By Douglas Murray
Well at least we all know the form by now. This morning
Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they
haven’t previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack.
The standard response now goes as follows. First the body
parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or
underground trains. Briefly there is some shock. On social media the
sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity’s cutesy hashtag or
motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the
scene of the attack to sing ‘Imagine there’s no countries’. Meantime
someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can
condemn as ‘inappropriate’. I see that the Telegraph columnist
Allison Pearson was this morning’s Twitter miscreant, foolish enough to
say in the wake of the Brussels attack that the EU might not make us
very safe. One may agree or disagree with this sentiment, but Ms
Pearson should have known that the only acceptable thing to do after a
suicide bomber detonates beside the European Commission is to acclaim
the Commission as one of the few entities able to keep us safe.
We will shortly move to the next phase, which is to find a
good news story amid the rubble. Anything will do, but best of all is a
Muslim good news story. After Paris it was swiftly reported that one
of the suicide bombers at Stade de France had been turned away by a
brave Muslim security guard. The story whizzed around the world before
anyone could check whether it was true. It wasn’t. But people needed
it to be. Not because Muslims don’t do good deeds, but because in the
wake of any Islamist terrorist attack people need people opposed to the
bombers to be Muslim and the bombers themselves not to be Muslim. Then
the good Muslim can represent Islam while the bad Muslims can be said to
have nothing to do with it.
Soon we will move to the next phase, during which
broadcast media will ask questions that address no major points. So in
the UK the government’s Communications Data Bill will get quite a lot of
mentions. We will probably also have another round of the old
discussion about Control Orders versus TPIMs. This will most likely be
first raised by a Labour politician hoping to look tough. Everywhere on
the media people will start to talk of ‘radicalisation’ as though it is
something you can get from the water, and experts will claim insight
into the ‘paths to extremism’. Nicky Morgan will announce that the
Prevent agenda should be extended to encompass pre-kindergarten. A year
later she will close some Quaker-run nursery.
Meanwhile other people will change the subject over to the
question of Belgium’s unacceptably interventionist foreign policy.
Others will get onto Israel-Palestine. At around the same time the
Corbynite-wing of the Labour party will get onto their favourite subject
which is not dead bodies in airports but people who have been looked at
meanly on a bus while wearing a headscarf. By at least tomorrow the
story of a savage ‘backlash’ (consisting mainly of stares and horrible
things written on social media) will be being talked-up by all
mainstream Muslim leaders. By Thursday no one will be talking about the
victims.
Source: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/03/a-terrorist-attack-has-happened-in-europe-let-the-standard-response-begin/
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