Shedding idiocy about terrorism

We're shedding idiotic talk about terrorism

Terry Glavin

In the NATO capitals, something has finally shifted in the way Islamist terror is understood. It is as though the public tolerance for claptrap and prevarication of both the leftish and rightist type has at last been reached, and a new consensus, of the kind expressed so beautifully by Mancunians this week---Muslim and otherwise---is beginning to take hold.

Monday night’s slaughter of 22 innocents was carried out by a deranged college-dropout suicide bomber who was known around Manchester’s Didsbury Mosque as a bit of a crank. In recent months, had developed the habit of praying loudly and obnoxiously in the streets of his Whalley Range neighbourhood. It was the worst terrorist attack in Britain since the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings that took the lives of 56 Londoners.

At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labour Party for his dalliances with anti-Semitism) and the disgraced former Labour MP George Galloway (a fancier of Syrian genocidaire Bashar Assad and a Hezbollah enthusiast) in blaming the London attack on Western foreign policy.

Corbyn is now the leader of a bitterly divided and vastly diminished Labour Party that is expected to be trounced by Prime Minister Theresa May in the June 8 parliamentary elections. You won’t hear Corbyn blaming the wicked former U.S. president George W. Bush for Monday night’s outrage in Manchester. It would be suicidal. Things have changed.

The Manchester massacre occurred four years to the day after Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was butchered by “lone wolf” jihadists in the streets of Woolwich. Rigby’s throat was opened with a crude knife and he was nearly decapitated, with a meat cleaver. As recently as 2013, it was still fashionable to utter imbecilities lightening such murderers’ burden of guilt by resort to the “blowback” defence.

At the time, the famous American fantasist/documentarian Michael Moore declared that Rigby’s slaughter was understandable, because Westerners “kill people in other countries.”

This sort of vulgar “analysis” has been largely excised from respectable conversation and appears now to be confined to the sewers of public debate, where it belongs. On Tuesday, the Kremlin propaganda channel RT News found some “experts” who took up the line. So did the viciously homophobic and anti-Semitic British Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is about as popular among British Muslims as Galloway is among Britain’s Labour Party MPs.

Another stupid point that was once commonly made whenever some whackjob went off the deep end and took to bloody mayhem while citing “Islam” as the excuse: Was he a really a jihad-inflamed terrorist, or was he just mentally unstable? 

Weird as it now seems, as recently as October 2014, New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair considered this a relevant question in the case of ISIL fanboy Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who murdered Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and then stormed Parliament Hill before being shot dead.

Mulcair objected to the tragedy being described as an act of terrorism, owing to evidence for Zehalf-Bibeau’s mental illness---as if death-cult bloodlust and insanity were two different, mutually-exclusive things. At the time, American celebrity leftist Glenn Greenwald categorized Zehalf-Bibeau’s rampage as---your guessed it---blowback owing to Canada “wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others.”

You’re not likely to hear this kind of idiotic masochism being flaunted in the matter of Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old mass murderer who police say killed those kids in Manchester.

Another stupidity that was once considered a clever response to jihadist terror in “dar al-harb” was to point out that more North Americans (or Europeans) die from falling in their bathtubs than by getting killed by terrorists. It’s probably true. But bathtubs have not happily slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Muslims in recent years, and bathtubs have not deliberately murdered more than 400 people in horrific attacks in Europe since 2015.

The scores of hideous mass murder plots successfully foiled by European authorities over the past two years were not being plotted by bathtubs. Britain’s MI5 is currently monitoring 3,000 extremely dangerous jihad hobbyists. French intelligence agencies are trying to keep tabs on about 15,000...

Rob's comment:

See also We Know What Inspired the Manchester Attack, We Just Won’t Admit It and The Wahhabi Threat. Both writers finger Saudi Arabia, which recently gave President Trump a friendly reception. Gee, what a surprise: during his visit there were no protests in that country!

The "idiotic" leftist analysis of Islamic terrorism lives on at Alternet, which also likes to change the subject after these attacks.

Thanks to Harry's Place.