RUTHFULLY YOURS

The wisdom of the late Norm Macdonald has rarely felt so prescient. ‘What terrifies me’, the Canadian comic once tweeted, ‘is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims.’ It was a perfectly aimed jab at those who fear the public reaction to terrorism more than terrorism itself. At those leftish talking heads and phoney liberals who see people in Manchester, Paris or Brussels being blown limb from limb by radical Islamists and instantly think: ‘Oh no, the Islamophobia is going to be terrible.’ These cowards and fainthearts have been out in force once more following the ISIS knife atrocity in Solingen.

The bodies of the people slain by the Islamist fanatic were barely cold before sections of the media were fretting over how the ‘far right’ might react. It was on Friday evening, at a festival celebrating the 650th anniversary of the founding of the west German city, that a man went on a knifing frenzy. Three people were killed and eight wounded, four seriously. The suspect is a 26-year-old from Syria who, according to German prosecutors, shares the ideology of the Islamic State and was acting on those tyrannical extremist beliefs when he wielded his knife. He arrived in Germany as an asylum seeker in 2022, but although his claim was rejected, the authorities failed to deport him. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the slaughter, describing it as an intentional slaying of European Christians ‘to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere’.

So this was an act of war. A low-level, lone-wolf act of war, but an act of war nonetheless. It was a violent assault not only on the citizens of Solingen but also on Germany itself, and in particular on its Christian heritage. And it was sanctioned by those sworn foes of Western civilisation: the bigoted religious hysterics of ISIS. It ought to be a wake-up call, a reminder that while ISIS may have lost its caliphate, it retains its zealous lust for murdering ‘infidels’. It seems we are ‘seeing the first signs of a new wave of terrorist attacks’, says Peter Neumann of King’s College London. He suspects ISIS is trying to ‘capitalise on the huge mobilisation resulting from Hamas’s terror offensive on 7 October’ and wants to ‘inspire’ its admirers to ‘attack unbelievers’. Shorter version: this is serious.

Will it be treated with the seriousness it deserves? Will the barbarism in Solingen finally give rise to the frank discussion of radical Islam that’s been so sorely lacking in European society these past few years? The signs are not good. Already public grief seems to be giving way to an instinct to ‘move on’. The post-terror script is being followed. Flowers have been laid for the dead, prayer emojis have been posted on social media, and now we can get on with our lives. Germans haven’t quite chanted that craven slogan, ‘Don’t look back in anger’, as some Brits did following the Islamist massacre of 22 pop fans at the Manchester Arena in 2017. But it does feel like there’s a reluctance, in some circles at least, to take a hard look at the Solingen slaughter and the tough questions it raises about the migrant crisis, the failure of integration and the poison of Islamism.

Is it possible the terror-amnesia industry is kicking in already? This is when open discussion of Islamist terror is so ruthlessly discouraged by the elites that acts of Islamist terror end up being forgotten. Who now recalls the Brussels bombings of 2016 in which 32 were massacred? Or the Reading stabbings in England in 2020 in which three gay men were murdered by an extremist Libyan refugee? Or the Barcelona van ramming of 2017 in which 13 were mown down by Islamists on La Ramblas? That occurred just days after the far-right rally in Charlottesville in the US at which a neo-fascist drove a car into a crowd of protesters, killing one young woman. It is telling that the latter fascistic car attack is fresher in the heads of the left than the far bloodier fascistic car attack carried out by ISIS in Barcelona not a week later.

The instinct of the powers-that-be in the aftermath of acts of Islamist barbarism is to tightly police public discussion and even public feeling. There are some emotions you are allowed to feel – shock, sadness – and others you are not: anguish, anger. Veer too far from the list of approved emotions and you might find yourself accused of stirring up ‘Islamophobia’. The Orwellian monitoring of public sentiment suggests the elites fear the thoughts and emotions of their own citizens as much as – if not more than – the violent actions of the adherents to a dangerous foreign ideology. The spectre of the ‘Islamophobic backlash’ that they raise after every Islamist attack is really code for their own dread of public opinion. They see us as a latent mob. They fear our hypothetical violence more than ISIS’s actual violence. ‘Fear yourselves, not the terrorists’, is the unspoken message of their post-terror agonising.

I worry the same will unfold following the slaughter in Solingen. There are already waves of concern across the European media that bad actors will seek to exploit this awful act. This horror ‘risks feeding the narrative of the far right’, says Politico. The Financial Times sounds freaked out that the stabbing has put ‘immigration and Islamist terrorism at the top of the political agenda’ ahead of key regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia in the east of Germany next weekend. Some have ‘seized on the knife attack to hammer home [an] anti-foreigner message’, it frets.

The BBC reports that ‘the attack may fuel an already fraught debate about immigration and asylum in Germany’. Shouldn’t it, though? That a foreign national murdered three people on behalf of a fanatical movement should raise questions, surely, about Germany’s asylum policy and security measures. ‘[The] far right is eyeing gains’, the BBC says, almost as if that is the worst thing that’s happened in Germany this past week. The unhinged dread of the post-terror response was best summed up in a surreal discussion on Sky News, where one of the participants said of the stabbing: ‘When you look at something like this, you just really worry about how it could be used by those on the far right to stir up hatred.’

And there it is: the Norm Macdonald tweet made flesh. The fantasy violence of a post-terror backlash seems to rattle some influencers more than the real-world violence of ISIS itself. The truth is, it is ISIS that has stirred up hatred in Germany. It is ISIS that has visited far-right terror on the good people of that nation. It is nothing short of bizarre that people can witness an act of fascistic violence, carried out with the blessing of one of the most intolerant, bigoted and racist movements on Earth, and think to themselves: ‘Oh no, we might see some fascist action now.’ The fascist action has already taken place. And it is not bigoted to feel angry about it. Those who respond to the supremacist slaughter of men, women and children across Europe by saying ‘Everyone needs to calm down’ terrify me far more than those who respond by asking blunt, probing questions. The latter, at least, are clearly shaken by the Islamists’ violent ripping at their civilisation.

It sometimes feels as though we are sandwiched between two bigotries. The bigotry of radical Islamists who hate us so much that they are willing to stab us to death, and the bigotry of a ruling class that fears us so much that their first instinct after every Islamo-fascist rupture is to tame our emotions and shush our fury. Our societies are attacked, then our sentiments are gagged. A double whammy of elitist contempt, the first violent, the second censorious. We are witnessing the moral decommissioning of the citizens of Europe. Our role is to partake in the post-terror performance of ersatz grief and nothing more. Don’t think, don’t ask, and definitely don’t get angry. The irony is that if anything is likely to anger us, it’s this muzzling of our voices even as our fellow citizens are being murdered by tyrants. Let us speak.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy