Muslim brutality says all one needs to know about Islam. Our response to it says all one needs to know about us.
None of it is good. All we offer is cloyingly sentimental clichés, woolly explanations and pathetic defence measures. And our political ‘leaders’ liberally mix maudlin vulgarity with most refreshing cynicism, trying to exploit terrorism to their own ends.
Hackneyed phrases are a sure sign that sentiment has given way to sentimentality. How many times over the past two days have you heard the words “our thoughts and prayers go to the innocent victims”?
I suggest our public figures save their vocal chords, and our hacks their column inches, by abbreviating these platitudes to T&P and IV. This wouldn’t make the pronouncements any less trite, but it would certainly make them snappier.
At the French Open yesterday Andy Murray delivered a post-match interview in which every other word was ‘obviously’, the runaway favourite with our athletes. He then took up valuable TV time delivering the usual mantra. How much more inspiring it would have been had he just said “Our T&P go to the IV, and I was serving pretty well.”
The teddy bear industry is doing brisk business. There are shops in London that sell nothing but those cuddly toys. These days many of them end up on London Bridge and in Borough Market, which is supposed to show resolute solidarity in the face of terrorism. All it really shows is tasteless, mawkish sentimentality.
The Archbishop of Canterbury explained that the latest incident proves that scriptural texts can be “twisted and misused”. He then offered a toe-curling bit of moral equivalence by explaining that things like these also happen “within our own faith tradition”.
Saying that “this has nothing to do with Islam,” is wrong, opined Welby. That’s “just like saying Srebrenica had nothing to do with Christianity”.
It would be tempting to accuse him of rank ignorance, but surely even he knows that not a single verse in the New Testament calls for killing, while the Koran has hundreds of them. He must also be aware that the founder of Christianity was a crucified martyr, while the founder of Islam was a mass murderer – everyone knows that.
Hence there’s no moral equivalence. We’re all sinners, and Christians have been known to commit terrorist atrocities. But Christian thugs do that in spite of their religion, while Muslim ones do it because of theirs.
If the Archbishop is deaf to such nuances, he isn’t fit to be a parish priest, never mind the first prelate of our state religion. But deaf he isn’t. It’s just that PC reverberations drown out everything else inside his head.
Rachel Sylvester, writing in The Times, sees the roots of Muslim terrorism in “segregation and deprivation”, providing the useful datum that “more than three quarters of Islamist-related offences were committed by people living in the poorest 50 per cent of neighbourhoods”.
It’s true that the kind of Muslims who leave their Ferraris in the no-parking zone outside Harrods are unlikely then to drive said vehicles through a crowd. Yet Miss Sylvester doesn’t quite explain why white, Chinese or Indian people who share those same neighbourhoods with Muslims somehow desist from suicide bombing.
The same observation applies to the segregation part. It’s true that a few Muslim ghettos in Birmingham supply most jihadists. Yet there are parts of London, for example Acton, where one mostly hears Polish speech in the street. Yet the denizens of those Polish areas seem to favour plumbing over stabbing.
Jeremy Corbyn had the temerity to demand Mrs May’s resignation because, as Home Secretary, she reduced the size of the police force. Now since most of our policemen are unarmed, it’s unclear how they can stop large vehicles hurtling towards the IV to whom our T&P will then go.
Those policemen who are armed responded to the incident in a way that doesn’t suggest that their efficacy is hamstrung. It took them eight minutes from the first call to arrive on the scene and shoot the murderers dead. Pretty good going for an overstretched police force in a vast city.
In any case, Jeremy Corbyn is a fine one to talk. Even now he refuses to say one word against IRA terrorists whose mouthpiece he was, and neither does he renounce his Hamas and Hezbollah friends. Instead he proudly admits that “I’ve been involved in opposing anti-terror legislation ever since I went into Parliament in 1983.”
Is this the kind of idealism that, according to Charles Moore, endears Corbyn to young voters? This man isn’t an idealist but a villain, and we haven’t yet even begun to talk about his economic programme that, if executed, will destroy Britain at a speed that even previous Labour governments didn’t quite achieve.
That Corbyn is patently evil makes Mrs May good only comparatively speaking. She has responded to yet another Muslim atrocity by refusing to identify its provenance. Instead, having established that her T&P go to the IV, she then proposed a four-point programme to combat “Islamist” terrorism, each point perfectly pointless.
Point 1 is “countering Islamist ideology… with our pluralistic British values.” One doubts that British-born Muslims have been underexposed to such values. How can this exposure be increased? Pari passu with welfare hand-outs?
Point 2 is cracking down on online jihadist propaganda. Even assuming that this is achievable, such a countermeasure may only reduce the number of new recruits to the noble cause of turning Britain into a caliphate.
What about the tens – possibly hundreds – of thousands of jihadists already here? What about those to be admitted with an army of new arrivals? Especially, what about those 3,000 potential terrorists already known to the authorities as such?
Mrs May maintains trappist-like silence on such details, rendering this point moot.
Point 3 is closely related to Point 1, and just as pointless. It involves educational work in Muslim areas, teaching fiery-eyed youngsters the delights of moderation. Good luck with that.
Point 4 really takes the pita. According to Mrs May, “we need to increase the length of custodial sentences for terrorism-related offences”. But of course. A few more years in the pokey are guaranteed to be a powerful deterrent for people ready to blow themselves up.
Mrs May left out the fifth and most important point. We should publish a collection of vulgar post-murder clichés and issue free teddy bears to all who want them. That way we’ll be forearmed against those segregated, impoverished Muslims, as we’re already forewarned.
“He must also be aware that the founder of Christianity was a crucified martyr, while the founder of Islam was a mass murderer ”
Christian martyr dying but not killing. A Muslim martyr dying but killing in the process. Very big difference.
“Point 1 is ‘countering Islamist ideology… with our pluralistic British values.’”
Those pluralistic values are in large measure why these villains become jihadists in the first place.
TM took the levers of power but the ones that she was given are not connected to anything. She is like a toddler in a toy car making brmm brmm and beep beep noises. It is not impressive but very depressing. Corbyn will find that his chardonnay Marxist utterances will be just as ineffective.