Why is the Narrative still in denial about radical Islam? By Brendan O’Neill.
On 11 September 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, there was a mass brawl outside a pub in Marble Arch in London. A bunch of boozed-up members of the English Defence League had a run-in with Muslim youths. It was depicted as typical EDL ugliness. As one eye-witness described it to the Evening Standard, the ‘EDL guys’ were drinking outside the pub ‘when a large group of Muslims walked past’. The EDL thugs ‘started hurling racist abuse at the Muslims, who took offence’. ‘[The Muslims] got angry’, the eye-witness said, ‘and were yelling back’. Things escalated and two EDL members were stabbed.
The media the next day featured images of snarling, fuming EDL blokes. You know the type: fortysomething, with very trimmed haircuts, wouldn’t look out of place in a Danny Dyer documentary. The fascist menace, as they’re so often described. Two people from that fight in 2011 did indeed go on to become murderous neo-fascists. They went on to kidnap people they considered to be their inferiors, put them in cages, gave them ‘dog names’, tortured them, and then conspired in slitting their throats and removing their heads. Only it wasn’t any of the EDL guys. It was two of the Muslim youths they were reportedly hurling abuse at.
It was El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey. They were involved in that EDL-Muslim clash. They were arrested over the stabbing of the EDL members but were later released without charge. A few months after the brawl, in 2012, the pair travelled to Syria to throw their lot in with Islamic extremists. … With fellow Britons Mohammed Emwazi and Aine Davis, formed a notorious hostage-taking cell that came to be nicknamed ‘the ISIS Beatles’. Their depravity was extraordinary. They abused and tortured their captives. They treated them like dogs. They beheaded them on camera. They did this to aid workers and journalists. Their behaviour was ‘egregious, violent and inhumane’, in the words of the American judge who gave a life sentence to Kotey in April this year. …
Last week, El Shafee Elsheikh was given eight life sentences in a US court for hostage-taking and conspiracy to murder. The court decreed that he was central to the slaughter of four American citizens – journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and aid workers Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig. …
It wasn’t the English Defense League that did this to James Foley
So as observers wrung their hands over those EDL thugs in 2011 and in subsequent years, other Britons were travelling halfway round the world to visit their ideological hysteria on innocent souls in the most gruesome way imaginable. It wasn’t the woke elites’ least favourite identity group — angry white men — that produced knife-wielding extremist killers. It was one of their preferred, most-pitied identity groups: young Muslim men. We need to talk about this. …
It is important to note that Elsheikh, Kotey and the other youths who clashed with the EDL in 2011 were not your average British Muslims. They were supporters of an extremist group called Muslims Against Crusades (MAC), an organisation that opposed what it viewed as anti-Islamic military interventions overseas and which called for the imposition of Sharia law in the UK. Indeed, the reason they were out on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 was to protest against America. They burnt the US flag near the American Embassy. The EDL had gathered as a counter-protest to MAC. The vast majority of Muslims in the UK have no truck with the likes of Muslims Against Crusades. It wasn’t ‘Muslim youths’ the EDL clashed with — it was Muslim extremists. …
Our identity-obsessed elites would have looked at that scuffle in 2011 and only seen ‘fascism’ in the gurning faces of the EDL members, not in the anti-democratic, anti-Western cries of the radical Islamists on the other side.
The cowardice of the narrative-people:
There is an abject moral cowardice in the intellectual class’s unwillingness to reckon with the extremism problem. They now actively police discussion on radical Islam to ensure that no one gets too worked up about it.
Consider the report published by the Muslim Council of Britain last year, titled British Media’s Coverage of Muslims and Islam (2018-2020). It expressly problematised … political condemnation of Islamic extremism. … The report … rebuked the Daily Mail for prominently featuring the words of a Yazidi woman who had been enslaved and raped by ISIS members. She said: ‘They called it Islamic law. They raped women, even young girls.’ Apparently such comments, when made into a pull quote in a feature article, come off as anti-Islam. So even the honest recollections of some of the most brutalised women on Earth are problematic if they can be seen as contributing to ‘Islamophobia’. …
Why was it left to hard-right opportunists to stand up to a genuine hate group, two of whose members would go on to inflict extreme ideological terror on scores of people? The silence of the elites scares me far more than the rabble-rousing of a few right-wing fools.
The thunderous silence from the PC crowd continues.
