The West is finally stripping terrorism of political spin

Manchester is showing us how to shed idiotic post-attack analysis

The most dramatic event that occurred in Britain this week may or may not have been the “huge bomb-like bang” that Ariana Grande concertgoers began to call in to Greater Manchester Police at 10:35 p.m. on Monday night, with eyewitness reports of dead and dismembered teenagers strewn around the foyer of the Manchester Arena.

It may or may not have been even the most important thing that happened in Manchester.

Far and away more astonishing than yet another European eruption of bloody jihadist fascism — which all the evidence suggests was the “motive” behind the atrocity — the thing that should be holding our attention was the spontaneous and yet somehow brilliantly organized mass mobilization of ordinary people in the simple duties of defiant, selfless decency.

That, and a tectonic shift in the way the “debates” around terrorism have lately evolved.

In the best, hard-headed and big-hearted traditions of that great British city, Manchester’s Muslim cab drivers spent the night delivering people to their destinations without their meters on. The Sikhs opened their gurdwaras and langars to the stranded and the hungry. The blood donation centre was turning people away by Tuesday morning. Imams and Muslim youth groups from throughout Britain streamed into the city to gather with the thousands of “old stock” Mancunians for a vigil at Albert Square.

The full-throated consensus was that the people of Manchester will not be badgered into outbursts of Muslim-baiting.

They will not go at one another’s throats. They will grieve together, and rejoice in their freedom together.

Said Eddy Newman, the Lord Mayor of Manchester: “We will defy the terrorists by working together to create cohesive, diverse communities that are stronger together. We are the many, they are the few.”

Around the world, there were heartwarming outpourings of solidarity. The lights were turned out on the Calgary Tower, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower. Tel Aviv City Hall was illuminated in the colours of the Union Jack. So was the 850-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

These kinds of worldwide tributes to the victims of Islamic atrocities in Europe have become commonplace over the past three years: Brussels, Paris, Stockholm, Nice, Berlin, Copenhagen and so on. But this time around, something is different.

It may be because of the gathering pace of mass murders committed beyond what jihadists call dar al-Islam (the abode of Islam) and well within the “West,” the region jihadists call dar al-harb (the abode of war). The expansion of jihadist terror occurred nearly three years ago, when the al-Qaida mutation known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant “crossed some kind of Rubicon,” in the words of the Brookings Institution’s William McCants, author of The ISIS Apocalypse.

In the NATO capitals, something has finally shifted in the way Islamist terror is understood. It is as though the public tolerance for claptrap and prevarication of both the leftish and rightist type has at last been reached, and a new consensus, of the kind expressed so beautifully by Mancunians this week — Muslim and otherwise — is beginning to take hold.

Monday night’s slaughter of 22 innocents was carried out by a deranged college-dropout suicide bomber who was known around Manchester’s Didsbury Mosque as a bit of a crank. In recent months, he had developed the habit of praying loudly and obnoxiously in the streets of his Whalley Range neighbourhood. It was the worst terrorist attack in Britain since the July 7, 2005 suicide bombings that took the lives of 56 Londoners.

At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labour party for his dalliances with antiSemitism) and the disgraced former Labour MP George Galloway (a fancier of Syrian genocidaire Bashar Assad and a Hezbollah enthusiast) in blaming the London attack on western foreign policy.

Corbyn is now the leader of a bitterly divided and vastly diminished Labour party that is expected to be trounced by Prime Minister Theresa May in the June 8 parliamentary elections. You won’t hear Corbyn blaming the wicked former U.S. president George W. Bush for Monday night’s outrage in Manchester. It would be suicidal. Things have changed.

The Manchester massacre occurred four years to the day after Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was butchered by “lone wolf” jihadists in the streets of Woolwich. Rigby’s throat was opened with a crude knife and he was nearly decapitated with a meat cleaver. As recently as 2013, it was still fashionable to utter imbecilities lightening such murderers’ burden of guilt by resort to the “blowback” defence.

At the time, the famous American fantasist/documentarian Michael Moore declared that Rigby’s slaughter was understandable, because westerners “kill people in other countries.”

This sort of vulgar “analysis” has been largely excised from respectable conversation and appears now to be confined to the sewers of public debate, where it belongs. On Tuesday, the Kremlin propaganda channel RT News found some “experts” who took up the line. So did the viciously homophobic and anti-Semitic British Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is about as popular among British Muslims as Galloway is among Britain’s Labour party MPs.

Another stupid point that was once commonly made whenever some whackjob went off the deep end and took to bloody mayhem while citing “Islam” as the excuse: Was he a really a jihadinflamed terrorist, or was he just mentally unstable? Weird as it now seems, as recently as October 2014, New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair considered this a relevant question in the case of ISIL fanboy Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who murdered Cpl. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial and then stormed Parliament Hill before being shot dead.

Mulcair objected to the tragedy being described as an act of terrorism, owing to evidence for ZehalfBibeau’s mental illness — as if death-cult blood lust and insanity were two different, mutually-exclusive things. At the time, American celebrity leftist Glenn Greenwald categorized Zehalf-Bibeau’s rampage as — you guessed it — blowback, owing to Canada “wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others.”

You’re not likely to hear this kind of idiotic masochism being flaunted in the matter of Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old mass murderer who police say killed those kids in Manchester.

Another stupidity that was once considered a clever response to jihadist terror in “dar al-harb” was to point out that more North Americans (or Europeans) die from falling in their bathtubs than are killed by terrorists. It’s probably true. But bathtubs have not happily slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Muslims in recent years, and bathtubs have not deliberately murdered more than 400 people in horrific attacks in Europe since 2015.

The scores of hideous mass murder plots successfully foiled by European authorities over the past two years were not being plotted by bathtubs. Britain’s MI5 is currently monitoring 3,000 extremely dangerous jihad hobbyists. French intelligence agencies are trying to keep tabs on about 15,000.

The people of Manchester are not unfamiliar with the horrible implications of “radicalization” among young Muslim men. The Muslim leadership in that city has been acutely concerned with the implications of jihadist recruitment and grooming for some long while.

Throughout Europe and North America, we seem to be finally shedding a lot of sappy platitudes and bigoted hysteria about the problem. Manchester is showing us how it’s done.

Long live Manchester.