and detonating suicide vests in crowds of schoolgirls and their guardians, in retaliation for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it would be an exceptional occurrence to encounter second generation German immigrants blowing up commuters on the London transport system as retribution for the 2nd World War. However, if these were indeed common occurrences, I would expect reasonable people to be swatting away this kind of tasteless excuse-making reflexively.

Islamic terrorists, conversely, are given special consideration. If the apologists’ arguments had any semblance of consistency, it would be acceptable to claim that Darren Osborn, the Finsbury park terrorist, had legitimate political grievances since his murder of an innocent Muslim must be viewed in the climate of ceaseless Islamic terror attacks. Likewise, if hundreds like him began committing terrorism against Muslims in scores of countries around the world...

The demands of the terrorists, are simply and solely that they be allowed to operate with impunity, and these demands are presented in the form of an ultimatum that offers threats of violence in response to any failures of compliance.

The demand then, is that psychotic gangsters like Zarqawi must be allowed to decapitate civillians in Salafist snuff-porn. Al-Qaeda in Iraq must be allowed to butcher as many Shia Muslims as they please. Indonesia must be free to commit genocide in East Timor. And Al-Shabaab must be left alone to turn Somalia into an arena of terrorism and child abduction...

There is also something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation at play when Islamic apologists talk of Western military aggression. Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland recalls a student meeting he was speaking at in the 1990’s being disrupted by Islamist al-Muhajiroun protestors furious at the Wests lack of military intervention to prevent the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia. Similarly, Western inaction in Bosnia is claimed by British Muslim and former Islamist Maajid Nawaz as a contributing factor in his radicalization...

The Yazidi’s have committed no foreign policy transgressions against Muslims anywhere in the world at any point in history, yet they were subjected to genocide, rape, sexual enslavement, and forced conversion to Islam at the hands of The Islamic State. The motivation offered by ISIS for these atrocities was explicitly religious in that it claimed “enslaving the families of the (non-believers) and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia” and that this behavior reflected that of the companions of Muhammad...

It is more than possible that Adebolajo, Abedi, and the Tsarnaev brothers felt an overwhelming, life or death connection to the people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but only one aspect of the biographies of these suicidal killers provides a basis for such solidarity: their shared religion. It is significant that this particular religion promotes the idea of killing and dying in defense of it as a noble act which will reap otherworldly rewards...

This knee-jerk, unconditional solidarity that radicalized Western Muslims are said to apparently feel with their Muslim brothers and sisters around the world, does not seem to extend to the Muslim victims of Islamic terror groups. The mantra of many an apologist, is that Muslims are the biggest victims of Islamic terror. This is undoubtedly true, and so it would seem a self-refuting statement to, in the same breath, argue that Muslims join groups that primarily kill other Muslims, in order to defend Muslims from non-Muslims...

These people are not interested in defending Muslim lives; their primary victims are other Muslims. They are not concerned with ending Western intervention; they encourage it, on their own terms, in some cases as a means of fulfilling Islamic end times prophesy. The sole quantifiable demands of Islamic terrorists are that they are free to operate with impunity and that Western societies act with unwavering compliance to their every whim"


Attacks in London (comment)

"Here is a list of countries in which Islamist terror attacks have occurred in the last 30 days: Somalia, Indonesia, Iraq, England, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, USA, India, Italy, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Mali, Chad, Yemen, Bangladesh, Thailand, Chechnya, Israel, Germany, La Réunion.

This is what you have to be in order to be murdered by Islamists: a Nigerian farmer, an Iranian border-guard, a Pakistani cleric from a rival mosque, a French police officer, an Iraqi child searching for food, a German convert from Islam to Christianity, a Syrian ‘sorcerer’, a member of an Afghan wedding party, an Egyptian tribesman, young Malian lovers, an Israeli young woman ‘honour-killed’, a Chechnyan gay, a Chadian border-guard, a Bangladeshi Ahmadi imam, a Somalian coffee-drinker, a Thai child out shopping, a Kenyan labourer, a Saudi 2 year-old, an Italian train commuter, an Indian 45 year-old, an American disrespecter of Islam, the wrong kind of Muslim in Libya, an Indonesian bus worker, an English pop tweenie. And on. And on.

Now if you want to say that all these are covered by British foreign policy, you can. But include me out. And of course the real emergence of Islamist, as opposed to ‘secular’, terrorism dates back to the mid-70s with the collapse of Nasserist Pan-Arabism and the emergence of (ultimately Qutb-inspired) Islamism, further bolstered by the ‘soft power’ of Saud financing of mosque-building and Wahhabi preaching abroad."