The Sri Lanka Jihad Massacre and the Decline of the West

Well over two hundred people are dead, and hundreds more injured, in jihad massacres in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday morning, and now the usual denial and obfuscation are in full swing. I’m often asked, when I speak around the country, what it will take to wake people up to the nature and gravity of the jihad threat. For all too many people, the answer, as the Sri Lanka attacks abundantly show, is nothing.

The facts were clear enough, at least if one checked the Indian media. India’s News18.com reported that “two of the six attacks that rocked Sri Lanka this morning are reportedly to be have been carried out by suicide bombers,” that telltale sign that this was a jihad attack, with the bombers hoping to claim the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise for those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). “The attack at Shangri La hotel,” News18 continued, “was carried out by suicide bomber Zahran Hashim, while Abu Mohammad has been identified as the attacker at the Batticalao church.”

The Hindu, meanwhile, reported on another jihad suicide bomber, Mohamed Azzam Mohamed, who “waited patiently in a queue for the Easter Sunday breakfast buffet at Sri Lanka’s Cinnamon Grand hotel before setting off explosives strapped to his back.” Mohamed was “just about to be served when he set off his devastating strike in the packed restaurant, a manager at the Sri Lankan hotel said.”

What’s more, there was advance warning: AFP reported that “Sri Lanka’s police chief Pujuth Jayasundara issued an intelligence alert to top officers 10 days ago, warning that suicide bombers planned to hit ‘prominent churches’. ‘A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) is planning to carry out suicide attacks targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo,’ the alert said. The NTJ is a radical Muslim group in Sri Lanka that was linked last year to the vandalisation of Buddhist statues.”

Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Colombo, Malcolm Ranjith, said: “It’s a very difficult and a very sad situation for all of us because we never expected such a thing to happen and especially on Easter Sunday.”