BEAUTIFUL Paris has been attacked by Islamist terrorists again.
There’s no point pretending there’s any doubt about who the perpetrators are. Not a “lone wolf” gunman, not “disaffected youth” or “un-Islamic” madmen.
Less than a year after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the land of “liberte, egalite and fraternite” has been attacked at its heart, yet again, by
Islamist fundamentalists driven by a murderous totalitarian ideology that cannot be appeased.
Co-ordinated, militaristic attacks by suicide bombers and gunmen on soft targets at six locations across Paris are designed to cause maximum casualties and maximum terror.
Survivors say terrorists wielding Kalashnikovs yelled
“Allahu Akbar”, as they opened fire on young people watching a rock concert at the Le Bataclan theatre, scene of a dramatic police operation to rescue hostages from the carnage where 100 people were reported dead.
Leftist fools who try to downplay this virulent terrorism are missing the point. They sneer at attempts by our security agencies to keep us safe, and tediously claim that, because fewer Australians are killed each year by terrorism than, say, car accidents or heart attacks, therefore counter-terrorism is mere pantomime pandering to Islamophobes.
But when sports stadiums, restaurants and concert halls in the City of Love are not safe, nothing is safe. This is the point of terrorism, the ever-present threat of random and violent death, targeted specifically at innocent people in the Western world.
Denial and appeasement, pretending the threat has nothing to do with Islam, exaggerating Islamophobia, and blaming the victim, are exactly the wrong reaction to jihadist violence.But you can bet in the weeks to come, this will be the narrative from the bien pensants of Fairfax and the ABC, just as it was after the terrorist attack on the Parramatta police headquarters and on the Lindt cafe in the heart of Sydney.
This wilfully blind political correctness does no favours to Muslims, who are among the greatest victims of Islamofascism.“We have to acknowledge that today’s Islamists are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in the foundational texts of Islam,” Somali-born former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote after the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
We appease the Muslim heads of government who lobby us to censor our press, our universities, our history books, our school curricula. They appeal and we oblige. We appease leaders of Muslim organisations in our societies. They ask us not to link acts of violence to Islam because they tell us that theirs is a religion of peace, and we oblige. What do we get in return? Kalashnikovs in the heart of Paris.
The more we oblige, the more we self-censor, the more we appease, the bolder the enemy gets.”
I spent last Christmas in Paris, just before the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and had never seen such strong security measures, outside of Israel. Road closures, car checks, black vans disgorging scores of black-clad, fully armed special operations police. Once, walking in crowds down the Champs Elysees, I felt the hard steel of a gun brush against my hip as I passed a gendarme at close quarters.
Even with the best wall-to-wall security, Paris still wasn’t safe. And what happened there yesterday only reminds us how vulnerable we are in Australia — three terrorist attacks already on home soil, and numerous attacks foiled by counter-terrorism agencies.And yet, in the days after the lethal attack on Parramatta police HQ last month by a 15-year-old suicide gunman yelling “Allahu Akbar”, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and NSW Premier Mike Baird were reluctant to speak plainly about what had occurred.They repeatedly refused to mention the “I” word and instead used carefully scripted euphemisms such as “politically motivated”, and exhorted the public to “come together”.
Sugarcoating the truth about Islamist extremism, and pretending an equal threat comes from theoretical redneck Islamophobes, only further endangers us and pushes reasonable people into the arms of far-Right hate groups. Angela Merkel’s naive open-door refugee policy will only exacerbate the problem. As Tony Abbott said in a recent speech in London, it is a “catastrophic error”, which has benefited a majority of fake refugees. Yet, in a subtle repudiation of Abbott’s stance, Turnbull chose to bestow on the German Chancellor the rare honour of being the first European leader he has visited as PM this week. And in his reported remarks from their Berlin meeting, he made no criticism of the policy that has divided Merkel’s Government and threatens her leadership.