Hey, remember the bow-and-arrow terrorist in Norway? The mainstream media certainly don’t: the story all but vanished from their pages within a day. They’ll keep yammering about Christchurch or Anders Breivik as often as they can for the next decade or two, but when a follower of a certain religion is involved? They’ve got memory spans shorter than a teenager on red cordial browsing TikTok videos.
In a way, you can’t blame them: it’s basic news sense to put a local story on the front page and bury someone doing something somewhere, way, way down in the bowels of the ‘world news’.
Another excuse that might be made for the mainstream media is that they’re just jihaded out. When they’ve got more sexy stuff to report, like Covid, yet another climate beano, or a spat over Jacinda‘n’Clarke’s wedding venue, who can be bothered reporting on yet another jihadi terror attack? There’s just so many of them – 22 in the four days since the Norway terror attack alone! Who can keep up? Terror attacks are just another ‘dog bites man’ story, aren’t they?
And that’s the problem, isn’t it?
Islamic terror has become so commonplace that we hardly even notice it anymore. Which should worry us very much.
The murder of British MP Sir David Amess by a Somali Muslim likewise caused a brief flurry in the mainstream media – and will almost certainly vanish from headlines just as fast as that, um, thing in, where was it, again? Denmark? Sweden?
Yet even as the media yawn their way past another Islamic terror attack, the threat may be growing.
But we don’t need events in Britain to show us that Islamist terrorism is still very much with us. It’s the way we react to it that has changed. We don’t talk about Islamism as much as we did. Jihadist terrorism is less frequently on the front pages. Amid the panics about populism and pandemic, it has slipped down the news agendas.
Yet worldwide, it seems to be regaining momentum […] Ministers are warning of a new terrorism wave as various deranged men-children emerge from months spent inside and online thanks to COVID-19.
Spectator Australia
Terror attacks spiked sharply up to 2014, then fell off again. It’s been relatively quiet for the past two years, at least in the West, which has been locked down by the pandemic. But that means that Britain’s estimated 30,000 extremists have had a lot of time to sit at home and watch ISIS videos.
Officials believe there is an increased threat from ‘lone wolves’ who were radicalised online while spending months at home during lockdown […]
One security source told The Telegraph: ‘Counter-terror police and MI5 have been concerned for some time that once we emerged out of lockdown there would be more people out on the streets and more targets for the terrorists.
‘Combined with the fact that lots of young people have been spending so much time online, it makes for a very worrying mix and there is a real concern about the possible rise of the bedroom radicals.’
It is now feared extremists around the world may seek to activate their recruits and encourage them to carry out terror strikes across the UK.
Daily Mail
An apparently random stabbing attack in Melbourne has likewise raised fears of resurgent terrorism in Australia. Police have yet to name their suspect or provide any details as to motive, however.
Still, the numbers are there: Islamic terror hasn’t gone away and isn’t going to, any time soon.
Across the globe, Islamism continues to cause carnage. The worst hit countries are still those with Muslim majorities: Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria and Somalia. We can be grateful we don’t have to live with similar levels of fear, but in a globalised world, Islamism still travels to most corners of the world.
David Cameron got many things wrong, but he was right when he said the clash between our secular culture and Islamic extremism was ‘the struggle of our generation.’ It could be the struggle of the next, too.
Specator Australia
We ignore the threat of Islamic terror at our peril. To borrow from a famous saying, the mainstream media might not be interested in jihadism any more, but jihadism remains very interested in us.
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