Following on from the jihad attack in Reading, Berkshire that saw three people stabbed to death by a deranged Libyan ‘refugee’ with a criminal record, we’ve seen many of the usual platitudes coming out of the mouths of politicians. We’ve seen the phrases ‘appalling attack’ and ‘lessons will be learned’ which often come out after a terror attack. We’ve had the all too familiar revelation that the Security Service, MI5, had this jihadist on their radar but decided that he wasn’t as big a problem as some of the other 30,000 Islamic extremists that fester in the United Kingdom. We’ve also had the mainstream media, possibly following government orders, downplaying the obvious Islamic aspect to this case and highlighting the fact that the Islamic stabber was ‘mentally ill’ as if it was this rather than an ideology called Islam that lay behind this murderers decision to stab people to death.
It’s looking like the media and the government are doing their utmost to ‘memory hole’ this incident and any religious or ideological motivations behind it. This ‘memory holing ‘ of Islamic motivations for terror attacks stands in stark contrast to how the government and the media deal with the very small number, when compared to Islamic attacks, of deaths or incidents that involve neo-Nazis or the ‘far right’. In these cases involving the ‘far right’, the media and the government go out of their way to emphasise that the attacks were caused by their ideology.
Brendan O’Neill over at Spiked magazine has also noticed this glaring double standard and has written an absolutely brilliant article on how different types of terrorism are handled by both the government and the press. Here’s a small excerpt from what I believe is most definitely a ‘must read’ piece.
Brendan O’Neill said:
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.
Mr O’Neill is bang on with his assessment of the situation. We are indeed given chapter and verse on the miniscule number of neo-Nazi nutcases that are out there, but we are told to ‘not look back in anger’ or expressly told to forget anything about the Islamic motivation for Islamic terror. I completely agree that we should know about violent neo-Nazi nutcases, they are bad people following a bad ideology. However we should also know about the Islamic jihadi nutcases who are equally bad individuals who follow an equally destructive and disturbing ideology. Sod ‘not looking back in anger’. We should be angry and concerned about those who attack our people, our culture and our nation and that anger should not differ whether those who perpetrate such attacks come from some small bunch of sad Hitler worshippers or the followers of a seventh century warlord.
