RUTHFULLY YOURS

In The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, radical evil is described in the following fashion:

By the way, a Bulgarian . . . told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria[.] They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them all – all sorts of things you can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel.

These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.

Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk, points a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby’s face and blows out its brains.

The above passage was used in a 1980 essay by Kenneth R. Seeskin titled “The Reality of Radical Evil,” wherein he describes the actions of the Nazis against the Jews during the Holocaust.

Seeskin maintains that such evil describes “the actions of someone who understands only too well what human dignity is and takes pleasure in mocking it.” In fact, “he has chosen to profane the tenderest and most sacred of living creatures and to do so in a manner destined to show the victim and everyone else that he is fully aware of the horror in what he is doing.”

Seeskin makes a distinction between those murderers with a conscience and those who do not possess one. He maintains that this describes the “essence of radical evil. It both denies God and puts something awful in His place. In theological terms, it is really a form of idolatry – only not the kind which is satisfied with pagan gods or graven images. The person who attempts to exterminate a whole people does not just succumb to evil, he worships it.”

As with the Holocaust, Islamic jihadist evil is a “nihilistic, demonic celebration of death.” Consider the word celebration. In the Muslim world, when the infidel is slaughtered, “they hand out sweets in jubilation” as the murderers are praised, and the families of the evildoers are paid for the evil perpetuated.

Unfortunately, despite philosophers’ and religious leaders’ attempts to explain the evil, “morality has nothing to say to those who appear to choose evil purely for its own sake, nor reason to those who insist on knowing why such choices are made.”

But there certainly is a common thread that describes such evil. It “unites cruelty, desecration, humiliation, and every other form of depravity. Where God creates what has dignity or lasting significance, [evil doers] seek to reduce it to nothing. Human beings, sacred articles, transcendent ideals – all are turned to waste.” Consider the destruction by ISIS of artifacts dating back thousands of years.

Furthermore, “[a]s Joseph Contrad once said: ‘[t]he belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary, [as] men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.'”

As many so-called pundits and politicians attempt to mitigate the evil by equivocation and mouthing absurdities, it is important to recall “that when evil is so foul that its full horror defies description, the categories of more or less and of better or worse no longer apply.”

French President Emmanuel Macron can only be described as close to the business world if one understands how things work in France. The French economy is a mixed system where it is almost impossible to succeed financially without having close relations with political leaders who can grant favors and subsidies, and either authorize, prohibit or facilitate contracts or hinder them. Macron is not supposed to bring any new impetus to business, but to ensure and consolidate the power of those who placed him where he is.
A deliberate side-effect of Macron’s policies will be population change. Macron wants Islam to have more room in France. Like many European leaders, Emmanuel Macron seems convinced that the remedy for the demographic deficit and the aging of ethnic European populations is more immigration.
The French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood published an official communiqué, saying: “Muslims think that the new President of the Republic will allow the reconciliation of France with itself and will allow us to go farther, together.”

Emmanuel Macron — whose victory in the French presidential election on May 7, 2017 was declared decisive — was presented as a centrist, a newcomer in politics with strong ties to the business world, and a man who could bring a new impetus to a stagnant country.

The reality, however, is quite different.

His victory was actually not “decisive”. Although he received a high percentage of the votes cast (66%), the number of voters who cast a blank ballot or decided to abstain was the highest ever in a French presidential election.

Although his opponent, Marine Le Pen, tried to dissociate herself from the anti-Semitism of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, she was treated as a walking horror by almost all politicians and journalists during the entire campaign. That she nevertheless drew 34% of the votes was a sign of the depth of the anger and frustration that has been engulfing the French people. More than half of those who chose Macron were apparently voting against Marine Le Pen, rather than for Macron.

Macron, who won by default, suffers from a deep lack of legitimacy. He was elected because he was the last man standing, and because the moderate right’s candidate, François Fillon, was sabotaged by a demolition operation carried out by the media and by a political use of justice. Significantly, the legal prosecution of Fillon stopped immediately after he was defeated.

Macron is not a centrist: he was discreetly supported throughout the campaign by most of the Socialist Party’s leaders and by the outgoing Socialist President, François Hollande. The day after the election, during a V-E Day ceremony, Hollande could not hide his joy. A few days later, on May 14, when he handed the office of the president over to Macron, Hollande said that what was happening was not an “alternative” but a “continuity”. All Macron’s team-members were socialists or leftists. Macron’s leading political strategist, Ismael Emelien, had worked for the campaign that led to the election of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Macron’s entire program is socialist. Proposals for additional public expenditures abound. “Climate change” is defined as “the key issue for the future of the world”. The proposed changes to the Labor Code and the tax system are largely cosmetic and seem intended more to give an illusion of change than to bring about real change. While Macron does not reject a market economy, he thinks that it must be placed at the service of “social justice”, and that the government’s role is to “guide”, to “protect”, “to help” — not to guarantee freedom to choose. Significantly, the economists who participated in the elaboration of Macron’s program are those who had drawn up Hollande’s economic program in 2012.

Attempting to upstage President Trump as he travels in Europe, President Obama made an appearance in Germany at the Brandenberg Gate for a rock star welcome. He also appeared with Chancellor Angela Merkel, in a bid to boost her campaign.

Seeking to help Merkel get re-elected (a woman he spied on to much brouhaha at the time, but this is politics), it’s clear that Obama’s new game out of office is to have a cadre of like-minded world leaders to obstruct President Trump as he seeks to work with Europe. (So much for returning to his community organizer roots and helping the black youth or watching Sasha graduate). Obama laid out and advocated the full Eurotrashian platform parade of leftist tax-spend-appease-and-open the borders positions at his events, and the German crowds went wild, quite likely in a way they never would with Merkel alone. Not having had to live with the effects of Obama’s low-growth economy, his corruption of the agencies, or the nightmare of Obamacare up close and personal, the man was easy to cheer.

‘We can’t isolate ourselves. We can’t hide behind a wall,’ he said, to cheers from the audience.

Merkel, who has taken political heat for her open door policy on refugees, including from Trump who called it a ‘catastrophic mistake,’ got reassurance from Obama.

‘In the eyes of God, a child on the other side of the border is no less worthy of love and compassion than my own child,’ Obama said. ‘You can’t distinguish between them in terms of their worth or inherent dignity.’

Here’s the irony of all that scolding about walls, and Obama’s sudden newfound interest in God as a political ally:

Police helicopters patrolled the skies and snipers with balaclavas watched the scene from nearby rooftops.

Get that? Cause. Effect. Obama was surrounded by de facto SWAT teams. Looking for terrorists, rioters and assassins. All of these elements are linked to Germany’s open door on immigration and its failure to assimilate immigrants so that even their offspring have become human bombs, desperate to go from zero to hero as they listen to radical imams, get drunk on Internet chat boards, and join Islamist terrorist groups. The rabid left, of course, helps out with the riots.

Instead of a world of safety for everyone which is the democratic effect of walls keeping out Islamic terrorists, what’s seen here, with the balaclava crowd and the highly trained rooftop snipers keeping guard, is the logical result of Obama’s and Merkel’ open door policy. Walls for elites, zero walls for people. And don’t think this isn’t just what Obama wants. In Obama’s case, he’s knowingly let in MS-13 members to wreak havoc on Long Island and in the skeevier parts of Los Angeles County. Let the little people take the murders. The elites get SWAT team cordons. Who knows how many ISIS members have been let in by Obama’s policy as well? We know Merkel has let them in.

The SWAT teams are evidence of Obama’s howlings about walls: a new normal of constant terrorist vigilance, of a casual willingness to accept losses among the citizenry, even as world leaders merit the finest in protective cordons. The elites get security cordons. The people have to sit there and take it, as leaders like Merkel and Obama virtue-signal about the superiority of having no walls, and the wickedness of building any. They don’t care about miscreants and killers getting in. There are too many political goodies in them. They want votes, Social Security dollars and bureaucrat employment opportunities, particularly in the social welfare sector. Open walls make all that possible.

A suicide bomber who killed 22 people at a Manchester pop concert likely had the help of a terror network, U.K. authorities said, and his brother confessed to a Libyan militia that the two of them belonged to Islamic State.

The allegations came as a portrait emerged of how Salman Abedi, the 22-year-old perpetrator of Britain’s deadliest attack since 2005, grew up straddling middle-class Britain and the tumult of Libya, playing street soccer as a schoolboy before heading off as a teenager to fight alongside his father in their homeland.

Once he returned to Manchester, he nursed a strong sense of anger. Twice, for different reasons, he spoke of wanting revenge. “Whether he got that is between him and God,” his sister, Jomana, said.

The suspected bomber’s brother, Hashem Abedi, is in the custody of Radaa, one of several large militias responsible for security in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Ahmed Dagdoug, a militia spokesman, said Hashem Abedi confessed that he was in the U.K. during preparations for Monday’s attack and aware of the plans.

Radaa said the younger Abedi was arrested late Tuesday in the city as he picked up a wire transfer of 4,500 Libyan dinar, or about $3,260, sent by his late brother, Salman.

It was impossible to independently confirm Radaa’s claim or to ascertain how such a confession may have been obtained. Libyan militias routinely resort to harsh tactics to extract information from terrorism suspects.

The group’s spokesman, Mr. Dagdoug, said it was also holding Abedi’s father, Ramadan Abedi, to aid in the probe of the attack, which killed 22 people outside a concert by American singer Ariana Grande.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the Libyan group was in contact with British investigators, who on Tuesday in Manchester arrested a man one Western official identified as 23-year-old Ismail Abedi, another brother of the suspect.

British intelligence agencies and police made raids on more properties on Wednesday and are piecing together how Salman Abedi came to use a sophisticated bomb to carry out Monday’s attack.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” said Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police. “There’s extensive investigations going on and activity taking place across Greater Manchester as we speak.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Pictures of dictator Kim Jong Un applauding as another North Korean missile ascends into the sky have become routine. But the Hermit Kingdom’s two most recent launches deserve special attention because they show Pyongyang nearing its goal of deploying a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could destroy American cities.

On May 14 the North launched a new intermediate-range missile it calls the Hwasong-12. The missile traveled fewer than 500 miles, but that’s because it was fired at a very steep angle to avoid flying over neighboring countries. If launched at the optimum angle, it could have a range of 2,800 miles, which means it threatens the U.S. island of Guam. That’s the farthest of North Korea’s missiles so far, not counting the rockets it used to launch satellites.

The Hwasong appears to use a new high-performance engine tested in March that it developed from scratch instead of adapting a Russian or Chinese design. The missile appears to be a single-stage, liquid-fueled rocket that could become the first stage of a new ICBM. That would allow the North to abandon the derivative designs it previously cobbled together to achieve the thrust for longer ranges. In its current form the Hwasong is also road mobile, making it more difficult to find and destroy. The North Koreans further claim the Hwasong can carry a “large, heavy nuclear warhead.”

On Sunday the North successfully tested another relatively new missile, the Pukguksong-2. While its range is shorter at about 1,000 miles, it is solid-fueled and can be moved using a domestically produced transporter, both of which improve survivability.

Based on a submarine-launched missile that may be a modified Chinese design, the Pukguksong’s first test in February was also successful. That suggests the missile will prove reliable, and North Korean media are reporting that Kim has ordered mass production.

The North also took advantage of the steep trajectory of both missiles to work on one of the last remaining obstacles to ICBM deployment—a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding the heat and vibration of the fall through the atmosphere. The North Koreans say the Hwasong “verified the homing feature of the warhead under the worst re-entry situation,” and that may be more than a boast. The U.S. and South Korea have confirmed that the test warhead survived and transmitted data.

The North still has to overcome obstacles to targeting the U.S., not least designing an ICBM re-entry vehicle. While the Kim regime is believed to have partially miniaturized an atomic weapon, it hasn’t tested a hydrogen bomb. But that is little comfort. On Tuesday when Senators asked Lt. Gen. Vince Stewart, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, how long North Korea needs before it can deploy an ICBM, he answered that it “is on a pathway where this capability is inevitable.”

This month’s tests mean advances in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs are coming much faster than analysts thought possible. If the U.S. and its allies don’t take steps to stop it now, the world will soon wake up to a nuclear North Korea far more dangerous and disruptive than the one we have today.

The United Nations Human Rights Council is preparing a blacklist of American and other companies doing business with Israel—and U.S. taxpayers are paying a quarter of the bill.

The council’s move embraces the “boycott, divestment and sanctions” campaign, which seeks to accomplish through economic strangulation what Israel’s enemies have been unable to achieve through war and terror. How did the U.S. get on the wrong side of this battle?

When the Human Rights Council was created in 2006 as a “reform” of the original U.N. Human Rights Commission, the Bush administration voted against, because no membership conditions required actually respecting human rights.

But Barack Obama jumped on board and, playing Gulliver at the U.N., allowed the American giant to be tied up by foes contributing a fraction of our moral and financial weight. In 2016 Americans sent the U.N. almost $10 billion.

On Thursday a U.S. Senate subcommittee will meet to “assess” the Human Rights Council. Reconsidering U.S. membership and walking away—now—is the right choice. Successive White Houses have tried and failed to correct the entrenched anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias of the council (and commission) for decades Simply put, the Lilliputians have more votes.

The council has condemned Israel more than any of the other 192 U.N. states, notwithstanding 500,000 dead in Syria, starvation and mass torture in North Korea, and systematic, deadly oppression in Iran. Saudi Arabia and China have used their seats on the council to avoid condemnation altogether.

Terror in Brussels – ISIS claims responsibility for “martyrdom” bombers; Belgium’s Jewish schools locked down http://www.jewishledger.com/2016/03/terror-brussels-isis-claims-responsibility-martyrdom-bombers-belgiums-jewish-schools-locked/

(JTA) As the Ledger went to press on Tuesday, news began pouring in regarding three suicide bombers who blew themselves up in Brussels early in the day, killing at least 34 people and injuring as many as 130. It was the worst terror attack to hit Europe since the Islamic State-organized terror attacks in Paris last November.

The Islamic State – commonly referred to as ISIS — claimed responsibility for the attacks, according to Amaq, a news agency affiliated with the terror group.

“Islamic State fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station,” the Amaq agency said.

“Islamic State fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martyrdom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek metro station.”

Jewish schools and other institutions in Antwerp and Brussels went into lockdown following the attacks, as police advised civilians to remain indoors. Public transportation and flights to and from Zaventem were suspended.

Among the wounded was an Israeli citizen who resides in Antwerp and was in Brussels for a wedding, according to Rabbi Pinchas Kornfeld, a community leader from Antwerp. He sustained injuries to his legs but is not in life-threatening condition, Kornfeld said.

Another Jewish person was moderately wounded, according to Samuel Markowitz, a paramedic for Hatzoloh, a local Jewish emergency services organization. Several dozen Jews were among the hundreds of passengers who were evacuated to a safe area near the airport, he added in an interview with the Joods Actueel Jewish monthly.

.

Shortly after the attacks, the Antwerp World Diamond Center canceled a Purim party it planned for tomorrow “out of respect for the victims and their families,” the center’s CEO, Ari Epstein, told Joods Actueel. Another Purim party by the European Jewish Association was canceled in Brussels, the group’s director, Rabbi Menachem Margolin, said.

The airport attack occurred at 8 a.m. near the American Airlines desk, according to the online edition of Joods Actueel. Kornfeld said many Jewish passengers were traveling between Antwerp, which has a large haredi Orthodox community, and New York.

“It was the right time and place to produce many Jewish casualties,” he said.

Recess was canceled at dozens of Jewish schools in Antwerp and children were instructed to stay inside the buildings, Kornfeld said. Community leaders are discussing the possibility of canceling school tomorrow and Purim street festivities planned for Thursday. Shortly thereafter, similar instructions went out from the Belgian government’s crisis center to all of the country’s schools.

University students were instructed to refrain from coming to campus.

“This is yet another shocking, appalling, and deadly attack on innocent Europeans by terrorists. These attacks on an airport, train system, and outside European Union institutions are shots at the heart of Europe. Our prayers and thoughts are with the Belgian people at these difficult times,” said Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, adding, ”we can no longer ignore the fact that radical Islamists are at war with Europe and all Europeans and we call on our governments and law enforcement agencies to act accordingly.”

Witnesses told Joods Actueel that at the airport, they heard shouts in Arabic, gunshots and a massive explosion.

Prague — The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio.

About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions.

The Czech Republic, to take one example, joined the European Union in 2004. But it has not yet adopted the euro and cannot decide whether the EU is wisely preventing wars of the past from being repeated or is recklessly strangling freedom in the manner of the old Soviet Union — or both.

In places devastated by globalization — such as southern Michigan or Roubaix, France – underemployed youth in their mid 20s often live at home in prolonged adolescence without much hope of enjoying the pre-globalized lifestyles of their parents.

Eastern Europeans are now discovering those globalized trade-offs that are so common in Western Europe, as they watch rates of marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing decline.

One half of the West — the half that lives mostly on the seacoasts of America and Western Europe — loves globalization. The highly educated and cosmopolitan “citizens of the world” have done well through international finance, insurance, investments, technology, education, and trade, as the old Western markets of 1 billion people became world markets of 6 billion consumers.

These coastal Westerners often feel more of an affinity with foreigners like themselves than with fellow countrymen who live 100 miles inland. And they are not shy in lecturing their poorer brethren to shape up and get with their globalized program.

Late-20th-century globalization — a synonym for Westernization — brought a lot of good to both poorer Western countries and the non-Western world. Czech farmers now have equipment comparable to what’s used in Iowa. Even those who live in the Amazon basin now have access to antibiotics and eyeglasses. South Koreans have built and enjoyed cars and television sets as if they invented them.

But all that said, we have never really resolved the contradictions of globalization.

Does it really bring people together into a shared world order, or does it simply offer a high-tech and often explosive veneer to non-Western cultures that are antithetical to the very West that they so borrow from and copy?

An Islamic State terrorist does not hate the United States any less because he now wears hoodies and sneakers and can text his girlfriend. More likely, Western fashion and high-tech toys only empower radical Islamic hatred of Western values.

Iran is desperate for nuclear technology originally spawned from the ‘Great Satan’ in order to better destroy the Great Satan.

So it was not a “response” to Trump’s visit to Israel, nor a sudden”lone wolf” attack, not by an “evil loser” but by a barbarian Jihadi who is part of a group that planned the attack….Wake up! rsk

Authorities tell ABC News that they found a kind of bomb-making workshop in Salman Abedi’s home and he had apparently stockpiled enough chemicals to make additional bombs.

The hunt is intensifying for what British authorities suspect is a possible “network” behind the deadly suicide blast outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena on Monday, officials say.

The search stretched from the U.K. to Libya, where officials made multiple arrests in a country seen by American officials as a burgeoning new base of operations for ISIS, which has claimed Salman Abedi was a “soldier of the Caliphate.”

Counterterrorism officials fear whoever built the bomb that killed 22 people and injured more than 50 others may have built other improvised-explosive devices which could be used in further attacks.

“I think it’s very clear that this is a network that we are investigating,” Ian Hopkins, chief constable of the Greater Manchester Police, said in a press briefing.

According to a terrorism expert who has been briefed on the investigation, the bomb featured a sophisticated design similar to the bombs used in the attacks in Brussels in 2016.

The expert confirmed that Abedi traveled to Manchester Arena by train, likely carrying the bomb in a backpack. The device, a metal container stuffed with bolts and nails, was apparently hooked to a powerful battery and featured a remote, cell-phone detonator with built-in redundancies to ensure a blast even if a first attempt failed.

The design was sophisticated enough to bolster the theory that Abedi didn’t act alone, suggesting, according to the expert, “there’s a bomb maker on the loose.”

“It’s really suggesting that he probably did not act alone, that he probably had some help, that he certainly had some advice on how to create the bomb,” said Matt Olsen, former director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center and an ABC News contributor.

After the terror, the platitudes. And the hashtags. And the candlelit vigils. And they always have the same message: ‘Be unified. Feel love. Don’t give in to hate.’ The banalities roll off the national tongue. Vapidity abounds. A shallow fetishisation of ‘togetherness’ takes the place of any articulation of what we should be together for – and against. And so it has been after the barbarism in Manchester. In response to the deaths of more than 20 people at an Ariana Grande gig, in response to the massacre of children enjoying pop music, people effectively say: ‘All you need is love.’ The disparity between these horrors and our response to them, between what happened and what we say, is vast. This has to change.

It is becoming clear that the top-down promotion of a hollow ‘togetherness’ in response to terrorism is about cultivating passivity. It is about suppressing strong public feeling. It’s about reducing us to a line of mourners whose only job is to weep for our fellow citizens, not ask why they died, or rage against their dying. The great fear of both officialdom and the media class in the wake of terror attacks is that the volatile masses will turn wild and hateful. This is why every attack is followed by warnings of an ‘Islamophobic backlash’ and heightened policing of speech on Twitter and gatherings in public: because what they fundamentally fear is public passion, our passion. They want us passive, empathetic, upset, not angry, active, questioning. They prefer us as a lonely crowd of dutiful, disconnected mourners rather than a real collective of citizens demanding to know why our fellow citizens died and how we might prevent others from dying. We should stop playing the role they’ve allotted us.

As part of the post-terror narrative, our emotions are closely policed. Some emotions are celebrated, others demonised. Empathy – good. Grief – good. Sharing your sadness online – great. But hatred? Anger? Fury? These are bad. They are inferior forms of feeling, apparently, and must be discouraged. Because if we green-light anger about terrorism, then people will launch pogroms against Muslims, they say, or even attack Sikhs or the local Hindu-owned cornershop, because that’s how stupid and hateful we apparently are. But there is a strong justification for hate right now. Certainly for anger. For rage, in fact. Twenty-two of our fellow citizens were killed at a pop concert. I hate that, I hate the person who did it, I hate those who will apologise for it, and I hate the ideology that underpins such barbarism. I want to destroy that ideology. I don’t feel sad, I feel apoplectic. Others will feel likewise, but if they express this verboten post-terror emotion they risk being branded as architects of hate, contributors to future terrorist acts, racist, and so on. Their fury is shushed. ‘Just weep. That’s your role.’

The post-terror cultivation of passivity speaks to a profound crisis of – and fear of – the active citizen. It diminishes us as citizens to reduce us to hashtaggers and candle-holders in the wake of serious, disorientating acts of violence against our society. It decommissions the hard thinking and deep feeling citizens ought to pursue after terror attacks. Indeed, in some ways this official post-terror narrative is the unwitting cousin of the terror attack itself. Where terrorism pursues a war of attrition against our social fabric, seeking to rip away bit by bit our confidence and openness and sense of ourselves as free citizens, officialdom and the media diminish our individuality and our social role, through instructing us on what we may feel and think and say about national atrocities and discouraging us from taking responsibility for confronting these atrocities and the ideological and violent rot behind them. The terrorist seeks to weaken our resolve, the powers-that-be want to sedate our emotions, retire our anger, reduce us to wet-eyed performers in their post-terror play. It’s a dual assault on the individual and society.That the post-terror narrative is fundamentally about taming our passion and politics is clear from its sidelining of all issues of substance. We are actively warned against asking difficult questions about 21st-century society and why it has this violence in it, this nihilism in it. Question the wisdom of multiculturalism, of refusing to elevate one culture over another and instead encouraging people to live in their own cultural bubbles, and you’re racist. Wonder if the obsession with combatting ‘Islamophobia’ might have given rise to a situation where some Muslims, especially younger ones, cannot handle ridicule of their religion, and… well, you’re ‘Islamophobic’. As for immigration: this is the great unmentionable; you’re a fascist even for thinking about it. The post-terror narrative that barks ‘You must empathise!’ also says, implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, ‘You mustn’t think! You mustn’t ask those questions or say that thing.’ And so in their response to terrorism, they erect an intellectual forcefield around some of the problems that might, just might, be contributing to that terrorism. CONTINUE AT SITE