Pussyfooting on Islam has emboldened radicals and created a world for monsters
ANOTHER month, another atrocity.
This time the targets were Saturday-night revellers in London Bridge and Borough. Mown and stabbed for the crime of having fun. Killed for being free.
And almost instantly, even before we knew how many souls had perished, we saw the same craven response that follows every act of Islamist terror.
“Watch out for an Islamophobic backlash”, aloof observers and leftists said.
Once again, their minds were agitated more by the thought of stupid white people saying something rude about Islam than by an act of Islamist mass murder.
Their greatest fear is always what us ill-read plebs, as they see us, will say and do after a terror attack.
Even as the details of the latest outrage are unfolding on the rolling news they’re taking to Twitter and the media to lecture the throng.
“Don’t be mean about Islam”, they snootily warn. Not only is this a deeply patronising response that treats ordinary people as a greater threat to social stability than gangs of theocratic murderers — it’s also an incredibly dangerous one.
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It is becoming increasingly clear that our unwillingness to criticise Islam, to throw it open to the same scepticism and mockery that every other religion and ideology faces, plays into the terrorists’ hands.
It emboldens their belief that Islam is perfect and beyond rebuke, and that anyone who says otherwise deserves punishment.
Yes, one of the main problems we face is not that our society is too mean about Islam, but that it flatters Islam too much.
Islam now enjoys the same kind of moral protection from ridicule that Christianity once, wrongly, enjoyed. If you criticise the Koran or question whether women should wear the full-face veil, you’ll be branded “Islamophobic” and elbowed out of polite society.
Student unions regularly refuse people they judge too critical of Islam to be given a platform to speak — a policy known as “no platforming”. They accuse these critics of “spreading hate”.
Campaign groups like Tell Mama trawl Twitter and the press for unkind words about Islam and log them all as evidence of a “rising tide of hate”.
Things are so bad that political leaders won’t even use the I-word when talking about terrorism.
When Ukip leader Paul Nuttall broke with this informal diktat and said “Islamism” during the BBC General Election debate last week, he was rounded on by the other panellists.
Green Party leader Caroline Lucas branded him “completely outrageous” for suggesting recent terror attacks are “somehow representative of Islam”.
He had committed the cardinal speech-crime of our era: he said something a little bit critical of Islam.
After the Manchester Arena attack, the city’s mayor Andy Burnham said the attacker was just an “extremist”.
As legendary Mancunian Morrissey quipped: “An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?”
Our leaders and many in the media constantly censor themselves, flat-out refusing to say anything bad about Islam. And they police the minds and words of the rest of us.
This censorious privilege is not extended to any other religion.
We do not avoid saying “Catholic paedophiles” about the priests who molested children for fear of tarring all Catholics with the same brush.
We happily say “Christian fundamentalist” about people who are Christian and fundamentalist.
And yet Islam is ring-fenced from tough discussion. Criticism of Islam is virtually treated as a mental illness — it’s a “phobia”, and a phobia, of course, is an irrational fear. Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of Mohammed — the key commandment of our age.
This is incredibly dangerous. This censorious flattery of Islam is, in my view, a key contributor to violence in recent years.
Because when you constantly tell people that any mockery of their religion is tantamount to a crime, is vile and racist, you actively invite them to become intolerant.
You license their intolerance. You inflame their violent contempt for anyone who questions their dogmas.
You provide a moral justification for their desire to punish those who insult their religion.
From the 7/7 bombers to the Charlie Hebdo murderers to Salman Abedi in Manchester, all these terrorists expressed an extreme victim mentality and openly said they were punishing us for our disrespect of Islam or our ridicule of Mohammed.
According to those who knew him, Abedi was obsessed with Islamophobia. He apparently once reported a schoolteacher over his “Islamophobic” line of questioning about conflicts in the Middle East.
When a friend of his was stabbed, Abedi was convinced it was an Islamophobic hate crime, even though there was no evidence for this. He was convinced everyone hated Islam, and that hating Islam was the worst thing in the world. Where could he have got an idea like that?
Likewise, one of the London Bridge attackers,
, mixed with a gang of Islamists who were incredibly sensitive and hostile to criticism of Islam.
Butt appeared on last year’s Channel 4 documentary ‘The Jihadists Next Door’. He and his fellow Islamist loudmouths were fans of the radical American preacher Ahmad Musa Jibril, whose finger-wagging YouTube sermons are packed with denouncements of the “kuffar” (non-believers).
There’s a depressing, unholy marriage between the chattering class’s attitude to Islam and the demands of these hot-headed radicals: both believe Islam must be defended from public questioning.
Our leaders want to defend it from what they patronisingly view as a dim-witted public. Islamists want to defend it from kuffars.
But the cry is the same: Islam must never be demeaned. It’s wonderful. Bow down.
What really stood out in that documentary, which I watched again on Monday night, was the narcissism of the aspiring jihadists, including Butt.
They publicly displayed the IS flag in London’s Regent’s Park.
They stood on street corners telling people they would go to hell for criticising Islam (a more fiery version of being No Platformed for criticising Islam).
And not many members of the public, far less officials or thinkers, confronted them and debated them. Probably for fear of being branded Islamophobic. We’re not allowed to criticise Muslims, right?
Force-fielding Islam from the to and fro of public debate has been a disaster. It has green-lighted Islamist intolerance.
There are no quick fixes to the terror problem, but here is a good start: we should oppose all clampdowns on offence and blasphemy and Islamophobia.
All of them, whether they are legal, in the form of hate-speech laws, or informal, in the guise of Twittermobs against critics of Islam or self-censoring politicians being literally struck dumb on TV because they cannot muster up the word “Islamist”.
This will at least start the process of unravelling the Islamist victimhood narrative and its bizarre, violent, officially sanctioned sensitivity to criticism.
The response of our supposed betters to terror outrages — where they say, “Don’t blame Islam, don’t criticise Islam” — is the worst response imaginable.
It inflames the very religious narcissism and violent self-pity that motors many of these attacks.
Making criticism of Islam as commonplace as criticism of any other religion is the first step to robbing Islamist terrorism of its warped moral agenda.
It will also send a clear message to everyone in Britain: that our society prizes freedom of speech above everything else, including your religion, your prophets, your holy book and your feelings.
- Brendan O’Neill is the editor of web magazine .