The Islamic festival of Ramadan starts on the 23rd of April and it is likely as in previous years to have a significant death toll from Islam inspired violence attached to it. Last year’s death toll from terrorist attacks that were carried out during Ramadan stood at 861 in various Islam inspired attacks.
No other major world religion has anything like the deliberately caused death toll that Islam has. We don’t see mass violent religion inspired deaths during either Easter or Passover. In the modern world it’s only during Islamic Ramadan that we get such horrific figures of death and destruction that have been brought about in the name of religion during a religious festival.
Such terrible levels of carnage give the lie to the dishonest claim that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’. Whilst I’m fully willing to admit that there are many Muslims who are peaceful individuals, the ideology of Islam itself is plainly not peaceful. This lack of peace at Islam’s heart becomes more starkly visible during Ramadan. This is because some Muslims whose minds may have been unbalanced by the weeks of successive periods of starvation and bingeing on food, become more violent or more willing to commit violence at what is for them a ‘holy’ time. Ramadan is also considered by the more violent followers of Islam as an auspicious time to attack those who they see as the enemies of Islam and those enemies can be either those outside of Islam or those who are seen as not Islamic enough or the ‘wrong’ kind of Muslim.
Last year’s death toll was pretty low for Ramadan compared with some previous years. 2017 for example saw 1595 people being killed in Islamic violence. So much for the idea of Islam being a ‘religion of peace’.
This year things might be different. The Syrian civil war, which provided the ISIS group with plenty of victims and became a major killing ground for Islam, has calmed down somewhat but that does not mean that this year’s Ramadan will not have an Islamic violence death toll. Also this year much of the world is on lockdown due to the Chinese Covid19 pandemic and in much of the world Muslims will be prevented from gathering in mosques for fear of spreading the disease. How this lockdown will affect the overall death toll from Islam is anybodies guess. It’s quite possible that the death toll may be less than last year as less people are packed in mosques listening to ranting Imams screaming about killing the Jews/Christians/Hindus/Sikhs/wrong sorts of Muslims and being inspired to kill for Islam. On the other hand the isolation that some of our more unbalanced Muslims may be under may lead some to fall into an extremist echo chamber led by online Islamic extremist preachers with large followings. We may also see more violence from Muslims in places like Pakistan where the government is trying, but often failing, to close down the mosques during Ramadan to prevent the spread of Chinese Covid19.
I hope and pray that this year’s death toll will be either small or non-existent, but knowing Islam as I do, I suspect that this year we may be seeing a death toll of around 500. Less than previous years but still awful. Not for nothing do those who are cynical about Islam refer to Ramadan as ‘the festival of skipping lunch and embracing murder’
