by Kevin Meagher
‘It was a monster not a Muslim’ read a message left with some flowers in Manchester yesterday. A well-intentioned sentiment, no doubt, but it’s no slander on ordinary Muslims to point out the killer of 22 people and the maiming of scores more, Salman Abedi, was plainly both.
Islam is more than a religion. ‘Islamism’ – the warped and extreme interpretation of it that drives the hate we saw in Manchester – is a hard line, violent, impossibilist, political ideology. In reducing the gaping risk it poses to our society we must be free to critique it as such.
This requires countering the phoney grievances of its adherents and the pernicious false narrative that all non-Islamists are legitimate targets. The statement from Isis claiming responsibility for the attack referred to those killed as ‘Crusaders.’ Such insanity apparently justifies deliberately targeting a pop concert full of children.
It is adjoined to a twin lunacy; that of the global jihadist’s pipedream of a worldwide Caliphate. If the methods of Islamic terror are appalling enough, the cause they kill and maim for is arguably worse: Global enslavement under an ignorant and brutal despotism. That a reasoning human being could buy into such a dystopian vision makes the attack in Manchester and all those that have taken place before it, even harder to comprehend.
I repeat – as we should – that not all Muslims are Islamists, but all Muslims are on the frontline of this clash within a civilisation, fighting for a correct and just interpretation of their faith. They are the only ones who can win this culture war between a virtuous Islam that is capable of accommodating itself to living and thriving in the West and the nihilism of a minority of their co-religionists who demonstrably cannot.
In the short-term, shock and grief are appropriate responses to the massacre in Manchester. We can talk about ‘bringing everyone together’ in a spirit of solidarity in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity, but in the longer term our public policy responses should be obvious enough: A more sustained and emphatic bid to flush out and destroy Islamism, isolating and prosecuting its demented followers.
