The hate that dare not speak its name

Oct 19, 2021 by

by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:

In the days since the horrific murder of Sir David Amess, Britain seems to have gone mad. Here was a good, much-loved politician allegedly slain by a young man who is currently being held under the Terrorism Act on suspicion of possibly being motivated by the Islamist ideology. And what are we talking about? Tweets. Online anonymity. The rude things members of the public say to politicians. The need to ‘be nice’. It feels increasingly unhinged. It feels like a displacement activity of epic proportions. A possible act of Islamic terrorism takes place, and the chattering classes gab about how horrible Twitterstorms are. What is going on?

It feels like the political class is gaslighting the nation. Reading the newspapers has become an entirely disorienting experience. ‘PM faces calls for “David’s law” to halt online abuse’ screams the front page of today’s Guardian. What does this mean? Was Amess subjected to online abuse? There’s no suggestion he was. So why are we talking about this? Why would a man allegedly murdered by someone who the police suspect had radical Islamist beliefs need to be memorialised with a law against saying stupid things online? The disconnect between what seems to have happened in Leigh-on-Sea and the questions and concerns now dominating political discourse is confusingly vast. It’s hard to make sense of it.

[…]  A cloud of obfuscation covers the country. Consider yesterday’s discussion in the Commons. It was unnerving in its unreality. Yes, some fine tributes were paid to Amess, and who didn’t let out a cheer when Boris Johnson announced that Southend-on-Sea would be granted city status, something Amess campaigned for throughout his parliamentary career. And yet there was an elephant in the chamber. A great, stonking beast whose presence MPs refused to acknowledge as they instead told stories of personal abuse or called for a tightening of the laws governing what can be said online. The beast’s name? It’s that political-religious ideology that begins with the letter ‘i’. Are we allowed to name it out loud? Judging by its absence from political discussion over the past four days, it seems not.

Read here

Watch:  Dr Rakib Ehsan“If people really want to do something meaningful in David’s memory they should tackle Islamist extremism.” 

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