In the spirit of the season, Asad Shah, a Glasgow newsagent and a "devout Muslim"*[see update at the foot of the page], decided to send out an Easter greeting on his Facebook page:
GOOD FRIDAY AND VERY HAPPY EASTER, ESPECIALLY TO MY BELOVED CHRISTIAN NATION X! BISMILLAH...
Let's Follow The Real Footstep Of Beloved Holy Jesus Christ (PBUH) And Get The Real Success In Both Worlds xxxx
Less than four hours after this ecumenical greeting, Mr Shah was savagely murdered outside his shop by his co-religionists:
The victim was found seriously injured on Minard Road, Glasgow, and was taken to the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital where he later died on Thursday.
An eyewitness, who did not want to be named, told the Daily Record: "As I drove past I saw two men standing over the victim.
"One was stamping on his head. There was a pool of blood on the ground. It was horrific."
A 32-year-old Muslim man has been arrested.
Pace Mr Shah, Scotland is not much of a "Christian nation" these days. Instead, it is "tolerant", "diverse" and "multicultural". But a "tolerant" society determined to tolerate the avowedly intolerant won't be in business for long. Men like Asad Shah's killers are everything the safe-space pansies accuse us "white privilege" types of being: It is Shah's co-religionists who cannot abide the other. They won't tolerate Christians, they won't tolerate Muslims who convert to Christianity, and they won't even tolerate a devout Muslim who commits the sin of offering neighborly greetings on a Christian holiday. And so they killed him by "stamping on his head".
Not all Muslims are like these savages. Some (albeit not enough, for understandable reasons, given his grim end) are like poor Asad Shah. But, as my late compatriot George Jonas liked to point out, what matters in any population is not the numbers but who makes the running, who has the energy, who has the wind at their backs. And in Islam (in part thanks to the supine cringe of Cameron and other western leaders) the wind is not with Mr Shah but with the blood lust of his ravenous killers, and those who killed this week in Baghdad and Brussels and beyond.
You can have pluralism or Islam, but not both. Mr Shah thought he could have both, and so they killed him.
Rest in peace, Asad Shah.
~Following the news this week, Michelle Malkin re-posted a prescient interview with yours truly from ten years ago. For Parts One, Two and Three of our fascinating conversation on Europe, Islam, jihad and demography, see here. For the final part, click below:
~On a related theme, at the end of this coming week I'll be debating the "refugee crisis" in Europe and beyond with former UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour and distinguished historian Simon Schama on one side and me and UKIP honcho Nigel Farage on the other. For more details, see here.
*UPDATE: It has since emerged that Mr Shah was an Ahmadi - that's to say, a member of a small sect of, so to speak, "moderate Muslims", and whose moderation, back in Mr Shah's ancestral home of Pakistan, is regarded as apostasy. Which makes them a frequent target of other Muslims. To reprise my point, there are too many Muslims who cannot abide the other - Christians, Jews, somnolent John Lennon-chanting Euro-secularists, Yazidi and Ahmadi.