Listening to some of the prattles of pundits after two alleged Islamist-related attacks within 48 hours, I am reminded of Philip Roth, who wrote in American Pastoral:

‘And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint’s.’

In other words, what people manage to ‘forget’ is often telling.

Whenever atrocities like the attacks we saw in Europe occur, to me it feels as though the Left is guaranteed to suffer amnesia on the following points:

• Islamic terrorism is by far the largest source of terrorism globally.
• As left-wing governments invite unprecedented numbers of migrants from Muslim-majority countries, these attacks will inevitably occur more frequently.
• The Left was supposed to champion the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people and other minorities.

The attack on the Pride March in Berlin was committed by Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German-born man of Lebanese heritage who reportedly attempted to join ISIS in Syria in 2025. Ballout was sentenced in a Berlin court in May to 22 months for ‘preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state’. The sentence for such a heinous act was considered by some to be too soft, and he was subsequently released as the sentence was suspended while the prosecutors, quite rightly, argued for a longer sentence. He was killed by police attempting an arrest.

The Berlin attack resulted in the death of a woman and injured at least 29 people. But here’s the kicker – one person at the Pride march stood on a podium and said they would be disappointed if the attacker wasn’t a white Christian man.

I’ve often wondered how the ‘Queers for Palestine’ crowd would react if they were dropped in the middle of the Islamic world.

The Berlin attack is a deadly vignette.

According to the Human Dignity Trust, homosexuality is illegal in more than 60 countries. Toggling their map, you’ll notice that this is largely the Islamic part of the world – almost the entirety of the Middle East as well as virtually all of North Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia criminalises homosexuality by law. Palestine is also one of those places.

Screenshot from https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/

It is ironic that while liberal LGBTQ+ individuals can only thrive in tolerant Western societies, many continue to welcome Islamic influence into Western societies even though some individuals carry with them atavistic and dogmatic views antithetical to the LGBTQ+ community.

The second incident in Europe last week was a random knife attack in Paris, where a man proclaiming that he was commanded by Allah to kill women allegedly stabbed three women, including one who is pregnant. Fortunately, none of the victims were killed, but two were left in a serious condition. Luckily, bystanders and an off-duty policeman bravely detained the alleged attacker before he could unleash more harm.

In addition to friction with the LGBTQ+ community, it is well documented that women within many Islamic nations are treated as either second-class citizens or are significantly oppressed compared to Western definitions of human rights. It is written in the Qur’an that the testimony of a woman is worth only half of a man. Women in some of these regions are jailed or killed for opposing the veil or contravening Islamic ‘morality’ laws. Even in a relatively progressive Islamic country like Saudi Arabia, women have only been allowed to drive since 2018. And yet there, the male guardianship law remains in place, where women require the consent of a male guardian for major life decisions.

It is rare to hear mainstream Western feminists criticise this ideology and cultural behaviour, even after violence is perpetrated against women. Similarly, they have remained relatively quiet about the deliberate use of sexual violence perpetrated against Israel during the October 7 attack by Hamas and Palestinian citizens. In fact, it was alleged that UN ‘experts’ denied or minimised the sexual violence that was perpetrated against Israelis (where Arabs were victims as well as Jews).

It is my opinion that whenever Islamist attacks happen in Western countries, it is usually those on the Left who make excuses. Sometimes, they go so far as to blame those who have been warning about the possibility of attacks instead of the attackers themselves.

The Global Terrorism Index show that of all terrorist groups (The UN Security Council lists 275 such groups) in the world, four Islamic groups alone are responsible for three-quarters of terrorism-related deaths in the period of 2007-2025.

In recent years, just in Germany and France, they’ve had so many Islamic terrorist attacks that it’s hard to keep up. But people should at least have memories of the atrocities of the Paris attack that killed 130 and injured more than 400 people, of the Nice attack where a jihadist killed 86 people celebrating Bastille Day, of the Berlin Christmas market attack, where another ISIL jihadist killed 12 and injured 56, and of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

There have been numerous other such attacks in Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Russia, the UK, the US and Australia. I had to remind myself, researching for this piece, that ISIS carried out an attack that killed 151 people in Moscow as recently as 2024. Or that in 2025, an Islamist terrorist rammed a crowd in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, killing 14 people and injuring 57. And this is not even considering the dozens of thwarted attacks.

And it is not as if there haven’t been warnings about this spanning decades. I remember Christopher Hitchens in a conversation almost 20 years ago, warning that:

‘Resist it while you still can before the right to complain is taken away from you […] because you’re “Islamophobic”, as if it was race hatred.’

Hitchens wrote a great piece in Vanity Fair in 2007 warning about the Islamification of London. He was an ardent supporter of Salman Rushdie, when he was given a Fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah in 1989. He was an outspoken critic of Islamism during the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy. His 2007 book, God is Not Great, identified Islam’s intransigence and insistence on divine authority, and its willingness to use violence to suppress dissent, making it the most dangerous of the monotheistic religions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s wonderful books, beginning with 2006’s The Caged Virgin, tried to call attention to the already bourgeoning issue of Islamism in Europe. Her collaborator, Theo van Gogh, was killed by an Islamic terrorist for making a film with her exposing the mistreatment of women under fundamentalist Islam. As a former Muslim, her 2015 book Heretic contains her theses for Islamic reformation.

Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic radical, authored Islam and the Future of Tolerance in 2015, based on a dialogue he had with the atheist Sam Harris, where they discuss and debate how Islam can be formed.

Michel Houellebecq’s novel, Submission, was published in 2015, in which he imagined a France where a Muslim political party, aided by socialists, won the 2022 French presidential election and implementing reforms based on Islamic law. The book was released on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre, as if to underline the timeliness of his novel.

Douglas Murray’s 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe was a wonderful warning about the results of unthinking uptake of immigrants, especially from the Islamic world, on Europe.

But the media, the political set, and large swathes of the intellectual circle in the West choose to forget these very bloody and very recent lessons. And the result of it is clear to see – there is going to be, I’m afraid, more of these attacks. And those who deliberately try to make society forget should not be forgiven.