One looked in vain for the words ‘Islamic extremist’ in the Guardian’s reporting of the Westminster attack a fortnight ago. Even after Isis claimed the attacker, Khalid Masood, as one of its own, the paper declined to accept him as a terrorist motivated by religious extremism. And who knows, maybe it was right. Masood had had a violent past, even before he had converted to Islam. It is still far from clear whether he had been influenced or was controlled by an Islamist group, or whether he was a freelance operative motivated entirely by his own internal anger and frustrations.
But if you are going to take that line and refuse to undertake any speculation into incidents of this kind you ought at least to be consistent. On this, the Guardian fails badly. When news broke at the weekend about the despicable attack on Reker Ahmed, a 17-year-old Kurdish-Iranian asylum-seeker, the paper’s website started to spin a narrative that this was an attack which came about as a result of negative public attitudes towards migration.
‘It is entirely linked to the environment that has been created by the public discourse about people coming to this country from overseas,’ one campaigner was quoted as saying. Another stated: ‘The environment has changed. People with rightwing views think it is OK to insult asylum seekers.’ One person referred to ‘the level of fear and prejudice which is taking hold of parts of British society.’
In other words, it’s all the fault of those patriotic, Brexit-voting, small-minded suburban Britons who are leading the counter-revolution against decent, left-liberal people like us. The comments above are pretty rash claims to make when we as yet know nothing about the motivation for this attack. We know that 16 people have been arrested and 7 charged, but as for their views on migration? We don’t even know if they are migrants, or even asylum-seekers themselves.
It was the same last summer, when Omar Mateen entered a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, swore his allegiance to Isis and then shot dead 49 people. In spite of his self-declaration, the liberal-left refused to accept that this was an Islamist terror attack, with Owen Jones in particular determined to interpret it as a homophobic hate crime caused by continuing negative societal attitudes towards gay people – unwise and somewhat wide of the mark given that it later emerged that Mateen had been a frequent client of the club.
Yet a few days later when Jo Cox was murdered the liberal-left lost no time in blaming it all on the public discourse of Brexiteers during the referendum campaign. ‘The mood is ugly and an MP is dead,’ read the headline to Polly Toynbee’s thoughts on the matter. Toynbee went on to write: ‘There are many decent people involved in the campaign to secure Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, many who respect the referendum as the exercise in democracy that it is. But there are others whose recklessness has been open and shocking.’ In other words, you Brexiteers all have blood on your hands. While Cox’s killer, Thomas Mair, was later revealed to be a white supremacist, he had not expressed views on the EU.
The Guardian, and many others on the liberal-left, can’t have it both ways. If they are going to play down any Islamist connections on terror attacks, on the grounds that it is irresponsible to speculate before the facts are fully-known, they should stop spouting off when faced with an attack they suspect of being motivated by anti-migrant opinion.
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