Brave Muslims stopped far more deaths in the Paris terror attacks - now it’s up to the rest of Islam to show the same guts and root out ISIS 

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 Amid all the chaos and misery in the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks, some very important facts appear to have slipped most people’s attention.

The incident at the football stadium, Stade de France, for example, should have been a hundred, perhaps a thousand times worse.

ISIS’s atrocious plan was for one suicide bomber to go inside with a ticket to the game and blow himself up among the 80,000 spectators – including French President Francois Hollande - while another two waited outside to do the same as the terrified crowd fled into the streets.

It was only foiled because security guards frisked him at the entrance and spotted he was wearing a suicide vest.

80,000 spectators were at the football match in Paris Friday night - and a brave guard saved that site from being infinitely worse when he turned away a suicide bomber after spotting the vest

The bomber backed away and detonated himself.

This prompted his two fellow terrorists to activate their own suicide vests.

Crucially, none of them was inside the stadium.

Thus only one person other than the bombers was killed.

For this, we have the vigilant security guards to thank.

And what needs to be made very loudly and clearly public is this: that team of security guards who saved many more lives included Muslims.

We know this because one of them, a Muslim known only by his first name Zouheir, revealed the amazing story to the Wall Street Journal.

He himself was stationed just inside the stadium, by the players’ tunnel and near President Hollande and helped protect people when the bombs started going off.

‘Once I saw Hollande being evacuated, I knew it wasn’t firecrackers,’ he said.

Those security guards’ outstanding alertness and courage stopped what could have been a massacre of 9/11 proportions or worse.

And they did so at great personal risk to themselves because ISIS don’t give a damn who they kill; Muslim, Christian, Jew, Sikh, black, white, gay, straight, male, female, young, old.

In fact, it’s believed a number of the dead and wounded in Paris were also Muslim.

Stade de France wasn’t the only scene of heroism that night from people of Islam.

Another Muslim, a worker named Safer at the Cosa Nostra restaurant, saved the lives of two injured women during Friday’s attacks by risking his own to run out into the mayhem and bring them inside.

His valour echoed that of a Muslim named Lassana Bathily who saved numerous customers’ lives at a kosher grocery store during the January attacks in Paris by hiding them in a walk-in freezer.

Compare and contrast these heroic Muslims with that of millions of other Muslims after these latest outrages by terrorists purporting to be acting under specific murderous instruction from THEIR religion, and THEIR prophet.

All I’m hearing right now is a lot of silence.

A loud, deafening silence.

As memorials spread and the world weeps there is nothing but  a loud deafening silence from the vast majority of Muslims around the world. It's not acceptable

An unforgivable, cowardly silence.

As the non-Muslim world rages and weeps, the vast majority of Muslims appear content to keep their heads down and say nothing. Either out of genuine fear, or, if one was being less generous, out of tacit support for what ISIS stand for.

It has been the same after every single ISIS rampage, from the Charlie Hebdo slaughter to the Tunisia beach massacre and recent downing of a Russian passenger plane.

And I’m sorry but it’s just not acceptable any more.

I’m a Catholic and if a load of other Catholics suddenly started beheading and shooting people in the name of my religion in this modern age, falsely claiming papal authority to do so, I would stand up and denounce them from any rooftops I could find.

As would, I am sure, millions of other Catholics.

There would be shared revulsion at the way our religion was being hijacked to justify mass murder.

Only when the wider Muslim population turns on ISIS properly in their own communities, renounces everything they stand for, and roots them out, will they be finished off.

It’s pretty clear now that they cannot be beaten by Western bombs alone, although that will certainly help.

President Obama admitted as much today when he made yet another weasly, non-committal speech promising to do very little more about the biggest current threat to America and the world’s security.

He’s led from behind throughout the mounting turmoil in the Middle East and it’s been pathetic to watch.

Today, he seemed almost impotent about how to deal with the crisis, which is hardly surprising given his infamous failure to act when Syrian dictator President Assad used chemical weapons, thus crossing Obama’s supposed ‘red line’ and calling his bluff.

In fact, Obama seemed more exercised about the Republican party’s response to ISIS than about what to actually do about ISIS; putting cheap political point-scoring ahead of the national and global interest.

In one laughably deluded moment he actually said: ‘If there’s a good idea out there, then we’re going to do it. I don’t think I’ve shown a hesitation to act.’

Well yes, Mr President, that’s exactly what you’ve shown.

Today Obama seemed almost impotent. he seems more exercised about the Republican party's response to ISIS than about what to do with ISIS. He has done nothing effective to stem their rise

The truth is that Obama’s done nothing of any significance or effectiveness to stem the inexorable rise of ISIS other than lob up a few drones over Syria from thousands of miles away and commit a handful of special forces troops on the ground.

And his irritable insistence that he never underestimated ISIS is contracted by his own damning words when he called them a ‘JV team’ two years ago.

No wonder these extremists feel so emboldened.

But their real strength lies not in Obama’s shameful inaction but the equally shameful inaction of many of their fellow Muslims.

ISIS have terrorised many of them into supine lack of resistance, which is perhaps understandable in places like Iraq and Syria given the barbarity of their violence.

What is not understandable, nor acceptable, is the spinelessness from Muslims living outside the war zones.

They need to find a voice, and their feet, and get out of their homes to protest about what ISIS is doing.

I want to see Muslim anti-ISIS marches, Muslim anti-ISIS conferences, Muslim anti-ISIS rallies.

I want to hear that Muslim clerics have denounced ISIS in mosques to congregations of young impressionable people.

I want social media to blow up with furious Muslims attacking ISIS, with the same velocity deployed by those callous suicide bombers.

I’ve said many times that ISIS are not ‘real’ Muslims and been mocked for it.

But they’re not.

As the Paris hero restaurant worker Safer said: ‘This has nothing to do with religion. Real Muslims are not made for killing people, these are criminals.’

He’s right. They’re just medieval gangsters who’ve stolen a religion and abused its true meaning to wage a new world war.

I believe most Muslims are decent, law-abiding and peaceful and hate what ISIS are doing.

I just can’t hear or see enough of them say it.

It’s time for them to show the same courage that the likes of Safer, Lassana and Zouheir and his colleagues showed.

Real Muslims of the world, regain your voice, reclaim your religion and help save all of our lives.