‘I Have Learned to Cut Throats’: The Specter of ISIS Lives on in Western Nations

Are the Islamic terror attacks that plague the world random outbursts of Muslim madness, or are they the result of calculated directives?  Consider the following, seemingly disparate accounts.

On Apr. 22, 2024, Muslim terrorists rammed their vehicle into four Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem, causing three of them to go flying in the air.

On Apr. 15, a Muslim man lunged at and repeatedly stabbed a Christian clergyman, Bishop Mar Mari, as he was delivering a sermon from the pulpit of his church in Sydney, Australia.  (The incident was captured on video — much to Australia’s chagrin.)

Most spectacularly, on Mar. 22, Muslim terrorists with automatic weapons launched an attack on Crocus City Hall near Moscow, massacring at least 139 people and wounding more.  The Islamic State (ISIS) quickly claimed and presented the attack as an effort to kill “thousands of Christians.”

But the connection to ISIS may be deeper.  On Jan. 4, 2024, the “caliphate” called on Muslims to terrorize and slaughter Christians and Jews, “wherever and whenever.”  Moreover, the three aforementioned attacks perfectly conform to ISIS’s directives.  Consider the italicized sections of the following excerpt from the statement:

Lions of Islam: Chase your preys whether Jewish, Christian or their allies, on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Break into their homes, kill them and steal their peace of mind by any means you can lay hands on. … [S]hoot them with bullets [Moscow], cut their throats with sharp knives [Sydney], and run them over with vehicles [Jerusalem]. A sincere person will not lack the means to draw blood from the hearts of the Jews, the Christians, and their allies, and thus ease the suffering in the hearts of the believers. Come at them from every door, kill them by the worst of means, turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres.

Due to their sensationalist nature and, in Moscow’s case, large death toll, the three aforementioned terror attacks received some media attention.  In reality, however, they are the tip of the iceberg: terror attacks conforming to ISIS’s directives are common, though minor or foiled ones receive little media attention.

In France, for example, on Mar. 5, police foiled a terror plot to bomb the Notre Dame Cathedral (much of which “inexplicably” went up in flames in 2019).  A Muslim man of Egyptian origin, 62, was arrested.  The Mar. 30 report notes that this was just the latest terror attack to be foiled in the previous three weeks.  It quotes France’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin saying,

We have never foiled so many attacks in France. The Islamic State is the author of the last eight foiled attacks in France. We foil a lot of [such terror] attacks, one every two months.

“Leila, 21,” begins a separate Mar. 15 report, “was planning to attack the faithful of a church in Béziers on Easter Day with a sword when she was arrested.”  The report adds that police discovered in her home photos of decapitated bodies and videos of beheadings and how to make acid bombs.  In her spiral notebook, she writes of

[my] increasingly intense desire to go out into the street to slit the throat of the first passer-by, drag his corpse into the forest and smash his skull with an iron bar or a hammer then return to look for someone else. … I have learned to cut throats so there will probably be no problem.

On March 12, another unidentified woman, aged 39, barged into a church during morning Mass, where she made threats while waving a knife around.  (The church had already suffered an arson attack, and stands near an area where three teenagers once violently attacked two other teens with tear gas while calling them “dirty Christians” — standard nomenclature regularly employed by Muslims.)

This is to say nothing of the dozens of churches, cemeteries, and public crucifixes in France that were vandalized and desecrated in just the month of March, including with triumphant Islamic slogans.

In short, when Muslims ram their vehicles into infidels, or barge into their churches and other venues, slitting their throats and opening fire on them with automatic weapons, not only is that because Islam is inherently hostile to non-Muslims, but it may be a growing reflection of how the “caliphate” — which was supposedly beaten in 2019 — continues to influence Muslim hearts and minds.