by Brendan O’Neill, spiked
Imagine if you had told someone on 11 September 2001 that in 25 years’ time the streets of New York City would ring out with sympathy for Islamofascism. Imagine if you had said to one of the startled souls watching American lives be incinerated by Islamist filth that one day the West would swarm with youths cosplaying as Islamist filth. Imagine if you had said that in a mere quarter of a century even our leafiest campuses would be awash with jihad chic, with silver-spoon students gushing over an Islamo-army (Hamas) every bit as hateful and medieval as the one that burnt New Yorkers alive.
Imagine if you had said on that apocalyptic day that one day the twisted beliefs of Osama bin Laden would be commonplace in radical circles. Imagine you had said that his anti-Semitic cry that ‘the creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased’ would become the luxury belief of every smug activist. Imagine you had said that the very justification for that day’s pitiless massacre of New York innocents – namely, that America had become the ‘servant’ of ‘the Jews’ petty state’ – would soon be the hot take of the every woke leftist and crank rightist in Christendom. Imagine if over the thud of WTC workers falling to their deaths, you had said that one day Western youths will gush over bin Laden’s writings, and thank him for ‘open[ing] their eyes’ to the evils of America and Israel.
Imagine if you had said there will be further acts of Islamist inhumanity – smaller in scale but equal in evil intent – and that our response would not be horror, but nonchalance. Imagine if you said Islamists will one day massacre girls in Manchester, England and people would say, ‘Don’t look back in anger’. Imagine if you said there will soon be an Islamist atrocity in which more children would perish than on 9/11 – the Nice truck attack – and our response would be awkward silence followed by craven, snivelling amnesia. Imagine if you said that one day it will be a cancellable offence to talk shit about the totalitarian ideology that wreaked such savagery upon New York City.