Whitewashing Islamist Terror

Originally published under the title “West Bowing to Radical Islam.”

Almost 10 years ago, Maclean’s magazine published an essay by Mark Steyn, titled “The future belongs to Islam.” In it, he suggested, “the West is growing old and enfeebled, and lacks the will to rebuff those who would supplant it.”

It was an extract from Steyn’s then best-selling book America Alone, where he concluded, “It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it.” Steyn wrote:

We are witnessing the end of the late 20th-century progressive welfare democracy. The children and grandchildren of those fascists and republicans who waged a bitter civil war for the future of Spain now shrug when a bunch of foreigners blow up their capital. Too sedated even to sue for terms, they capitulate instantly.

There was an outcry among Canada’s Islamists, who took Steyn and Maclean’s to the Ontario and British Columbia Human Rights Commissions. My fellow Sun columnist, Farzana Hassan, and I wrote a rejoinder in Maclean’s titled, “Mark Steyn has a right to be wrong.”

Today, I recognize, Steyn was right and I was wrong.

If there were any doubts the West is abdicating its responsibility to stand up for Western values, the amateur attempts by the FBI to cover up the Islamist nature of the Orlando attack removed them.

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President Barack Obama and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton deflected attention from the obvious Islamic nature of the terrorism to a debate about gun control.

Obama has tried to deflect attention from the Islamist nature of the attack to the issue of gun control.

An FBI spokesman did the same when he downplayed the role of Islamism in the attack, editorializing that the killer, “does not represent the religion of Islam, but a perverted view, which based on what we know today, was inspired by extremist killers.”

In Toronto, Premier Kathleen Wynne, Canada’s first openly gay premier, also refused to address the Islamist nature of the attack, saying, “one cannot fight homophobia with Islamphobia,” at a vigil for the Orlando victims.

This is nonsense. Orlando was an act of Islamic terror and of Islamofascism, a doctrine of hatred towards the West and what it stands for, including LGBTQ rights.

It holds secular liberal democracy in contempt, hates non-Muslims, degrades women, and is racist towards non-Arabs, especially black Africans. It is a supremacist death cult that has the end times as its ultimate goal.

Chia Barsen, a 32-year old Canadian Marxist, was 10 when his family fled Islamic Iran, political refugees escaping the murderous rule of its barbaric ayatollahs.

Commenting on the liberal left’s reaction to the Orlando massacre, Barsen wrote on his blog:

Blaming guns for the Islamist murder of 49 people in the Orlando gay club is like saying that Zyklon B gas was the cause of the Holocaust and not the Nazis. Gun control is a clear and present issue in the U.S. and there are countless episodes of shootings in the U.S. to justify the removal of all guns (not just automatic weapons), from the streets. However, piggybacking on the gun control debate and not making any mention of the threat of Political Islam and Islamism, is the furthering of a political agenda and not simple ignorance or apathy.

Exactly.

Tarek Fatah, a founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress and columnist at the Toronto Sun, is a Robert J. and Abby B. Levine Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

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I recently witnessed something I haven’t seen in a long time. On Friday, August 16, 2024, a group of pro-Hamas activists packed up their signs and went home in the face of spirited and non-violent opposition from a coalition of pro-American Iranians and American Jews. The last time I saw anything like that happen was in 2006 or 2007, when I led a crowd of Israel supporters in chants in order to silence a heckler standing on the sidewalk near the town common in Amherst, Massachusetts. The ridicule was enough to prompt him and his fellow anti-Israel activists to walk away, as we cheered their departure. It was glorious.