We live in a time of universal deceit. The media lie. The government lie. The public service lie. Academics lie. We are bombarded, day and night, by a constant litany of lies.
Such a state is clearly not conducive to a well-functioning society. Which may well be the point: as Theodore Dalrymple has written of Soviet propaganda, the whole point was not that anyone actually believed the lies, but that they went along with them. “A society of emasculated liars,” Dalrymple says. “Is easy to control.”
But the miasma of lies in which we swim is not just poisonous to the soul of our society, it’s literally killing and brutalising our children.
I’m not just talking about the lie of “transgenderism”, that women have penises and men get pregnant, but the lies of “racism” and “dangerous extremism”.
It’s not that racism doesn’t exist: the lie is that it’s “systemic” in the West, and that it’s racist to notice the bad behaviour of certain groups.
It’s also not that dangerous extremism doesn’t exist: the lie is who and what the biggest and clearest threat is.
Dame Sara Khan, the social cohesion tsar, last week warned that efforts to tackle Islamist extremism are being hampered by ‘political correctness’. The fear of being called a racist, she explained, is hampering our ability to avert deadly extremism.
Khan is of course right, as anyone who has followed Britain’s numerous terror attacks will have heard. Remember the Manchester Arena bombing and the security guard who spotted the Salman Abedi behaving suspiciously with his rucksack? Kyle Lawler, then aged just 18, claimed that if he had confronted Abedi, his career might have been ruined by an accusation of racism.
Yet, but for one “racist” stop-and-search, 23 little girls might still be alive. A thousand more might still have all their arms and legs, and their minds unscarred by blood and terror.
But for police, politicians and social workers terrified of being accused of “racism”, tens of thousands of white and Sikh British girls might have been spared industrial-scale, systematic rape at the hands of gangs of Pakistani-British Muslims.
Yet, no-one wants to talk about Islamic extremism. Instead, we are told, the “real threat” is “right-wing extremism”. Yet, apart from a bare handful of right-wing white extremists scattered around the world and across a decade or more, whom in contrast to Islamic terror the media simply cannot stop talking about, the terror score-sheet is notably stacked in favour of one group of extremists. And it’s not the right-wingers.
Khan herself has given the example of an unnamed local authority in which councillors were ‘very comfortable’ talking about the far-right but altogether more coy when it came to the Islamist threat – which, regardless of what some media outlets might have you believe, is still by far the greater danger to Britain’s streets.
And it isn’t just local government that’s the problem. Hannah Stuart, a terrorism expert who previously worked at the independent Commission for Countering Extremism alongside Dame Sara Khan, has spoken of how common it was to sit through hours-long meetings with government departments only for Islamist extremism to be studiously avoided. She has said how during these meetings, civil servants seemed ‘very wary of talking about Islamism and very wary of being called racist’.
Police are so terrified of the terror which apparently dare not speak its name that they are resorting to ever-more ridiculous circumlocutions. “Faith-claimed attack”, for instance. Which faith? The Mormons? Sikhs?
Academics are even worse. Of course.
A colleague recently tried recruiting a graduate analyst to work on Islamist extremism and terrorism. He couldn’t find a single researcher. All of the applicants – perfectly polite and eloquent – spoke of their interest in studying the far-right, incels, or in studying video gaming and extremism. In other words, in studying anything but Islamist extremism […]
Even at the very top, the response to Sir David Amess’s murder quickly descended into a debate about online trolling. The reality was clear, if uncomfortable. During the trial of Ali Harbi Ali, who was later jailed for life for the attack, the jury heard that the killer had written that he was motivated by ‘revenge for the blood of Muslims’.
Spectator Australia
Jacinda Ardern’s hand-picked Grand Inquisitor for her Ministry of Truth, Professor Joanna Kidman comes to mind.
Still, in some ways, you can’t blame these academic poltroons for their cowardly shying away from speaking truth to Islamic terror. At the very least, they’ll be drummed out of their profession and forced into hiding. At worst, they’ll end up like Samuel Paty, the French teacher beheaded by Islamic fanatics.
