How Many Muslims Are In Anguish Over The Latest Massacre, And How Many Merely Worrying About How To Protect The Image Of Islam?’

Many in France are urging that everyone be on guard so as to avoid the terrible, mortal, not venial, sin of lumping together “all Muslims,” to be careful not to do that because, you see, that’s exactly “what the terrorists want.” Remember Shimon Peres who, after every PLO atrocity, would declare that if the “peace process were derailed that would let the terrorists win.” Oh for Christ’s sake. The men who did the planning and the killing yesterday were not trying to cause a “split” in a putatively “unified” French society. The large-scale presence of Muslims has caused a permanent disruption, permanent fear and, among many, despair. Nonwhere in the world — not merely in the West but also in Asia and Africa — is there any true sense of Muslims and non-Muslims belonging to the same mental and social and political universe. This should surprise only those who refuse, still, to study Islam. Muslims have been taught, suffused with the idea, that the kuffar are ungrateful, kuffar deserve to be mistreated, kuffar are not to be taken as friends by Muslims (though in order to protect or promote Islam it is licit to offer smiles and a false friendship). Daring to make any judgment, after what is merely the latest of many attacks by Muslims on non-Muslims in France (and many more thousands of such attacks all around the world) is not allowed. So when people mechanically repeat that those terrorists mustn’t be allowed to win by turning non-Muslims against Muslims, this posits a pre-existing trust and affection that never was. And it misstates the intent of the killers, which was, as they screamed out quite clearly, was to “avenge Muhammad” and to “kill Charlie-Hebdo” just as others who mocked Muhammad, such as Asma biint Marwan and  Abu ‘Afak, had been killed by his most loyal followers, and to whom, he made clear, he was grateful.