by Tom Slater, spiked
Norm Macdonald was the prophet of our cowardly post-9/11 age.
‘What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?’
That tweet – posted with a twinkle in the eye by the late great comedian Norm Macdonald in December 2016 – might just be the most incisive piece of satire our still-young century has so far produced.
It had another good airing on social media over the weekend, as the world marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and mainstream-media outlets couldn’t help but Do The Norm Tweet, pivoting away from the apocalyptic Islamist atrocity itself to hand-wring about the ‘backlash’ supposedly suffered by Muslims in its wake:
‘After 9/11, Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers’, ran a headline in the New York Times. ‘We were viewed through the lens of terrorism’, a British Muslim interviewee told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘Sadly there were questions about our faith and whether we share British values.’
You’d be forgiven for thinking 9/11 was a colossal act of ‘Islamophobic hate speech’ – a spicy viral YouTube video, perhaps – rather than the mass slaughter of Americans by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda for having the temerity to defy their radical Islamic ideology.
The liberal elites have been struggling to shake off this tic for a quarter of a century now. We saw it in Britain last year, when the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings was met with a preponderance of thinkpieces in which ‘Islamophobia’ was mentioned more than Islamism, if Islamism was mentioned at all.