It seems like a while ago that Tony Blair gave his most recent Middle East speech, where he warned about the rise of radical Islam. In fact it has only been 24 days.
And in that 24 days, at the very least, there have been 14 major, news-grabbing incidents involving Islamists. How many, especially in the recesses of certain African countries, go unreported is anyone’s guess.
The Clarion Project website has a list of 14 incidents that should be noted. And with that, we submit to you that Tony Blair’s critics at the time of his speech were being dangerously disingenuous about his speech. He was dead right. And it has taken just over 3 weeks to prove it.
Most of the reporting below is taken directly from the Clarion Project website, and edited for ease of reading:
1. In the U.S. in Pennsylvania, a Muslim man murdered his pregnant wife in a fight over her refusal to wear what he regarded as sufficiently Islamic dress. It is widely regarded as an honour killing.
2. In Nigeria, 236 schoolgirls abducted by the terrorist group Boko Haram in Nigeria remain in captivity. They have been sold into sex-slavery, forcibly married to the mujahideen for the price of $12 each. An international grassroots campaign has been building to pressure the Nigerian government to do more to bring about their release.
3. Boko Haram massacred 300 people in an undefended town.
4. A new study has revealed that every year hundreds of Christian and Hindu girls are abducted, beaten, raped and forced to marry their captors and converted to Islam. Over Easter, an eight-year old Christian girl was raped by three Muslim men. The girl’s father was kidnapped and forced not to press charges about two of the attackers, while the third was released.
5. In China, a bomb and knife attack in the regional capital of Xinjiang province killed three and wounded 79. The Chinese government has said the attack was carried out by Islamic Uighur separatists. Tony Blair remarked in his speech that “radical influences are stretching across the whole of the central part of Northern Asia, reaching even the Western province of Xinjiang in China.”
6. The Maldives have taken a radical step towards instituting sharia (Islamic) law, re-instating capital punishments. The law will apply to children as young as 10.
It follows in the footsteps of its regional neighbor Brunei, which instituted “phase one” of its Sultan’s plan to institute sharia law at the beginning of April. Punishments will include amputation, flogging and, for certain crimes, death by stoning.
7. In the Middle East, Sunni-Shiite violence marred historic elections in Iraq. Dozens of people were killed in bombings across the country, including 37 people at an election rally in a triple-bombing by the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which seeks to establish a breakaway Islamic state ruled by a Caliph in accordance with sharia.
8. In Syria, ISIS displayed the executed bodies of its enemies on crosses in the centre of their stronghold Raqqa, to send a message to the subjugated population. (Warning: Pictures contain extremely graphic content.)
9. The Saudi government sentenced Raif Badawi, the imprisoned liberal blogger to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for running an online site which encouraged people to debate the appropriate role for religion in the kingdom. There is no civil code in Saudi Arabia. His sentence was decided according to the judges interpretation ofsharia law alone.
10. International links to the Syrian war have spread as far as Australia, where a woman was arrested for supporting terrorism after allegedly trying to board a plane with supplies for her husband who is fighting in Syria. A group of hardline Muslims arrived outside the Sydney police station and clamored for her release. Police were forced to call for reinforcements.
11. In Britain, further evidence of the so-called “Trojan Horse” bid by Islamists to take over British schools in Birmingham shows the situation is far more widespread than previously believed. Senior sources from the Department for Education “said that coordinated attempts to undermine secular heads had occurred or were suspected in at least five places across the UK: Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester, and the London boroughs of Waltham Forest and Tower Hamlets.”
12. In France, Hani Ramadan, a celebrated Islamic leader, said that “All the evil in the world originates from the Jews and the Zionist barbarism.” The conference is one of the largest and most prominent Islamic events in France.
13. The Palestinian Al-Quds Teachers Union expelled one of its professors for taking students on a trip to Auschwitz.
14. Since this article was first drafted, eight more schoolgirls have been kidnapped by Boko Haram.
The Clarion Project has reported on many of these incidents separately. They differ in region, type, scale and almost every other metric. All of them have taken place since Tony Blair’s speech, and no doubt there have been more we left uncovered. The only common denominator across all of these different incidents is the extremist Islamist ideology that has been the driving force behind each one of them.
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