When Prime Minister David Cameron says that aid worker David Haines was “brutally murdered” by Isil, the extremist Islamic terrorist group, he is no doubt referring to the manner of Mr Haines’ killing as well as to the fact that a helpless innocent man was murdered.
David Haines was beheaded by a knife-wielding Muslim jihadist, his throat cut and his head severed from his body. This is behaviour that we in the western world never in our wildest dreams thought we would ever see.
How naïve we were. How thoroughly unrealistic is that liberal political creed by which we westerners live. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Liberal values were supposed to convert all who came into contact with the West and everyone would naturally become western secular liberals.
That was one of the big ideas behind large-scale Muslim immigration to Europe. It didn’t work out that way, as many warned. The jihadist who butchered David Haines spoke with a London accent. That London accent also threatened David Cameron and the British people.
Some day soon, that jihadist voice may even find its way back to London shouting about human rights, and there will be plenty of people and institutions in Britain willing to listen to it.
David Cameron and Barack Obama say they are shocked at the primitive barbarism of Isil, but if they knew European history they wouldn’t be shocked. This has all happened before, to a European people, on a much bigger scale.
It has happened to the Serbs, not just in their historical struggle against Turkish rule, but in the recent conflict in Bosnia. Beheadings are nothing new to Islam.
In the 1990s in Sarajevo, an extremist Muslim magazine, Vox, published suggestions for a new board game, The Skull Tower. This was a reference to the Skull Tower in the town of Nis in southern Serbia, a tower made of the skulls of Serbs beheaded by the Turks.
Extremist Muslims in Sarajevo in the 1990s boasted of these beheadings and indeed continued the tradition by beheading innocent Serbs in an ethnic cleansing war.
In his book, The Serbs, Tim Judah writes:
“When the Serbs captured the nearby Muslim village of Kamenica in February 1993, they began to exhume the mass graves which they found in a wood on a hill above the village. Because it was a sunny winter’s day and the earth was frozen, the corpses began to steam as they were peeled out of the ground. By the time the workmen had finished, there were eighteen bodies. One corpse had no head, the feet of another were tied with wire.”
Elsewhere, the writer refers to captured mujahedin fighters, mainly Arabs and Afghans who had on them collections of photographs showing decapitated Serb civilians and soldiers.
One photograph “showed a box with three severed heads and a man’s foot on one of them. Another showed a grinning, bearded man, said to be a Saudi Arabian, holding up the severed head of a man by his hair.”
This happened in Europe, in Bosnia, only a few years ago, but was not much reported in the West, where the Serbs were demonised and the Bosnian Muslims entirely portrayed as innocent victims.
Yes, there was wrong on both sides in that war, but the Serbs were up against decapitating mujahedin fighters from all over the Muslim world, just like the situation today in Syria and Iraq, with British, Irish and French Muslims joining in the fighting.
No, the Serbian people will not be surprised at the beheading of David Haines, or at the butchering of Lee Rigby; they’ve seen it all before.
David Cameron says Isil killers are monsters, not Muslims. But clearly such monsters are not confined to Syria and Iraq. Where next?
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