We do not yet know enough about the three terrorists who, saying “This is for Allah!”, killed and wounded so many in London on June 4, but consider these two recent scenes:

Scene one: Manchester, United Kingdom, the “free world”. A British-born Muslim terrorist prays in a former church. All around him, the Christian sites and congregations accepted being turned into Islamic sites. The day after, this terrorist goes on a rampage, murdering 22 concert-goers.

Scene two: Minya, Egypt, the “unfree world”. An Islamist terror group stops a bus full of Christian pilgrims. The terrorists demand that their victims recite the Islamic creed, the shahaada. The Christians refuse to abandon Christianity and become Muslims. The Islamists murder them, one by one.

What do these scenes tell us? Christians resist Islam more in the Middle East than in Europe.

Salman Abedi, the British terrorist who massacred 22 innocent men, women and children at the Manchester Arena, could, every day, enter what was once a beautiful Christian church, consecrated in 1883. It was desecrated in the 1960s, during a great wave of secularization. People still remember the Methodist Church that it was until it was bought by the local Syrian Muslim community to make it a place of Islamic worship, the Didsbury Mosque. One can still see the typical architecture of a church, from the bell tower to the windows. But inside, instead of an altar, Abedi would be headed to the mihrab, the niche in the mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca. The pulpit is still there, but it is no longer used by a Christian pastor. It is used by the imam for the Khutba, the Islamic prayer.

Outside the Didsbury Mosque there is a sign announcing: “Do you want to know more about Islam? Come and socialize”. Such a sign for Christianity would be unthinkable in any European city. Our secular elites condemn proselytizing only when it is practiced by Christians, never when practiced by Muslims. On YouTube, an Islamist organization celebrates “the church converted to a mosque“. Instead of the times for Mass, there is another sign: “Prayer Room for Men”.

A few days after the Manchester attack, Islamists again struck Christians; this time, pilgrims in Egypt. That attack took place after Pope Francis’s trip to Egypt, where he offered the local suffering Christians only a vague condemnation of “every form of hatred in the name of religion“. The head of the Catholic Church evidently did not have the courage to address the question of Islamic fundamentalism, as had his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, at Regensburg.

“Religions do not cause violence and terrorism”, assured the new head of Italian bishops, Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, after the massacre in Manchester, adding: “Muslims, Jews and Christians believe in a single creator”. Unfortunately, the terrorists murdered the Christians in Minya because they believe Allah is superior to the Judeo-Christian religion, and gives them the right to take the lives of “disbelievers”.

About terrorism and Islamist violence, Christian leaders offer only words of relativism and moral equivalence. Is it possible that after two big massacres of Christians, Catholic leaders have not a single word of courage and honor, but only the same offer of the other cheek?

The most honest Catholic prelate was the Archbishop of Ferrara, Luigi Negri, who said:

“I hope that some of these gurus — cultural, political and religious — in this situation will hold back words and not invoke the usual speeches to say that ‘it is not a war of religion’. I hope there is a silent moment of respect”.

The gurus, unfortunately, did not hold back; they had words only of weakness and confusion.

These Islamic fighters, such as those who hit Manchester and Minya, are not “radicalized”; they follow an Islamic religious dictate according to a literal reading of the Koran. They attack Europeans because they believe that Islam is superior and stronger than Europe. They feel that Allah and history are on their side. They want to see the flag of Islam flying across Western capitals.

The jihadists might think they can do to Europe what they did to Christians in Niniveh, Iraq. The only way we can win is by defeating them; no compromise is possible. But Europe speaks of “inclusion” and “integration”, never of victory.

While Muslims pray in Europe’s former Christian sites, Christians in the Middle East are murdered for refusing to renounce Christianity and convert to Islam. Father Antonio Gabriel, of the San Mina parish of the Coptic church in Rome, in the course of an interview with Tg2000, revealed the dynamics of the new Islamist aggression against the Egyptian Coptic community. The terrorists, before killing the passengers of two buses traveling to the San Samuele monastery, “asked them to give up Christ and become Muslims”. But, at the demand for apostasy, the Christian Copts responded negatively. The rejection of conversion to Islam triggered the fury of terrorists, who “put the gun on the head and neck” of pilgrims “to kill them directly”.

“If they had accepted”, Father Gabriel pointed out, “they would have spared them”.

The same strong-arming took place in Iraq. When ISIS militants gave four Iraqi children the choice of converting to Islam or death by beheading, the children chose to follow Jesus and were murdered.

But these amazing stories never reach the European mainstream newspapers and televisions, as if the information might disturb our self-righteous certainties. “For decades, the Middle East’s increasingly beleaguered Christian communities have suffered from a fatal invisibility in the Western world”, Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times. Is that invisibility the result of the West forsaking of its own identity, as happened with the church in Manchester?

In Syria and Iraq, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of places of Christian worship that Islamic fundamentalists have demolished in the past three years. These images shock public opinion, it seems, for one day — along with the mass decapitations and the rape of the minorities. Churches, cemeteries and archaeological sites — every building that carried the symbols of the Christian faith (crosses, statues of the Virgin Mary, icons of the saints, even graves) — were razed to the ground. But is the demise of Christianity in the heart of Europe, by churches converted to mosques, less severe? And why has Pope Francis not condemned the abandonment of Christian holy sites and their takeover by Islam?

Archpriest Dmitri Smirnov, chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church Commission on Family Matters, recently announced:

“There is very little time left until the death of the entire Christian Civilization. Several decades, perhaps 30 years, well, maybe in Russia it will last 50, no longer.”

It is impossible for any observer to deny that Christianity is descending into a terminal crisis in Europe. Catholic leaders in the Netherlands estimate that two-thirds of their 1,600 churches will be out of use in a decade, and that 700 Dutch Protestant churches will be closed within four years. The Church of England closes around 20 churches a year. The Catholic Church in Germany has closed about 515 churches over the last ten years. You find the same scenario everywhere in Europe.

“I have often heard from Muslims that their goal is to conquer Europe with two weapons: their faith and their birthrate,” said the Maronite patriarch of Antioch, Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai. “So when they come to Europe and see the empty churches, and find the unbelief of Europeans, they immediately think that they will fill that void”.

This is one of the most tragic ironies of our time: that Christians in Europe, including Pope Francis, have a lot to learn from Christians in Egypt, Syria and Iraq.

Cardinal Bechara Boutros Rai, the Maronite patriarch of Antioch, has said “I have often heard from Muslims that their goal is to conquer Europe with two weapons: their faith and their birthrate… So when they come to Europe and see the empty churches, and find the unbelief of Europeans, they immediately think that they will fill that void”. (Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images)

After another ISIS jihadist slit the throat of an 85-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel, during a Catholic mass in France, no rally was called to protest his murder. No secular personality or newspaper said, “We are all Christians”. The entire Christian establishment refused to write the word “Islam”.

Make no mistake; these Islamists are very clear in their goal: eradicating Christians not only from Mosul, as they did in 2014, but also uprooting Christians from Manchester, where churches are already converted to Islam. The pumped-up forces who drove Christians out of their ancestral lands rightly thought: Why not continue in the West the work begun so well in the East?

Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.

After terror attacks, we often hear from Western media and politicians that we must accept terrorist attacks as the “new normal.”

For Western citizens, this phrase is dangerous.

Islam’s doctrine of jihad, expansion and dawah (Islamic outreach, proselytizing) rely heavily on the use of both terror and luring. Targhib wal tarhib is an Islamic doctrine that means “seducing (luring) and terrorizing” as a tool for dawah, to conquer nations and force citizens to submit to Islamic law, sharia. It amounts to manipulating the instinctive parts of the human brain with extreme opposing pressures of pleasure and pain — rewarding, then severely punishing — to brainwash people into complying with Islam.

Most ordinary Muslims are not even aware of this doctrine, but Islamic books have been written about it. Mainstream Muslim sheikhs such as Salman Al Awda have discussed it on Al Jazeera TV. On a show called “Sharia and Life,” Al Awda recommended using extremes “to exaggerate… reward and punishment, morally and materially… in both directions”. “The use of terror under this doctrine,”‘ he said, “is a legitimate sharia obligation.”

People in the West think of terror as something that Islamic jihadists inflict on non-Muslims, and it is. But terror is also the mechanism for ensuring compliance within Islam. Under Islamic law, jihadists who evade performing jihad are to be killed. Terror is thus the threat that keeps jihadists on their missions, and that make ordinary Muslims obey sharia.

An online course for recruiting jihadists contains this description:

“Individual Dawa depends on eliciting emotional responses from recruits (and building a personal relationship). Abu ‘Amr’s approach illustrates a recruitment concept called al-targhib wa’l-tarhib, which is a carrot-and-stick technique of extolling the benefits of action while explaining the frightening costs of inaction. The concept was introduced in the Qur’an and is discussed by many Islamic thinkers exploring the best way to call people to Islam (several scholars, for example, have written books titled al-targhib wa’l-tarhib). According to Abu ‘Amr, recruiters should apply the concept throughout the recruitment process, but emphasize the benefits of action early in the process and the costs of inaction later.”

In other words, recruiters of jihadists should start by emphasizing the “good stuff” first, the “lure” — the future glory, supremacy and fulfillment of every lustful wish, such as virgins in heaven. Later, they should threaten the recruits with “terror” and shame — the consequence if they fail to participate in jihad.

Part of the tarhib or “terrorizing” side of this doctrine is to make a cruel example of those who do not comply with the requirements of Islam. That is the reason Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and entities such as ISIS, intentionally hold ceremonial public beheadings, floggings, and amputation of limbs. Countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are more discrete, but they tolerate and support honor killings; killing apostates; beating women and children, and torture and murder in their jails. The doctrine of targhib and tarhib is alive and well, not just in Islamic theocracies but also in the so-called “moderate” Muslim countries.

Islam has been using these “pleasure and pain” brainwashing techniques, and cruel and unusual punishment, from its inception and until today. While the Bible — the Western Judeo-Christian tradition — is in harmony with, and nurtures, kindness in human nature, Islam does the opposite: it uses the human instincts for self-preservation and survival to break the people’s will and brainwash them into slavish obedience.

Like the majority of Muslims, I never heard of this foundational Islamic doctrine when I was growing up in Egypt, but have felt the impact of this doctrine on my life — in every aspect of Islamic culture; in Islamic preaching, in my Islamic family relations; in how Islamic governments operate and how people of authority, in general, treat the people under them.

The Islamic doctrine of “lure and terror” has produced a culture of toxic extremes: distrust and fear, pride and shame, permission to lie (“taqiyya“), and rejecting taking responsibility for one’s actions.

Having lived most of my life under Islam, I am sad to say that people the West calls “moderate Muslims” are frequently, in fact, citizens who have learned to live with and accept terror as normal. For centuries, many have made excuses for terror, condemned victims of terror, remained silent or equivocal, and have even compromised with the terrorists to survive. The Islamic culture in which I lived looked the other way when women were beaten. When girls were honor-murdered, the question was “what did she do?” instead of “how could that be?” When Christians were killed and persecuted, many blamed the Christians for their own persecution at the hands of Muslims. The normal Islamic response to terror became: “None of my business.”

And now the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib, has moved to the West and aims at changing Western humanistic culture. It would replace respect for human rights, caring for one’s neighbor and the values of freedom and peace, with the values of bondage, terror, tyranny and fear.

Islamic jihad has always counted on people in conquered lands eventually to yield, give up and accept terrorism as part of life, similar to natural disasters, earthquakes and floods.

It did not take long for the Islamic doctrine of Targhib wal Tarhib to work on the psyche of Western leaders and media, who are now telling us to live with it as the “new normal.” Islam counts on turning everyone into “moderate” Muslims who will eventually look the other way when terror happens to the person next to you.

The new normal? Police help survivors of the terrorist attack on London Bridge, June 4, 2017. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

Nonie Darwish, born and raised in Egypt, is the author of “Wholly Different; Why I chose Biblical Values Over Islamic Values.”