Europe is suicidally complacent about the Islamist threat

Three women – one of them pregnant – are fighting for their lives in a Paris hospital, following a frenzied knife attack on Monday afternoon. ‘Allah ordered me to do it’, declared the suspect as he lay on the floor, after being disarmed of his two large knives and subdued by passers-by. According to a police source, he later told officers that ‘Allah’ had sent him to ‘kill women’.

You might think that those words speak for themselves. That an Islamist motive for these stabbings could hardly be clearer. So why, then, are the French authorities not currently treating this atrocity as a terrorist incident? Laurent Nuñez, the French interior minister, has explicitly downplayed any potential Islamist connection. He said we must be ‘cautious’ before speculating about a motive. The ‘incoherence’ of the suspect’s police statements, he said, could well be a sign of his poor mental health.

Time will tell if this is the right approach in this case, but people can surely be forgiven for drawing their own conclusions. Two eyewitnesses report that the suspect seemed to exclusively target women. And that statement, ‘Allah ordered me to do it’, does not leave much to the imagination. The French state’s insistence that there is no clear motive, when evidence of a possible motive abounds, sounds like a wilful act of obfuscation.

One thing is for certain, neither France nor Europe can afford to be complacent about the Islamist menace in our midst. No country has endured as much bloodshed at the hands of Islamists as France. The Paris stabbings arrived just weeks after France had been commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Nice attacks that left 86 dead and more than 400 injured. In 2015, jihadists murdered 130 revellers in Paris, in the Bataclan massacre. ISIS may not be the force it once was, but the Islamist ideology is not even close to being defeated.

Indeed, Monday’s stabbings also came just days after an Islamist terrorist targeted a Berlin Pride parade. Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese heritage, drove a rented van into a crowd on Saturday, before going on a stabbing spree, killing a woman and injuring at least 29 other people.

In recent years, across Europe, Islamists have targeted music lovers at concerts, gay people at Pride parades and gay bars, Jews in synagogues and in Jewish neighbourhoods. Misogyny is a core component of Islamist ideology. Is it really so far-fetched to think an Islamist might have targeted a group of women in Paris? Especially when eyewitnesses suspect exactly this, and the suspect himself is reported to have said, ‘Allah sent me to kill women’?

If the Paris stabbings turn out to have been an Islamist attack, this refusal to call a spade a spade could prove to be nothing short of suicidal. Islamist atrocities are now a depressingly regular feature of life in modern Europe. They do not need to be. And they would not be – if we had a political class that treated this threat with the seriousness and urgency it deserves. How many more killings, stabbings and maimings will it take to get our leaders to even name the problem?

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.