NO, YOU’RE NOT MORE LIKELY TO BE KILLED BY A RIGHT-WING EXTREMIST THAN AN ISLAMIC TERRORIST

On 22^nd May, 2017, a 22 year old jihadist named Salman Ramadan Abedi wandered into the Manchester Arena during a concert populated primarily by young teens and their parents, and detonated a suicide bomb, killing 22 people including an 8 year old girl, and injuring approximately 120 others. This was the deadliest terror attack on U.K. soil since a group of jihadists murdered 52 commuters in the London transport attacks of 2005.

We are often told that in the wake of a large scale atrocity of this kind, we should defy the terrorists by simply carrying on as normal. Well, it just so happens that what I would normally be doing is writing about Islamic terrorism and berating the apologists who shamefully obfuscate the issue. Which is exactly what I intend to do now.

 

An Open Letter to Andy Burnham

Dear Mr Burnham,

I’m writing this because I wish to acknowledge your remarkable achievement on BBC’s Question Time on 25^th May 2017. Only two days prior to your appearance, I woke up to the news that a young man had strolled into a pop concert being held at the Manchester Arena and detonated a suicide bomb in a crowd of primarily teenaged girls and their parents. My initial reaction was to be overcome by a mixture of painful emotions. Outrage. Grief. Disgust. Devastation. Followed by a tidal wave of unbridled, unimaginable anger. Your achievement, Mr Mayor, is to have made me feel even more apoplectic than I did already. To increase the rage that I already felt upon finding out that children had been murdered en masse, should have been a truly impossible task. And yet you managed it. Effortlessly.

 

Westminster and the Islamic Connection

Back in the autumn of 2010, an online magazine produced and published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula entitled Inspire, urged it’s readership to attack “the enemies of Allah” by ploughing vehicles into pedestrians in crowded locations. “Narrower spots are better because it gives less chance for the people to run away” they advised. “It is a simple idea and there is not much involved in its preparation. All what (sic) is needed is the willingness to give one’s life for Allah.”

Similarly, in 2014 Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani issued the following statement directed at enthusiastic ISIS supporters without the means for acquiring explosives and firearms:

 

Believer

Imagine a series of An Idiot Abroad in which effortlessly amusing man-child Karl Pilkington is replaced by an effeminate Topman mannequin in a silver-flecked wig. Congratulations, you’ve just imagined Believer with Reza Aslan.

Yesterday I finally got round to watching the first episode of CNN’s six-part travelogue, in which Aslan cosies up with members of various eccentric belief systems in the hope of convincing us that religions are nothing more than “different languages” used to express the same inherent faith. Or something.

This is not the kind of condescending, new age guff that I like to hear about real-world ideologies that are responsible for the death and abject misery of countless billions of real human beings, and so I was very much looking forward to hating this show. To that extent I was disappointed.

 

Milogate

Raging narcissist and professional irritant Milo Yiannopoulos appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher last week and was repeatedly told to go fuck himself (a request that I suspect Milo has earnestly attempted to overcome the logistics of, from time to time.) This overtly hostile reaction from both Maher and his other guests naturally resulted in catchy headlines such as; Milo Yiannopoulos found a bromance with Bill Maher, and Dean Obeidallah’s roll-off-the-tongue effort; Bill Maher’s shameful mainstreaming of Yiannopoulos’ hate.

 

The Comic Con

There’s a charming line of argument popular among the godly, which posits that a lack of religious faith is responsible for the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, that morality is impossible without submitting to the authority of a supernatural creator, and that the only psychological state necessary to commit mass murder is a lack of belief in deities. There is even an entire book devoted to this nonsense entitled The Amorality of Atheism by Giorgio Roversi.

Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have spent much of their careers as ‘New Atheist’ authors and speakers, kicking these arguments into orbit.

A recent mutation of these trite and fatuous accusations of atheism-inspired violence has begun to spread, which argues that New Atheism’s criticism of religion’s inherent menace is tantamount to incitement to violence.

 

The Alt-Right to Remain Silent

A few weeks ago the BBC broadcast a comedy skit satirising the western women who abscond to Syria and Iraq to live under the caliphate. Filmed in the style of one of those insufferable reality TV shows about entitled, narcissistic, Sex-and-the-City types who have kids called ‘Porsche’ and tedious shoe obsessions; the Real Housewives of ISIS poked fun at the clash between western culture and the 7^th century theocracy of the Islamic State.

The 2 minute clip spoofed cloaked women fretting over what to wear to a public beheading, suicide vest fashion parades, jihadist Instagram hashtags, ISIS emoticons, etcetera etcetera.