When Islamists say they want to destroy the West, we should believe them

Appeasement so often ends in catastrophe.

Shortly after lunchtime on 22 March 2017, an Islamist extremist called Khalid Masood ploughed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and then attacked the police officers at the gates of parliament with a knife. The Right Reverend James Langstaff, Bishop of Rochester, was walking into the parliament buildings as the horror unfolded. Afterwards, he remarked that ‘We don’t know the story behind this, or what their motivation might have been’.

Yet there was never any real puzzle here. Islamist terrorists have always been quite clear about their chief goals: namely, the eradication of Western civilisation and the imposition of an authoritarian caliphate. After the Madrid train bombings in 2004, Spanish authorities were investigating possible links to the Basque separatist group ETA, even after the release of a video statement by Al Qaeda: ‘It is a response to your collaboration with the criminal Bush and his allies. You love life and we love death’.

It’s a recurring pattern. After 86 people were murdered by a Tunisian terrorist at the Bastille Day celebrations in Nice in July 2016, the Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve was asked for confirmation that the attacker had been motivated by Islamist ideology. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we have an individual who was not known to intelligence services for activities linked to jihadism’. The terrorist himself evidently disagreed, having cried out ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack.

In My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, social justice activist Titania McGrath discusses the atrocity at London Bridge in June 2017, ‘where three austere religious scholars drove into pedestrians before going on a rampage, stabbing people at will while shouting: “This is for Allah”.’ As McGrath points out, ‘the sad truth is that their motives are for ever likely to remain a mystery’.

We are seeing this kind of dogged naivety on a much larger scale with the current conflict in the Middle East. In June 2018, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, called for the wholesale destruction of Israel.

One of the Iranian regime’s slogans, often repeated at state-organised rallies and prayer meetings, is ‘Death to Israel’. The Iranian-backed Houthi movement in Yemen has written on its flag the following lines:

‘God is Great
Death to America
Death to Israel
Curse on the Jews
Victory to Islam’

Whatever else you might say about the Islamist views on the Jewish state, they are not making any effort to be ambiguous or subtle. And yet since Israel launched its attacks on the nuclear facilities and military command structure in Iran, a number of Western commentators have been determined to ignore the explicitly-stated aims of Islamist regimes…

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