Terrorist attacks often reveal a country at both its worst and its best. Yesterday’s atrocity – in which a Muslim terrorist Usman Khan murdered two passers-by before being shot dead by police – was no exception. Here is the good news and the bad…
The good news:
Ordinary people have had enough
This was the clear message from social media yesterday. People were overwhelmingly jubilant that a vicious killer had been taken down quickly and ruthlessly with what sounded – from the much-shared video footage – like two head shots. My suspicion is that the general public are way, way to the right of almost all politicians on this issue. The political class – see below – is still more eager to persuade us that radical Islam isn’t a threat than it is to take serious measures to protect us from it. But the public’s evident impatience – and obvious desire for tougher measures – is a sign that this complacency will not last.
The longer this ‘Keep buggering on and it’ll go away’ narrative persists, the longer MPs can delay doing anything.
Armed police officers on patrol following the terror attack on Parsons Green station (image: Getty)
Not long after the Parsons Green Tube bombing, another of those viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-terror cartoons started doing the rounds. It was quite witty — a section of Tube map, redrawn in the shape of a hand giving those pesky terrorists the middle finger. But it wasn’t remotely funny. In order for humour to work it has to spark a feeling of amused recognition. This did the opposite. It said something that all but the most deluded among us know to be a complete lie.
The lie is that when a terrorist bomb fails to detonate properly and injures ‘only’ a dozen or so people, rather than killing scores, this constitutes some kind of moral victory; that Londoners — indeed Britons generally — now accept such incidents as ‘part and parcel of living in the big city’; that our mood is not one of fear, helplessness and apprehension but of cheery optimism and determination not to have our lifestyles altered in the face of terror.
Don’t worry about terrorism: baths are much more dangerous.
At least I think that’s the subtext of the latest infographic from The Economist – house journal to Davos man, Euro technocrats and the rest of the globalist elite.
Terrorism is here to stay, get used to it, the Ecommunist advises:
TERRORIST attacks are fiendishly hard to prevent. Anyone can rent or steal a lorry and drive it at a crowd. Especially in America, it is all too easy to buy high-powered semi-automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in moments. Neither great planning nor great intelligence is required to carry out such attacks. Thus it seems likely that much of Europe and America will have to get used to acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism becoming, if not routine, at least fairly regular occurrences.
It goes on:
Barack Obama was correct when he said earlier this year that the danger of drowning in a bathtub is greater than that of being killed by terrorists. Baths are a one-in-a-million risk. Even if the terrorism deaths in San Bernardino and Orlando were doubled to give an annual death toll, the risk would still be about one in 2.5m.
Well yes. But so what? A bath is a soothing, relaxing experience whose charms not even that scene in A Nightmare On Elm Street has quite managed to ruin. You can read magazines; you can wallow in every variety of bubbles and scented, therapeutic oils; you can improve the dextrousness of your toes by turning the hot tap on and off with your feet; you can listen to the radio; you can think deep thoughts.
Also, baths – in the unlikely event that they are going to kill you – do not alert you to your imminent demise with a bloodcurdling scream of “Allahu Akbar”; nor do they torture you beforehand like happened to some of the victims at the Bataclan massacre in Paris; nor are they undiscriminating. If you die in the bath, chances are you’re going to be elderly or infirm and probably on your way out anyway.
More bad news from Nice: we learn from the BBC that local Muslims have been getting the cold shoulder from theirkuffar neighbours. “People who yesterday would embrace me warmly are now cold towards me,” says one.
And all because of the unfortunate and terribly unfair coincidence that the man who mowed down over 100 people in a truck just happened to be called Mohamed, of Tunisian descent, and allegedly yelling “Allahu Akbar” as he went about his murderous spree.
“The worst affected by these attacks are us, the Muslims. We have seen an increase in abuse and threats,” complains local man Ahmed Mohamed.
Another – Abdul Moniem – has some sage things to say about not pointing the finger of blame.
“You have to distinguish between different types of crime. Are these crimes that relate to terrorism? Or are these individual criminal acts? In this case what happened was a terrible crime and shouldn’t be treated as terrorism. The criminal who carried out this attack did not pray or fast…he had social and relationship problems. It was this that led him to hurt people.”
The BBC is very concerned about this outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’. That would be why it sent a reporter – also called Mohamed – to down to investigate.
But I’ve a strange feeling that not many of you reading this – unless, perhaps, your name is Mohammed, or you are LBC’s resident faux-Cockney dhimmi James O’Brien, or you work for the BBC yourself – are going to be shedding bitter tears for Nice’s Muslim community right now. In fact you may well suspect that reports like this are very much part of the problem not the solution.
It’s really not much different from the pieces he wrote after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre. But then, barring a few details – innocents mashed with a truck rather than, as at Bataclan, either shot, blown up or tortured by having their testicles cut off or their vaginas stabbed – the situation remains just the same as it ever did: with the chattering classes, the politicians, most of the media, and virtually the entire Umma still in denial of the nightmare problem facing us.
That problem, gloss it how you will, has something to do with Islam.
If Britain leaves the European Union then we’re all going to die. Orphaned kittens and stray puppies, their wounded paws tragically unbandaged, will wander the blackened streets mewling and yelping pitifully for their owners.
But they won’t last long for their cute little eyes will already have been burned out by the nuclear fireball that flattened every house in the city and turned every human – kids especially: the most promising, pretty and best-behaved ones will have died first, probably, weeping for their lost future – into a greasy pile of blackened bones which smelt very briefly of roast pork but now smells like the worst word in the history of lexicography… Brexit!
Or so Prime Minister David Cameron has been telling the world today in his latest escalation of Project Fear.
“Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash to make that assumption… What happens in our neighbourhood matters to Britain. That was true in 1914, 1940, 1989…. and it is true in 2016.”
With the shameless chutzpah and disingenuousness we’ve come to expect from the Remain camp, Cameron’s Foreign Secretary then went on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme to explain why Cameron’s speech certainly wasn’t saying anything as crass and literal as “if you vote for Brexit you’ll end up with war.”
Oh certainly not.
That’ll be why, to emphasise that this wasn’t remotely what he meant, Cameron invoked “serried rows of white headstones in lovingly tended Commonwealth war cemeteries”, “Blenheim. Trafalgar. Waterloo. Our country’s heroism in the Great War”, and Winston Churchill.
Nope. No veiled war references there then. No wrapping himself in the Union flag and English history in order to make the ludicrous suggestion that a vote for continued membership of the growing European superstate is a vote for patriotism, courage and tradition.
I’m afraid I disagree. The time to make political capital out of atrocities like this is precisely when the bodies are still warm and the limbs haven’t been swept up. That’s because – you see this again and again from the Boston bombings to the murder of Lee Rigby to the Charlie Hebdo – our decadent, supine, relativistic, Western liberal culture would dearly love to pretend that these are rare criminal events which we should learn to take in our stride and to which we should not ‘overreact’.
And I personally think the people who have been killed and maimed so cruelly and unfairly deserve better than that.
If their deaths and injuries are to mean anything, then surely the very least we owe the victims is to ask ourselves honestly why this happened and how we can reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Getting squeamish about speaking home truths on grounds of “taste” does not honour these victims. It insults them.
Here is why this morning’s bombings happened: political Islam is at war with the West.
It may suit our complacency to reassure ourselves that we’re not at war with Islam but that’s not going to make any difference to the sundry Jihadist cells now plotting even bigger atrocities all over the world.
They understand perfectly well what’s going on even if we refuse to.
For the basics, read John Ware’s superb profile of the Muslim Brotherhood in Standpoint.
Political Islam has absolutely no interest in finding any accommodations with what it considers to be our worthless Western culture. Its aim is total conquest. To deny this is a bit like reading Mein Kampf and going “Yeah but he doesn’t really mean it.”
This is why, increasingly, immigrant Muslim communities are failing to integrate with their host countries in the West, be they the US and Canada, those in Europe or in Australasia. Even if you believe that practitioners of “soft” Islam are in the majority, the moderates don’t stand a chance against the aggressive proselytising of the fanatical hotheads.
The situation is not unakin to that of Germany around 1933. Up until then, many if not most Germans had found Hitler’s short-trousered, strutting, zealots to be vulgar, unpleasant and not at all where they wanted to be politically. But the aggression and ruthlessness of those zealots overcame all resistance, so that even the moderates who despised them found it easier to endorse them and go with the flow. I’m sure there are lots of lovely Muslim families from Bradford to Molenbeek who’d prefer their daughters to be subject to British and Belgian law rather than the de facto jurisdiction of their local sharia courts. But I’m not sure it’s an option open to them.
