Another appalling Muslim terrorist incident, this time in Manchester, has taken the lives of over twenty young people. Some ask, ‘Why is that Muslims always carry out such attacks?’ The question is false. True, certain Muslims do carry out such attacks, but so also do Shintoist Japanese kamikaze (suicide bombers), as well as warped Fascist White supremacists, like Breivik in Norway (77 dead) and McVeigh in Oklahoma (168 dead).

The fact is that all religions and ideologies that do not have forgiveness as their central tenet are capable of producing fanatics who carry out mass murder. This includes unforgiving Western State terrorists, who carry out carpet bombing, atomize Hiroshima and Nagasaki, spread Agent Orange and fire uranium-tipped shells into Serbia and invade Iraq, all exemplified by the US general, Curtis LeMay, to whom is at least attributed the quote, ‘let us bomb them back into the Stone Age’.

What is the unique Christian attitude? It is to forgive, because God is in charge of judging history, not men, and God forgives, otherwise He would not have died for humanity on the Cross. Thus, Roman Catholics pillaged and raped their way through New Rome (Constantinople), invaded Russia with their Teutonic Knights and created Uniatism in the Ukraine, from which thousands of people are still dying today, and seventy-five years ago slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs just for making the sign of the cross correctly. But we forgive them because a Higher Justice will deal with them. We tremble at the mere thought of hellfire.

However, we do not forget. The facts of history are the facts of history. They cannot be altered – to the eternal shame of all those who commit such atrocities, like those above. We do not forget because there is only one mistake that we human-beings can avoid, and that is, the mistake of not learning from our mistakes and so making the same mistake again.