Islamism

On Monday, Tony Blair addressed a military think tank in London and stated that the West should continue to intervene in countries under threat from Islamist extremism. According to the former PM, who led Britain as it joined the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, an isolationist policy would serve no purpose because:  Islamism, both the ideology and the violence, is a first-order security threat and, unchecked, it will come to us even if centred far from us... Its defeat will come ultimately through confronting both the violence and the ideology, by a combination of hard and soft power. His declaration was along the lines of the one he made in October 2015 at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City.

Nine Chinese engineers were killed in an explosion near Pakistan’s Dasu hydroelectric dam last Wednesday. The government initially said that their bus suffered a ‘mechanical failure’ after it plunged into a ravine, but officials eventually admitted that the incident was a terror attack after Beijing decided to send its own investigators. China has now postponed work on the $65 billion (£47 billion) China Pakistan Economic Corridor, a network of roads and infrastructure projects. The programme represents Beijing’s largest overseas investment and is a critical part of its Belt and Road Initiative.

Do Hamas’s supporters in the West know what this organisation really stands for? The reality is that Hamas is no liberation movement in search of a Palestinian nation. Instead, it seeks the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic empire on its ruins. How do we know? Because senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar has said so: Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state… In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state… This is a holy land. It is not the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world… [Hence] our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.

On 2 June 2019, a German politician was found lying in a pool of blood outside his home in Hesse. He had been shot in the head at close range with a .38 Rossi revolver. Walter Lübcke, the 65-year-old leader of Kassel city council, who had been a vocal supporter of Germany's immigration policy, had been assassinated by a German member of the British neo-Nazi group Combat 18. On Tuesday, his killer was sentenced to life in prison. Lübcke’s murder is the most extreme example of Germany’s increasingly alarming relationship with immigration, anti-Semitism, and fanatical politics.

Pakistan's prime minister Imran Khan has once again blamed women for an appalling rise in rape cases. Khan used a televised question and answer session this week to say that sexual violence was a result of 'increasing obscenity'. Women in Pakistan should remove 'temptation' because 'not everyone has willpower', he added, urging females to cover up to help reduce the sexual violence which has plagued our country. Khan pointed the finger of blame at Bollywood and Hollywood, for spreading ‘vulgarity’. He also repeated the growing divorce tally of the UK as evidence of the ‘ethical plunge’ of the West, which he said is messing up the moral compass of the Muslim world and Pakistan.

Last week, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the release of UK born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh who was accused of kidnapping and beheading the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. The verdict came after Sindh High Court overturned the death penalty for Sheikh and three alleged abettors last year, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to find them guilty of murder and stating that they had served their sentence for their role in the kidnapping. The decision has outraged Washington, with Joe Biden’s new State Department chief Antony Blinken dubbing it an ‘affront to terrorism victims everywhere’ and announcing his readiness to prosecute Sheikh in the US.

On Monday, 13 soldiers were killed by the Islamic State in northeastern Nigeria. A week ago, just after midnight on Friday morning, a Boko Haram suicide bomber blew up 14 villagers in northern Cameroon. These attacks — passing us by, as they do, in a stream of news and information — are becoming increasingly common in the beleaguered states of West Africa.  At the end of last year, Islamists kidnapped 344 schoolboys in an apparent ransom attempt. While the raid saw a continuation of Boko Haram’s strategy (in 2014 the group kidnapped 276 schoolgirls, to global condemnation) it marked a change in the terror group’s ambitions.

Can an entire country sue for libel? If so, France would have a strong suit against swathes of the American left. The US progressive movement, including the New York Times and Washington Post, has turned on la Republique over its citizens’ habit of getting themselves murdered by Islamists. Most recently, this has included Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and three people murdered in a church in Nice. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed stricter regulations for mosque-financing and an end to home-schooling. And in response to this, much of the American left has lost its mind.

A few years ago, in a Lords debate on the treatment of Christians in the Middle East, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminded his peers of some famous words of Martin Luther King: ‘In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.’ That reflection may now be going through the head of the French President, Emmanuel Macron. In recent weeks he has been left alone on one of the most dangerous and delicate ledges of our time: that of Islamic extremism. And while he has already incurred the wrath of much of the so-called Muslim world — with French goods disappearing from many Arab supermarkets and Macron condemned from Ankara to Islamabad — it is the silence of everyone else that has been so striking.