The ‘intifada’ comes to New Orleans

‘Bring the intifada home!’, cried Ivy League radicals throughout 2024. Well, here it is. On the bloodstained, wreckage-strewn streets of New Orleans. In the shattered limbs of the injured, the extinguished promise of the dead. The very Islamist violence that the West’s woke influencers have been making excuses for, have been glorifying as ‘resistance’, have openly praised from the safety of their leafy campuses, has now struck at the heart of America’s own Big Easy. Is this what you wanted?

The atrocity on Bourbon Street on New Year’s morning would have been horrifying in any era. Fifteen dead, scores injured. All mown down or shot, allegedly by Shamsud-Din Jabbar. He is the 42-year-old US army vet who is suspected of ploughing his pick-up truck through hordes of joyful revellers in the French Quarter just three hours into the new year. He had guns, and improvised explosive devices, and the black flag of ISIS. This has all the hallmarks of an act of Islamist barbarism, visited without mercy on those that Islamists hate above all others: young, carefree Westerners who have the sinful temerity to drink, dance and love life.

The list of the dead reads like a roll-call of those good, everyday Americans who make that great republic tick. Kimberly Usher Fall, the 27-year-old manager of a deli store and mother of a four-year-old boy. Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, an 18-year-old aspiring nurse. Reggie Hunter, 37, a store manager and dad of two. Matthew Tenedorio, a 25-year-old audio-visual technician. Martin ‘Tiger’ Bech, a former football player at Princeton. Here we had the workers, carers and students of the United States butchered by a man who had allegedly committed the most heinous treason of swearing allegiance to the death cult of ISIS. The horror on Bourbon Street is a reminder of the indiscriminate savagery of the Islamist ideology: to these fanatics, every inhabitant of the ungodly West – man, woman and child – is a legitimate target.

Yet in our era, the massacre in the Big Easy hits even harder, it hurts even more. For ours is an epoch of excuse-making for Islamist violence. Ours is a time in which the activist class, the educated, the influential and the supposedly ‘progressive’ issue craven apologias for precisely the kind of ideological sadism that was inflicted on the merrymakers of New Orleans. They’re on record calling such mass murder ‘resistance’. They’ve hailed its practitioners as ‘martyrs’. They’ve celebrated the blow that these religious hysterics sometimes land on ‘evil’, ‘imperial’ nations. What will they say now, as New Orleans reels from what they falsely and madly swoon over as ‘resistance’?

The New Orleans massacre follows more than a year of noisy Islamo-apologism in educated circles in the West. Since Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October 2023, sympathy for Islamism has been all the rage among the right-on. ‘Long live the intifada’, they cried. Even ‘Globalise the intifada’. This gushing over ‘intifada’ in the weeks and months following an ‘intifada’ that involved the slaughter of more than a thousand Jews by an army of fanatical Islamists dragged us to ever greater depths of ethical delirium and moral depravity. Some even hailed the Islamist butchery of 7 October as ‘exhilarating’ and ‘energising’. Imagine if someone said that about New Orleans. Imagine if they said they felt elated upon hearing of this barbarous slaying of the young. Perhaps someone will. It is a testament to the slow, deadly corrosion of our civilisational values that it would not be wholly surprising if someone did.

For the truth is that something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale, and back then the activist class celebrated it. The 364 young men and women butchered at the Nova music festival by the invading Islamists from Gaza were every bit as innocent as the slain of Bourbon Street. They were every bit as ‘full of life’. Yet their extermination was downplayed. In some cases it was outright cheered. That Islamist assault was a ‘day of celebration’, some said. ‘Glory to our martyrs’, said student agitators days after those ‘martyrs’ raped and murdered hundreds of revellers who were indistinguishable, in their spirit and their liberty, from the revellers of New Orleans.

The case was made, whether implicitly or explicitly, that the Nova partygoers weren’t all that innocent. They were citizens of a ‘settler-colonial’ regime. They were inhabitants of the ‘Zionist entity’. They had the gall to live free, untroubled lives in a ‘genocidal state’. If it turns out that the butcher of Bourbon Street thought similarly – that no one in America is truly innocent because America commits ‘war crimes’ and sponsors Israel’s ‘genocide’ – what will we say? What can we say? After all, our elites have fully embraced the poisonous ideology of collective guilt and punishment, where if you live in a state that does ‘bad’ things, then you have no right to be surprised if Islamist vengeance comes your way.

No, this is not to say the suspect in the New Year’s Day massacre was directly inspired by the past year’s depraved cries of ‘Bring the intifada home’. The bored rich kids of the West who unforgivably made light of the Islamist slaughter in Israel are not responsible for what that man allegedly did. But we do need to talk about the creepy empathy for the Islamist ideology that has spread like a pox through our institutions. For years, the West failed to take seriously the threat posed by the Islamist menace. Even as hundreds were massacred by Islamists in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, we said ‘Don’t look back in anger’, don’t get too het up, don’t say or do anything that might stir up ‘Islamophobia’. Over the past year, this lethal insouciance in the face of the Islamist derangement morphed into something even worse: active sympathy for Islamism. They call it ‘intifada’ but we all know what they mean: the killing of citizens by Islamist ideologues with a grievance. Like what happened on Bourbon Street.

The attack on New Orleans was an attack on America itself. On its young, its workers, its openness, its freedoms. We should mourn the victims and then confront, head-on, the unsettling rapport with such neo-fascism that has bubbled up in our very own societies in recent years.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy