George Orwell is my favourite political writer, but not because he tells me what to think. Rather, Orwell shows one how to think. And perhaps more important still, where to look.
Look, says Orwell, at the hardest thing to see: what is in front of your nose. What actually happened, says Orwell, is the thing to keep one’s eye on. In 1984, he writes of how the totalitarian regime ruling his dystopian Britain “told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” One might turn to Roy Walker, genial host of the bygone quiz show Catchphrase, for a simpler summary of Orwell’s fundamental principle: “Say what you see.”
Which brings us to the attack on Berlin’s Pride parade by a now deceased (in his own terms, doubtless, martyred) Islamist. The branch of the Hamas fan club that styles itself Queers For Palestine could benefit by applying “say what you see” here. But it won’t. This depressingly familiar specimen – a petty hoodlum granted a divine licence to indulge his taste for cruelty and mayhem – murdered one participant with a vehicle. Either he or accomplices then stabbed numerous others. They have so far survived their injuries, by the mercy of pure chance, rather than any on the part of their assailant. It was a horrific assault not only on other human beings but on the very expression of freedom, love and joy.
Should we view him as representative of every Muslim person in Europe? Categorically not. Should we pretend that there is no pattern here? Apparently so. Judging by their behaviour, which is the only reliable way to judge anyone, it is an unspoken article of faith among the Good People™️, and the many key institutions in which they hold sway, that one must never treat the identity of Islamist terrorists or thugs as anything other than an unfortunate coincidence, even when it is self-avowedly integral to their terrorism and thuggery. The Good People™️’s rote pieties are reminiscent of the American right’s habit of despatching thoughts and prayers to the victims of mass shootings while rearing away from any question of how the killer came by his guns.
This is in one way understandable. Far-right ethnonationalism and xenophobic populism are mushrooming all around Europe, their ugly primary goal the targeting and eventual removal of our Muslim fellow citizens. The Good People™️see their omerta as countering those forces – failing to grasp how instead it functionally abets them. Given Jews are themselves the target of an unbidden Muslim sectarianism enabled and even applauded by the Good People™️– a sectarianism that exists on a continuum with Islamist terror, as sectarianism and terror invariably do, anywhere – that goal might be mistaken for a desirable outcome. It is not. Not only is it a barbaric idea that would, in the UK, make for a grim precedent. It also lets off scot-free institutions that will not say, unequivocally: if you wish to be part our polity, our civil society, you will not be permitted to import and restage external conflicts, because no liberal democracy can endure such illiberalism. It would not, in short, solve the underlying problem, which is moral cowardice. The same people will simply throw Jews under the next antisemitic bus to inevitably come rattling along.
The problem Jews have is that, if we dare name our persecutors, the Good People™️– in their now standard inversion of all evidence and moral logic – will say it is we who are the bigoted aggressors. We may, however, fare better with ordinary people. By which I mean that majority of the public who are not political hobbyists, whose self-image is not defined by a set of beliefs they got out of a packet. Whatever their own individual prejudices, they do not share the Good People™️’s collective psychological motivation to see what is not there, and to not see what is. When the Good People™️ rally alongside Islamists and their fellow-travellers, who rail against “Zionists”, ordinary people might be confused as to the issues. But it will not have escaped their notice that it isn’t “Zionists” who have been blowing up their pop concerts and buses, or ramming and stabbing their countryfolk in the street. Throughout Europe’s ongoing Islamist terror campaigns, the number of victims who have suffered any such violent attacks by “Zionists” is exactly zero.
“But Gaza!” Indeed, ordinary people may well sympathise with the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Yet unlike so many of the Good People™️, they have not adopted a fetishist’s fantasy of Gaza as their spiritual home. They are more concerned with their actual one. When nobody else is willing to say what they see – that it is the Islamists suicidally fêted as a liberation movement, not the despised “Zionists”, who present a menace to the people of Europe; and that these Islamists have not appeared out of nowhere – that leaves the field clear for the fascists and populists to say it, and to prosper accordingly.
It is not an axiom of Orwell’s, but one of mine, that I can only fancy he might agree with: it is always a bad idea to give the worst people something to be right about.
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