The slaughter of Sri Lankan Christians is a dagger aimed at the heart of Western civilisation
The eight co-ordinated terrorist attacks on Catholic and Evangelical churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday sent a shudder around the world. There were messages of condolence for the people of this idyllic island from Western countries, whose tourists were among the 290 dead and 500 injured. Many religious leaders condemned the slaughter, too: Pope Francis expressed his “affectionate closeness” to a minority that, like hundreds of millions of Christians around the world, has been singled out for persecution.
Yet there has been a striking reticence, to put it no more strongly, by these politicians and pastors to say anything at all about why this carefully planned and brutally executed massacre happened. Most media organisations were careful not to point the finger of blame, doubtless excusing themselves by the fact that so far no terrorist group has claimed responsibility. The religious affiliation of the perpetrators was not mentioned in news reports, although three policemen were killed in the course of arresting dozens of suspected terrorists.
And yet there is not much doubt about who was behind this assault on a small country, still recovering from a civil war only a decade ago. Although the Tamil Tigers, who were crushed in that conflict, also used suicide bombs, they were inspired by ethnic separatism rather than Islamism.Experts agree that these Easter suicide bombings bear all the hallmarks of jihadists, probably inspired by Isis and perhaps carried out by fighters returning from the MiddleEast. There are similarities to other co-ordinated attacks, such as those on Mumbai in 2008.
But the main reason for identifying Muslim extremists as responsible is the nature of the targets. Christians are persecuted in various ways by a variety of regimes, but only Islamist terrorists are capable of carrying out such a sacrilegious onslaught on the holiest day of the church calendar, along with attacks on hotels designed to destroy the tourist industry on which Sri Lanka depends. For Islamists, Christianity and the West are two sides of the same coin.
For some reason, The Times tried to deflect attention away from this fact in its leading article today. “It was not so much a clash of civilisations, a naked assault on the Christian faith” the paper concluded, “as an attack on a government that will be presented as incapable of securing the safety of a society based on the principles of multiculturalism.”
If Sunday’s carnage does not count as an assault on Christianity, it is hard to know what would. Samuel Huntington’s phrase “clash of civilisations” is often misunderstood, but the jihadists who launch attacks of this kind make no secret of their ultimate aim of subduing the infidels of Western civilisation. If they had intended to attack the Sri Lankan government, they could have done so, but instead they chose churches as their targets.
What does this onslaught portend? The defeat of the Islamic State has led to a fall in the number of victims of terrorism over the last three years, according to the Global Terrrorism Index compiled by the Institute for Economics and Peace. But the 2018 Index still showed that 18,814 people were killed by terrorists during the previous year. The danger of Islamist terror may have slightly abated, but it has certainly not disappeared.
Western societies would much rather see global warming rather than global terrorism as an existential threat. Yet we depend entirely on our highly sophisticated security services to protect us from the fate of Christians and tourists in Sri Lanka. The more havoc that such “spectacular” attacks wreak, the more they act as a jihadist recruiting sergeant. There is doubtless a desire for revenge, too, after the defeat of the so-called Caliphate. The persecution of Muslims — for example in Burma and China — will also have stoked the fires of terrorism.
Hence we can expect to see more such attacks in the coming months, not only in the East, but perhaps also in the West. This is not a time to let down our guard, for example by threatening to disrupt intelligence-sharing or security co-operation in Europe on account of Brexit. The same applies to transatlantic relationships, which have been marred by mutual suspicions. Faced with such lethal foes, Western democracies must stand together — or fall.
