The shameful silence on France
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
Even after the slaughter in Nice, too many Western liberals are cravenly quiet about the jihad against the French Republic.
And still they’re silent. Even following the decapitation of an elderly woman while she was praying at church. Even following the stabbing to death of two others whose only crime was to be Christians attending the Notre-Dame church in Nice. Even after these latest acts of barbaric intolerance, of Islamo-fascism, as the mayor of Nice aptly described it this morning, the West’s self-styled guardians of liberal thought and usually noisy anti-fascists are silent. No hashtags, no angry commentary, no clear, unconditional expression of solidarity with the French Republic. Just another round of craven hush, of looking the other way.
The news from Nice is grim, even by the standards of the Islamist horrors that have rocked France in recent years. A man with a knife ‘repeated endlessly’ the Islamic phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he stabbed and slit the throats of churchgoers. The elderly woman merely wanted to pray; she was ‘virtually beheaded’. A man’s throat was cut open. Another woman managed to flee after being stabbed numerous times, but she died shortly afterwards, after taking refuge in a cafe. It was an ‘Islamist terrorist attack’, said President Macron, and it is surely an indictment of the West’s cowardly culture of silence in relation to Islamist extremism that it feels odd to hear a Western leader firmly use the i-word – Islamist – to describe one of these acts. Normally euphemism abounds. They’re ‘knife attacks’, as the New York Times infamously referred to the Islamist beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty two weeks ago. Macron has dispensed with such dishonest terminology and said outright what threatens France right now: a separatist and increasingly deranged form of Islamist extremism.
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