When this pandemic is over, the cultural battle in the West will continue to live on. It’s important to remember which side we want to be on.
When this pandemic is over, the cultural battle in the West will continue to live on. It’s important to remember which side we want to be on.
J ihadi leaders are telling their militants that the coronavirus is their friend, a fellow soldier of Allah, and that is good news for us. With a bit of luck, these lunatics will forego any health precautions, and there won’t be any respirators available for them when that soldier of Allah comes to take them to paradise. Jihad magazines are now calling on their lone wolves to take advantage of this crisis and attack the West, pointing to places such as Paris, London, Brussels and Chicago. And it certainly is an excellent time for them to attack, especially if they choose self-immolation: My advice would be to do so in stadiums, nightclubs, or large venues, before the end of this mandatory confinement. I have spent the last few days monitoring radical messages for this article, and I suspect that this viral-jihadist plan might have some gaps in it, but I can’t quite put my finger on them. From the point of view of a freedom-loving Westerner and enemy to scum in general, it seems like a perfect plan.
“The last thing [the Crusaders] want is for the horrible pandemic experience to coincide with attacks on their countries,” they say in their pamphlets. (“The Crusaders” are you and I.) “America, France, Britain, and other countries are rechanneling their armed forces towards fighting the virus,” they celebrate, claiming that this keeps them from concentrating on their anti-jihadi surveillance. As I read their propaganda, I receive a message on my cell phone from a source in the police: “One of Europe’s most wanted jihadists has just been arrested in Almeria [southern Spain]. He was wearing a mask to hide his identity from the police!” I light a cigar, smiling like Hannibal Smith.
The terrorist arrested in Spain is Abdel Majed. He is a former British rapper. After listening to some of his music, I wonder if perhaps he should have faced execution long before he decided to leave everything to go to Syria and join Islamic State (or at least a ban on public performance). There, he became infamous for posting gruesome images on Twitter of him holding the heads of decapitated hostages. This led the police to wrongly suspect, for a time, that he might be Jihadi John, the bloodthirsty individual who became notorious for his video of the disgusting murder of American journalist James Foley. Abdel Majed had arrived in Spain ten days ago. In a demonstration of state forces being “very distracted” by coronavirus, as Islamist leaders suggest, about 20 police officers armed to the teeth raided Abdel Majed’s house in the early hours of the morning, arresting him without having to fire a single shot.
For the most part, both Al Qaeda and Islamic state are convincing their terrorists that the coronavirus is Allah’s punishment for infidels, inferring that the faithful are not harmed. Within this trend, there are two lines of theological discourse: one, more cautious, which points out that although it does not harm jihadists, “it is better to wash your hands,” and another, more seductive from our point of view, that insists the coronavirus “is a friend of the jihad” and that, in the worst case, pneumonia is nothing more than a passport to paradise.
As usual, these diatribes of jihadi leaders are the product of relentless predicating from radical clerics. On April 8th, the Egyptian “scholar” Mohammed Al-Hefnawi Al-Ansari posted a video on YouTube where, overjoyed, he signaled the way forward for the more ominous of his viewers. “Thank you coronavirus,” he said, “by order of Allah, who has imposed this plague on us, the coronavirus has managed to close all the pubs.” And he added with evident enthusiasm: “The coronavirus has closed the pubs and has banned bongs and cigarettes. Thank you coronavirus!” A guy who is happy about a pandemic that has killed nearly 200,000 people worldwide is, by definition, a bad person. But if he also celebrates that the bars have had to close, personally, and as a Spaniard, I consider Al-Ansari to be the damned offspring of a hyena.
It is easier to sympathize with what a Canadian cleric, I think his name is Younus, said to his disciples. This Islamist leader claims that mingling with non-Muslims is “more dangerous than the coronavirus.” This idea is interesting for two reasons: On the one hand, it could keep the jihadists away from us, which is exactly what we want, and on the other hand, it could keep the terrorists close to the coronavirus, which won’t keep us awake at night either.
Encouraged by such messages, a radical Islamist claimed that, thanks to the popularization of the mask, Europeans and Americans are finally discovering the benefits of the burqa. Meanwhile, in another forum, an enthusiastic Islamist writes a long message in which he repeats the same statement over and over again: “Muslims don’t kill, they infect. That’s only for infidels!” Brilliant. A definite candidate for the Darwin Awards 2020. The best thing is that there are hundreds like him all over the various forums and social networks.
Far from our borders, in Iraq, Islamic State terrorists are taking advantage of the pandemic to intensify their attacks, especially against security forces, due to the fact that they are “distracted” in streets and town squares forcing civilians to respect the confinement. In Tunisia, two Islamists were arrested last week on charges of attempting to infect the police with coronavirus. The first of these masterminds hatched his brilliant plan and spread it among his followers. The second, who was already under police surveillance, was instructed to cough like crazy every time he visited the police station, so as to spread the virus. He was arrested for being unhygienic but ended up going to jail for jihadi terrorism.
I stumbled across a prayer to Allah, written by a lunatic imam, asking the Almighty to annihilate all the infidels with the coronavirus, causing them as much pain as possible, and to protect the Muslims from the virus. Contrast that plea with another prayer that has also accidentally fallen into my hands, from European bishops, in which the faithful are invited to pray for an end to the pandemic and for the healing of all affected people in all countries of the world. All of this just reminds me that, when this pandemic is over, the cultural battle in the West will continue to live on. It’s important to remember which side we want to be on.