Looking through the wrong lens?

Sigmund Freud observed that when someone is desperately trying to suppress something, they will likely give themselves away unconsciously.  Thus, the idea of the “Freudian slip” was born.  Why do I bring this up?  Because Britain’s liberal elite just made an almighty Freudian slip – unconsciously giving away its deep-seated fear and hatred of Muslims. I speak, of course, about the unconscious response to events last Tuesday which may or may not have been an attack on Parliament.

Let me ask you this – how do we know that this was a terrorist attack? 

The only rational answer is that we do not.  We assume that it was a terrorist attack.  But – at the time of writing – nobody in an official investigatory role has yet put forward conclusive evidence for this assumption, and we are beginning to see signs that it may not have had anything to do with terrorism.  In the end, it will take a coroner’s court hearing (together with any other official inquiries that take place) to establish the full facts behind the case.

Now, I am not saying that it was not an act of terrorism (which would have to be an organised conspiracy for political ends, not the violent act of a lone individual). I am simply saying that at this point we do not know.  We are currently dealing with narrative rather than fact.  It is a narrative that began with the first pictures of the attacker – a man with brown skin and a beard – on the floor with an armed policeman standing over him.  Just consider for a moment whether the media would have leaped to Islamic terrorism if the attacker been a white male who had gone on the rampage or if a car had been driven into a crowd somewhere other than Westminster.

It is entirely understandable that the security services treated the attack as terrorism.  Without a doubt they will have put into action a tried and tested emergency plan for securing Westminster in the event of a potential terrorist threat.  They will have followed the plan to the letter, and unclouded by personal assessments of the situation.  Obviously the plan needed to err on the side of safety.  So any perceived attack on Parliament will have been treated as terrorism.

The media together with our political leaders have no such justification.  Their task is to ask questions, raise doubts and interrogate the evidence.  Failure to do so can lead to injustice.

In the same way as media coverage of the Hillsborough disaster resulted in the widespread belief that the cause was drunken fans – an injustice that took decades to overturn – the media coverage of events last Tuesday have created the belief that “Britain” has been the victim of a terrorist attack. Confirmation bias will do the rest – ensuring that evidence that supports the terrorist hypothesis will be brought into focus while anything that casts doubts will be brushed over.

To arrive at the Islamic terrorism narrative the media and politicians had to put on a particular pair of lenses.  These brought certain facts into focus while blurring many others.  Most obviously – and this is why I charge the liberal elite with fear and hatred toward Muslims – the fact that the perpetrator had brown skin and a beard, later turned out to be a convert to Islam and had once gone to teach English in Saudi Arabia was taken as sufficient proof that he was a terrorist.  Because, all brown skinned and bearded Muslim men (especially those who have visited Saudi Arabia) are terrorists, right?  (This is what passes for reason in UKIP and the English Defence League, not what we should expect from our political representatives or supposedly respectable journalists at the BBC).

The point is hammered home by the fact that the attacker crashed his car into the wall outside Parliament, stabbed and killed a policeman, before being gunned down just inside the grounds of Parliament.  After all, that’s a little bit like those lorry attacks in Brussels, Nice and Berlin (except they involved hi-jacked articulated lorries because these would cause far more damage than a 4x4 – whereas this was more akin to entirely non-terrorist incidents involving cars mowing people down).  Confirmation apparently came when someone purporting to speak for ISIL claimed that this was their work (although ISIL would lay claim to every car crash, stabbing or gas explosion in the UK if someone else didn’t claim them first).

It is these facts – brought into focus and then amplified by Westminster’s liberal elite – that established this as an act of terrorism in the public mind.  An act, by the way that many among the supposedly anti-Islamophobic political left also unconsciously accepted as a terrorist attack – thereby displaying their own unconscious fear and distrust of Muslims – when they rushed to vacuously point out that not all Muslims are terrorists.

At this point, you might reasonably object that there can be no alternative explanation.  “We are not being Islamophobes; we are simply weighing the evidence.”  After all, what happened was pretty terrifying.  And since events concluded in the grounds of Parliament, surely that means that our democracy, Parliament, the political establishment, the government, Ministers or MPs must have been under attack, right?

Let me offer an alternative explanation – not one that I claim to be true or intend to diminish the horror of the event; but one that, using a different set of lenses allows us to bring certain other facts to the foreground while easing Islam and the political establishment in Parliament further back. 

It turns out that the perpetrator – n. Adrian Russell Elms, aka. Khalid Masood – was an unlikely terrorist; known to the security services, but not on their terrorism radar.  His background, however, speaks of a highly disturbed individual.  The product of a broken home back in the early 1960s when that still carried huge social stigma, Elms/Masood had a track record of juvenile delinquency that led on to an adult life punctuated by occasional spells in prison as a result of various offenses; several involving extreme violence.  Having spent a somewhat transient life, most recently he appears to have rekindled a relationship and moved in with a previous partner in Birmingham.  However, about a month ago the relationship appears to have broken down.  Most recently, Elms/Masood had been staying in a cheap hotel in Brighton.

We all know what happened next.  But at this point we do not know why – and since Elms/Masood is now dead, we will never know for sure what was going through his mind when he drove to London and mowed down 40 tourists on Westminster Bridge prior to his final rendezvous with the security services in the grounds of Parliament.

As Simon Jenkins noted in the Guardian on Wednesday:

“As yet, nothing is known of the motive. All that can be said is that the attacker failed to enter parliament itself. Bystanders were killed and injured, but the massive security inevitable for such an institution was effective in protecting its occupants.” (My emphasis)

What I can say, is that when BBC Radio 4’s Today programme ran an item profiling Elms/Masood on Thursday morning, what I heard was strangely reminiscent of a phenomena that emerged in the USA in the 1990s, and came to be known as “blue suicide” or “suicide by cop.”  Again, I need to be clear that I am not saying that this is what happened, I am merely pointing out that it is a credible alternative explanation in which Islam and politics fade into the background.

What we do know about some men who commit suicide is that they have a tendency to impulsive violence and self-destructive behaviour.  Homicide/suicides (in which men kill others before killing themselves) happen roughly once every six weeks in the UK.  Most often they go unreported outside the local papers because the only people murdered are the family of the murderer/suicide victim – tragic but not, apparently, newsworthy.  Sometimes when cases are particularly bloody they do make the news– such as this example from South Wales.  Occasionally, male suicide involves extreme violence that can be directed at random members of the public.  We also know that seaside resorts like Blackpool and Brighton are favoured spots for many potential suicide victims because of the anonymity provided in the B&B/cheap hotel districts.  Strangers come and go unnoticed, and hoteliers do not pry into guest’s private affairs.

One thing we might also consider is that most of the various government suicide reduction programmes since the early 2000s have focused on removing the means of suicide rather than providing services to help suicidal people.  Access to high buildings, for example, is far more difficult today than it was twenty years ago.  Bridges often have netting beneath them to prevent people leaping to their deaths.  This makes the kind of active/public suicide often favoured by men extremely difficult in modern Britain.  Combine this with a sense of grievance toward the public at large and a tendency to violent behaviour, and suicide by cop becomes a plausible explanation.  Elms/Masood’s version of Islam may have further distorted his mental state by allowing him to see himself as some kind of martyr.  But even if not, I can think of no better way of getting yourself shot to death by the security services than by running up to the gates of parliament armed with a knife and shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”  Not only this, but you would be hard pressed to think of anywhere else in Britain that such as response by the police and/or security services would be guaranteed.

Could what happened on Tuesday be suicide by cop?  It might be I have no idea.  In the same way, I have no idea whether it was Islamist terrorism.  Both are possible.  And it is instructive that five days later, the BBC conceded that:

“Westminster attacker Khalid Masood acted alone and there is no information to suggest further attacks are planned, Scotland Yard has said…

“We must all accept that there is a possibility we will never understand why he did this. That understanding may have died with him”

However, the liberal elite’s rush to judgement means, in a sense, that it no longer matters.  For them, this was terrorism long before Elms/Masood got in his car and headed for Brighton.  Why? because in a strange perverted way they needed their terrorist attack.  Rather like the Queen (the current monarch’s mother) at the height of the Blitz in 1940 expressing relief that Buckingham Palace had been bombed: “I am glad we have been bombed. Now we can look the East End in the eye.”  Following Elms/Masood’s actions, Britain's liberal elite can look Paris, Brussels, Nice and Berlin in the eye.

Here, perhaps, is the problem.  In rushing to satisfy that strongly emotive desire for shared victimhood with our European neighbours, their rush to judgement admits their unconscious and deeply buried belief that Muslims and terrorism really are intimately linked.  And for all of the huffing and puffing about not being Islamophobic, our elites demonstrate precisely how terrified they really are.  Again, in this Simon Jenkins appears to be the one sane voice emanating from the Westminster bubble:

“Don’t fill pages of newspapers and hours of television and radio with words like fear, menace, horror, maniac, monster. Don’t let the mayor rush into print, screaming “don’t panic”. Don’t have the media trawl the world for pundits to speculate on “what Isis wants” and “how hard it is to protect ourselves from attack”. Don’t present London as a horror movie set. Don’t crave a home-grown Osama bin Laden. In other words, don’t pretend you are “carrying on as usual” when you are doing the precise opposite. When the prime minister stands up in parliament to announce, “We are not afraid,” the response is “why then is the entire government machine behaving as if it’s shit-scared?”

Whatever the liberal elite may claim to the contrary, the reality is that by labelling Tuesday’s events as terrorism and responding accordingly long before any evidence had/has been gathered, our politicians and our mass media have demonstrated for the world to see that they are just as fearful of Muslims as the extremists on the political right – the only difference is that the liberal elite are usually better at hiding it.