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Manchester and My Saturation Point

I thought the images of children lost would speak for themselves.

by Tiffany Gabbay

My personal knowledge of radical Islam was fostered from my earliest years, having been raised in a family of Mizrahi Jews who fled a pogrom and persecution in Baghdad, were ultimately exiled to Israel, and later immigrated to the U.S. seeking safe haven from those who invariably plotted their extinction. My extended family and closest friends all come from similar houses of horror and bear the same scars.
Thus, from my earliest recollection, I’ve always known what the Islamic world and its inhabitants stand for – pre-ISIL, pre-al Qaeda, pre-whatever the latest incarnation or label it is that one wishes to place on them. Are all Muslim denizens of the Islamic world members of the “formal death cult?” Of course not, but as statistics reveal, the majority are at best sympathizers and enablers who engage in their own illiberal practices and beliefs at home.
The Islamic world has always been a tinderbox. Only the faintest of sparks is needed to ignite its flames. Sure, periods of peace and modernity graced select cities peppered across the Middle East and Maghreb of yesteryear. Make no mistake, however, they were the consequence of British or French mandate, not of indigenous enlightenment.
Skipping ahead to my professional life in the political arena, I found a niche about a dozen years ago (how time flies) that afforded me the ability to educate people about what could lie ahead if we, as a society, became willfully blind toward the threat of radical Islam.
Since 9/11 I have, at best tally, produced roughly 3,000-plus articles, columns, investigative reports, short blog posts, long form missives, televised productions, interviews, radio-spots, media campaigns, talking points and more, on topics relating to Islamic terrorism. This body of work covering tenets of Islam and the culture at large, addressing subtopics ranging from Wahhabist Saudi Arabia to the warlords of Chechnya, from the mullahs of Iran to the volatile dynamics that arise when a Sunni regime presides over a Shia majority nation, and so on and so forth. There have been countless social media postings and debates both formal and informal, speaking on panels, at symposia and conferences, and soon, documentaries in which I’ve appeared. A lifetime of living with this knowledge and sharing it as widely as possible with any Westerner who deigned listen.
Forget since 9/11 – since just 2015 alone there have been more than 6,000 of these attacks on humanity across the globe, resulting in thousands upon thousands of innocents dead and injured.  After each major terror attack, and the imbecilic progressive response that invariably follows, I furiously took to my keyboard to denounce the craven enablers, to cite statistics on terrorism, and honor violence, and expound the abysmal human rights record in the Islamic world. Facts, I hoped, would matter.
But then the Manchester terror attack struck and I reached my saturation point. I simply could not bring myself to say or write anything meaningful about the carnage of children. How could that be so? Perhaps it’s because I thought the image alone of Saffie Rose Roussos should have spoken for itself.
As a mother, I’m ashamed to say I could barely cast my eyes on her shining face for more than a moment. The bile and rage rising up from within me almost instantaneously. I had to avert my gaze.
And so, I stood speechless. Unable to stomach the thought of regurgitating the same statistics, to blast the same idiots on social media for spewing the same falsehoods and bilge they did during the last half-dozen terror attacks. Nor could I even satirize the latest solidarity hashtag in the hopes sarcasm might awaken the West to its utter depravity.
After Manchester – an attack that, as others before it, targeted children – I looked to my young son and thought: I want out of this business. I want to turn off the news and avert my eyes from the carnage strewn across my television screen. I want to whisk him off to some isolated place. But where? My family fled the Middle East for the West precisely to ESCAPE the very barbarians who we, ourselves, have let through the wide-open gate.
It is often accurately stated that those who enable bad acts are inherently worse than the perpetrators of those acts. Consider the raging alcoholic who abuses his step-children while their mother looks on. Who is worse? The abuser, or the one who invited him into her home to abuse her children? Who is worse – the one who acts in accordance with his own savagery or the one sworn to protect the innocents she now betrays?
I am sick to the back-teeth with the Left’s betrayal of humanity. And everything that has made our culture and societies here in the West a safe harbor and beacon of liberalism and modernity.
The carnage in Manchester, in Paris, in San Bernardino and Orlando, in Brussels and beyond is our “new normal.” We’re told to “get used to it.” To get used to children being mowed down with two-ton trucks and blown to pieces at concerts. This, we are told, is the new status quo.
Well, that is not a “normal” I will ever accept. Not for me. Not for you. Not for my child, or for yours.
I suppose that means, nausea aside, I will never be able to avert my eyes.

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