Normally when I publish a ‘From Elsewhere’ piece I normally feature and comment upon only one article. However, today is different. This is a double header of a ‘From Elsewhere’ piece with two pieces, one from Douglas Murray and another from Dr Rakib Eshan. Both of these pieces deal with a very similar subject, that of the whitewashing by the political establishment and the media of jihad attacks and a failure by these entities to properly discuss the ideology that drives jihad attacks.

First up for an excerpt is a piece from Dr Eshan on the CapX site entitled ‘Political correctness must not obscure the fight against violent jihadism’. Dr Eshan said:

The way we are dealing with that threat is a huge cause for concern. My new report for the Henry Jackson Society argues that there is a fundamental mismatch – on paper – between our counter-terrorism efforts and our overall terror threat. While leading counter-terrorism officials, such as Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, have stated that while far-right extremism represents the fastest-growing terror threat, jihadists remain a far more prevalent menace.

The 2019 Independent Review of Terrorism Legislation by Jonathan Hall QC, which was published in March 2021, concluded that ‘Islamist terrorism remains the principal threat in Great Britain’, with the majority of terrorism convictions in 2019 relating to Islamist extremism. It has also been reported that the vast majority of the 43,000 people on MI5’s terror watchlist – as many as 39,000 – are jihadists, compared to a few thousand far-right extremists. 

Dr Eshan is absolutely correct here. Far right extremists, sometimes violent ones, do exist but we can see from the historical record that these jackboot licking nutters do not pose anything like the threat that Islamists do. Whilst both are causes for concern, a love affair with political correctness by the Establishment sees the relatively lesser problem of far right nutcases being prioritised whilst the far greater danger of Islamic terrorists downgraded.

Dr Eshan added:

The UK – including its counter-terrorism structures and law-enforcement institutions – cannot afford to be paralysed by political correctness and tribal identity politics in the fight against Islamist extremism. It is a terror threat that concerns both Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain to similar degrees. Playing down the role of violent fundamentalist ideologies in deadly terror-related attacks – such as the killing of Sir David Amess – only undermines our counter-terrorism efforts. 

Moving on now to Mr Douglas Murray’s excellent opinion piece in The Sun newspaper. Mr Murray said that the nation, but most obviously the Establishment, is paralysed by Islamic terror. It is something that they will not talk about when in reality they should be. Islamic terror is the elephant in the room that people, especially politicians go out of their way not to notice.

Mr Murray compared the markedly different ways that the politicians discussed and the media reported the murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. Mr Murray said:

To listen to the speeches from Amess’s colleagues in Parliament this week you’d have thought he died of natural causes. Sad as they were, MPs distracted themselves with talk about “online harm”.

Questioned on the BBC at the weekend, Home Secretary Priti Patel ended up talking about online anonymity.

None of which appears to have had anything to do with Sir David’s murder.

The suspect is a 25-year-old Muslim of Somali origin.

In my view the political class dishonoured Sir David and treated the rest of us like mugs by engaging in worthless and obvious diversionary tactics such as banging on about online anonymity instead of talking about the real problem. You don’t need to be an Einstein to work out the massive amounts of sound and fury about ‘hurty words’ by the politicians was a displacement activity, a way of avoiding talking about the real problem, that of Islamic extremism.

Mr Murray continued:

If the killer had been a far-right maniac, like the man who murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016, then MPs would have had no problem talking about the fact. Indeed back then, before the Brexit referendum, it sometimes seemed as though the whole Brexit movement was being blamed for “radicalising” Cox’s killer.

Though no such link existed it didn’t stop prominent politicians and others smearing half the country by association. So why is no one even talking about the possible causes of Sir David Amess’s murder?

The reason is because when faced with a possible murder in the name of Islamic fundamentalism, this country still struggles to find any way to respond to it. Look at the situation four years ago when suicide bomber Salman Abedi detonated himself at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena.

Had the attacker been driven by any other ideology the nation would have tried to work out what drove the bomber to do it, who his network was and who his influences were.

But from the first moments after the Manchester attack things went in a different direction. People seemed uninterested in the details about the mosque Abedi had attended. They never asked why his family were given asylum in the UK.

Spot on Mr Murray. I and many others have noticed the difference between how the Cox and Amess murders have been covered. There was loads of attention to the ideology allegedly followed by Jo Cox’s killer but absolute silence on the ideology followed by the alleged murderer of Sir David Amess. It’s disgraceful it really is. Even when one of their own was murdered,the political classes still cannot talk about radical Islam. It makes me wonder that if they can’t bring themselves to talk about radical Islam when one of their own number is killed then how can we trust them to defend our lives and our interests against radical Islam? They really are a bunch of cowards of the worst sort.

These are two excellent and really important pieces and I would really like to see them more widely read and distributed.