The number of victims in the jihadist attack at a Sufi Mosque in Egypt has risen to 305 and is destined to rise even more. Inside this number there is another one, even more tragic: the 27 children murdered by Islamic terrorists. It has been not only one of the world's most sickening terror attacks since 9/11. It was, in intent, a genocidal attack aimed to erase a religion and a community from the face of earth.
The murder of children is the most ruthless face of the war that radical Islam has declared: Palestinian children used as human shields by Hamas, Israeli children butchered in buses and cars, Iraqi children massacred by smiling terrorists with candy, French children brought as recruits to Raqqa, Iranian children sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iranian camps, Christian children wiped out by the Taliban in Pakistan, Western children murdered in Barcelona, Manchester and Nice, and the children of Beslan forced to drink their own urine before being killed. How much longer will we have to update the ferocity of radical Islam?
Some Muslim writers have compared the savagery of extremist Muslims to that of the Nazis. In his novel "Le village de l'Allemande", the Muslim Algerian writer Boualem Sansal compared the similarities: "Single party, militarization, propaganda, falsification of history, xenophobia, affirmation of a plot hatched by Israel and the United States, etc." According to another Muslim dissident, Naser Khader, "the radical Muslims are the Nazis of Islam".
The massacre at the Sufi mosque in Egypt is reminiscent of the worst Nazi massacre France, in Oradour-sur-Glane, where German troops executed 642 people. Women and children were taken to the church, which was then set on fire. In the twentieth century, the targets were churches and synagogues; today, they are churches, synagogues, mosques, temples -- wherever there is a faith, even a Muslim one, that these Islamic fundamentalists want to "purify".
Physical violence is how the Nazis were able to "cleanse" most of Europe of the Jews -- by shooting, terrorizing, gassing and pressuring others to flee. The same strategy, for Christians and other minorities as well, is being pursued by the Islamists. By butchering 350 people, they want to terrify Christians and Sufis and erase them from Sinai. Random lynchings and other attacks were able to pressure Jews into abandoning North Africa and the Middle East, almost in its entirety. In Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, pogroms erupted against the Jewish communities; nearly a million Jews fled.
Radical Islam is building, under our noses, a Brave New World of mass-murder and religious submission. Its adherents seem to want to change individuals in the name of a deadly totalitarian ideology based on a specific interpretation of Islam.
Just as Nazis led a war of extermination against Jews, Slavs, Romanis, Jehovah's Witnesses, leftists, Catholic clergy, Freemasons, gays and others, extremist Muslims have declared war on Jews, Christians, Atheists, Yazidis, minorities such as Alawites, Kurds, Baha'is, Sufis and Druze, and even many of their own Muslims, branded as "apostates". At the same time, radical Islam has declared war on the pillars of the West: modernity, science, rationalism, tolerance, equality under the law, freedom of expression and the dignity of the individual, to name only a few. Many of these ideas are currently under threat in Western Europe.
Recently in Iraq, a new mass grave was found, filled with Yazidi children. The day before that, a mosque in Nigeria was attacked. It is almost impossible to make a detailed account of the jihadist massacres that take place each week. Ten years ago, Islamic terrorists attacked Yazidi villages in Iraq: 500 people were murdered; entire communities were wiped out. Recently, 500 more people were slaughtered in a Somali terror attack.
In Europe, Jewish synagogues, if they were not protected by police and soldiers, would meet the same fate. That is what came to pass with Christians in the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey (1914-1923), the murder and expulsion of its Pontic Greeks (1915-1922) , the continuing attacks on Christian Copts in Egypt, as well as with Iraqi Christian churches in Nineveh and throughout the Middle East. In Toulouse, France, Jewish children were gunned down just for being Jews for the first time since World War II.
These murderers are working to build a pan-Islamic dictatorship that sucks in the spilled blood of every culture and faith -- including their own. Islamic extremists have effectively been able to redraw the map of the Middle East by committing genocide against so many.
In Europe, Islamic radicalism has caused the largest emigration of Jews since the Holocaust (40,000 Jews have left France just in the last decade). Many Europeans might sentimentally think of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims pouring into Europe as "the new Jews" -- even though their culture is virtually opposite to the Jews' -- but perhaps the Europeans should be aware that they have now forced the Jews to flee twice in the modern era.
The level of persecution against Christians is "worse than at any time in history," according to the European-based Aid to the Church in Need. It also predicts that if the decline of its religion continues at the same rate as in the past two years, Christianity in Iraq could be wiped out as early as 2020. Islamists are erasing civilizations. Is Europe's next?
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
Mark Matthias