Almost a quarter-century has passed since September 11, when 19 Islamic radicals murdered nearly 3,000 people in line with the blunt teaching of “The Verse of the Sword” (Quran 9:5). That cataclysm should have sufficed to cause Western leaders to examine the doctrines of the Muhammadan religion in order to understand why the killers carried out this crime.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, we can summarize the Western leaders’ response in two statements.
Nine days after 9/11, President Bush 43 stated in his speech before Congress,
The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics — a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.
Bush 43 also commented that Islam’s “teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.”
After the December 14, 2025 jihadist mass murder of 15 Jews at Bondi Beach, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese indicated that his government would focus on measures such as “increasing penalties for existing offences for hate speech” and “gun laws.”
These attitudinal bookends of the Western elites from 9/11 to Bondi Beach declare that 1) Islam is a peaceful faith hijacked by violent fringe loons, and 2) Islam is not mentionable because guns are the problem.