There was much commentary over the weekend about a piece of analysis published in the Irish Times on Saturday morning by that newspaper’s Crime and Security Editor, Conor Lally. Writing about the apparent Islamic terrorism attack in Galway carried out by a 16-year-old boy last Friday morning, Lally spent most of the article talking not about the dangers of Islamic extremism, but about the risk of similar or worse terror attacks by “the far right”:
“ In the post-pandemic period the atmosphere in the Republic has become more charged around the issue of migration. The far right has become emboldened and violent.
Senior Garda officers have been increasingly concerned about the prospect of a serious attack on a politician….
Though there are no known links to the far right, the incident also underlines the challenges that could emerge if increasingly hostile public discourse, and violent protests, by those opposed to migration are allowed to spiral.”
Some people, I think, are genuinely and correctly baffled by the disconnect between how the media treats the threat of Islamic extremist terrorism and violence, as opposed to how the media treats the apparently ever-present threat of extremist right-wing terrorism and violence. The former, on those occasions when it occurs, is usually, nay always, presented as a one-off incident, and the focus of the media and politicians becomes on ensuring that the public know that acts of violence by Muslims are very rare, and that the attacker does not represent any kind of systemic problem.
The latter, by contrast, is presented as an ever-present and ever-heightening threat of which we must all be vigilant, and for which many people and their “rhetoric” are to blame. While there are absolutely no calls for society and government to combat the rise of Islamist extremism, right wing extremism (real or imagined) is presented as a problem that Government, media, and civil society have a constant duty to combat through a combination of education, re-education, and criminal and other penalties.
Nota bene, for example the report in the Sunday Times yesterday that the Irish Government is considering the removal of an Irish passport from the UK activist Tommy Robinson, who has swiftly become a byword for all things dangerous and “far right”.
This disconnect is jarring for many people, but when you think about it, the logic behind it is solid, from the point of view of those who hold to it.
The first difference between Islamic extremism and right wing extremism in the liberal mind is a simple threat analysis: Islamic extremism may threaten lives, but lives are by and large all it threatens. There is precisely zero prospect, demographically, of Ireland or the UK or the United States transforming, in our lifetimes, into Muslim-majority Sharia law states. Further, the statistical chances of dying in a terror attack of any kind are very low.
By contrast, right wing extremism is much more terrifying to the liberal mind because to that mind it threatens much more than mere lives. Even if the death count from right wing extremists was much lower (as it is) that does not take into account the terror that the notion of right wing extremism inflicts upon our poor chattering classes: It is a much more terrifying prospect, for two reasons.
First, because right wing extremists, as they understand it, could realistically take power in their lifetimes and do all sorts of unconscionable things, ranging from cracking down on immigration to defunding universities to ending the subsidisation of the media to openly saying things that just aren’t said in polite society. Islamic extremism might pose an occasional threat to liberal lives; but right wing extremism (as they understand the term) poses a threat to the entire western liberal way of life.
Second, because Islamic extremism can be reliably siloed off as “the other”, whereas the threat of “right wing extremism” is – again, to the liberal mind – much more scary precisely because it cannot be siloed off. Your elderly aunt is unlikely to become a radicalised supporter of ISIS after an afternoon browsing Elon Musk’s website. Yet she is only a few clicks away, these people might fear, from perhaps expressing the view that Donald Trump has a point on one or two things. You simply never know where Right Wing extremism might pop up, which is why it has the media and much of its clientele utterly terrified.
I use “clientele” instead of “audience” by the way, because the two things are different. Anybody can buy or read a newspaper, and thus become the audience. But the media also has clientele: The people whose opinions journalists fear or respect and cannot cross. The clientele are mainly other journalists, respected (by journalists) academics, senior politicians, and that blob of NGOs that the media customarily refers to as “civil society”.
For all of these people, Islamic extremism is a much less present threat, and a much less pernicious one, than right wing extremism. They can live in a society where 10% of the population hold radical Islamist views much more comfortably than one in which 45% of the population hold radical right-wing views. Paris has had a problem with Islamic terrorism for years – the average Irish journalist would still much sooner live there than he or she would live in Jackson, Mississippi, where there are no ISIS-types but plenty of people who think veganism is for sissies and would dare say so openly.
The second major difference, aside from threat analysis, is simple empathy. Put simply, the average liberal journalist has a much easier time seeing how a young Muslim man could be driven to murderous rage by the policies of the west than he or she does in understanding how a young Irish person could be driven to public disorder by immigration. After all, they broadly understand the world through the same paradigm: The young Islamist sees the history of the world as primarily a story of the great satanic west obliterating and oppressing the global south, and seeks to take vengeance for the Iraq war, the actions of Israel, the American greed for oil, and the horrors of the Pope’s crusades.
The average western liberal, while perhaps not quite driven to raise the black flag of jihad, broadly sympathises with the outlines of this analysis and that sympathy is turbocharged by a tendency to identify with the exotic. Or, to put it in terms that they might, the progressive is determined to try and see the world through the eyes of a young Muslim angry at the west. Journalists have been seeing the world that way for generations. This means they believe that Islamic extremists can be easily de-radicalised: That the Islamic extremist is just a few small steps in the right direction away from seeing the world as all right-thinking people do.
Consider, for example, the differences between Hamas, and the Fatah movement that rules Palestinians in the West Bank. The correct Irish liberal position is to deplore Hamas but to pledge sympathy to Fatah, even though these are organisations with almost identical views of the world who differ merely on tactics and strategy. The Irish media and its clientele broadly share Hamas’s grievances, but cannot condone its tactics.
Thus, the pattern continues when it comes to Islamic terror: The Irish progressive can empathise with the radicalised young Muslim man because they broadly understand with his grievances with the west, while deploring his tactics. He, and others like him, are redeemable. With the correct interventions and de-radicalisation programmes and perhaps a few tweaks to American foreign policy, the Islamic extremist could be made into an interesting and exotic neighbour, or even colleague in the sociology department of a respectable university where he could write academic papers on the sources of radicalisation in the middle east which pin the blame where both he and the Irish progressive agree it properly belongs: With the Americans.
By contrast, the “right wing extremist” is much more evil to these eyes precisely because of the fact that the right wing extremist and the journalist have no shared worldviews at all, even on the superficial level. The heresies of the right winger are much more foreign to the journalist: While the journalist might have some superficial sympathy for the idea that the Iraq war was bad, and thus understand the radicalisation, what is he to do with people who do not believe in the urgency of addressing climate change? The right wing extremist is irredeemable – there are no circumstances in which an ex-radical could be welcomed to a dinner party to discuss how he had come to see that lower immigration should be achieved by peaceful means, because his very grievances, not just his means, are what is heresy in the first place.
The liberal journalist and the Islamic extremist have a shared analysis of the world from first principles. The liberal journalist and the right wing extremist, by contrast, have nothing in common whatever. As such, a world with Islamic extremism is one in which the liberal establishment can comfortably live, because that extremism reaffirms, rather than challenges, their view of the world. A world where Right Wing extremism was to take root, however, would be a world in which the liberal journalist no longer recognised his place.
Thus, the danger of one is forever downplayed, and the danger of the other is forever played up. It’s not that hard to understand.
*Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed a report on the Government considering the status of Tommy Robinson’s passport to the Sunday Independent. It was in fact published by the Sunday Times.