Sousse

by Rick Johansen

My heart aches for the victims of what appears to be a terrorist atrocity in Tunisia. At the time of writing, some 27 people of so far unknown origin have been murdered in the resort of Sousse. It looks like a lot of people went away on holiday and never came back.

That’s surely the end of tourist travel to Tunisia. Part of the country are already out of bounds for any kind of travel and even Tunis itself has recent history. Like the Red Sea resorts of Egypt, it was believed that places like Sousse were safe. That is no longer the case.

I have a simple rule, myself: I don’t go on holiday to islamic countries. This is not to say that all muslim-led countries are terrorist death traps – they plainly aren’t – but there are too many aspects of the religion that I find incompatible with my own secular philosophy. Not that I could afford to go, but my dream destination would be the Maldives. There is little chance that I will ever achieve that dream, not just because of the cost of a holiday there, but also because soon the country could well succumb to the type of islamification that has infected much of the world.

But as we have seen, also today, in France, there is nowhere that is 100% safe. These things can happen anywhere and we have seen them at home.

There are currently 20,000 Brits on holiday in Tunisia and I’ll be every single one of them wishes they were at home. I can only imagine how frightening it must be now, holed up in a hotel room or lobby, with armed police surrounding the hotel. Many will have seen people murdered, or the bodies of people murdered, apparently on the beach. They will have heard gunfire, they would have seen people in a total state of panic. They’d have been running as fast as they could, fearing that a bullet would hit them from behind.

There are flights leaving Britain tomorrow for Tunisia, including from my local airport, Bristol. My guess is that it will leave Bristol empty tomorrow and come back tomorrow full of relieved tourists The companies will, as we speak, be commandeering all available planes to evacuate the country. It will surely be evacuated of tourists for ever.

You take a chance wherever you go on holiday. There is also a risk of getting caught in something you can’t control, but a holiday, any holiday, in somewhere like Tunisia, Egypt and even Turkey should carry a health warning. The Turkish border with Syria is perilously near ISIS held territory. So far, the only real travel has been out of Turkey into Syria, but if it’s that easy to get into Syria from Turkey, one must imagine it’s quite simple to get out again. For me, going somewhere like that, even to one of the beach resorts far away, would be a risk too far.

As I write in real time, we now hear that 28 people may be dead with many others in critical condition, so the death toll will rise. Many of the victims are British.

What kind of world are we living in when innocent holidaymakers are slaughtered in the name of islamism? There just seems to be no way of stopping it. The only possible hope we have is to try and spread secularism and to openly challenge religious superstition as scientists openly and rightly challenge science. We have reached a stage where some religions are beyond not just lampooning, but questioning too. The ancient texts, prepared when, as Christopher Hitchens put it, no one really knew what was going on are accepted by many as literally god’s word. There is absolutely no evidence that any of the biblical stories are true and yet they cannot be challenged. The time is surely coming when we have an adult debate about what is true and what isn’t. Don’t ban religion, of course, but let’s be open about what it is, or rather what many of feel it isn’t: the truth. The politicians don’t have a clue. David Cameron has announced that “problems need to be addressed at source” but contrast that with the decision of his government to support “faith” schools. Why would parents send their children to “faith” schools if they didn’t want their children to be taught it as fact? That’s not addressing the problem at source: it’s political cowardice and all parties, even those previously led by Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, atheists both, are guilty. Cameron finished his reaction by pronouncing that “islam is a religion of peace”, which is interesting given that this attack, along with other incidents in France and Kuwait today happened during Friday prayers and in Ramadhan.

The walkways of Sousse are now the killing fields of Tunisia where innocent people have died at the hands of fanaticism. That’s somewhere else in the world we can’t go and the places we can’t go are growing by the day and I fear that many of them are beyond help and beyond hope.

It’s another dark day and another opportunity for us to wonder about the type of world we will bequeath to our children.

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