Friday, October 6, 2017

The Goal of Western Leaders: Avoid Change, Duck Accountability

by Douglas Murray • October 6, 2017 at 5:00 am

Political leaders across the Western world seem to have a clear set of priorities that we will not change, and therefore we must simply accept the problem.
There are several possible reasons for this, but the most likely is that they know that it is the policies of successive governments, including their own, that have caused such attacks to happen. If countries such as Canada, France and Finland had been more careful with their national security, these current attacks would not be happening.
In order to avoid the political repercussions that might follow any honest evaluation of our current situation, they seem to conclude, the only thing to be done is to pretend that terrorism is -- like the weather -- something that just happens to us, and that our principal problem is the bigotry of Europeans rather than another two women lying dead on our streets.

If countries like Canada, France and Finland had been more careful with their national security, the current terrorist attacks would not be happening. Pictured: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) meets with France's President Emmanuel Macron (left), on July 7, 2017.

In Europe today, it is what goes unacknowledged and un-commemorated that reveals the trouble we are in.

There are plenty of public campaigns and calls by politicians to demonstrate "awareness" of things that are either non-existent problems or second-order problems. Earlier this year, for instance, the President of Austria came up with an eye-catching initiative. Addressing the ban on women wearing full-face coverings in public places, Alexander van der Bellen, the former leader of the Green Party, said:

"If this real and rampant Islamophobia continues, there will come a day where we must ask all women to wear a headscarf -- all -- out of solidarity to those who do it for religious reasons."