Islamic Terrorism is Genocide

It's supremacist ethnic cleansing, not a struggle for political change.

Muslim terrorists began their latest massacre in Kashmir, they first checked IDs and asked their victims to recite the ‘Kalmas’ one of several Islamic recitations used by Indian Muslims, beginning with, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger.”

Those who could not recite the Islamic doctrine were killed.

“Are you Muslim? If yes, then recite the Kalma,” victims were told by the Jihadis.

“He asked my husband’s name and religion. Then he shot him,” one female survivor testified.

Describing the massacre of 26 innocent people, including an American citizen, in a Kashmir meadow as terrorism is misleading. The targets were not selected because they were government officials. They were not screened for their politics. The location was not a strategic target. The only thing that the victims had in common was that they were non-Muslims.

This is not terrorism. It’s genocide.

Muslim terrorists have followed the same protocol for screening out and exterminating non-Muslims. During the Westgate Mall Massacre in Nairobi, the Muslim terrorists killed over 60 people after asking their victims to name Mohammed’s mother or recite the “Shahada’, the Islamic creed, with the same premise as the ‘Kalma’ to tell apart the non-Muslims from the Muslims. The dead included children as young as eight killed for not being Muslim.

Al-Shabab, the Somali terrorist group that carried out the attack, stated that their Jihadis or “Mujahideen carried out a meticulous vetting process at the mall and have taken every possible precaution to separate the Muslims from the Kuffar before carrying out their attack.”

By ‘Kuffar’ they mean infidels or non-Muslims.

The Jihadist group had done the same thing at Garissa College in Kenya, first attacking a Christian morning prayer group and then going door to door asking students if they were Christians or Muslims, and then demanding that those who claimed to be Muslims recite the Islamic Shahada. “If you were a Christian, you were shot on the spot,”

“We sorted people out and released the Muslims,” Al-Shabab announced and massacred 147 Christian students.

The terrorist group did the same thing at villages on the Kenyan coast where dozens were killed in a number of attacks accompanied by religious tests. “They ordered all of us to get out of the house, and then asked us to recite ‘shahada’.” one man recalled.

Those same tactics were used by Boko Haram in its genocide of Christians in Nigeria.

During a terrorist attack in Bangladesh, terrorists took over a cafe before the Islamic period of Ramadan, and massacred 22 people. Muslims and non-Muslims were separated. Suspected non-Muslims were asked to recite verses from the Koran. The Muslims sat and ate in one section while the non-Muslims were being tortured and murdered to cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

The dead included a number of Japanese tourists and an American citizen who was murdered for not being Muslim. The victims were not killed for their politics, many were tourists, but for being non-Muslims. This was not terrorism. It was ethnic cleansing and a religious massacre.

When Abu Sayyaf Jihadis took over the city of Marawi in the Philippines, they “gave civilians a de facto religious test prior to killing them; they were asked to recite the Shahada… civilians who did not recite the Shahada or failed to respond appropriately were often summarily executed.”

Christians were shot or had their throats cut. Others were taken hostage. The men were forced to help the terrorists while the women were used as sex slaves.

This is not ‘terrorism’. It’s ethnic and tribal warfare whose goal is to kill or enslave members of other groups. The ultimate aim of Islamic Jihad is not a change of government, but genocide.

Islamic terrorists don’t limit their attacks to the government. They focus them on non-Muslims. A meadow in Kashmir, a music festival in Israel, a theater in Paris or a school in Africa are all fair game because the overriding objective is the extermination and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

An 8-year-old in a Kenya mall is a target not because he’s a means of taking over the government, the way traditional terrorists do, but because every single infidel is an enemy.

Terrorism is a western concept that was transplanted to the Muslim world by the Soviet Union. Moscow trained groups like the PLO were taught some of the same tactics utilized by the USSR’s networks of Marxist terrorist organizations, but the old Marxist groups in the Muslim world have long since become either Islamized or irrelevant, and the Islamist groups utilize some terror tactics within the larger context of the Jihad, but only as part of their traditional conquest of non-Muslims.

Marxist terrorism is political while Muslim terrorism is identitarian supremacism. Jihadists do not care what form a government takes as long as it abides by Islamic law. Their ideological programs mix bits and pieces of capitalism and socialism with little regard for any consistency. Their mission is to ensure that their religion, Islam, and ethnic group, conquers the country. Everything else is a minor detail. That’s why even ISIS allowed self-government in captured cities. It’s why Hamas has kept Gaza dependent on Israeli services and allowed the PLO to run some of its bureaucracy. The Jihad does not care about who actually fills out the paperwork.

Apologists for Islamic terrorism want to pretend that these are all local political conflicts motivated by local human rights abuses. They insist that what motivates Hamas in Gaza, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram in Africa, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Lashkar-e-Taiba in Kashmir, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen in Bangladesh and a litany of other Muslim terror groups in other areas are local matters, that they don’t share any global aims or an overriding ideology, and that their concerns have to be addressed by removing or reforming local governments.

But a movement that massacres members of other groups wholesale is not looking for political change. Killing anyone who isn’t a Muslim is not about the form of government, but religious and ethnic supremacism, and a genocide taking place on a scale so large we can no longer see it.

The Islamic Jihad against non-Muslims is far worse than Rwanda or all the African genocides put together because it is a worldwide phenomenon being practiced on every major populated continent. After over a thousand years of butchery in which tens of millions were killed, raped or enslaved, entire cultures and peoples were wiped out, it remains the greatest threat to humanity.

Dismissing the Islamic Jihad against human civilization as terrorism obscures the scale and horror of the threat. What we call terrorism is really the mass killing of non-Muslims.

It’s not terrorism. It’s genocide.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.