The Plague of Radical Islam Strikes Again, In Sydney

 

IBDEditorials.com

War On Terror: Monday's Sydney cafe attack is a reminder, as if we needed one, that radical Islam continues its lethal war on Western civilization. It remains critical for the West to get rid of this plague.

The 18-hour siege by a deranged gunman holding hostages in a little Sydney cafe across from the Reserve Bank of Australia, leaving two innocent people dead before Australian police stormed the place, was as much the work of Islamic radicals as other terror attacks.

Sure, the self-styled ayatollah was no real clergyman, and there were mosques in Sydney that prayed for the hostages' well-being as the siege progressed.

Nor was the gunman, Man Haron Monis, much of a political asylee, a designation that he had been granted in the 1990s with a sob story about persecution as an Islamic moderate in Iran.

He repaid his Australian hosts with a long criminal record including sexual attacks and charges of being an accomplice in stabbing and setting afire his ex-wife last year. He sent crank letters to the families of fallen Australian soldiers until a court ordered him to stop.

His attack, in fact, was eerily similar to a 1990 attack in Berkeley, Calif., when another deranged Iranian, Mehrdad Dashti, after a string of criminal acts, took about 16 people hostage and forced his perversions on them, declaring himself a "devout" Muslim to justify his acts.

Monis was the same kind of unhinged individual, with a failed past and personal demons. But it doesn't mean he's not part of the ongoing Islamic war on terror against the West. In fact, he's its latest tool and tactic.

In his first act as gunman in the Lindt cafe, he ordered the hostages to post a black and white flag of Islamic radicalism in the window — a clear plea for support and identification with the terrorists of radical Islam.

The flag of radical Islam enables lone-wolf lunatics like Haron to justify their attacks — and thus fuels them.

And the attacks are growing more common.

Starting with the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon bombings by two Chechen misfits who killed three and gravely wounded 183, to the knife-attack murder on British soldier Lee Rigby on May 22, 2013, in London, followed by the Oct. 22, 2013, shooting of a Canadian soldier, followed by an attack on Canada's parliament, to the Oct. 23, 2014, New York subway hatchet attack that injured four New York City policemen, it's clear that radical Islam feeds and encourages the deranged.

The madmen gather strength from the radicalism, aided also by the overly psychologized West's tendency to dismiss them as merely madmen acting alone.

It's not just well-planned terrorist spectaculars in the war on terror we fight anymore — from the 2010 attempted Times Square car bombing to the 2013 Kenya shopping mall bombing. No, today it's madmen being set loose in the name of the same cause.

And the sooner the West recognizes this phenomenon and the Islamofascism that animates it, the better.

Contrary to what you might hear, this isn't about a lone madman acting on insane impulse. It's about how Islamic radicalism continues to find new ways to attack the vulnerable West.