Islam

Last weekend, Felix Klein, Germany’s anti-Semitism commissioner, said that he can no longer ‘recommend to Jews that they wear the skullcap at all times everywhere in Germany.’ This statement betrayed two devastating truths. First, that anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance in Germany, as elsewhere in many European states. Second, that no one with any knowledge of the situation has any confidence that things will get better anytime soon. Instead of working to change the latter, Jews are instructed to hide their faith. This is abhorrent for several reasons. The kippah or yarmulke is, like the hijab, an external signifier. It proclaims to the world that the wearer identifies with a particular group and a particular set of ideas.

It has become commonplace to describe terror attacks as ‘senseless’. The horrific Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, which cost the lives of more than 350 people, several British citizens among them, make little sense. The only way to understand them is as a symptom of the growing globalisation of terror. The tactics — synchronised bombs on a Christian holy day — are grotesquely familiar. And it was not surprising to learn that one of the attackers was partly educated in London. The attacks, on three Catholic churches and three hotels favoured by westerners, clearly targeted Christians. The culprits have been identified as local Islamic extremists. The purpose of the attacks, therefore, was to increase tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims.

After years of Obama-era State Department obfuscations and Orwellian redactions, it was heartening to hear Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lay the blame for the ‘horrific wave’ of bombings at international hotels and Catholic churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday where it belongs: at the feet of ‘Islamic radical terror.’ Pompeo stated at a press conference Monday that ‘radical Islamic terror remains a threat’ and that the US, along with international partners, is working against the ‘evil’ of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Islamist groups. That’s a far cry from the antics of the State Department under Obama.

The reaction of New Zealand’s vast non-Muslim majority to the terrorist attack at the Al Noor mosque in Christchurch is both inspiring and alarming. Inspiring because, faced with a group of mostly recent arrivals who constitute a mere 1 percent of New Zealand’s population, the other 99 percent have chosen not to ignore their loss and distress, but to commiserate and console at a time when liberal democracies are beset by factional resentments. What is alarming is the form the reaction has taken. When New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern observed Friday prayers in the park outside the mosque, she and many other non-Muslim women wore a hijab.

I have been travelling in the Middle East for the last few weeks and slightly regret returning to the maelstrom of ancient animosities and unbridgeable sectarianism that is modern Britain. But in my absence I see that one of the worst tropes of our time has been stalking unhindered across the land. That is, of course, the latest push to make an equivalence between anti-Semitism and the crock term ‘Islamophobia’. It is not just in the UK that this play has been made. In America over recent days people have been able to follow the progress of the new Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, with her supporters deciding to deflect attention from her expressions of anti-Semitism by claiming ‘Islamophobia’.

So, what do you reckon then about the jihadi bride, Shamima Begum, unearthed by the Times’ Anthony Loyd in a refugee camp in Syria? Should she be brought back home for an NHS delivery for her imminent baby – with the cops hovering backstage – or left to stew in a Syrian refugee camp, to give birth in the same conditions as other mothers-to-be? I may be misjudging my readers here, but I fancy I can discern which way most of us would want to go. But the first thing to say about all this is that this wretched 19-year old is about the least important aspect of the Isis situation.