Islamic State Comes To Malaga

Black boats floated in on the serene blue water. The sun shone in the sky, warming the multinational bathers on the beach. Lovely young German girls or young ladies chatting on the beach – blondes and brunettes, all wearing their own personal choice of beach wear. Cool, slim Spanish guys with short hair, dressed for winter, which meant casual jeans, T shirts, jackets, while others took full advantage of the sun. A pleasant looking wife did some acrobatic stretches on the beach, then went for a short dip in the sea, her husband looking on. She took off her top and her bikini bottoms and was fully naked in the sea, an object of rounded and bronzed beauty. We could see her succulent breasts and feel her confidence.
Older couples, fairly mature, like ourselves, sunbathed, reading their books, tanning their bodies, writing their free thoughts, thinking only about how pleasant life can be, and how wonderful nature can be. Winter in Spain is like summer everywhere else!

The black boats floated in, rowers rowing, and came in to land on the beach.

“We will avenge the Reconquest!” they said. “We are bringing history back to Europe.” They were fighting the wars from centuries before, like Time Travellers from the middle ages.

They were young men, who have never even lived in the middle ages.
Some of them had never even read a history book until they found Allah again.
Born Again in the melting pot of the modern world.
Schooled in British comprehensives and Dutch, French, German or Danish schools.
Given all the tools of reading and numbers, and education, all the opportunities of TV and news, dramas, romances, and all the freedoms of communication, the internet, mobile phones, and far too much information.
Modern People!

Possibly many of them actually do have roots in the middle east. They are mainly from genuine muslim families, or so we believe.

Stealthily they hit the beach, sporting beards and longish hair, instead of prayer books, and wielding machine guns. The first victims were the innocent German girls. Beauty laid bloodied in the sand, in the name of Allah! What crimes have they committed except to show some legs and bare arms on the beach? They have not been pledged to marry yet, and they had no male minders. They may not even have heard of the prophet Mohammed, and if he had ever been made aware of their slaughter I am sure he would have been as appalled as we were.

Everyone on the beach was fair game it seemed. They were all idolators or infidels without any of them even being asked. The act of sitting on the beach and trying to get a sun tan made them more concerned with selfish pleasures than serving the cause of Allah on this planet. Older couples were cut down without any regard and the intrepid jihadis ran quickly onto the streets to restore the Caliphate to Spain.

Ali was a clever youth. He was good with computers and polite to his parents. They were from Pakistan, but he was born and raised in Britain. As a teenager he liked computer games a lot, but as he grew older he seemed to resent the employers who refused to take him on. When he was younger he watched a lot of action movies and war films. He decided the western superpowers were evil and had brought wars and colonial control to the muslim world.

Some people had been talking to him, trying to give him a more useful way to lead his life. He would become a footsoldier for jihad. Someone told him that by killing he could prepare the world for Allah. He hated the prostitutes and fallen women on the beach. He despised the Christians and Jews, who sent their planes to bomb his brothers in the muslim countries. If only he could restore Islam to Europe the world would be a much better place, he had become convinced.

We saw what was happening on the beach. The lovely young German girls and all the others massacred by the figures in black from the sea. It was like some modern day version of El Cid, where the black cowled extremists landed in huge numbers on the beach at Valencia to lay siege to El Cid’s Christian and muslim moderates in the walled town.

We ran for it, as quickly as we could, praying the bullets would not reach us, across the road and through the buildings. “Fanatics! Terrorists on the beach! Run quickly, they’re killing everybody!”

There were plenty of people in this busy hot afternoon. Some of them had heard the sporadic cackle of gunfire, and the cries of terror from the wounded and fleeing. Others had not yet realized. But when they heard our cries, and the cries of others in Spanish, most people understood.

We had all been hearing reports of sporadic terror attacks over the last few years in the newspapers and on the TV. We had all been appalled by the World Trade Centre attack and the London and Madrid bombings, the Mumbai hotel, the Nairobi Shopping Centre, the abduction of the Nigerian schoolgirls,, the massacre of the schoolchildren in Peshawar, Pakistan, and the recent Paris attacks on cartoonists and Jewish people.

The new Islamic State group seemed to be the worst of the lot, and they had even managed to carve out a kind of state and control large populations. We all knew they were particularly keen on killing people, and that their speciality was beheading aid workers and journalists, and a much longer list of groups and types of people than that. They were all putting the old Christian Crusaders, and their predecessors the bloodthirsty Vikings, to shame with their new levels of modern barbarism. And here they were at last, landing on our beach in the middle of our precious holiday!

Ali was enjoying this! So far it was just too easy. When they had been told about this attack they had all been quite excited. To hit the Christians where they weren’t expecting, and take the fight to Europe itself. The soft underbelly of Europe ; the beaches of Spain. He had looked at that blonde woman in the face before he shot her! A few years before he would have been excited by the thought of a glamorous young German woman like that, but that type never looked at him. Now he understood his faith better and he no longer looked at women that way. After this mission he had been promised a wife. She would be a good muslim wife, for his eyes only. They would raise a family, and have sons, who would, god willing, he was sure, be warriors like himself.

He saw the fear and pleading on that blonde’s face before he gave it to her, and her friends’ selfish petty desires, and he was pleased to end their pathetic selfish lives so that the people who worshipped Allah could be the favoured ones at long last.

The infidels went scurrying up the beach, screaming. He hunted them as if they were rats, which they were in the eyes of God. It was like playing a computer game, but so much more real. He could feel the sand dragging at his feet, the feel of a heavy machine gun in his arms, and the recoil as each bullet was sent on its way.

Very quickly he was over the road, through apartments and hotels and onto the modern marina front. Some of his brothers went into a hotel to determine who should live and who should die, but as they had planned it he was to go along the shopfronts. He burst onto the promenade and was pleased to see there were targets here who were still unaware of their attack. He stood next to a shop window and leveled fire at the shoppers and tourists. Few of them were able to escape the concentrated fire.

He had always wanted to do this, he thought, deep in his heart. He had always wanted to fight back against the people who thought they were better than him, the people who made the money, the women who fancied themselves. He had always wanted to be able to show his own superiority, to return those racist slurs he had sometimes received, sometimes imagined. He had wanted to turn the tables on them, all of them; the Christians, the Jews, the beautiful women, the establishment, the police, the governments, the employers, the teachers, even the muslims who only pretended to be muslims, but really just followed the infidel social rules.

He had done the training. He had learned the discipline, he had been to Syria, and he had fought against the enemies. He had learned to kill with a sword at the throat and with a machine gun. He was superior to them all now. He had a reason to live now. His religion had given him that reason, the excuse to be proud of what he did.

(I cannot pretend that I really understand why men would do this or think this way. I merely present a caricature because I cannot get inside their heads or understand. Nonetheless I have at least tried to imagine what might motivate a modern youth to do this. Maybe they just have not grown up yet.)