“Who would do such a thing?”

'EVEN after all these years, all these attacks and all these dead, the West still keeps asking the same question: “Who would do such a thing?”

The answer is always the same.

Sometimes the culprits are home-grown. Sometimes they are recent arrivals.
Sometimes they have been in the West for generations, eat fish and chips and play cricket.
Sometimes the perpetrator is a lone wolf, unknown to the authorities.
More often it turns out to be a “known wolf”, in the peripheral vision of the security ­services.

Yet still our society wonders: What would make someone do such a thing?

The tone of bafflement is strange — like a society that keeps asking a question, but keeps its fingers lodged firmly in its ears whenever it is given the answer.

For their part, the Islamists are ­amazingly clear about what they want and the reasons why they act accordingly. You never have to read between the lines.

Listen to Jawad Akbar, recorded in the UK in 2004 as he discussed the soft ­targets he and his al Qaeda-linked cell were planning to hit.

The targets included the Ministry of Sound nightclub in ­London.

Akbar said to his colleague, Omar Khyam, that no one could “turn round and say, ‘Oh they are innocent’, those slags dancing around”.

It’s the same reason why ten years ago next month, Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed (an NHS doctor and an engineering PhD student, respectively) planted a car bomb outside the glass front of the Tiger Tiger club on London’s Haymarket.

They then planted another just down the road in the hope that those “slags” fleeing from the first blast would run straight into the second.

Similarly, Irfan Naseer and his 11-member cell from Birmingham were ­convicted of plotting terror attacks in the nightclub area of the city where “slags and whores go drinking and clubbing” and “have sex like donkeys”.

Where does it come from, this hatred the Islamists hold — as well as everyone else they loathe — for half the human ­species?

Even moderate Muslims hate it when you ask this, but the question is begged before us all.

What do people think the burka is? Or the niqab? Or even the headscarf? Why do Muslim societies restrict the freedom of women?

Why are the Sharia courts, which legally operate in the UK, set up to prejudice the rights of women?

Why do Islamists hate women from their faith who raise their voices against the extremists?

It’s in Islam’s ­origins, and too few people are willing to admit it or reform it.

 

It is a constant of Islamic history, along with the Jews, the gays and the “wrong type of Muslim”: always and everywhere, the question of women.

Such disdain is what led to the abuse of hundreds of girls in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxfordshire and elsewhere.

Obviously, in the wake of Manchester, there are security questions to address.

But what we seem most likely to dodge yet again is the possibility of learning any proper lessons at all from this.'

I've seen this sort of article before but this one from Douglas Murray in The Sun is right on the money.