This sickening attack will thrill ISIS: they long to spark a holy war in Britain

WITHIN just minutes of the barbaric attack on innocent Muslim worshippers in Finsbury Park on Sunday night, the fanatical propagandists of Islamic State were taking to social media, calling on their twisted followers to take revenge against the ‘crusaders’ and ‘infidels’ they claimed were behind the atrocity.

‘Oh Muslims, you need to wake up to the war that is starting now in your own streets, outside your own mosques,’ read one of a seemingly endless stream of messages that demanded a fresh wave of terrorism immediately be unleashed in the West.

The despicable crime, rightly defined by Prime Minister Theresa May as an act of extremism and Islamophobia, left one person dead and ten others injured, and the perpetrator arrested for suspected terror offences.

Fear

Coming on the back of a reported surge of anti-Muslim hate crimes after the terrorist attacks by Islamist radicals in Manchester and London, it will leave Britain’s Muslim community gripped by fear and anger — and everyone else with the appalling sense that things are spiralling out of control.

Worse, this outrage brings closer to realisation Islamic State’s hope that the small minority of radicalised British Muslims will now be more determined than ever to join the holy war on these shores.

For however much ISIS may feign outrage, in reality they must be ecstatic. The undeniable reality is that they could not have scripted either the timing or the way it was carried out more perfectly to suit their evil agenda.

For a start, it played to their obsessively promoted apocalyptic vision of how a global caliphate will come into being, in the sense that they aim first to cast Muslim against nonMuslim in the West to foment chaos and division.

We are surely witnessing for the first time a new phenomenon in this country: Islamophobic terrorism versus Islamist terrorism.

Muslims, moreover, were deliberately targeted outside their place of worship, just as ISIS has slaughtered Christians outside of theirs in the Middle East.

Even more chillingly, the Finsbury Park outrage perfectly mirrors the central jihadist principle that, whenever possible, revenge is enacted by using the same method with which the avenged were killed.

In 2015, for example, a Jordanian pilot was burned alive in a cage in Syria, then buried under rubble. That act of utter cruelty was, according to ISIS, a recreation of exactly how the bombs he had fired from his fighter jet had killed civilians in their homes.

So we had in Finsbury Park, as in the London Bridge attack, a white van driven by a hate-filled maniac. And he was reportedly screaming that he wanted to kill all Muslims, just as the jihadists in London wanted to kill every nonMuslim in their sights.

Most bizarre, though, is that the perpetrator repeatedly yelled that he wanted to die in the act. It was as though, like the jihadists that appear to have so enraged him, he were seeking a kind of religious martyrdom.

From ISIS’s point of view, the timing was no less propitious. All Muslims but the jihadist minority see Ramadan as a time of quiet contemplation, contrition, abstinence and charity.

That, of course, is why it was especially heartbreaking that the group of young men targeted were giving first aid to an elderly man who had collapsed after performing evening prayers in the nearby mosque.

During this month, Muslims around the world also feel an especially strong bond and kinship, and reflect on the ideal that their faith transcends national borders — something that ISIS wants to eradicate.

Islamic State’s perverted call among its followers to carry out more terror attacks will, therefore, especially resonate among its fanatical foot-soldiers at this moment.

Terrifyingly, ISIS already has a history of explosive terror on a day during Ramadan called Laylat al-Qadr — The Night of Power — which this year will fall on June 21.

This is the day when Muslims believe God revealed the first verses of the Koran to their Prophet Muhammad. For jihadists, though, it is a perfect day to slaughter infidels.

On that same day during Ramadan last year, ISIS butchered 20 Bangladeshis and foreigners in Dhaka with machetes, and a massive truck bomb simultaneously killed more than 200 in Baghdad.

Suspects

Even before Sunday’s attack in London, Western counterterrorism forces had been set to be on especially high alert tomorrow.

Meanwhile, following the general election and resulting hung parliament, the Government is less stable than it has been in living memory — another potential boon for the jihadists.

After the London Bridge attack, Mrs May had finally declared that ‘ enough is enough’, promising to introduce measures this paper has been campaigning for, including closer monitoring of terror suspects.

It would be nice to think that, given the unprecedented terrorism threat now facing the country, such legislation could still be passed swiftly with cross-party support.

Yet, since the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is invariably hostile to any such practical moves to make us safer — having voted against them hundreds of times in the past — to hold out such hope may simply be a case of wishful thinking.

That is especially troubling because of the utterly flawed rationale among those on the far-Right that the Government is incapable of tackling the problem of fundamentalist terror — which leads to Islamophobic extremists taking the matter into their own hands.

Radical

Already political opportunists, most conspicuously English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson, appear to be pointing to the radical history of Finsbury Park mosque — as though that were some kind of justification for the mowing down of innocent Muslim worshippers who happen to pray there.

That is the moral equivalent of arguing that the murder of soldier Lee Rigby was justified because of grievances about British foreign policy in the Middle East. It is a call for mob violence, and it is contemptible beyond words.

Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of ordinary Britons will have been sickened to the stomach on hearing about what happened in Finsbury Park.

And at least we should take heart from the fact that despite knowing the attack was deliberate, at the orders of the local imam the worshippers who had been targeted did not take it upon themselves to enact revenge on the perpetrator. Instead, he was restrained and handed over to the police.

Terrorists on both sides of the political spectrum are desperate to divide this tolerant nation. That must not be allowed to happen.