Here we go yet again. This is how this narrative, which we see after every jihad massacre, works. When Muslims murder infidels, Muslims are the victims. Any measures taken in the wake of the jihad massacre to prevent Muslims from massacring infidels in the future is a sign of “collective punishment” and “Islamophobia.” Always and in every situation, Muslims are victims, to be appeased and accommodated in every possible way, and every counterterror measure, no matter how mild, is a step toward “stigmatising and criminalising Muslim communities.” Even discussion of how jihadis use the texts and teachings of Islam to recruit peaceful Muslims and justify violence must be shut down, as it supposedly endangers innocent Muslims. Non-Muslims in the West fall for this propaganda initiative every time, which is why it keeps on being used.
“After Terror Attacks, Muslims Wonder About Their Place in France,” by Constant Méheut, New York Times, October 29, 2020:
IVRY-SUR-SEINE, France — At age 42, Mehdy Belabbas embodied the French republican promise of upward social mobility: the son of a Muslim construction worker of Algerian descent, he was the first in his family to attend graduate school and served for 12 years as the deputy mayor of the working-class city where he grew up.
And yet for the past two weeks, Mr. Belabbas has been thinking about just one thing: “I’m wondering if I should leave France.”…
“After this attack, five or six million people have to justify themselves,” Mr. Belabbas said. “But we just don’t know what is expected of us.”
The knife attack in a Nice church on Thursday promises to deepen the confusion, despite Muslim leaders’ condemnation of the killer. Naziha Mayoufi, a member of LES Musulmans, an association of Muslim groups and mosques, said she felt “dread and infinite sadness for the families of the victims, for our Catholic friends.”
But she said that after the attack on Thursday, she feared politicians and commentators would feel even more entitled to label Islam an “enemy from within.”
“As Muslims,” she said, “we pay the damages of those two forms of extremism.”…
“Everything that has been said and done suggests that we Muslims are all targeted, that we are all likely to be related to this new paradigm of ‘separatism,’ that we are all suspected,” said Mohamed Akrid, the president of Annour, an organization that is overseeing the building of a mosque expected to be completed in 2023….
Sitting next to the plans of the future mosque in Ivry-sur-Seine — a modern 20,000-square-foot building that will include prayer rooms, classrooms and a library — Mr. Akrid said that many young people were ignorant about religion “and are going to educate themselves on social networks, at the mercy of manipulators.”
Why can’t the mosques teach them about how Islam is peaceful? Why does the supposedly peaceful message of the mosques get overwhelmed by the supposedly false, twisted version of Islam peddled by “manipulators”? Why can’t the allegedly true Islam stand up to challenge?