How long is this going to go on before people admit that religion is largely behind these attacks, and that the real culprits are the attackers, not the colonialist West? But I’m violating my own dictum of first honoring the dead. Fortunately, there aren’t any dead from these two attacks—yet. We know that three people are seriously injured, and that both attacks were on families.
The first, widely reported, is Monday night’s attack on train passengers in Germany by a 17-year-old Afghan immigrant. The boy (man?) used an axe to attack four members of a family from Hong Kong (two are seriously injured) before he was shot dead. This morning ISIS claimed responsibility, and investigators found the black flag of ISIS, and other signs of radicalization, in the boy’s room. Of course, we don’t know if the boy was really a “soldier of ISIS,” as the group claims, but there were certainly signs that he was following their instructions, even if indirectly.
The second attack, just reported in the Torygraph, involved a family of four French people who were knifed by a Moroccan-born man. The attack took place in an Alpine resort, and the man reportedly attacked them while shouting they were dressed too scantily. A mother, 46, and two of her daughters, 12 and 14, weren’t mortally wounded, but another daughter, only eight, was reported as “fighting for her life” after being stabbed in the chest.
The Torygraph report contains this sentence: “The local mayor, Edmond Francou, said he preferred ‘not to speculate about the motive of the attack’ in the wake of the massacre in Nice last week.
More will be revealed, of course. But if the guy’s stated motivations were genuine, how can you exculpate religion in this attack, or dare to pin it on the West? How many murders can the apologists dismiss as just retribution for the crimes of Western governments, many of whose citizens are opposed to Western incursion into the Middle East?
