Rod Liddle has written a very odd article (£) for today’s Sunday Times. The main thrust of his piece – ‘We’ve become masters of delusion over this murderous Islamism’ – is that the authorities are too anxious to separate terrorism from Islam or even from Islamism. This is well-worn territory – what makes it odd is the way he shoehorns Munich in.
Sometimes it might seem as though Liddle’s dreaded ‘liberal elite’ are slow to confirm that a terrorist attack is Islamist. If this is true then Boris Johnson certainly bucked that trend.
But the Munich shootings are a reminder that there’s a reason to be cautious. In the current climate many will have assumed this was yet another Islamist attack, and the fact the shooter’s background was Muslim seemed to clinch the matter.
However it emerged well before Liddle’s article was published that Ali David Sonboly was a loner with a strong interest in school massacres. Apparently he was also fascinated by Breivik. Yet the casual reader of Liddle’s post might well assume that Sonboly was a proven Islamist.
In Munich, a young German-Iranian man born and raised locally killed at least nine people with a gun and injured 16 more. He seems to have targeted teens in particular.
This was another outrage with roots stretching well beyond our continent. Deranged the gunman most certainly was. And inspired, one would hazard, by the similar attacks witnessed recently in both Germany and France and perhaps the UK.
In fact his inspiration can be traced far more easily to Norway than to ISIS attacks in Europe, and although the murders could have had roots ‘beyond our continent’, these roots can be found US school massacres not the Middle East.
He goes on:
We have an atrocity in Europe every day or so now and one way or another we are fairly clear where it comes from, even if the authorities try desperately to persuade us otherwise — by withholding information, or telling the police to keep shtoom, or putting out misleading statements.
Given Rod Liddle’s refusal to engage with evidence that this shooting really did have ‘nothing to do with Islam’ – is he implying that we are being lied to about Munich here?
