Oh do put a sock in it, Lily!
When contemplating highly complex and culturally sensitive issues, such as extremism, multiculturalism and how to address the ongoing threat of terrorism, I don’t know about you, but I turn to the wisdom of Lily Allen.
After all, what better qualifications for a career in socio-political commentary could there be than writing songs about the inadequacy of your boyfriend’s foreplay?
This week, Allen — who used to be a passable pop star, but now spends most of her time proving why it’s best not to leave school at 15 and spend most of your formative years drinking, smoking and falling over — tweeted that the real perpetrator of the attack at Finsbury Park mosque was not, in fact, an inadequate drunken loser, but British journalism.
‘ Radicalized by the British media. #FinsburyPark’ she posted, before deleting several tweets.
It wasn’t her first anti-‘meeja’ outburst. earlier, in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, she told Channel 4’s Jon Snow — in her infuriating Mockney accent (which somehow survived her expensive early schooling at, among others, Prince Charles’s old pre-prep hill house, Millfield and Bedales) that the mainstream media was ‘downplaying’ the scale of the tragedy by reporting the number of victims confirmed by police to be only 17.
Word going round, apparently, was that it was more likely to be closer to 150.
Lily, dear, can I just say one thing. I don’t pretend to be a pop star. So how about you don’t pretend to be a journalist?
Of course, everyone knew the death toll would tragically rise. But it would be irresponsible, and cruel to the families involved, to report as fact anything other than the official police figure.
And the truth is that the wicked man who terrorised worshippers at Finsbury Park mosque wasn’t ‘radicalised’. he was just a thick, drunk, racist, ignorant weirdo.
Which is not the same as believing you are fighting a holy war against non-believers.
But that’s not the issue. even if this lunatic turns out to be a paid-up member of the english Defence League, the idea that the mainstream media is to blame is absurd.
Ask yourself this one simple question. Where do these attackers get their ideas from? Where do they find the space and, more importantly, the freedom, to share and disseminate their poison?
The answer is the same in every case: the internet.
Specifically, the misguided online narratives and twisted virtual propaganda that create division, stir up hatred — and give both zealots and vulnerable or troubled individuals excuses to commit terrible atrocities.
That is why we are seeing such an escalation in these types of attacks. Because the internet is what all modern extremism, whether it be right, left, or religiously motivated, feeds off.
Fake news, misinformation, call it what you will. It’s all made-up nonsense dressed up as fact.
SUCH as, for example, the notion doing the rounds a few days ago that Theresa May had Asperger’s syndrome; or the rumour that the police were hiding bodies from the Grenfell fire. Spite, malice and hysteria, presented as news.
Far from being the villain of the piece, the mainstream media is the last bastion of truth and decency in a world dominated by an internet that neither accepts nor cares about moral responsibility; that has no boundaries and no control. And that finds fertile ground in the febrile imaginations of angry people.
Sure, newspapers sometimes get things wrong and, when they do, they must be called to account.
But they don’t encourage their readers to kill non-believers or abuse young children or go out and rape people — things that happen every day on the internet.
If, instead of indulging in mob-pleasing, virtue- snivelling political point-scoring, Lily Allen was to engage her brain for half a second, she might realise this.
But I’m not holding my breath.