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Will We Ever Get Angry about Jihadism?

Terrorism is distinguished by the particular heinousness of its acts. Picture: REUTERS/Eric Gaillard.

In the US, a father whose daughter was raped by a “transgender” fellow student, is cuffed and bloodied after confronting school officials who covered up the crime. In Germany, holocaust survivors bring a former SS officer to tears, telling him that they “cannot forgive him”. In Israel, survivors shouted their condemnation of other Nazis brought to trial.

And in France, at the trial for one of the worst terror attacks in French history?

The sister of the only Briton killed in the Bataclan terror attack has told those accused of the atrocity that while she and other victims’ families “deplore what you did, we don’t hate you”.

The Bataclan massacre was a monstrosity beyond its mere numbers: victims’ bodies were beheaded, eviscerated, had their eyes gouged out and their genitals sliced up. The men who committed such crimes are monsters on a par with the beasts who oversaw the death camps.

And how does the West respond to the never-ending enormities of Islamic terrorism? With orgies of schmaltz, hand-wringing and terrified fretting that people might get angry about it.

Testifying on the 33rd day of the biggest trial in modern French history, [Nick Alexander’s] sister Zoe said Alexander eschewed hatred, saying: “You cannot neutralise poison with more poison.”

In remarks addressed to the sole surviving member of the 10-man ISIS cell that carried out the attacks, Salah Abdeslam, and his co-accused, the 48-year-old Briton said: “I don’t expect to hear remorse, but hope something you hear here will resonate with your conscience” […]

“We’re not at war with you, you’re at war with yourselves,” Ms Alexander told the defendants.

The Australian

The piles of bodies on the floor of the Bataclan theatre might beg to differ. As the saying goes, Ms. Alexander might not be interested in war with jihadis, but jihadis are very much interested in war with her. They proved it by murdering her brother, and 129 others, and mutilating their corpses.

Now, of course, it is not up to any one of us to dictate how anyone else should grieve the murder of a family member, but, collectively, we must ask: what will it ever take to rouse the West to righteous anger?

Every time the jihadis commit an atrocity, the collective response is to trot out the hideous schmaltz of “Imagine”, pile up flowers and teddy bears, and scourge ourselves about an “anti-Muslim backlash” that never actually happens. Not even the deliberate murder of little girls at a pop concert or the industrial-scale rape of non-Muslim girls is allowed to make anyone angry. British comedian Jason Manford was suspended by the overlords of social media for getting angry about the Bataclan attack.

On the other side of the coin, not even the enormity of the Christchurch massacre inspired more than a flurry of hugs and hijab-wearing.

Sure, you might argue that we fought a (disastrous, hopeless, failed) “War on Terror”, but even during that, the West nearly gave itself a hernia trying not to “offend” the ideologists behind the jihadi terror.

Horrifying scenes like this helped turn the tide of public opinion against the IRA. It appears that nothing is shocking enough to penetrate the cloud of willful denial about Islamic terrorism.

It wasn’t always this way: when the IRA murdered four soldiers and seven horses in Hyde Park, and six bandsmen in Regents Park, public reaction was visceral. Margaret Thatcher reviled the “evil, brutal men”. Irish prime minister Charles Haughey called them “inhuman crimes”. No-one fretted about a “backlash” against the IRA.

Forty years earlier, when those brave, magnificent young men stormed the beaches of Normandy, they weren’t about to apologise to their enemies. Be certain that they hated the Nazis with all their guts.

But, then, that was back when the West actually won wars against murderous, totalitarian ideologies.

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