France is aware of the threat of Islamic terrorism, Is the UK ?
Source - Spectator online today"‘Low-cost’ jihadists are Europe’s new danger"https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/low-cost-jihadists-are-europes-new-danger/'There is a new Islamist terror threat in Europe that the French describe as ‘low-cost terrorism’. The expression was deployed in a television interview at the start of this week by Bruno Retailleau, the Minister of the Interior. Warning France that Islamic State is ‘reconstituting themselves in Africa and elsewhere’, Retailleau said that the other menace was the individual extremist acting on his own initiative. Unskilled in bomb-making and with no access to firearms, these ‘low-cost’ Islamists kill with knives or behind the wheel of a car'. However the greatest killers of Muslims around the world are Islamic extremists. Between 1979 and April 2024, Islamists carried out 66,872 attacks worldwide and killed nearly 250,000 people. Of that staggering death toll, 204,937 lost their lives between 2012 and 2024, and most of the victims were Muslims.The data, compiled by the French think tank Fondapol (Fondation pour l’innovation politique), show that the vast majority of the attacks – 96.7 per cent – do not occur in the West. They take place in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and rarely do they make the western mainstream news.How many people are aware, for example, that since Christmas 2024, at least 237 Christians have been killed by Islamic State Central Africa Province (ISCAP) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? In total, since 2017, the Islamist group has murdered 6,000 Christians in this country.The Islamist attacks that do make the news in the West are small by comparison, although they are growing in number. This year alone, there have been atrocities committed in France (Mulhouse), Austria (Villach) and Germany (Aschaffenburg, Berlin and Munich). The attack in Aschaffenburg, which killed two, including a toddler, was carried out by an Afghan, although police attribute the atrocity to mental instability.These five attacks have taken the lives of six people, two of whom were run down by a car and the others fatally stabbed. They are in marked contrast to the Islamist terrorism of a previous generation; those who planned and carried out the mass-casualty attacks in Madrid (2004), London (2005), Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) had been trained overseas. In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph at the weekend, Lord Walney, the former Labour MP who served as the government’s independent adviser on political violence and extremism, stated: ‘Islamist extremism and Islamist terrorism is the greatest threat this country faces.’A similar warning was issued this week in France by Francois Fillon, the former Prime Minister, who said that extremism is ‘gaining ground in Europe, where a growing proportion of Muslim populations are bowing to the rules of a radical, authoritarian, freedom-destroying Islam that represents a real and immediate danger to our values and our way of life’.Some might claim that good starting point for Britain would be to scrap the planned definition of ‘Islamophobia’, which would, in effect, proscribe any criticism of Islam. Is the Labour government unable to distinguish between criticism of a religion and discrimination against a person because of their religion ?
John Hawkes ● 25d0 Comments ● 25d