Europe Is Suicidally Complacent About the Islamist Threat

Three women – one of them pregnant – are fighting for their lives in a Paris hospital, following a frenzied knife attack on Monday afternoon. ‘Allah ordered me to do it’, declared the suspect as he lay on the floor, after being disarmed of his two large knives and subdued by passers-by. According to a police source, he later told officers that ‘Allah’ had sent him to ‘kill women’.

You might think that those words speak for themselves. That an Islamist motive for these stabbings could hardly be clearer. So why, then, are the French authorities not currently treating this atrocity as a terrorist incident? Laurent Nuñez, the French interior minister, has explicitly downplayed any potential Islamist connection. He said we must be ‘cautious’ before speculating about a motive. The ‘incoherence’ of the suspect’s police statements, he said, could well be a sign of his poor mental health.

Time will tell if this is the right approach in this case, but people can surely be forgiven for drawing their own conclusions. Two eyewitnesses report that the suspect seemed to exclusively target women. And that statement, ‘Allah ordered me to do it’, does not leave much to the imagination. The French state’s insistence that there is no clear motive, when evidence of a possible motive abounds, sounds like a wilful act of obfuscation.

One thing is for certain, neither France nor Europe can afford to be complacent about the Islamist menace in our midst. No country has endured as much bloodshed at the hands of Islamists as France. The Paris stabbings arrived just weeks after France had been commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Nice attacks that left 86 dead and more than 400 injured. In 2015, jihadists murdered 130 revellers in Paris, in the Bataclan massacre. ISIS may not be the force it once was, but the Islamist ideology is not even close to being defeated.