Why the Greens are so scared of saying the word ‘Islamist’
Shame on Hannah Spencer for refusing to name the murderous ideology behind the Manchester Arena atrocity.
Brendan O'Neill
It was the look of terror in Hannah Spencer’s eyes that was most telling. There she was, the gurning Green candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, being asked the simplest of questions. What was the cause of the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017? Her face froze into a rictus of fear. She stuttered but the words clogged in her throat. She couldn’t believe it – she was being pressed on live TV to say a word that her morally supine kind have sworn never to utter in public. Islamism.
It gets worse. Her gentle interrogator was Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in Gorton and Denton. After Ms Spencer spouted the usual kumbaya bullshit about how Manchester ‘came together’ after the arena atrocity, he quizzed her again.
Okay, fine, but ‘why are [these] things happening?’, he asked. Then came what will surely rank as the dumbest reply of 2026, a remark that should make Spencer cringe in ignominy every time the memory of it invades her mind. It’s ‘because people like you are dividing people’, she told Goodwin.He was startled. So was everyone else whose brains haven’t yet been fried by that moral spinelessness that gets dolled up as ‘progressivism’. ‘So I’m responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing?!’, he said. ‘That’s not what I’ve just said’, Spencer protested. But it is what you said. You were asked why Britain has been rocked by such sadistic acts of misanthropy as the slaughter of teens at an Ariana Grande concert, and instead of giving the correct answer – which is that our nation is ailed by the pox of Islamist militancy – you said it’s because people like Goodwin have hot takes on immigration, etc.
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To refuse to name the homicidal creed that motored that massacre of innocents is a betrayal of the dead and the survivors. Ask yourself: if it had been a neo-Nazi bloodbath, do you think Ms Spencer would have held back from saying the word ‘Nazi’? If the killer had been a devotee of the knackered old National Front, do you think Spencer would have squirmed in her seat when asked why that atrocity happened? Of course not. She’d have shouted from the rooftops the names of those poisonous ideologies. But when it comes to Islamism, there’s a conspiracy of silence.
‘Islamism’ is the equivalent of ‘Voldemort’ to our chickenshit chattering classes – a taboo word never to be uttered lest it turn thick oiks into an ‘Islamophobic’ mob.https://x.com/GoodwinMJ/status/2024166650262544698