The Silence of the Anti-Fascists

The 'anti-fascists' will not speak out against M. Paty's murder because they see the Islamist jihadis as allies in their struggle to destroy Western Civilisation!

From Sp¡ked

By Brendan O’Neill

Where is the outrage over the medieval murder of Samuel Paty?

Anti-fascists are incredibly quiet about the fascist in France who cut off a man’s head because he displayed some cartoons in a classroom. It is two days since the gruesome Islamist murder of schoolteacher Samuel Paty for the supposed crime of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his pupils during a classroom discussion about freedom of speech. And yet the self-styled anti-fascists of the European and American left have said barely a word. There have been no big protests outside of France, no angry rallies, no Twitterstorms, no knee-taking or fist-raising, no promises by ‘Antifa’ to face down these extremists who slaughter schoolteachers for talking about liberty. Their craven, cowardly silence is as revealing as it is depressing.

After every Islamist terror attack, we hear the same thing from significant sections of the Western left, including those who style themselves as anti-fascist. Their first concern is always, but always, that an Islamist terror attack might give rise to an ‘Islamophobic’ backlash. We have to be careful about how we talk about Islamist terrorism, they say, or we might help to make Muslim communities into targets for racist violence. This is such a morally warped response to the extremist violence of radical Islamists. Imagine if, following an act of far-right violence carried out by a white man, someone said ‘Let’s not get too angry about this because we might alienate white people and put them at risk’. Imagine if, in the wake of the terrorist attacks by Anders Breivik in Norway or Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, people’s first response was to wonder if white people would be okay, if white men were feeling safe. That is how crazy leftists sound when their Pavlovian response to the mass murder of children in Manchester or the slaughter of Bastille Day celebrants in Nice or the mowing down of Christmas shoppers in Berlin is to say: ‘I hope Muslims will be okay.’

Their instinct is always to hush and chill discussion of radical Islam. They have developed numerous strategies for doing this. The first, as described above, is to imply that there could be violence against Muslims if we get too angry or heated about an Islamist attack – a form of moral blackmail designed to stymie frank discussion of Islamist violence. Another is to promiscuously deploy the insult of ‘Islamophobe’ against anybody who raises awkward questions about the frequency and bloodiness of Islamist attacks in Europe, or who even uses that i-word at all (Islamist) to describe these acts of violence.

Indeed, in mainstream institutions there have been efforts to expunge words like ‘Islamist’ from the discussion about Islamist terrorism. Police forces in the UK have seriously considered replacing terms like ‘Islamist terrorism’ and ‘jihadis’ with ‘faith-claimed terrorism’ and ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’. This warped impulse to deny that these acts are motivated by Islamism is designed to disorientate the public response to terrorism and ensure there is no deep or focused discussion about its causes and ideologies. The left continually parrot this institutionalised cowardice by obsessively policing the language that people use and the emotions we express in the wake of Islamist attacks. ‘Don’t say “Islamic violence” because this has nothing to do with Islam’, they say. And of course, ‘Don’t look back in anger’. Cry, change your social-media picture for a week or two, and then move on. Nothing to see here.

This spineless unwillingness to be honest about the ideological motivation behind Islamist violence, or to confront the fact that it has become an increasingly widespread form of violence that has caused the deaths of hundreds of people in Europe in recent years, has been on full display following the beheading of Samuel Paty. Consider the response of the National Education Union in the UK. When George Floyd was killed by cops in Minneapolis, the NEU issued a strongly worded, highly political statement, condemning ‘the systemic racism that caused his killing’. But in response to the murder of Paty, a teacher, the NEU put out a lame, half-hearted tweet which said this is a ‘sad day’ for France. No mention of Paty’s name, no mention of what was done to him, no mention of why it was done to him – because he was teaching his pupils to think critically. No, just a perfunctory, probably begrudged tweet essentially saying the killing was a bit sad. This sums up the moral cowardice of sections of the left when it comes to Islamist violence. They just don’t want to talk about it. They want things to be forgotten as quickly as possible.