What are we to make of people who think it's OK to kill children at a concert with a nail bomb? Who will slit the throats of people on a night out without a second thought?
It's useful to understand one's opponents, on the off chance that there might be some way of accommodating them. But opponents who are willing to reduce happy girls to a tangle of bloody meat are beyond the pale. And besides which, as Douglas Murray has pointed out, we know very well why they do it. After all, they will keep telling us.
As a Mancunian, it was tempting to go into town the other day to mark the awfulness of the occasion and pay tribute to the dead. But these events are full of platitudes and are an excuse for doing nothing. "We stand together", the assembled cry. No we don't. If "we" stood together these atrocities would not happen. They happen because in fact "we" are divided. That's to say, years ago we allowed into our country devotees of a religion most of whose adherents lead separate lives to the majority, and a small minority of whom hate everything the rest of us stand for.
I was going to write "we stand for", but in fact the importation of Islam into the UK has made it impossible to write "we" in this context. "We" implies me and all my fellow Britons. But many British Muslims in fact stand for something else entirely, and therein lies the rub.
There are over 2 million Muslims in the UK. If 1% of them are potential terrorists, that's 20,000 people. In fact the security services apparently reckon the number to be more like 2,000, which is a tenth of 1%. That seems more reasonable. According to the Home Office, in the period 2001 to 2012 175 of 241 convicted UK terrorists were Muslim. Not only were Muslims overwhelmingly the majority, but when you consider that this is 175 of about 2 million people it turns out that during the period in question Muslims were about 80 times more likely to commit a terrorist offence than non-Muslims.
It has always seemed obvious to me that if Islam's ideology was not the sole cause of Islamic terrorism, it must at least be an influencing factor. In the UK there do not appear to be many Anglican terrorists. Or Quaker terrorists. Or Methodists, or Jehovah's Witnesses, or, to broaden matters out, terrorist golfers, estate agents or stamp collectors.
The extraordinary over-representation of Muslims amongst convicted terrorists revealed by the Home Office figures is testimony that there is something about Islam which leads some of its adherents to do this kind of thing.
And yet still they come. I'm not referring to Muslim immigrants (the perpetrator of the Manchester outrage seems to have been home-grown in any event). I mean the brain dead apologists for Islam, whose blind devotion to the cause of multiculturalism is such that not only are they willing to overlook the forced marriages, honour killings, FGM and female subjugation, but they make excuses for Islam when yet another pumped up wanker high on the promise of righteousness and six dozen virgins smears "our" streets with blood.
I've written here before about Mishal Hussein's statement that Islam had no more to do with the murder outside the House of Commons recently than Yorkshire did with the murder of Jo Cox MP. Ms Hussein is absolutely typical in her head-nodding stupidity (Yorkshire doesn't have an ideology, Mishal, unlike Islam; now do you see why your comforting comparison is so inept?), but Twitter has been replete with celebrities and opinion-formers like her in the last week or so. When I hear their lame accommodations with the people who are murdering British families it makes me feel sick.
"We all stand together", "The terrorists will never win", "I love Manchester", "It's nothing to do with Islam". These are all just ways of making us feel better while doing absolutely nothing whatsoever. And as long as we do nothing we make repetition of the Manchester bombing more likely.
There are people alive today who are going to be killed in the next terrorist attack. For them, time is running out. And the rest of us just sit on our hands.
