After the Manchester attack on pop fans, the Oasis song Don't Look Back In Anger became the anthem of the nation. It captured the sentiment that now takes hold after terrorist attacks: don't dwell on it, just lay a flower and move on.

We are discouraged from asking difficult questions. Debate is frowned on.

Wonder if radical Islam is a problem for the West and you are branded “Islamophobe.”

Ask if it was wise of Angela Merkel to welcome hundreds of the thousands of migrants from the Middle East in 2015 and you'll be called racist.

Even to argue that there are certain French, British, American and Australian values that are good, and that we should encourage newcomers to adopt, is to risk being viewed as a sinner against the multicultural idea that all values are equally valid.

We always see this post-terror chilling of debate. The aim is to tame moral thought, dampen dangerous emotions. After every attack their (politicos and the media) response is to say: “There had better not be an Islamophobic backlash in response to this.”

It is becoming clear that the perversely chilled response to terror is not an act of defiance. Rather, it speaks to a reluctance in the West to engage in robust debate about terror, religion, immigration and values.

We need to change this post-terror culture. We need to recognise that a society, that will not even permit anger or moral soul-searching when an eight-year-old girl at an Ariana Grande concert is blown apart, is a society that has already been defeated.

We need to give peace a chance, these terrorist are reasonable people. They are just misunderstood.

O'Neill's article is nothing but a whole bunch of strawmen.

The truth is, we do speak up, lament, and soul search all the things he claims we don't.

The problem can be boiled down to this:

he, and all his ilk pretend they are merely posing this question:

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when in reality they want to ask this question:

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- as if they actually hold the view that there is a version of Islam (and by extension muslims) that can be distinguished from the radical kind, and which they would accept into their society. What a joke.

I have far more respect for open Islamophobes who hold no such pretense, and say what all Islamophobes are thinking - Islam - full stop, is the problem, and has no place in western society - in any form.

Term Dog wrote on Dec 15^th, 2018 at 10:17pm:



Let Allah sort it out for them.....