Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Rise of the atrocity exhibitionists

The fact that a loathing of homosexuals is but one of the many problems of Islam was something he could not accept

Life is speeded up. It used to be that when a hideous atrocity occurred people waited a day or two, even a week, before co-opting it into their political armoury. Now it happens while the smell of cordite is still in the air and before the blood has dried. There is a breathtaking shamelessness about it and a certain narcissism, if not outright solipsism and an eagerness to demand a sort of acquired victim status.

The revolting murders in an Orlando nightclub are a case in point. Some 49 people dead and 53 injured after a Muslim, presumably what we are enjoined to call a radical Muslim, ran amok with a gun. Suddenly infused with a gratifying sense of outrage, the reliably idiotic left-wing columnist Owen Jones had a temper tantrum while reviewing the papers on Sky News — and stormed off the set, apparently because neither the presenter nor the other reviewer, Julia Hartley-Brewer, would accept that the tragedy was all about Owen.

This was an attack upon an LGBT community, Jones insisted — needlessly, as it happens, because everybody had accepted that it was an attack upon an LGBT community and the excellent Hartley-Brewer had made that specific point several times. But none of it was enough for Owen. The only thing that mattered was that it was an attack upon gay people, and so it was a kind of singularity, an atrocity which Owen, being gay, could have to himself. The fact that a loathing of homosexuality is but one of the many problematic facets of Islam — along with misogyny, a contempt for those who are not Muslim, a hatred of Jewish people — was something which Jones could not accept. Presumably because this contradicted his resolutely fixed mindset that Muslims are oppressed people and are therefore as one in the struggle for liberation along with gay and transgendered people.

This epic delusion is shared by many on the adolescent left, despite the Islamic State flinging gays off tall buildings, despite the vile sentences — including the death penalty — handed down to people who are gay in every single Islamic state, despite the imams in mosques across our own country insisting that homosexuality is a grotesque sin against Allah, despite the fact that a majority of British Muslims wish for homosexuality to be criminalised.

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