Islamists are waging a war against the rest of the world. Our mainstream media barely reports on their terror attacks outside the West. True suffering and horror is shamefully ignored.
Every day in Africa jihadists murder and injure innocents in their pursuit of a caliphate. That is their sole aim and they are ruthless in fulfilling it, as we have seen with their counterparts in Syria and Iraq.
Al Shabab, Al Qaeda’s East African branch, has been responsible for several car bombings in Mogadishu over the past few months. One in September killed six, including two children. An Italian military convoy, part of the EU’s Training Mission, was attacked in October.
Earlier this month simultaneous blasts killed 50 and injured at least 100. Somalia’s President Mohamed Mohamed has tried to accommodate Al Shabab’s demand for sharia law. But they are not interested in peace, only in conquering, and will murder innocents to achieve this.
The African Union (AU) and US troops have been fighting Al Shabab for ten years with little success. https://au.int The shambolic AU poses no threat to Islamists. Like their UN counterparts, its delegates prefer to have endless meetings to justify their bloated expense accounts while their soldiers die in Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. Al Shabab has forced AU troops to withdraw from large swathes of Somalia.
Another Islamist group, Boko Haram, have been waging a terror campaign in north-eastern Nigeria for the past decade. Boko Haram were responsible for kidnapping more than 200 schoolgirls in 2014 and more than 100 in February this year. In August they killed 48 Nigerian troops and in October they murdered an aid worker.
Sadly this list is not exhaustive, nor is it restricted to Africa. In Afghanistan – this generation’s Vietnam – the US and coalition forces are losing to the Taliban.
President Trump’s insistence on negotiating with the weak Afghan government is misguided. The real power in Afghanistan lies with the Taliban. Over the past three months they have further cemented their dominance by attacking coalition military bases and conquering district after district. NATO is already suggesting that the Afghanis withdraw from some of their bases. Despite this, Britain has committed 440 more troops to NATO. It’s time to abandon Afghanistan. The West’s resources are wasted there. Far better to focus on the Islamist threats emanating from North Africa and the Islamic State.
Thanks to a more forceful foreign policy from Trump, the Islamic State is disintegrating in Iraq and Syria. But the appeasement of these Islamists by his predecessor, and by so many others, gifted them licence to inflict great destruction and death. In early November more than 200 mass graves containing up to 12,000 bodies were discovered in territories previously controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq.
The victims were probably mainly Christians and Yazidis. Both minority groups suffered the most under the Islamic State. While these innocents were being slaughtered and enslaved, Europe and Britain have been held hostage to identity politics and an obsession with immigrants.
World leaders wrung their collective hands and scolded the Islamic State yet did nothing, and still do nothing, to help the thousands of Yazidis and Christians abused by war. Thanks to Angela Merkel’s disastrous decision to open Europe’s borders in 2015, their suffering was ignored in favour of accommodating millions of economic migrants and potential jihadists. Those who have survived now languish in Iraq and Syria while Islamists slip through Europe’s porous borders, and some have carried out terror attacks.
Our government has reprehensibly followed the EU’s destructive immigrant policies while neglecting to give sanctuary to those who need it. As I have pointed out, economic migrants are not refugees. Those truly in need of help are often pushed to the back of the queue by fit young men wearing leather jackets, brandishing iPhones and posing as refugees. This conflation of economic migrants with refugees does no favours to anyone.
We have limited resources. Not only does the taxpayer pick up the bill for the chaos created by Islamists but we also have to witness the cowardly inaction of our government when it comes to giving asylum to real refugees. So much money has been wasted on economic migrants when instead it could have been used to rescue Yazidis and Christians. We are a civilised nation with a history of offering sanctuary to those in need. We must not forget this even if our government does.
Our politicians’ priorities are now so peculiar that they refuse to offer asylum to Asia Bibi but do nothing about returning jihadists. In an act of breathtaking stupidity our authorities are letting British Islamic State fighters return from Iraq and Syria, more than 400 last year alone. More than 80 jihadi brides are also expected to return by the end of this year.
Why have these terrorists, radicalised by propaganda and war, not been stripped of their citizenship and put on trial for treason? By failing to do so the government does a great disservice to all of us, including those who truly need asylum from the Islamists, both home-grown and imported, who live among us.
The West needs to get real. Our navel-gazing, narcissistic identity politics and self-defeating immigration policies means we are losing the war declared against us by Islamic fundamentalism. Once Al Shabab and their ilk have finished terrorising and destabilising Africa they will turn their attention towards Europe. We must not ignore this. We must strengthen our borders and military resources as conflict creeps closer. This unpalatable fact should be acknowledged if we want to save what is left of our peace in the West.
