OPINION:
Holy occasions call for religious observance, and believers try to be on righteous behavior. But what they do depends on what they believe. Radical Islamic terrorists celebrating Ramadan have added murder to the month-long period of prayer, acts of charity, daytime fasting and after-dark feasting. With the quickening of the violence, the most recent in London, it’s clear that those who aren’t Muslims have two choices, resist or submit. One form of resistance would be President Trump’s temporary travel ban, but that has been blocked by judges sympathetic to the resistance, and not resistance to jihad, but resistance to Donald Trump.
The 2017 Muslim holiday slaughter has claimed 149 victims so far. This is well short of last year’s toll of 421 dead and 729 wounded, as tallied by the Arab Gulf States Institute, but the killers have only been at work for less than a fortnight. By its count, ISIS claims to have murdered 5,200 persons worldwide during Ramadan last year.
The toll includes 7 persons who were run down or stabbed near London Bridge Saturday night, and 49 wounded by Khuram Shazad Butt, 27; Rachid Redouane, 30; and Youssef Zaghba, 22. They shouted, “This is for Allah,” as they drove their blades into the innocent flesh. ISIS claimed the killers as their own. The rampage followed a suicide bombing in the northern city of Manchester, which killed 22 children and adults and wounded 119, mere days before the start of holy month.
British Prime Minister Theresa May condemned the London attack Sunday, saying there has been “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the United Kingdom, and added a dramatic vow: “Enough is enough.” She might have said there was no tolerance at all for extremism. President Trump used the carnage to drive home his own anti-terror message, tweeting: “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” (The usual exclamation point his.)
As expected, the media caviled that the president’s two attempts to temporarily order a travel ban is actually a Muslim ban, with some arguing that terrorism was not proved at London Bridge. Just at that time, the New York-based Institute for Economics and Peace released its Global Peace Index, which finds that worldwide, death-by-terrorism climbed from slightly more than 11,000 in 2007 to more than 29,000 in 2015, with a spike to 32,765 in 2014. During that period, the number of terrorist attacks mushroomed from 2,800 in 2007 to more than 12,000 in 2015.
The 35 members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, mostly the world’s most prosperous nations, were in the terrorism bull’s-eye. Those nations have seen their terrorist deaths swell by 900 percent between 2007 and 2016, “with the largest increases occurring in Turkey, France, the United States, and Belgium.”
Radical jihadists make an unholy farce of Ramadan with their determination to kill unbelievers — not those with no religious belief, but those who hold no belief in Islam. Mr. Trump’s travel ban would restrict Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hottentots and those with no religious belief from six nations with a record of exporting terrorists from entering the United States. This would give the nation’s doorkeepers a brief period to sort the good from the bad. The sooner the Supreme Court halts the judicial overreach of lower courts that has prevented the nation from securing its ports of entry, the better. The rogues of Ramadan won’t bide their time forever.
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