Clarity and reality

First, we grieved. And we must never stop remembering the victims of Monday night’s terrorist murders. But now that the initial shock has dissipated, there is a palpable sense of dread. Because we know that this will not be the last Islamist attack — and we worry who will be next. We worry, in other words, that we will be next. Every time there is an attack, it is greeted with the same platitudes about the terrorists’ motives. But there is no mystery to any of this: in their words and actions they tell us that they hate our Western freedoms and lives — and that they hate Jews. This is not a clash of civilisations: it is a battle between civilisation and barbarity. There is no ambiguity about Islamism and its origins. Yet very few of our leaders are prepared to acknowledge reality and speak with clarity about the ideology and roots of Islamism. Doing that, however, is a prerequisite for defeating it. 

Facebook hate

It was bad enough when Facebook ducked responsibility for the poison and hate speech on its platform by claiming that it simply obeyed the law of whichever land it was being viewed in. Now we know from leaks to the Guardian that it does not even do that. Its internal memos reveal that it goes out of its way to avoid dealing with its legal obligations, let alone any wider responsiblity. There is an arrogance about Facebook and other social media which behave as if they are above such trivial concerns as the law and morality. They are not. They are profiting from hate — and specifically from the Jew hate that is behind Holocaust denial.