You Have to Give Liberals ‘Credit’: At Least They Turn a Blind Eye to Islamist Terror in Syria and at Home Alike

The double standards are staggering. Far-right violence is always held up as proof that there are dangerous hateful forces in the country; Islamist violence is never discussed in this way. Far-right violence is something we must get angry about and organise against; Islamist violence is something we must refuse to get angry about (that would be giving them what they want, apparently) and don’t even think about organising against it.

Remember when thousands of football fans – men, women and children – peacefully marched with wreaths to signal their horror at recent terror attacks? They were denounced as fascists. This is the situation we find ourselves in now: we are told we must organise against far-right violence because these people are fascists, and we are told that if you organise against Islamist violence then you are the fascist. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral and political contortionism.

The double standard is best captured by the gaping disparity between what has been said in the UK about the brutal police killing of George Floyd and what is likely to be said about the killing of three people by a suspected Islamic terrorist in Reading. Despite happening 4,000 miles away, Floyd’s killing, and its aftermath, has dominated news coverage here. It has galvanised the activist middle classes. It has become the catalyst for change (smashing statues, ‘decolonising’ curricula, etc). The three victims of a suspected act of Islamist terror, in contrast, will swiftly be forgotten. It always happens. Their deaths will not come to signify anything.

Islamist violence is always removed from the moral universe that other political and violent acts are said to inhabit. It apparently has no cause, no meaning, no impact beyond the sad deaths it causes. It is not to be dwelt on, far less made the subject of any kind of wide-ranging public discussion. A culture of amnesia is deployed almost instantly in the wake of Islamist terror attacks. People’s emotions are policed (don’t get angry), their speech is monitored (don’t be ‘Islamophobic’), and they are encouraged to move on and forget. ‘Don’t look back in anger.’ Which really means: ‘Don’t look back.’

Make no mistake: this invoking of amnesia, this memory-holing of Islamist violence, is designed to suppress difficult discussion about social and communal tensions in 21st-century Britain. There is very often a censorious dynamic to the left’s hunt for the intellectual underpinnings of far-right violence. The blaming of newspaper columnists or un-PC politicians for acts of neo-fascistic violence is very often an attempt to chill public discussion and to make certain things – on immigration, Islamic practices, and so on – unsayable. We should not play that game after Islamist attacks. We should not engage in the culture of public blaming and shaming that exploits violent acts to the low end of silencing certain opinions and ideas. However, we absolutely must ask what these regular acts of extremist violence – which are far more destructive than far-right violence – tell us about the situation in the UK right now.

It is significant, surely, that the Reading attack occurred at the end of a week in which the cultural elite and chattering classes continually told us that Britain is a disgusting racist country and all white people are complicit in racism. There is a relationship, surely, between the anti-Western self-loathing that is now so fashionable among the intellectual elites and the rise of Islamist extremists in the UK and other European countries who view the West with hateful, violent contempt. It is interesting, surely, that Islamist violence against ordinary Brits should have intensified just as the political elites promoted new cultures of grievance that depict ethnic-minority groups, and especially Muslims, as victims of an ignorance and prejudice that is rife among ordinary Brits. It is important, surely, that a country that has largely given up on the project of assimilating migrants and their offspring into British values and culture, in favour of promoting an ideology of multiculturalism that invites people to remain in their own values bubble, should have a problem with community separatism, community tension, and even anti-British violence.

We must talk about these things. We must reject the silencing tactics of the terrorism-amnesia industry and be honest and open about the culture of grievance and hatred that the divisive ideology of multiculturalism seems to have fostered. Let’s look back in anger at what happened in Reading. More importantly, let’s look back with intellectual and political rigour in order to uncover the climate in which this hateful, extremist violence has been able to grow.

And let’s remember the victims’ names. Perhaps they could be put on the back of footballers’ shirts in the next Premier League game.

Source: Spiked