Ten years ago this week, the British MP Jo Cox was murdered. In his post on social media platform X marking the anniversary of that horrifying crime, Keir Starmer writes, in his very first line, that her killer was ‘a far-right terrorist’. Quite reasonably. It is obviously legitimate, indeed important, to identify the worldview motivating acts of political violence.
The problem is that those, like Starmer, who are quickest to invoke ideology in some cases consistently refuse to do so in others. Specifically, when the ideology in question is Islamist in nature.
The problem is that those, like Starmer, who are quickest to invoke ideology in some cases consistently refuse to do so in others
After another MP, Sir David Amess, was murdered by an Islamist fanatic in 2021, Starmer did not describe the killer in the same ideological terms, instead speaking about the ‘poison of extremism’ more broadly.
In another post on the anniversary of Amess’s death he made no reference whatsoever to the worldview motivating the murder. Instead, he stated, in far vaguer terms, that ‘violence and threats to our democracy will never prevail’. Note the difference in the language used: ‘far-right terrorist’ versus generalised, abstract ‘violence’. These are, obviously, deliberate choices.
There has, admittedly, been some change in the past few months, with Starmer and his fellow Labour politicians at long last begrudgingly using terms like ‘Islamist’ and ‘jihadist’ on rare occasions. But this is not some voluntary embrace of honesty. Following the deadly attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester (by a man literally called ‘Jihad’), for instance, Starmer condemned anti-Semitism and terrorism while carefully avoiding any discussion of the attacker’s religious background or the theological factors involved. It was only after mounting criticism, and following a series of high-profile anti-Jewish attacks that made the usual evasions increasingly untenable, that he changed tack.
It’s worth making clear at this point that Starmer is not an outlier here. He exemplifies a broader tendency in elite discourse. Across Britain, and indeed the West more broadly, liberal politicians, journalists and public figures have spent years engaging in the same rhetorical sleight of hand.
When confronted with far-right extremists, they speak with little hesitation about the ideas in question, often seeking to draw wider conclusions about the guilt or complicity of the broader conservative movement. Progressives throw terms like ‘far right’ around with remarkable abandon, and often incorrectly, as a political weapon with which to smear opponents and delegitimise populist-right positions that enjoy a substantial degree of popular support.
When confronted with Islamism, however, the pattern is very different. They obfuscate, deflect, and retreat into vague terminology which leaves the uninformed listener none the wiser as to the nature of the brutality in question.
This habit is widespread. Sadiq Khan routinely warns about the dangers of the ‘far right’. He speaks of ‘far-right violence’, ‘far-right extremism’ and ‘far-right misinformation’. Yet when confronted with attacks carried out in the name of Islam, we suddenly hear about ‘hatred’, ‘extremism’, ‘division’ and ‘radicalisation’; rarely about the specific belief system involved.
In 2019, in the aftermath of a spate of mass casualty jihadist atrocities in Britain, the Labour party released a manifesto that referred to the far right by name but failed to directly mention Islamic extremism.
This is not a distinctively British phenomenon, either.
Following an Isis-inspired attack on a Hanukkah event near Bondi Beach that claimed 15 lives, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was criticised for carefully structuring his remarks to avoid any mention of ‘Muslims’, ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic extremism’, while nevertheless invoking the spectre of ‘right-wing extremist groups’ more than once.
This sort of deflection, obfuscation and selective outrage is not merely cowardly, it amounts to gaslighting on a grand scale. It asks people to accept a partial and misleading characterisation of crimes explicitly directed against the core values and institutions of democratic life.
Jihadism remains, by some distance, the most significant terrorist threat facing Western societies. Yet the underlying motivations behind that violence are, in certain influential quarters, discussed less openly than those of movements that are vastly less deadly.
The result is not greater social cohesion or public trust. It is the opposite. People can observe the double standard for themselves. They can see that some ideologies are named immediately while others are obscured behind layers of euphemism and abstraction. And once people conclude that they are being misled about something so obvious, they inevitably begin to wonder what else they are not being told.
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