Terrorists are not Barbarians, They are Enemies at War with the West

"Unity in the face of barbarians", says the headline of the French newspaper Le Monde. It would be comforting, except that the terrorists who struck in France and in Tunisia were not barbarians. They were model Muslims.

Seifeddine Rezgui, the terrorist who killed close to forty foreign tourists on a beach in Tunisia in cold blood, was an exemplary student. He was attending a master's degree program in computer engineering. He had no criminal record and had not participated, according to information available so far, in training camps. Rezgui was the clone of Mohammed Emwazi, the executioner of Western journalists in the Syrian desert and a son of the Islamic British middle class with a degree in computer science.

The terrorist who beheaded a Frenchman was a Muslim, born and raised in France, named Yassin Salhi. He had a wife and three children. "A quiet boy, it was a pleasure to have him in the mosque, it was nice," said Nacer Benyahia, president of the mosque in Pontarlier, frequented by the terrorist who praised the Islamic State.

In Somalia, also hit on the same day by Islamic terrorists, the jihadists' leader is a converted Muslim with British citizenship, Samantha Lethwait, believed by intelligence services to have 400 deaths on her "conscience". She has a university education, she is the daughter of a soldier of His Majesty, she was a member of Amnesty International and is a mother.

As for Fritz Gelowicz, who planned to execute a killing spree at the airport in Frankfurt - his father was sold solar panels, his mother was a doctor. The terrorist who, this past April, separated Muslim and Christian students in Garissa, Kenya, killing 147 of the Christians, was once a headmaster and the son of an official of his country.

Students with degrees, sons of the failed French integration, converts ... Islamic terrorism does not come from illiteracy, poverty, inequality. It germinates from within Western democracy or the Arab world's upper middle class. The war they have declared is not logical, but theological. New York Magazine, in its investigation on the British foreign fighters, writes: "Most of them want to die as soon as possible and go to Heaven." It is estimated that every month 1,000 foreign fighters go to volunteer in the Caliphate.

Terrorism in the seventies and eighties chose the infrastructures of ''imperialism" such as pipelines and airliners. Today, Jihad aims at luxury hotels, such as those in Soussa, in Tunisia, or the Sheraton Hotel in Baghdad, hit last month ago by Islamic State. In 2002, in Bali, Indonesia, al Qaeda massacred Western tourists, leaving 200 dead. In 2005 it was the turn of Sharm el Sheikh, a tiny village transformed by Hosni Mubarak into a global attraction. In Netanya, Israel, a suicide bomber killed thirty Israelis in the Park Hotel at their Passover eve seder.

The Marriott was devastated in the collapse of the Twin Towers and was torn apart again eight years later in Islamabad, Pakistan. The terrorists called it "den of Western decadence", with a swimming pool for foreign women and a basement bar where alcohol was served.

Hotels are ideological targets: these are symbols of Western culture, and the terrorists want to purify these places. In accordance with the Qur'anic injunction of preventing vice and promoting virtue, hotels are places where men and women mix freely, where guests can consume alcohol, dance and have sex.

The British terrorist Omar Khyam confessed to having embraced Jihad after seeing a show at a nightclub. And in Bali, that night, the terrorists struck not only a luxury resort, but also the Sari nightclub. As in the novel "Platform" by Michel Houellebecq. It is a catharsis of terrorism out to punish the comfortable Western promiscuity, so addicted to pleasure. They are enemies at war with the West.

The American scholar Victor Davis Hanson once wondered: "Are these terrorists engaged in a war to destroy Western culture or are they merely a band of criminals who were lucky on September 11?". You know the answer.