The Manchester Synagogue Jihad Terrorist: What’s in a Name?

New in PJ Media:

New information on Jihad al-Shamie, who murdered two people and injured four others in a jihad attack at Heaton Park synagogue in north Manchester, England on Yom Kippur, is coming out in dribs and drabs. Each new revelation reinforces the impression that this man should have been caught and deported long before he was ever in a position to murder anyone. Or alternatively, he never should have been in Britain in the first place.

Either one of those alternatives, however, would have required British authorities to have far more knowledge of the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat than they have ever displayed or showed any interest in gaining. Both would also require a good deal more courage than has been seen in Britain outside of Tommy Robinson for quite some time.

The UK’s i Paper reported Tuesday that al-Shamie “had been living a double life with up to three wives in separate towns before he carried out the attack.” His first wife and their child lived with him in Prestwich, a town north of Manchester. In two separate Islamic ceremonies, however, he had also married a second and a third wife. “Islamic marriages that take place in the UK,” says the I Paper laconically, “are not legally binding under UK law.”

And there’s the rub. Polygamy is illegal in the UK, but British authorities are desperate not to offend their growing and restive Muslim communities, and so they generally turn a blind eye to situations such as al-Shamie’s marital arrangements. Yet Muslims who are devout enough to put into practice the Qur’an’s call to “marry the women who seem good to you, two or three or four” (4:3) are also likely to take the whole book seriously, including its calls to wage jihad against non-Muslims, and “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, 4:91, cf. 9:5). If British (and American) authorities kept track of Muslim polygamists, they would find more than once or twice that they had some jihadis in their sights.

They will not do that, however, because doing so would be tantamount to admitting that Islam had something to do with terrorism, which authorities on both sides of the Atlantic remain determined to ignore. That willful ignorance is also why Jihad al-Shamie was in Britain in the first place.

Back in 2006, when he was 16, Jihad al-Shamie was granted British citizenship. There is no doubt whatsoever that no one ever stopped to wonder whether a fellow named “Jihad” might someday… wage jihad. By that time, five years after 9/11 and one year after the July 7 jihad attacks in London, British officials already knew better than to raise concerns about jihad, either as a concept or as a name. We were all being regularly assured that jihad meant “struggle,” and mainly referred to the struggle in the soul against sin, and that only racists and “Islamophobes” thought it carried any more ominous meaning.

There is more. Read the rest here.