When it comes to terrorist threats there should be no question as to where the primary threat comes from. This threat comes from radical Islam. Irish Republicanism and the various violent entities on the extreme Right or Extreme Left do not come close to the threat that is posed to Western societies by Islamism.
But, as Brendan O’Neill states in his excellent piece on the fall out that has been caused by the former Tory MP Lee Anderson’s mention of Islamism in some comments about Sadiq Khan the Greater London Mayor Mr O’Neill said that what has scared our political and media elites most was that Mr Anderson mentioned radical Islam. He’s correct, none or very few of the Westminster politicians nor the mainstream media want to mention the jihadist elephant in the room. The ‘moral cowardice’ as Mr O’Neill describes it of our political and media class is a major problem.
Mr O’Neill said:
‘Islamism’ is the great unutterable in 21st-century Britain. Representatives of the state have even flirted with erasing the i-word from public discourse – remember when counter-terrorist police considered ditching phrases like ‘Islamist terrorism’ and ‘jihadis’ and replacing them with ‘faith-claimed terrorism’ and ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’? In the end, such brazen Orwellian meddling in everyday speech wasn’t necessary. Instead, as Anderson found out, an informal moratorium on open chatter about Islamism has been enforced by our fretful cultural elite, who wield the charge of ‘Islamophobe’ against anyone who asks too many questions or feels too many feelings about the scourge of radical Islam.
That was by far the most alarming thing about the Anderson scandal – not what he said but the performative pearl-clutching of an establishment that is creepily incapable of taking the Islamist threat seriously. You want us to lose sleep over a loudmouth’s swipes at Sadiq when there is an entire political class out there that can’t even bring itself to name the ideology that has caused the deaths of almost a hundred Brits over the past two decades? Yeah, not going to happen. With their noisy castigation of Anderson, the elites handily reminded us that their moral cowardice poses a far larger threat to the nation than one bloke’s pop at a mayor.
Read the entirety of this really excellent piece via the link below.
