by Charles Bybelezer
Leaving aside the virtually unreported incidents that same week of the drive-by-shootings in Paris targeting the David Ben Ichay Synagogue, the Al Haeche kosher restaurant and a Jewish-owned publishing house, only a Kafkaesque willful blindness could suggest that citizens being run down on the streets constituted a mere threat of terrorism rather than a terrorist problem of the first order.
Three days before Christmas, one unsuspecting holiday shopper was killed and nine others injured when a van ploughed through a crowded market in Nantes, located in western France. The attack came a day after a man, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” rammed his car into crowds in the eastern city of Dijon, injuring thirteen people; this, some twenty-four hours after an assailant stabbed and wounded three police officers in Joue-les-Tours, central France, likewise while yelling “God is the greatest” in Arabic.
A day after the Dijon attack, which the
perpetrator dedicated to the children of “Palestine,” France’s Interior
Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called on the public “to not draw hasty
conclusions since…[the driver’s] motives have not been established.”
Nevertheless, and despite the fact that “the investigation had barely
begun,” Dijon’s public prosecutor, Marie-Christine Tarrare, made clear
that the incident was “not a terrorist act at all.”
It took the third attack before French Prime
Minister Manuel Valls came closest to accepting reality, conceding that,
“there is, as you know, a terrorist threat to France.”
Leaving aside the virtually unreported
incidents that same week of the drive-by-shootings in Paris targeting
the David Ben Ichay Synagogue, the Al Haeche kosher restaurant and a
Jewish-owned publishing house, only a Kafkaesque willful
blindness could suggest that citizens being run down on the streets
constituted a mere threat of terrorism rather than a terrorist problem of the first order.
The icing on the cake was an official French pronouncement that no link had been found between any of these events.
For starters, how about Islam?!
Across the globe, residents of Sydney were
still reeling from the surreal siege on a café, which left two civilians
dead. During the 16-hour standoff, Australian Prime Minister Tony
Abbott addressed the nation, asserting, “we don’t yet know the
motivation of the [hostage-taker].”
At that point, however, it was evident that
the individual who would later be named as Man Haron Monis, an Iranian
refugee and self-styled sheikh, was acting out of religious conviction;
a black flag with clearly legible white Arabic writing had been forcibly
held up by hostages against the restaurant’s front window.
Following the ordeal, once the extent of
Monis’ extremism became public, Abbott had this to say: “These events do
demonstrate that even a country as free, as open, as generous and as
safe as ours is vulnerable to acts of politically motivated violence.”
Politically motivated…? How about religiously inspired?!
How could it be, Australian officialdom
pondered, that someone with such a long and checkered history not have
been under surveillance? The answer is that “sick and disturbed
individual[s],” as Abbott described Monis, do not generally find their
way onto terrorist watch lists, whereas radical Islamists might.
Monis fell through the cracks because the
threat he posed was incorrectly characterized. While authorities (and
much of the media) were quick to describe him as a “lone wolf,” the fact
of the matter is that there have been multiple events throughout
Australia over the past few months pointing to an extensive network of
terrorist collaborators.
On September 23, Numan Haider was shot and
killed outside a police station after stabbing two officers in the state
of Victoria. He was found carrying an Islamic State flag.
Throughout September, in fact, Australian
police conducted major anti-terrorism raids in Brisbane, Melbourne and
Sydney. At least fifteen people were detained, including Omarjan
Azari—an alleged associate of Mohammed Ali Baryalei, leader of the
Islamic State in Australia—who was planning to behead a random civilian
in broad daylight. Just days after Monis’ attack, Australian authorities
arrested two men, including Sulayman Khalid, found in possession of
documents designed to facilitate terrorism.
Monis’ was therefore not a random act, but rather part of a greater pattern of Islamic fanaticism in Australia.
While the denial of Islamic terrorism has
long roots, it reached a post-9/11 turning point on November 5, 2009. On
that day, thirteen people were massacred by Nidal Malik Hasan at a
military base in Ford Hood, Texas.
A self-proclaimed “Soldier of Allah,” Hasan
had been contacting al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. He too
shouted “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down dozens of people.
Nevertheless, the White House worked overtime to ensure the mass killing
was classified as “workplace violence.” In his initial response to the
nation, U.S. President Barack Obama stated, “we cannot fully know what
leads a man to do such a thing.”
Certainly not Islam!
Half a decade later, the families of Hasan’s
victims are still fighting for combat-related benefits they would
otherwise be privy to if their loved ones had been killed in
a classified “terrorist attack.” By contrast, Hasan remained on the
army’s payroll until his conviction in mid-2013, earning some $300,000
in the interim.
Under Obama, references to Islamic terrorism
have been purged from law enforcement documents and lexicon. He is,
after all, the man who courted the Muslim Brotherhood, whose American
front groups, mind you, were recently designated as terrorist
organizations by Gulf States and Egypt. Obama is the Christian who
played golf on December 25 with the Islamist leader of Malaysia, and who
shares a special bond of trust with the Islamist dictator-in-progress
of Turkey, a state-sponsor of Hamas.
His outreach to the Mullahs in Tehran confirms he is an equal opportunity (Sunni and Shiite) embracer of radical Muslims.
Obama’s actions have set the tone for the
current whitewashing of Islamic terrorism in most of the West;
thankfully, though, north of the border in Canada there is a clear-eyed
leader to offer a counter-example, one that needs to be followed.
On October 20, Martin Couture-Rouleau, a
Muslim convert and supporter of the Islamic State, rammed his car into
two Canadian soldiers, killing one, just north of Montreal. Immediately
thereafter, Prime Minister Stephen Harper defined the incident as a
terrorist attack.
Two days later, another soldier was killed
when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, a convert to Islam who openly professed his
admiration for jihadists, attacked parliament in Ottawa.
“I have been saying for a long time, we live
in dangerous world,” Harper affirmed to lawmakers the next morning.
“Terrorism has been here with us for a while.… [I draw] attention back
to incidents such as the Toronto 18 [terror plot in 2006], the Via Rail
conspiracy in 2013, and I could point to a number of others that most
will never know about.”
Harper not only labelled the two October
attacks as terrorism, but also properly contextualized them as the
latest in a long series of Islamic plots.
Only by correctly defining a problem can one
begin to effectively combat it: A Muslim who runs over a dozen people
while shouting “Allahu Akbar” is not simply “mentally unstable; ” he is a
terrorist.
The delusional refusal in the West to accept
this fact has contributed to the transformation of large swathes of
Paris, Sydney, and other urban centers into Little Baghdads. And unless
the confusion over “confused” Muslims killing people ceases, many
Western countries can expect more dead bodies lining their streets in
the future.
Charles Bybelezer is a correspondent for i24news.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/charles-bybelezer/whitewashing-islamic-terrorism-from-sydney-to-jerusalem/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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