The West's Response to Terrorism is a Sick Joke Run According to a Stupid, Murderous Script

See if this reads as the standard cycle for gaining "closure" on a terrorist attack within a week. (By the way: Should we seek closure for such a calamity within a week?)

The only thing he misses is that we in the west have become just aces at staging tastefully subdued funerary memorials. We do like our candles and flowers.

Well at least we all know the form by now. This morning Islamist suicide-bombers struck one of the few European capitals they haven't previously hit in a mass-casualty terrorist attack.

The standard response now goes as follows. First the body parts of innocent people are flung across airport check-ins or underground trains. Briefly there is some shock. On social media the sentimentalists await the arrival of this atrocity's cutesy hashtag or motif and hope it will tide them over until the piano man arrives at the scene of the attack to sing 'Imagine there’s no countries'. Meantime someone will hopefully have said something which a lot of people can condemn as 'inappropriate'.

I see that the Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was this morning's Twitter miscreant, foolish enough to say in the wake of the Brussels attack that the EU might not make us very safe. One may agree or disagree with this sentiment, but Ms Pearson should have known that the only acceptable thing to do after a suicide bomber detonates beside the European Commission is to acclaim the Commission as one of the few entities able to keep us safe.

This "miscreant" made the mistake of saying something which is obviously true:

She should have known, only the crude-minded say things that are so obviously, gauchely true. The truly fine minds work hard to invent things which are subtle, inobvious, and completely false.

I mean, any idiot can say true things. Where's the sport in that?

We will shortly move to the next phase, which is to find a good news story amid the rubble. Anything will do, but best of all is a Muslim good news story. After Paris it was swiftly reported that one of the suicide bombers at Stade de France had been turned away by a brave Muslim security guard. The story whizzed around the world before anyone could check whether it was true. It wasn't. But people needed it to be. Not because Muslims don’t do good deeds, but because in the wake of any Islamist terrorist attack people need people opposed to the bombers to be Muslim and the bombers themselves not to be Muslim. Then the good Muslim can represent Islam while the bad Muslims can be said to have nothing to do with it.

That's just the beginning; he then gets into why we keep talking about the same things -- it's to keep ourselves from not talking about the same things all the time.

Virtue Signalling and Altruistic Punishment. John Sexton had a good piece yesterday of a case of the Bien Pensants showing just how bien they pensent, making the hashtag "#StopIslam" trend by pouring out all their enlightened hate for the nobody who tweeted it.

posted by Ace at 01:10 PM

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