Islamic extremism is not a politeness issue.

There is an elephant in the room that hates Jews, aims to kill infidels, and keeps screaming "Allah is the greatest!"

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This is a guest essay written by Max Klinger. You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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Recently, British Member of Parliament Mike Freer, for the heavily Jewish constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, announced he will be quitting politics.

Why? Because due to the fact that he represents Jews and supports Israel, Islamists and “anti-Zionists” across the country keep trying (and threatening) to kill him.

Placed in his shoes, almost any sane person would make the same decision. After all a few weeks ago his offices were burnt down in a “suspected arson attack,” only the latest in a decade’s worth of similar such events.

Here is how Melanie Phillips, the acclaimed British writer, describes Freer:

“He now wears a knife-proof vest when attending constituency events and says he feels lucky to be alive. In 2021, a government reshuffle meant he had to cancel his planned constituency surgery in order to remain in Westminster.”

“While he was there an Islamist terrorist, Ali Harbi Ali, was lurking with a knife outside his constituency office waiting fruitlessly to attack him. One month later, Ali murdered fellow Tory Member of Parliament Sir David Amess in a frenzied knife attack over Amess’s support for air strikes against ISIS and his membership of Conservative Friends of Israel.”¹

She goes on:

“Ten years previously, Freer was targeted by the group Muslims Against Crusades (a banned radical Islamist group in the United Kingdom). It posted online a picture of Freer with the message ‘Let Stephen Timms be a warning to you.’ In 2010 Timms, a Labour Member of Parliament, had been stabbed in his constituency surgery by an al Qaeda supporter.”

“When members of Muslims Against Crusades burst into an event that Freer was holding in a mosque, one said he was ‘a Jewish homosexual pig defiling the house of Allah.’ In subsequent years, Freer was targeted with numerous threats, abusive notes were stuck on his car and mock petrol bombs were left on the steps of his constituency office.”

This is an unacceptable state of affairs. It is unacceptable that in modern Western nations Islamist extremists are corrupting the democratic process through violence and threats of violence.

And it is similarly unacceptable that anyone (including Muslims) who seeks to address the dramatic rise in Muslim antisemitism and jihadist terror gets tarred as a bigot and cast out of polite society by liberal and leftist authoritarians who hold themselves out as “anti-racists.”

Take a look at events merely in London, just in the last few weeks. Two days before Freer announced his decision to stand down at the next election, a few minutes’ walk from his burnt-out office, a Muslim man grabbed a knife and tried to stab Jews.

Since October 7th, Islamic fanatics have beaten up, attacked, and tried to stab people for criticizing Hamas, and donned the group’s paraphernalia. They have praised Hitler; called for “death to all the Jews”; drawn swastikas on tube carriages; vandalized Jewish schools; destroyed menorahs; and assaulted, beat up, and tried to kill members of the Jewish community.

They have torn down thousands of posters depicting the faces of kidnapped Jewish men, women and children, and hurled abuse at anyone (myself included) trying to stop them. Reminder: All of this was in direct response to the genocidal mass murder of 1,200 people by Hamas (and other Gazans).

None of this should be normal.

A man recently tried to stab Jews near my parents’ house in London.

So, did this latest shameful episode — a Member of Parliament being forced out of political life by Islamist intimidation and antisemitism — trigger any proper reflection on the issue of Islamic radicalism among our political classes? No, sir.

Rather, conversation turned to the need for Members of Parliament to “treat each other better.” Saying “please” more often is a surefire way to persuade jihadists to stop slaughtering infidels. If only the Yazidis had thought of it!

Then we were fed articles claiming the real issue is “social media anxiety,” and we were warned to not mention Islamism, jihadism, or Islamic extremism once — but do mention Islamophobia.

Thus, proper interrogation of uncomfortable realities has been sidestepped, in favor of generalized condemnation of “abuse from all sides.”

This is so cynical. It allows those who have most vociferously sought to shut down discussion of un-politically correct topics — such as the rise of Muslim fanaticism and any possible downsides of mass migration (and shame anyone who does not play ball) — to now generalize the blame for clear problems thrown up by the policies they support, and place it upon “British culture” as a whole.

This is all absolutely par for the course. After Member of Parliament Sir David Amess’ life was so cruelly cut short by an Islamist scumbag, his fellow politicians decided the real issue was a lack of “compassion” in political life. One Member of Parliament started rambling about Brexit, and the Observer asserted that it would be “abhorrent” to “politicize the tragedy.”

After schoolgirls watching an Ariana Grande concert were blown up by Salman Abedi, leading left-wing figures took to the airwaves to tell us the attacker was not Muslim. Say what?

Then talking heads queued up to virtue signal about how we must not look back in anger (Say what?) and the mayor of Manchester rebuked a Muslim woman who sought to raise the issue of radicalization on “Question Time.”

When journalists from the magazine “Charlie Hebdo” were slaughtered, hundreds of liberal authors signed a petition — not against extremism, but rather criticizing the decision to present the dead journalists with a bravery award because they were meany-pants to Islam.

After pub goers and bankers were stabbed to death by ISIS supporters, the Labour party decided to remove any reference to “Islamism” from its manifesto, while explicitly mentioning far-right terrorism repeatedly.

There are quite literally hundreds more examples I could give here.

Deflection, selective outrage, obfuscation. These are defining features of the cultish, quasi-religious groupthink that has come to dominate so much of our political, cultural, and intellectual life in recent years.

Events that highlight blatant holes in the narrative enforced by its midwit adherents are either ignored or shoe-horned to fit within rigidly delimited ideological parameters that render the ensuing discussion nonsensical. Anyone who pushes back against this anti-intellectualism, or who does seek to interrogate tough issues openly and honestly, is labelled “racist” or “sexist” or “a white supremacist” et cetera.

This is gaslighting of the highest order. And it is abusive.

It is abusive to expect Jews to be stabbed and shot and beaten up and only talk about the social and religious reasons for this in vague, euphemistic terms. It is abusive to expect parents whose kids have been murdered by a suicide bombing psychopath screaming “Allah is the greatest!” to accept that the attack had nothing to do with Islam, and feel no anger.

If a far-right nutter commits a racist attack, the liberal media (justifiably) make a show of interrogating the perpetrator’s worldview and the supposed threat it poses. But the far more significant threat posed by Islamic extremism and antisemitism, by contrast, is only discussed (if at all) in generalized, vague, obfuscating tones. It is pathetic and shameful.

Jihadist extremism is not a politeness issue. We ought to stop pretending that it is.

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1. “Britain’s social emergency.” Melanie Phillips.