To Protect Muslims Against Terrorism, Stop Muslim Terrorists

The mass murder of Muslims in New Zealand was a despicable act of terrorism, as wicked as any other act of terrorism. Terrorists who target Muslims must be hunted down the same way we hunt down Islamist terrorists who target non-Muslims. In most cases, this means suppressing Muslim terrorists who kill other Muslims.
As a matter of record, the vast majority of Muslim victims of terror have been killed by other Muslims. According to Voice of America: “By far the vast majority of victims of terrorist attacks over the past 15 years has been Muslims killed by Muslims…Of 167,221 terrorism-related fatalities reported from 2001 to 2015, almost all — 163,532 or 98 percent — occurred outside the United States and Western Europe, according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The U.S. government-funded GTD is the world’s largest public database on terrorist attacks.” This report was published in 2016, but the same applies.

The Assad government of Syria, backed by the terrorist state of Iran, is responsible for perhaps half a million civilian deaths in Syria since the rebellion against Assad’s rule began in 2011, as well as the displacement of more than 10 million. State terrorism, including the use of poison gas and barrel bombs against civilian populations, is part of a systematic effort to kill or displace the Sunni majority of Syria, so that Iran can repopulate Syria with Shi’ite settlers.

Slightly more than 7,000 Palestinians, by contrast, have died in the entire Israel-Palestinian conflict, the vast majority of them armed combatants.

So let’s keep things in perspective. Wanton murder of civilians is a horrifying crime no matter who does it, and the perpetrators must be crushed under an iron heel. But the single best thing that the world can do to protect the lives of Muslim civilians is to root out the terrorists who kill other Muslims–starting with the terror state of Iran.