The baleful consequences of cultural dogmyopia

Oct 23, 2021 by

by Melanie Phillips:

On both sides of the English Channel, the failure to grasp the nettle of Islamist extremism and the frightening consequences of that failure are sounding an urgent alarm for the whole of western society.

Last weekend, a British Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death in his regular constituency meeting. The man accused of murdering the MP, Ali Harbi Ali, is a British man of Somalian descent who had been referred to Britain’s anti-extremism program but had not been considered a threat.

Although the police are treating this as an Islamist terror attack, virtually all the anguished public debate since the murder has been instead about the culture of incivility on social media and the resulting threats to MPs from violent people of every stripe. Islamic extremism has been all but ignored.

This surreal reaction reflects a perverse development in British political culture. This is an exaggeration of the risk from far-right terrorism while the much greater threat from Islamist terrorism, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the 43,000 suspects on MI5’s watch list and the overwhelming majority of recent terror convictions, has been underplayed.

A report by the Henry Jackson Society think tank says that since 2015, when a Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered by a white supremacist, referrals of Islamist extremists to the anti-extremism program have been down by 80 percent while right-wing referrals have been rising.

Yet as an intelligence source told The Telegraph, right-wing extremists “do not present the same risk as Islamists by any distance, by a factor of four or five to one. More time has been spent than appropriate on right-wing extremism and not Islamism”.

Many British Jews also have their heads firmly in the sand. Surveys show that Muslims are three to four times more likely to hold antisemitic views, and from anecdotal evidence are disproportionately involved in anti-Jewish attacks. Yet the Jewish community leadership smears those who call attention to this as “Islamophobes”.

In France, this situation is far worse. France has a largely unassimilated, violent and antisemitic Muslim community that presents a deep threat to Jews and non-Jews alike. Islamist terrorist attacks there over the past six years have left more than 250 killed and 900 wounded.

Read here

Watch: Islamism Is Our Greatest Terrorist Threat. Yet Our Politicians & Media Refuse to Openly Discuss It. With Peter Whittle, New Culture Forum

Nasty tweets did not kill David Amess by Tom Slater, spiked

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