After Charlie, a reality check.

The strategy of Islamic Jihad is entirely transparent, except possibly to our political elite and the Daily Mail. The war-plan is to replace a free society with a controlled caliphate. Crazy, of course.

 

By small scale terrorist acts like Charlie, they want to drive a backlash against moderate, decent, hard-working Muslims, remove a possible source of information and create a marginalised community who, if not actively supporting them, will not co-operate in bringing them down. Alienating  the Muslim community will be a major achievement, even better if they can provoke boycotts of Mr Patel’s corner shop and other Muslim enterprises.

 

They are aided and abetted in this by the ranting Islamofoamers  who spittle-flecked outpourings defile the letters columns of the press and blog-sites incessantly to the point of obsession.

 

They have already succeeded in provoking serious retaliation, such as the 77 murders by a Norwegian fanatic, the Swedish mosque that has been attacked about 300 times. This all helps to create a Muslim Fifth Column which the jihadis would hope to be a source of cover and surreptitious help, including ‘safe houses’.

 

The present goal is to gather more recruits , and to do this they must force peaceful and law-abiding Muslims not to integrate with the secular societies in which they live. Their targets are symbolic – 9/9, 7/7, Charlie.

 

The over-the-top reaction of politicians the media and the French people generally was a major success for jihad. It showed the Muslim world how a handful of jihadis can shake an entire nation to its core, whereas after 7/7 it was ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

 

There is another dimension to the ‘Charlie’ affair. To portray the Prophet naked or with a bomb in his turban is not funny’ It’s incitement. The Nazis used similar grotesque cartoons to demonise Jews.

 

It was blasphemy- pure and simple. And we must remember that this was only decriminalised in England in 2008, in case anyone thinks it archaic.

 

The Biblical injunction is ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:  Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;  And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments’.

 

This is part of the Abrahamic law. It refers to idolatry, not to representations of God, Allah, Mohammed, Jesus Christ. So it seems that prohibition of pictorial representations of Mohamed is a relatively modern interpretation of the Koran. Early Islamic art seems not to have had any such inhibition

 

Nevertheless God was not represented on the English stage for 500 hundred years, between the mid16^th Century and 1951.

 

The cartoons deliberately set out to outrage and offend. They succeeded beyond the editor’s worst nightmares. But to defend them on the grounds of ‘free speech’ is laughable.

 

A democratic and civilised society assumes that there is tacit agreement to tolerate religious or cultural differences without deliberately insulting or abusing people who do not share identical values. Violence to impose alien views – political or religious – is an enemy of democracy. Those who go down this path must be shown with the utmost vigour that tolerance is not weakness.

 

We must understand that there is no ’war’ between Islam and the West. If we do not, the jihadis will have won a major victory.