Attacking women and children is just another day at the office for sick jihadists
It’s not just in Manchester that the twisted warlords of jihad have used women and children in their savage war on civilization.
In their Syrian and Iraqi heartlands they have taken both as war booty.
In 2014, IS kidnapped more than 5,000 women and girls from the Yazidi minority. Children as young as nine were raped as sex slaves.
They developed “slave markets”, a network of warehouses to house their captives with buses to transport them.
In the coming days and weeks there will be many questions over how this warped ideology spread to the streets of Manchester.
The first question in any attack is whether the perpetrator is an immigrant or home-grown?
It can just as easily be either. The 2005 London bombers were born and brought up here.
So, it seems, was the Manchester bomber. The beast who drove a truck into shoppers in Stockholm last month was a recent arrival.
Either way, our borders need to work better. We must stem the influx of people many of whom are unidentified and unidentifiable. It has become a huge security problem.
In the months after the 2015 attacks in Paris it turned out that most of the attackers had slipped in and out of Europe through the migrant routes.
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They trained in Syria and brought what they had learned on to the streets of Paris. This is a huge risk.
In every major terrorist attack in Britain to date there has been a common theme. The culprits either trained at terrorist camps or fought abroad.
These advanced fighters are far more likely to carry out successful bombings and other attacks than people who have learned tactics online.
Britain has better border controls than most of the continent but we are still far too porous.
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Sadly, we will never be able to stop every Islamist who wants to blow up a nightclub from doing so. But there are other things you can do.
We don’t allow people to encourage paedophilia online. Why is incitement to jihad not in that same category?
It is also necessary to stop the expansion of hardline Islamist teachings at home here in the UK.
Just last summer two hardline clerics from Pakistan spoke to packed halls up and down the country.
Both men defend the murder of people who insult Islam or leave the Islamic faith. It is outrageous that our country tolerates such preaching.
Finally it is also vital to bolster and refine the strategy which aims to address these problems.
It is telling that the Government’s Prevent strategy has had so much pushback. Critics complain that it “scapegoats” or “spies” on Muslims.
Prevent has had its problems but it is the best strategy going to deal with a real and urgent threat.
Those who quibble should be reminded of who the real victims are.
They are the young British girls who went out to a concert one Monday evening and never returned home.
- Douglas Murray is author of The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (Bloomsbury, £18.99).
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