The suicide factory

Perhaps the only surprising thing about the Finsbury Park attack, writes Dalrymple,

is that it took so long to happen.

For six years, the mosque

was the base of the most notorious Moslem cleric in Britain, Abu Hamza, who preached undying hatred of the West (while taking its social security). And although the mosque has reformed since his departure — he is serving a life sentence without parole in the USA — it is associated in the minds of most people in Britain with the kind of Moslem extremism that has led to the recent rash of terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.

They tremble in Molenbeek

Lucid: Eric Delbecque

Picking up a copy of the Paris newspaper the Monde, Dalrymple comes across a lucid article by Eric Delbecque, who is described as head of the pôle intelligence stratégique de Sifaris and a member of the conseil scientifique du Conseil supérieur de la formation et de la recherche stratégiques.

Dalrymple draws attention to the following passage in Delbecque’s article:

Témoigner de notre soutien sans faille à la Belgique et demeurer lucide dans ce combat de long terme sont nos priorités. Notre arme? Changer enfin de posture mentale dans la lutte antiterroriste et penser autrement: vaste programme.

Dalrymple comments:

So now you know. I bet they’re terrified down in Molenbeek. Henceforth the infidels are going to think differently. From now on they’re going to be lucid. If we don’t look out, they’ll withdraw our citizenship from us after we’ve blown ourselves up—like they almost did in France before the parliamentary opposition to the bill.

Another episode of tic douloureux

John Fothergill gave a useful description
of trigeminal neuralgia in 1773

Dalrymple likens the periodic anguish, convulsions and agitation caused by Islamist terrorist attacks to Fothergill’s disease or prosopalgia. He writes:

Every incident is now like an episode of tic douloureux: a condition very difficult to treat.

One not insignificant feature of the problem, he points out, is that their religion, for certain Muslims, is

the continuation of delinquency by other means.

Nicolas André coined the term tic douloureux in his Observations pratiques sur les maladies de l’urètre et sur plusieurs faits convulsifs (1756)

L’ogre des temps modernes

Arabe mal rasé de 13-30 ans vêtu d’un survêtement à capuche, il se promène avec un cocktail Molotov dans une main et un couteau à cran d’arrêt dans l’autre. Il fume du shit dans les cages d’ascenseur. Il brûle des voitures. Il gagne sa vie grâce à des trafics et en fraudant les allocations sociales. Sa sexualité consiste à violer les filles en bande dans des caves; sa spiritualité, à écouter les prêches djihadistes de l’islam-des-banlieues. Il hait la France, l’ordre, et il déteste les Français. Il aime le djihad et l’islamisme. Son rêve: partir en Syrie se battre aux côtés d’Al Qaïda ou de Daech, pour ensuite revenir en France commettre des attentats

Le jeune-de-banlieue

The only aspect of Mahometanism that really interests the young Muslim male of the banlieue, writes Dalrymple, is

the domination and abuse of women.

The jeune-de-banlieue cannot be said to be religious in any other sense, Dalrymple points out.

• He does not pray
• He does not go to the mosque
• He certainly does not give 10% of his income to the poor

The jeune-de-banlieue might

listen to the siren song of Islamism as the supposed solution to his existential impasse, for youth is always in search of complete answers: and, as the world has seen, it takes only a relative handful of people to create mayhem.

But more than likely,

it is the justification of the oppression of women that keeps him so deeply attached to Islam. Indeed, the oppression of women is the only source of pride for him, since no other is available. At least he is king of his own castle.

Following the French press, writes Dalrymple,

it is curious how little the absence of young women on the streets of the banlieues is remarked upon. No one asks what the meaning of this absence might be.

The Islamists’ cyclopean view of life

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)

Luckily, says Dalrymple, Western countries

are not given to lasting expressions of unanimity, the deliberate preservation of our peaceful divisions being what the struggle with Muslim fundamentalism is all about.

Dalrymple writes that the Muslim fundamentalists,

like other would-be dictators, have a cyclopean view of life, and believe that everyone else is blind. Their stupidity is matched only by their arrogance.

However,

it does not follow that our governments’ policies should be incoherent and vacillating.

François Hollande, who had not previously

seemed à la hauteur of his position, appearing more like the deputy head of a lycée in Limoges than a head of state,

promised that French nationality would be withdrawn from convicted terrorists with dual nationality, French and other, even if they were born in France. The problem is that

there is always the possibility of a miscarriage of justice.

Dalrymple says of Muslim terrorism:

I do not pretend to have the answer to the problem. I suspect that it will require long attrition rather than a final showdown. I am optimistic about the long run because of the extreme intellectual weakness of Islam in the modern world (far greater than that of Marxism, which at least produced some interesting historians), but pessimistic about the short.