Islamism’s useful idiots

There was something palpably different about the reaction to the latest atrocity to befall Britain – yet another attack on Jewish people and another act of terror. The alleged knifing of two men by a Somali-born British national in the north London suburb of Golders Green didn’t generate the usual roll-call of pieties, but a combination of rage and exhaustion instead. A feeling that enough was enough. It was as if a tipping point had been reached.

This sentiment was made evident to viewers of GB News that Wednesday afternoon, many of whom will have seen presenter Martin Daubney struggle to compose himself, welling up conspicuously with sorrow and anger. It showed itself on the front page of the next day’s Jewish News, which bore the headline: ‘Bull$#@# bingo. Jews bleed. Cue the clichés.’ Underneath ran examples of those banalities that have become so familiar over the past 25 years of terror: ‘We must choose unity at times like this’; ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you’. It showed itself in a speech by comedian and presenter Josh Howie in central London last Friday, which concluded: ‘I don’t want to call out Islam because I don’t want to be murdered. I’m scared… but if we don’t call it out, we’re going to be fucking murdered anyway!’

Those words captured the seething fury many have incubated in the past quarter of a century – fury at the repeated failure by too many in the establishment to speak honestly about the threat posed by certain adherents to Islam. They have been ostensibly scared to do so because they live in fear of the faith’s most extreme followers, who love death more than we love life. That much was made clear in America on 9/11 and, not long after, in the UK on 7/7. Yet many have been afraid to speak out for a far less admirable reason: the fear of being labelled a racist, and the fear of losing face as a consequence.

Western societies have failed to talk openly about Islamic extremism chiefly because of this taboo. Particularly since the Great Awokening of 10 years ago, being tarnished as racist has been our era’s gravest indictment. Now, when race is involved, people opt to obfuscate and lie.

If Britain’s Muslim population were mostly white, people would have never invented excuses for Islamist terrorism, there would have been no cover-ups of the rape gangs in the north of England, no ‘official definitions’ of ‘Islamophobia’, or attempts to introduce blasphemy laws. Secular white leftists would have been consistent in their atheism, just as the late Christopher Hitchens was.

Moreover, the anti-terror body Prevent wouldn’t have wasted everyone’s time by pretending ‘far-right extremists’ posed just as big a problem as jihadists. Liberals wouldn’t have sought to deflect a tricky issue by arguing that people who hoist St George’s flags are ‘just as bad’ as the people who, since September 2001, have killed untold numbers of people in the name of a religion – no matter how warped or misguided that interpretation may be.

You never hear the likes of Trevor Phillips, Matthew Syed or Katharine Birbalsingh making mealy mouthed apologies for Islamic extremism. That’s because this process of appeasement has been largely at the behest of white liberals, whose priority is to preserve their reputation among their peers. They are obsessed with both race and their self-standing.

Hence why this set largely stayed silent after last week’s atrocity, and did the same after all previous attacks on Jews, too. Jews don’t merit their sympathy because they are ‘white’. And in the imagination of guilt-laden progressives, white people are always the oppressors. Meanwhile, everyone who is not white is a victim of white Westerners’ appalling behaviour, past and present.

In turn, that’s always been radical Islam’s winning strategy: playing the self-pitying, self-righteous victim card. That way, it can rest assured it will never be denounced or challenged by this country’s self-regarding, cowardly useful idiots.

The childish folly of a borderless world

A good number of well-meaning left-liberals and progressives are not merely spineless – they are also infantile.

This point is illustrated by a recent report that children are being fed pro-migration messages through picture books. Said books feature illustrated animals packed into small boats and teaching infants that ‘everybody’s welcome’. These and other anthropomorphic yarns exhort youngsters to reject the notion that a place can be too crowded, and instead adopt the attitude that ‘there’s plenty of room, come on in’.

The appearance of these books is unsurprising. More than 1,100 schools and nurseries are currently signed up to the City of Sanctuary programme, which promotes an open-borders ideology. Fanatics prey on impressionable minds in order to further their cause, and ideologues have always exploited children this way.

It is fitting, too, because ultra-progressives are possessed of a worldview that is itself childish. They hold to the naive and dangerous belief that human beings are essentially benevolent, and that the world would be perfect if only everyone were ‘nice’ to each other. It’s appropriate that those with babyish, ‘hope not hate’, ‘be kind’ politics should choose the classroom as a place to disseminate them.

An absurd adaptation

As a fan of Albert Camus, I felt obliged to watch François Ozon’s The Stranger, the latest film version of his 1942 classic novel, L’Étranger, currently in UK cinemas. I did this with the full knowledge that such cinematic adaptations are rarely superior to the books that inspired them.

This effort is acceptable enough. Benjamin Voisin, playing the doomed protagonist Meursault, conveys a sufficient amount of impassivity and ennui, before dutifully exploding with rage at the prison chaplain’s patronising bromides about a supposed afterlife in the story’s glorious conclusion. And yet, the film has two major drawbacks. Firstly, Meursault’s inner dialogue is almost entirely absent. This is what makes the novel, told in the first person, so entrancing. While he is a listless and apathetic type, Meursault isn’t actually unhappy – he is merely empty and detached.

Secondly, the film gives the Arab victim shot by Meursault, known simply as ‘the Arab’ in the novel, a name – which misses the whole point. Meursault lived in colonial Algeria, where the name of this Arab or any other likely did not matter in the eyes of the French settlers. It certainly didn’t concern those in attendance at Meursault’s trial.

The film spoils matters further by seeking to atone for Meursault’s crime, concluding on a preachy note of redemption. The purists, I’m sure, will feel cheated.

Patrick West is a columnist for spiked and author of Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas, 2017). Follow him on X: @patrickxwest.