Can we now have an honest discussion about Islamist terrorism?

Oct 16, 2021 by

by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:

Police think the killing of David Amess may have had an Islamist motivation. We need to talk about this.

The discussion about the horrific slaying of Tory MP David Amess is set to change. Possibly radically. The police’s decision to treat his murder as a potential terrorist incident, with an Islamist motivation, is likely to shake up how the media elites in particular talk about it. Out will go any implacable political anger and the insistence that we search for the cultural and intellectual influences behind this barbaric act. In their place we’ll see demands for calm. Don’t feel too much fury, we’ll be told. Don’t extrapolate. Don’t blame it on any one faith or ideology. Don’t be Islamophobic. The liberal media will likely stop stirring up passionate feeling about this heinous crime, and instead seek to suppress such emotion.

It is always the way when a suspected act of Islamist terror takes place. ‘Don’t look back in anger’ becomes the rallying cry. From the Manchester Arena bombing to the slaughter in London Bridge, Islamist outrages are always followed by a media demand that we don’t politicise them, don’t make them into focal points for national fury or feeling. Feel grief, of course. Lay a flower, sign a book of condolence, post a sad tweet, issue a platitude. ‘We mustn’t let the terrorists divide us’, etc etc. Just don’t dwell for too long on the frequency of such acts – scores of Brits have been killed by radical Islamists over the past five years – and, whatever you do, don’t ask awkward questions about what this violence might say about the divisions and tensions in 21st-century British society. In the haze of the terroristic aftermath, we witness not the promotion of strong political feeling, but the policing of it. It seems likely something similar will happen following the Amess atrocity.

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