Opinion
When ISIS-K terrorists launched their bloody attack in Moscow last week, it was merely the most visible outrage of a renewed terrorist threat that has been growing since last October.
The field is ripe for a resurgence of Islamic mayhem, no doubt as Hamas and its backers in Iran principally, hoped. We’ve seen the shocking rise of more and more open anti-Semitism in mainstream politics in the West, for a start. What began with Greens politicians marching proudly alongside a slavering Muslim mob, just the day after the October atrocities, is now slouching and bellowing through the streets of Western capitals daily.
And the more and more the likes of Chloe Swarbrick urge the marching morons on to genocide — which is, after all, what her strident screeching of “From the river to the sea” is directly inciting — the more and more likely it is that some of them are going to put their loathesome words into violent action.
Much of the gruesome logic of terrorism is nothing more than bloody attention-seeking. The more barbarous the attack, the better. ISIS’ revolting snuff films were their biggest recruiting tool. Normal people are horrified by the sight of a child proudly holding up a severed head; Islamists are not normal people: the reactions of the thousands of young, Western-born Muslims who flocked to the Caliphate was, “I want in on that action!”
Hamas, therefore, upped the ante. ISIS, eclipsed and humiliated by its own setbacks, needed desperately to one-up them. The Crocus Theatre massacre was exactly that.
Islamist extremists, jihadis, and antisemites, inspired by Hamas’s bold attack, [are…] looking for new ways to attack Western targets. Groups affiliated with al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Taliban, and based across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, will likely try to demonstrate their own capabilities to secure attention in a crowded field. After all, terror groups need the publicity of high-profile attacks to attract recruits, cash, weapons, and protection.
Moscow was just the biggest and bloodiest in a new wave of post-October terrorism.
The Islamic State claimed responsibility after two Swedish football fans were killed in Brussels by a man, later shot dead by police, who was allegedly enraged by Quran burnings in Sweden. Italian authorities arrested two men accused of recruiting for the Islamic State. Gunmen with alleged links to the organization attacked and killed two tourists and their safari guide in Uganda. France deployed the military and raised the terrorist threat level to “urgent” after a teacher was stabbed to death and three others were injured by a Chechen man believed to be a radical Islamist. In Berlin, petrol bombs were thrown at a synagogue. The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide travel warning.
Hamas, after its surprisingly successful and deadly attack on Israeli villages, is for now on top of the terrorism tree.
There’s no shortage of swivel-eyed Mahommedans itching to claim their spot. Thanks to Joe Biden’s humiliating capitulation in Afghanistan, they’ve got plenty of ideological and material fuel.
Analysts said it was [the Taliban’s] victory in Afghanistan in 2021 that has emboldened extremists across the globe, and the group has restored Afghanistan to the terror-safe haven it was before the 2001 U.S. invasion. Mohammad Moheq, an Islamic studies scholar and the editor in chief of the daily newspaper Hasht-e-Subh (known in English as 8AM), said that Afghanistan is an integral part of the radical Islamist narrative. The ultimate goal, he said, is “fighting in Palestine and removing Israel.”
The Taliban have turned Afghanistan’s education system into a vast extremist-training network. The U.N. Security Council’s Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team has identified a large number of extremist groups that fought alongside the Taliban and now enjoy their protection in Afghanistan, including a resurrected al Qaeda. The $80 billion of weapons Biden abandoned in Afghanistan is not lying idle, either.
U.S. arms arms left behind in the 2021 retreat have turned up in the Gaza Strip, India’s Kashmir region, and Pakistan. The chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Mike McCaul, told CNN he’d “seen indications that the Taliban wants to come to liberate Jerusalem, in their words, to fight the Zionists.” Moheq said that he believes more than 100 Taliban gunmen have already been dispatched to Gaza.
Foreign Policy
But it’s no longer just the young men of the madrassahs, and disaffected Western-born teenagers out for some thrill-kills and sex-slaves who are forming the backbone of the new terrorist threat in Europe.
Police in Paris last week arrested a man suspected of planning an attack against a church. That in itself was not unusual. According to Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, since 2017 the police and intelligence services have thwarted 45 Islamist attacks. Is this some twisted form of mid-life crisis?
What was different about the man detained in Paris was his age: he was 62 […]
Terrorists are usually young men because this demographic is by nature more impulsive and idealistic; many are looking for an identity, a cause, some way of finding their place in a world their immature minds find confusing.
Studies from the early 1980s onwards have found that the average age of a terrorist – whether Middle Eastern, American or European – is in the mid-twenties.
Non-Muslim men having a mid-life crisis will buy a motorcycle or a speed-boat, even bang a younger woman. Muslims have slightly more alarming goals.
Often the crisis arrives when the person realises their life has not turned out the way they’d hoped.
Their behaviour changes. They become angry, impulsive, resentful and empty. The search – often online – begins for something meaningful. This was the case with Khalid Masood, who converted to Islam around the time he turned 40.
I’ve often written about what I call the “nosey-nannas”: those drearily familiar old biddies who flock to fashionable causes, apparently trying to find something meaningful to fill their post-childbearing years. There’s no shortage of them clucking “From the river to the sea”, naturally. They’ve got their male counterparts, too. Many of them make up a sizeable cohort of the male fetishists flocking to transgenderism: ageing losers who’ve finally found a way to belt women and actually get rewarded for it.
They’re bad enough: the grouchy old codgers in kiffeyehs are worse.
Middle-aged misfits bitter at life who embrace an ideology to give them an identity. They are just as impressionable as the Islamists half their age, and just as dangerous.
Spectator
They’ve already got the younger women: too young! If only past-their-prime Muslims would just settle for the Harley.