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| Financial Times 16/3/19 |
And then we blame.
When the terrorism is Jihadi there are the two well-worn reactions:
Apologists: the terrorist is a nutter. Nothing to do with Islam.
Critics: the terrorist is inspired by Islamic writings in the Koran, Hadith and Muhammad ‘s Sirah. Ideas have consequences.
When the terrorist is a white supremacist, again “one divides into two”:
Apologists: the terrorist is a nutter. Nothing to do with conservative ideology.
Critics: the terrorist is inspired by far-right ideology, self radicalised on the internet. Ideas have consequences.
I side with the Critics in both of cases. Jihadist ideology so plainly inspires violence around the world, not least amongst terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Shabab, that to gainsay it is disingenuous. Similarly far-right ideology inspires white supremacists to violence, and to gainsay is nonsense.
LATER: Maajid says it better.
There’s a difference though. The jihadists number in the hundreds of thousands, probably in the millions. The far-right white supremacists are orders of magnitude fewer. When I googled “are white supremacists increasing in number?”, I got a reference to groups that are infiltrating universities, posting white suprematist flyers about the campus. Their number has “skyrocketed” says Wikipedia, from 200 in 2013 to 500 now. That’s right, it’s not missing zeroes, it’s five hundred. There will be more around the world, of course. But clearly they’re not anywhere the number of jihadis world-wide. It’s true that we seem to have been suffering fewer jihadi attacks lately. Why? I don’t know, but I suspect that increased security is a factor.. Or it may just be the jihadis taking a breather. But still, as to which one is more dangerous, jihadi or far-right, I’m still going to stick with worrying more about the jihadi-Islamist threat.
Meantime the predicted “it’s Trump’s fault” took all of about ten minutes after “guns down” to hit the screens. That’s also silly, if totally predictable.
In the article above clipped from the Financial Times yesterday, it’s incorrect that Trump praised white supremacists at Charlottesville last year. What he said was that there are “fine people” on both sides of the statues question (whether or not statues of now controversial people should be taken down). Misreading Trump’s comments — which, to be fair, were ineptly framed — is wilful ignorance or simple stupidity.
LATER: How could I forget? Christchurch killings are also the fault of we critics of Islam. All of whom are encouraged by and enabled by.....“the joooz”, the evil jooooz! Silly me! So now you can’t criticise Islam, you can’t criticise an ideology, you can’t criticise its misogyny, its homophobia, it’s child bridery and genital mutilation, and all the rest of it, you can’t criticise any of this because then you’re not just an islamophobe, you’re a mass murderer!
