The post-terror ‘good news’ story came from Islam’s most persecuted sect

A few months back, after the Brussels terrorist attacks, I pointed out on Coffee House that there is a certain routine after any such atrocity. One part of it is that, after a couple of days pause, we always get the ‘Muslim good news story’. This is the part when after a couple of days of everyone insisting Islam has nothing to do with the Islamist attack the national and international media gets to run almost as big a story suggesting that although Islam is not part of any problem, it is, however, a very major answer to almost everything.

Fortunately the slaughter of Father Jacques Hamel last week has already got its good news story. Near the top of the news agenda on Sunday was news that Muslims had attended mass across France and Italy in solidarity. It is the sort of heart-warming news story to which the media these days is enormously attracted and, therefore, enormously vulnerable.

I have been scouring through these stories and the striking thing about them is that in most cases the Muslim attendees at mass appear to have been – as I would have expected them to be – Ahmadiyya Muslims. This is the persecuted sect which many Muslims regard as non-Muslims and who are subjected to severe persecution around the world from other Muslims. Even here in the UK. Despite being a tiny minority sect within Islam they are also – as I have pointed out here before – the group which is almost always behind any positive outreach from the Muslim communities in Europe.

Anyhow – stories of the Muslims of Europe attending church in their dozens as a gesture of solidarity was clearly an Ahmadiyya initiative. Accounts of the Muslims attending mass in Rouen show that they unfurled