[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Robert Spencer’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

It has been one of the quickest vanishing acts ever: a Syrian migrant in the French city of Annecy stabbed several young children on Thursday, and video of the horrific act quickly circulated on Twitter. But almost as quickly as it was taken up, it was removed again. Although any number of gory and horrifying videos circulate on Twitter all the time, Twitter top dogs seemed especially intent on removing this one. This fact is in itself the surest indication that the central curiosity of this attack – that the attacker claimed to be Christian acting in the name of Christ – was a false flag.

Remix News reported Thursday that “a brutal video of a Syrian migrant stabbing children on a playground in Annecy, France, that went viral on Twitter has now been mass deleted, with numerous accounts displaying the message: video deleted.” The video can be still be seen on Rumble here; however, “Twitter has also ordered Remix News to remove the video, which this outlet had initially posted on Twitter in full. The Remix News Twitter account was locked until we agreed to delete the video….Twitter has also removed a censored version of Remix News’ video, which removed all scenes of the perpetrator stabbing his victims.” Twitter censored the video after it had received millions of views.

Why was the social media giant, which has become somewhat more committed to the freedom of speech after Elon Musk took over, although not nearly as much as patriots had hoped, so intent on removing this video? Are there still people who work at Twitter who would think it terrible that some people might get the idea that mass migration into Europe wasn’t really such a great idea after all? Most certainly.

Yet there is another strange aspect of this incident. The attacker, Abdelmasih Hanoun, shouted in English “In the name of Jesus Christ” as he went about stabbing children. That was clear on the video. He was wearing a cross, and entered France in 2022 as a Christian refugee from Syria. Now, this would seem to be a gift for the Leftist political and media elites. Here at last was the Christian terrorist that validates every claim every Leftist politician has made over the years about how every religion has its extremists, and Islam is no more likely to give rise to terrorism as any other religious tradition.

The problem was that Abdelmasih Hanoun was a bit too obvious. His shout of “In the name of Jesus Christ” was all too obviously meant to suggest that the jihadis’ ubiquitous scream of “Allahu akbar” had its equivalent in other religions. But when has there ever been a Christian who committed acts of violence while screaming this phrase? It was just too on-the-nose. His very name, meanwhile, means “Slave of Christ,” just in case anyone didn’t get the point. His beard and his keffiyah, as well as his actions in themselves, all strongly suggest that he was another Islamic jihadist, not some new kind of Christian terrorist.

And so apparently the Twitter wonks decided that it was better that the great unwashed didn’t get a chance to see the video at all. That way they wouldn’t get any nasty anti-mass migration ideas, and wouldn’t see how poorly executed the whole Christian terrorist idea really was. Instead, the political and media elites could assert that a Christian terrorist stabbed random toddlers in France, and there would be no way for anyone to document any reasons to be skeptical. So that was that: the video was deep-sixed.

It also should be noted that if he is a Christian, he did not stab these children in accord with any Christian teachings, as there are no Christian teachings that call for such violence. Despite the best efforts of Islamic apologists and their Leftist allies to weaponize various passages of the Hebrew Scriptures that neither Jews nor Christians regard as applicable to all people or to today’s world, there is no Biblical equivalent to the Qur’an’s command to “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89, cf. 9:5).

Another possibility is that he is a Muslim who is claiming to be a Christian, in accord with Muhammad’s dictum “War is deceit” (Bukhari 4.52.268). He may have decided to shout about Jesus Christ during the stabbings in order to confuse authorities and the media, and to deflect attention away from Islamic jihad. Remember the case of Enzo Almeni, who converted to Christianity to get asylum in Britain, then returned to Islam and became a jihad suicide bomber; after his attack, he was widely reported as being a Christian, without much attention given to his return to Islam.

There are other possibilities as well. Some Muslims entering European countries in recent years have claimed to be Christian because they believe that doing so will strengthen their claims for asylum. Abdalmasih H. may be one of them, who is now continuing his deception to confuse authorities.

The vanished video, however, carries also one final message: we will almost certainly never be told the full story of what happened here. As in so many other cases, authorities clearly think they will benefit more from concealing the truth than from revealing it. And so their empire of lies remains intact. For now.