A man was arrested on Monday of this week after stabbing a man on a passenger train at Forest Hill station in London. Reports of the incident say that the knife-wielding assailant had shouted ‘Death to Muslims’ and ‘Go back to Syria’ among other things. Some reports suggest that he may have been looking for a male Muslim to stab. As always we’ll learn more about this in the coming days. But in the meantime, here are some things that we are very unlikely to hear.
It is very unlikely that anybody will argue that we should investigate and analyse the foreign policy views of the knife-wielding maniac at Forest Hill. It is unlikely that there will be any deep or sustained consideration of whatever foreign or domestic policy views he might prove to have held. And it is vanishingly unlikely that there will be any serious calls for the British government to change its foreign or domestic policies on the basis of this assault. Any such calls would be treated with justified outrage and contempt.
It is also highly unlikely that in the coming days mainstream figures in politics and the media will condemn the attack and then say ‘But’: that ‘but’ prefacing an agonised defence or justification of some aspect of the assailant’s views. Nobody will talk about ‘context’, ‘root causes’ or ‘legitimate grievances’. There will be no talk of a ‘need to understand’ or anything of that sort. Furthermore, if the assailant turns out (for instance) to be a member of some extreme racist sect which believes in stabbing people it is unlikely that an entire government strategy will be devised to bring extreme racist sects who don’t believe in stabbing people ‘right now’ into the political mainstream, the better to discuss what we might all do to appease the more violent segments of their ideological community.
People who are bemused by the absence of all these things might consider another demonstration of this absent trend. The New Statesman recently ran a piece headlined ‘The right must stop explaining away the crimes of Thomas Mair’. The piece tried to argue that ‘the right’ are ‘explaining away’ the motives of the murderer of Jo Cox. The piece was barely reasoned, let alone argued.
Because, of course, in recent years we have all grown very familiar with what actually constitutes ‘explaining away’ of attacks and murders. It involves people calling such attacks ‘reprisals’ rather than condemning them outright. It involves people saying that beneath the act of violence lies some philosophy or view of life that must be considered, taken on board or listened to. It says that terrible as the bloody deed is the bloody doer had some – as opposed to zero – point. And it involves that crucial factor: a demand to understand the ‘motivating factors’ so that we can better avoid the risk of annoying such people in the future.
Neither in the Forest Hill case nor in the case of Thomas Mair have I heard anyone on ‘the right’ or anywhere else do any such thing. If some people are surprised at that, they really shouldn’t be. Decent people don’t respond to despicable acts with caveats.
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