A message to those who ban Muslim travellers or boycott Europe: you are abetting Isis’s hate campaign

The death cult is so far from the meaning of Islam it doesn’t qualify as a distortion of that peaceable faith and people

"It is not Islam we should be at war with, or whose followers we need to ban. The fight is against terrorism, and terrorists" (Getty)

Justin Welby, leader of what remains the country’s largest single religious community, is a shrewd and media-savvy as well as a spiritual man. He will have realised that evoking the name of Herod on Christ’s birthday would be peculiarly startling. No matter; he was right to do so, and to warn once again of the plight of Christian people in the Middle East.

Isis is pursuing a campaign of religious genocide, persecuting and murdering those who adhere to different interpretations of Islam as well as Yazidis and Christians. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and the Queen’s messages also, though less dramatically, pointed to the threat of darkness overwhelming the Middle East and, through terror and the exodus of millions of people, creating misery across continents. That threat comes from a death cult, and one that is so far from the true meaning of Islam that it doesn’t even qualify as a distortion of that peaceable faith and people. The most important and quotable religious message was uttered by that bystander at Leytonstone Tube station during an apparently deranged attack a few weeks ago – “You ain’t no Muslim, bruv”.

We might equally say to Donald Trump, and all those who think like him, “You ain’t no Christian, bruv”. Like Bin Laden, the unsubtle aim of Isis in bringing terror to Western cities is to force division, foment hatred and spread religious and race war.

There are those who seem only too willing to do Isis’s evil work for it: the Dallas orchestra which cancelled a concert tour of Europe for fear of players’ safety; the immigration officials who prevented a Muslim family entering America; the politicians and commentators who lazily smear all Muslims with the taint of extremism; the cartoonists who portray refugees as rats entering Europe. All are, in fact, valuable but unwitting allies of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. This weekend is a time for reflection about the urgent need for inter-faith harmony across the West, and the rest of the world. Urgent, in particular, because about a million people driven out of their homes in Iraq and Syria are freezing and starving because they have inadequate shelter and no way of making a living as Europe closes its borders.


 Welby gave his annual Christmas Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral 
 (PA)

Some of the Paris attackers did come from the Middle East and were based in Europe, yet alienated from their communities and radicalised by Isis – just as the British 7/7 bombers and the murderers of Lee Rigby were beforehand. It is much better to see these individuals as political terrorists rather religious warriors. Imagine if some mad cult of nominally Christian people declared war on the British state and its values in the name of an irrational reading of the Bible. We would not call them “Christian terrorists” and ban all Christians from travel; such a notion is absurd.

Substitute the word “Christian” for “Muslim” and we can see the folly of some people’s attitudes. After all, Christians have lived and worshipped in Arab and Muslim lands for many centuries before Isis showed up, as did Jewish communities too. It is not Islam we should be at war with, or whose followers we need to ban. The fight is against terrorism, and terrorists. As we build political alliances to defeat Isis (and, for that matter, the Taliban) militarily, we need to take care not to lose the propaganda war.

At home, we have not been alert enough to the risks of division between communities. Too many religious and racial communities in our cities live separate lives. Religious or not, this is a time to pause and consider our responsibilities to one another, and to put tolerance into practice.