Of all the platitudes trotted out after an Islamist attack, the maddest has to be: ‘Don’t politicise this tragedy.’ The bodies of our fellow citizens are barely cold before we’re being pre-emptively told off for ‘exploiting’ their deaths for ‘political ends’. But it’s already political. When a religious hysteric takes up arms against innocents, that’s a political attack.
‘Don’t be divisive’ is a demand for self-censorship masquerading as a plea for social peace
The ‘no politics’ rule was swiftly enforced following the atrocity at Berlin Pride. The minute it was announced that the suspect was an Isis fanboy known for mingling with other Islamists, the cry went out: ‘Don’t politicise this. Don’t let it divide us.’ Listen, you might not want to be divided against Islamo-nutters who hate homosexuals, women, Jews, Western civilisation and fun, but I do.
The organisers of Berlin Pride were among the first to rap the knuckles of us ‘politicisers’. ‘We don’t want this deed to be instrumentalised for political ends’, said a spokesman. ‘People are trying to divide our society and set some people against others’, he said. And Berlin Pride ‘will not allow this’.
These are pathological levels of cognitive dissonance. Not to mention moral arrogance – who is Berlin Pride to tell the rest of us what we are ‘allowed’ to think and say following acts of Islamist slaughter? It’s not public anger over the Islamist scourge that threatens to ‘divide our society’ – it’s the Islamist scourge.
Officialdom’s instinct in the wake of Islamist atrocities is always to tame public opinion. To dampen down the ‘divisive’ rhetoric of right-wingers and plebs who’ve read a few too many angry tabloid editorials. It’s the ‘Don’t look back in anger’ pathology. The sole role of us untrustworthy little people is to lay a flower, shed a tear and then shut the hell up.
It feels as though our moral overlords fear us more than van-ramming, knife-wielding Islamists. Of course they condemn the atrocity, though, strikingly, they’ll only call it ‘extremist’ rather than ‘Islamist’. Well, we wouldn’t want to stir up the ‘Islamophobic’ urgings of the oiks. With eye-swivelling speed, that becomes their key focus: not crushing the Islamist pox but policing the anti-Islamist fury of the public.
We all know what they mean when they say, ‘don’t politicise this tragedy’. They mean don’t raise any awkward questions about the catastrophic failures of integration. Or about Europe’s broken borders, over which thousands of men with regressive beliefs pour every week. Or about the existential incompatibility of certain strains of Islam in societies where Jews enjoy equality, women are free and homosexuality is not a crime.
‘Don’t be divisive’ is a demand for self-censorship masquerading as a plea for social peace. It is the slippery demonisation of people’s entirely legitimatise concerns about Islamic radicalism, and the fact that a not insignificant number of young Muslims sympathise with it.
And ironically, it’s divisive. It seeks to divide the ‘good’ people who have madly made their peace with the Islamist menace from us ‘bad’ people who feel pure, cold rage when our fellow citizens are massacred by homophobic, misogynistic, anti-Semitic brutes.
Everyone with eyes in their head can see that it is only Islamist attacks that are followed by stiff diktats against ‘politicisation’. When it’s a far-right attack, ‘politicisation’ is not only permitted, it is actively encouraged.
We all know that had the homophobic atrocity in Berlin been carried out by a white far-right skinhead, there would not have been one utterance about the dangers of ‘exploitation’. On the contrary, the left would be on the streets, social media would be awash with fury about fascism, and the Berlin Pride people would have been raging rather than coy.
But when the fascist violence is of the Islamic variety, we all have to pipe down. When the Nazi-like intolerance of homosexuality or Jewish freedom comes from a Koran-basher, you must check your anger and watch your words. To ringfence Islamism like this, to implicitly protect it from the righteous anger of commonsense citizens, is worse than stupid – it is suicidal. It emboldens Islamist extremism by weakening the public opposition to it.
I am increasingly of the opinion that we need more division, not less. We need to make clear that there is a chasm-like moral divide in our society. Between freedom-lovers on one side and Islamists and their apologists on the other. Between those who value Western civilisation and others who either hate it or are suicidally cavalier about it. We shouldn’t shy away from these divides.
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