The first casualty of any terrorist atrocity is common sense. Here, following the murder of PC Keith Palmer and other innocent people outside Parliament yesterday, is a selection of utterances.
"Islam is no more responsible for this attack than Yorkshire is for Jo Cox MP's murder".
This one came from Mishal Husain, the BBC presenter. It does make you wonder what degree of intellectual calibre she brings to the job. What Ms Husain does not appear to have noticed is that Yorkshire, unlike Islam, does not have an ideology. It is the combination of that ideology with, no doubt, other influences (which might include mental health problems, drugs and general criminality) that makes an Islamic terrorist. After all, there are not many Yorkshire terrorists (and the one who killed Jo Cox was not a terrorist because he was a Yorkshireman). There are not many terrorists without an ideology. There are no golfing terrorists, for example. Or stamp collecting or estate agent terrorists. As someone put it today, British Islam has 5% of the population, 95% of the terrorists. The idea that Islam has nothing to do with the preponderance of UK terrorist attacks is frankly stupid.
"This has got nothing to do with immigration because the guy was born here".
A general trope on social media, this one. I've yet to discover how many generations back the murderer's ancestors came to Britain, but it makes not a jot of difference. The UK has admitted a lot of people who adhere to a religion which often holds British values in contempt. For the majority of Muslims, immigrants or otherwise, that just means living peaceful but somewhat separate lives. For a small but significant minority it means treasonable violence. Their place of birth is irrelevant. It is the ideology which has been imported.
"The response of the medics who tried to save the murderer's life is a magnificent tribute to British values".
Unfortunately this is only partially true. If there is any inference to be drawn from the murderer's birthplace it is that some Britons now hold a different set of values altogether. Whereas the laudable desire of bystanders to save the murderer was Britain at its best, the murderer was a Briton too. His set of values encompassed driving his car as fast as possible into people he had never met and who could not conceivably have done him harm, before taking a knife to the person of a policeman whose job it was to protect our democratically elected representatives as they went about the business of governance. We have to accept that these are the values of a small minority of people whose ideology has been allowed into Britain. If we don't do that we are just deluding ourselves.
"Violence will not work".
On the day of Martin McGuinness's funeral (some wag asked, "Will we ever find out where the body is buried?") a moment's reflection should remind us how wrong this is. Does anyone really imagine that the Good Friday agreement would ever have been signed had it not been for the violence? Violence does work. It may not have worked for Islamic extremists yet, but that's only because there hasn't been enough of it.
"Everyone gets on fine in London".
To the extent that this is true it is only because communities tend to live parallel lives (and see below). Besides, does anyone remember Muslim Patrol, the fundamentalist vigilantes of the East End?
"The cancer of radical Islam in our society . . . . needs to be cut out".
Little though I like him, I don't think Paul Nuttall is exaggerating in describing radical Islam as a cancer. But how can it be "cut out"? Had the murderer survived the Westminster incident he could not have been deported. He was born in Kent. He could have been sent to prison of course, where he would have been free to radicalise impressionable young men, just as he was radicalised himself by other Muslims not currently in jail. But you cannot "cut out" British people. You can only try and persuade them that they are wrong. You could start by ceasing to treat Muslims as if they were something separate and un-British. You could start to turn back the tide of multiculturalism and identity-politics. But it would only be a start. There would still be a long way to go towards a goal that was always receding.
"Liberals convince themselves multiculturalism works because we all die together too".
And lastly Katie Hopkins, writing in the Daily Mail. Ms Hopkins characterises the conflict as, "The patriots of the rest of England versus the liberals in this . . . city of lead, so desperately wedded to the multicultural illusion that it can only fight those who love the country the most".
Perhaps it's a mistake to take Ms Hopkins too seriously. She over-emphasises for shock value. But regarding London she has a point. London is a unique place, emphatically not like the other cities only bigger. It is an international city, which has lost much of its "London-ness". Manchester is still defiantly Mancunian, Glasgow is still Glaswegian, and so on. Not London. Partly that's because London attracts people from all over the world, who go there believing they can make it big and have a good time. By definition they are the last people to mind others being different from them. It's one reason why they go there.
But London is not a community or series of communities. It is a hive of individuals. On the flip side its tolerance shades into indifference. People live alongside others utterly different from them by not interacting with them. It can be a lonely city. People famously do not talk to each other. David Goodhart's new book The Road to Somewhere characterises these people as "Anywheres", which is to say they are often well-educated, affluent and unrooted types (of which I guess I should be one) with everything to gain from maintaining the status quo. Their liberalism is theoretical and involves little personal sacrifice.
This phenomenon is of course a subject for another day, but Hopkins may not be wrong when she writes that London is an "entire city of monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Blind. Deaf. And dumb".
