If you’re reading this then you’ve probably heard about the latest terrorist attack in London.
A man drove through a crowd in the heart of London’s tourist district, targeting any large group of pedestrians he could find, including a gaggle of Korean pensioners on holiday and a clutch of terrified French schoolchildren on excursion.
As we speak, forty have been reported injured and four dead, three from the wheels of the car and one forty-eight-year-old unarmed policeman named Keith Palmer, whom the driver stabbed to death after leaving his vehicle.
Fortunately the assailant was then shot dead by other police. When taken down he was within the perimeter of Parliament. He was just meters from the entrance and in the shadow of St Stephens’ Tower, better known as the home of the iconic Big Ben.
The attacker appears to have hired his car in Birmingham, the second largest city in England and home to a great deal of vibrant diversity. He chose to carry out his crime on the first anniversary of the Brussels bombings that murdered thirty-two innocent people.
Tobias Ellwood, Foreign Office minister and former British Army officer, whose brother was killed in the Bali terror attack in 2002, performed first aid on the dying policeman. Photos of him with the blood of the deceased man smeared on his face have travelled around the world; in them he stands beside the body with empty eyes staring into the distance.
“Islamist-related terrorism is our assumption,” Britain’s top counter-terror officer Mark Rowley told journalists, adding that as has been the case so many times in the past, investigators believe they know the identity of the dead assailant. Not so much a “Lone Wolf” as a “Known Wolf”.
Naturally, Prime Minister Theresa May came out with the same boilerplate response that every weak-willed Western political leader seems to have tattooed on the inside of their eyeballs. “We will all move forward together, never giving in to terror and never allowing the voices of hate and evil to drive us apart,” she declared, no doubt worried that people might think bad thoughts, observe the patterns around them and jump to politically inconvenient conclusions.
She added that any attempt to defeat the values Parliament stands for were “doomed to failure”.
I’m sure that’s a great relief to the grieving family of Keith Palmer. I’m sure they were worried that having their loved one stabbed multiple times until he bled to death on the street while in the line of duty might have affected the puffed-up, superannuated popinjays waving their order papers around while trying to figure out the best way to both block Brexit and rort their expenses.
When Tommy Robinson, founder and former leader of the EDL, showed up and began berating the assembled left-wing reporters for their spinelessness in the face of what is clearly both a physical and existential threat, those paragons of British journalism described him as having been “widely condemned” or “making everything worse”
The “wide condemnation” article was published by the Independent, a left-wing paper, and as a source they quoted a tweet by one man: David Harry Rivers, a self-proclaimed “Beardy Journalist” reporting for the obscure Ealing Gazette, as well as another tweet by an even more obscure Welsh radio station.
The incisive comment proclaiming that Robinson “made everything worse” was printed by the Telegraph, which once upon a time was a right-wing paper. This article used the same two sources as before, plus another tweet by Maya Goodfellow, a British Labour Party activist and media diversity consultant who writes opinion pieces for the Guardian.
This one example shows us in crystal-clear focus why the media simply don’t get it, and never will.
They show up at a scene of Islamist terror and their first instinct is to find someone to attack whose skin isn’t so inconveniently brown. In order to attack him they quote tweets from people just like themselves, people with ideological, educational, employment and class backgrounds similar if not identical to their own.
It’s not just that they’re looking for affirmation from people who think, talk and act exactly as they do. It’s the fact that for so many of these types, the idea that they would ever reach outside their bubble for explanations as to why the world is the way it is sounds almost as absurd to them as demanding they breathe in the vacuum of space.
That’s why politicians like Theresa May speak such bland bulls— on occasions like these. They know that the people doing the reporting would attempt to end her political career if she starting pointing out why these things keep happening and which particular groups are responsible.
From the perspective of the journalists, anyone who tells the truth about this atrocity is simply a hatemonger who doesn’t properly understand the benefits of diversity, due to ignorance, lack of education or some other fundamental defect.
Modern politicians don’t listen to the public as much as try and impress the press for favourable coverage so this charade will continue. Some people will post sympathetic social media posts asking you to #PrayforLondon, but no-one will do anything. This will happen again.
It doesn’t matter how many tiny bodies in Nice need to be covered in silver shrouds, their cold hands reaching for fallen dolls. It doesn’t matter how many Christmas market-goers get smashed to pieces of splintered bone and pulped flesh by trucks in Germany. It doesn’t matter how many concert halls in Paris need to be scraped clean of blood, gore and shell casings. It doesn’t matter how many iconic British red double-decker buses are opened up like giant sardine cans.
It doesn’t even matter how many young girls are raped and molested in places like Rotherham, Malmo or Cologne.
The journalistic class will never change. They will never admit that they themselves are part of the problem. They will never admit that the certainties they were taught by mentors and institutions they respected turned out to be wrong.
Only when we, the people, no longer listen to their lies will change be possible.
