Mick Hartley

Excellent from Janice Turner – What Jihad al-Shamie’s three wives tell us about terror:

Before he made a fake suicide belt and purchased real knives; before he drove his black Kia into a crowd of worshippers gathering outside a Manchester synagogue; before he stabbed and killed and terrorised British Jews on their holiest day, Jihad al-Shamie acquired three wives.

Not serially but cumulatively. The moment a police marksman ended his life, Shamie was married to three women. However, the crime of bigamy, which carries a seven-year sentence under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, did not apply here, since at least two of the marriages were conducted only under sharia law. Besides, Shamie wasn’t a big believer in bigamy. “In Islam a man can have up to 4 wives,” he texted Wife Two, whom he had not told about Wife One, “but these days most women don’t accept it.”

Indeed Wife One, the mother of his two children, left him when she learnt about Wife Two. This woman, a nurse and white convert to Islam who met him on a Muslim dating site and married him in an online ceremony during lockdown, is most revealing about Shamie’s character. He ordered her to read the Quran and visit the mosque, was “controlling and abusive and he did rape me multiple times, but to us we just fulfil what our husbands say”.

You have to wonder what on earth made this woman convert to Islam. “We just fulfil what our husbands say”. And stay at home, and get raped, and wear a veil when going out so no other man can look at us with lust.

The route from violent misogynist abuse to Islamist terror is well charted. Indeed the feminist author Joan Smith catalogues it in an excellent book, Home Grown.

Before he killed five people in the Westminster Bridge attack, Khalid Masood worked in Saudi Arabia, where he adopted strict, literalist Wahhabi Islam, then sought to apply its rules about women, via coercion and violence, upon his wife Farzana until she fled. The leader of the London Bridge terrorists, Khuram Butt, kept his wife fully veiled and believed women should not work. His accomplice Rachid Redouane tried to stop his wife leaving the house, attacked her in the street and demanded she wear the hijab.

Before he killed 22 people, mainly teenage girls, the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi chided a female classmate about her short skirt then punched her in the face when she argued with him.

The behaviour of these radicalised Muslim men is no coincidence. Central to the mission of Salafism, the conservative strand of Islam that in the past 70 years has swept through once-tolerant, forward-looking Muslim countries, is control of women. Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood member who visited 1950s America, concluded that wanton female sexuality was the mark of western depravity.

An Islamic state, Qutb argued, must define itself against this societal degradation by returning women to the piety codes that bound them during the Prophet’s time — that is, the 7th century. Al-Qaeda drew much of its inspiration from him.

The purity of a Muslim society was measured, therefore, by the “modesty” (invisibility, submissiveness) of its women. This is why the first act of Isis when it took over a city was to shroud and redact the female population. Indeed the Taliban, who deny Afghan women everything bar oxygen (and are probably working on that too) believe this is the route to a supreme Islamic state.

The subjugation of women is absolutely central to this new Islamism. Hence its appeal to a certain type of man.

In many ways Shamie was another textbook male loser: smoking dope, unable to keep a job, estranged from his kids, living with his mother, bulking up his body with weights and still not feeling enough of a man. He was an easy mark for an Islamist doctrine that gave him control over his wives. Then, when even these women evaded him, he directed his aggrieved entitlement, his desire for domination, into a new direction, one celebrated openly of late on Britain’s streets: killing Jews.

As I wondered yesterday: where’s the old tolerant Islam that we saw before the Saudis started spending their billions of petrodollars on spreading Salafist hate?