by Christopher W. Holton

This week, pop singer Ariana Grande vowed to return to Manchester in the wake of the deadly Jihadist attack that killed 22 innocent victims, many of them teen age girls.

Grande posted a letter on Twitter with a message to her fans. While the letter may have been heartfelt, its message demonstrates how so many among us are clueless as to the threat from Islamic jihad. Here are some quotes from the letter, with our commentary after each quote.

“We will never be able to understand why events like this take place…”

Actually, it isn’t difficult to understand at all. Jihadists routinely justify their actions with Islamic scripture. As Bill Warner, PhD of the Center for the Study of Political Islam pointed out not long after the Manchester attack, there is a particular passage from Islamic doctrine that Jihadists use to justify killing civilians, especially women and children. It comes from the foremost Hadith authority in Islam, Bukhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Hadith 256 (the Hadith are sayings, stories and traditions from the life of the Prophet Mohammed):

The Prophet… was asked whether it was permissible to attack the pagan warriors at night with the probability of exposing their women and children to danger. The Prophet replied, “They (i.e. women and children) are from them (i.e. pagans).

In this command, Mohammad established that it is permissible to kill non-combatants in the process of killing a perceived enemy. This has repeatedly provided justification for many Islamic terror attacks.

We may find this hard to accept, but we certainly must come to terms with it and understand what motivates Jihadists.

“We won’t let this divide us. We won’t let hate win.”

This is certainly an admirable sentiment. It’s also symptomatic of a misunderstanding of the nature of our enemy in this war.

In the terrorism of the 1970s and 1980s, carried out by political groups such as the Red Brigades, the Weather Underground, the Baader-Meinhoff gang, the Japanese Red Army, the Irish Republican Army and even the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, there was a mantra: “Kill 10 to scare 10 million.”

The terror attacks of that era had a different aim and a different nature. They were literally meant to terrorize. Each of the groups named above had a specific goal in mind. They were evil and demented to be sure, but they weren’t looking to subjugate the entire world. So, the proper response in those days was to “not let them win” by changing our way of life. The terrorists of the 70s and 80s lived to terrorize, so by not acting scared, we could deny them victory.

Islamic jihad is completely different. It is not meant merely to terrorize us. It is meant to ultimately subjugate us to Islamic rule under a caliphate operated according to the Sharia. Every Jihadist organization has this as its identical goal: the formation of an Islamic State ruled by Sharia.

They don’t just want to scare us. They want to kill enough of us and surround us with enough of them, to achieve victory over us. They aren’t looking just for publicity to spread terror. They want to kill enough of us to make us quit fighting, not just to make us frightened.

This is true apocalyptic terrorism and it represents an existential threat to Western civilization. If you don’t believe that, I suggest you take a much closer look at conditions in Western Europe today and then think back to how life was just 30 years ago in Western Europe. It’s not the same place. Not even close. What will Western Europe look like 30 years from now?

And they couple their military campaign of violent Jihad with a political, cultural, economic and legal campaign of civilizational Jihad. This is a vital point to understand. So, when we say we won’t let “hate” win, we are wide of the mark. This isn’t about mere hate. The enemy loves what they are doing. It is their devotion to their love of Allah and the prophet Mohammed that drives them. We can certainly consider it hate, but that doesn’t bring us to a better understanding of the enemy.

“Hate” isn’t trying to win. Islamic jihadists like the Abedi family are trying to win. Instead of saying “we won’t let hate win,” Grande would have been much more helpful and correct if she had said, “we won’t let the Jihadis win.”

We can’t be sure of what Grande means when she says, “We won’t let this divide us.”

Divide who? The victims themselves? The victims from the perpetrators? The host society from the alien culture that has invaded, chosen not to assimilate and become an incubator for an internal, existential, deadly threat in the form of Islamic jihad?

I’d say the enemy has already drawn the dividing line. How can that not be completely obvious already? How many deadly attacks do we have to endure before our pop culture-dominated society in the West wakes up to reality?

“Our response to this violence must be to come closer together, to help each other, to love more, to sing louder, and to live more kindly and generously than we did before.”

Again, these are certainly admirable sentiments that shouldn’t ever be opposed. We should all endeavor to live our lives this way. In the Judeo-Christian West, these are the kinds of values that we have been taught and must always strive to achieve.

But they cannot be our only response to “this violence.” The enemy is on a mission. There is a reason why he chose to attack a music concert attended largely by young girls. The enemy wanted to show us that there are no lengths to which he won’t go to fight and kill us. He wanted to show us that we are powerless to defend our most innocent and precious. They attacked that concert because they have disdain for us. It was a form of lethal ridicule. They want us to continue to hold and attend such concerts. And we can be sure they will seek to attack those events.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t hold concerts and celebrations. But those concerts and celebrations do not represent, even in a small way, defiance in the face of evil. More concerts will not phase the Jihadists in the slightest.

No, we need a real response to these attacks–and it starts with the realization that we are in a war, a war that most of us in the West deny even exists.

So, by all means let’s love and sing and come closer together, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that is the path to victory over the dark forces of Jihad spread now around the globe. Moreover, make no mistake: victory is essential in this fight, even if victory just means denying victory to the Jihadists.

“Music is something that everyone on Earth can share. Music is meant to heal us, to bring us together, to make us happy.”

All this is well and good, but excuse me if I point out that our Jihadist enemies don’t feel the same way about music, particularly Western music (and by Western I don’t mean Marty Robbins ballads). This presents us with a  teaching moment. In areas where the Jihadists have achieved their goal of forming an Islamic state, it is customary that music and art are often banished. We saw that when the Ayatollahs seized power in Iran. We saw that when the Taliban took control for a brief time in Afghanistan. When the Islamic State seized significant territory in Iraq and Syria, music and forms of artistic expression were banned and destroyed.

As a female, try driving a car down the street in Saudi Arabia with the windows rolled down with your stereo blaring the latest Ariana Grande tune.

Music doesn’t heal our enemy. It doesn’t bring him closer to us and it doesn’t make him happy. We need to start to understand a mindset, ideology and religious doctrine that is as alien to us in the West as anything from another solar system. Especially since that mindset, ideology and doctrine have as a goal subjecting us, or else…

“We will continue in honor of the ones we lost, their loved ones, my fans and all affected by this tragedy” (Emphasis added)

The attack on the concert goers in Manchester was NOT a “tragedy.” To say so is to dishonor the memory of those lost. A tragedy is an unavoidable event, such as an act of nature or an accident. A tragedy is a tornado or earthquake or tsunami. A tragedy is when a truck driver has a heart attack and careens into oncoming traffic, resulting in death and destruction.

A tragedy is not when a Jihadi steals a truck and purposely runs down innocent victims at a celebration or market.

And what happened in Manchester was not a tragedy.

It was an atrocity. It was an act of war. We better come to terms as a society with the fact that we are at war and, as people, demand that our leaders recognize that fact. We need to quit waiting on our so-called leaders to come around to the reality that we already know. We are at war. The enemy knows it and has about a 20-year head start on us.

Statements like this one from Ariana Grande aren’t helpful toward that end.