We’re shedding idiotic talk about terrorism
The most dramatic event that occurred in Britain this week may or may not have been the “huge bomblike bang” that Ariana Grande concert-goers began to call in to Greater Manchester police at 10:35 p.m. on Monday.
More astonishing is the spontaneous 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 traditions of that great British city, Manchester’s Muslim cab drivers spent the night delivering people to their destinations with their meters off. 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.
The 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.
Around the world, there were heartwarming outpourings of solidarity. These worldwide tributes to the victims of Islamic atrocities in Europe have become commonplace over the past three years. 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.)
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 is taking hold.
At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just an offside Labour MP, joined London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labour Party for dalliances with anti-Semitism) and disgraced former Labour MP George Galloway (a fancier of Bashar Assad and Hezbollah) in blaming the attack on Western foreign policy.
When British soldier Lee Rigby was butchered by jihadists in the street, the famous American fantasist/ documentarian Michael Moore declared Rigby’s slaughter was understandable because Westerners “kill people in other countries.”
This sort of vulgar “analysis” has been largely excised from respectable conversation.
Another stupid point once commonly made whenever some whackjob took to bloody mayhem while citing “Islam” as the excuse: Was he a really a jihad-inflamed terrorist, or was he just mentally unstable? 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.
Another stupidity once considered clever was to point out that more North Americans (or Europeans) die from falling in their bathtubs than by terrorists. It’s probably true. But bathtubs have not happily slaughtered tens of thousands.
The people of Manchester are not unfamiliar with the implications of “radicalization” among young Muslim men. The Muslim leadership in that city has been concerned with jihadist recruitment for some time.
Throughout Europe and North America, we seem to be shedding a lot of sappy platitudes and bigoted hysteria about the problem. Manchester is showing us how.