If you’re a police commissioner or a government minister, what’s the first thing you should do if a chap with a name such as “Mohammed Asha” or “Muhammad Hanif” turns up in the news in connection with some wacky novelty such as a flaming Jeep Cherokee crashing through the airport concourse?
Britain’s new Prime Minister knew exactly what to do:
Gordon Brown has banned ministers from using the word ‘Muslim’ in connection with the terrorism crisis… The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims, adopting a more ‘consensual’ tone than existed under Tony Blair.
So did the new Home Secretary :
Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied.
In less than six years this has become a time-honored tradition. After the 2005 Tube bombings, the first reaction of Brian Paddick, the deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was to declare that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together.” After the 2006 Toronto plot to behead the Prime Minister, the Canadian Intelligence Service’s assistant director of operations, Luc Portelance, announced that “it is important to know that this operation in no way reflects negatively on any specific community, or ethnocultural group in Canada.”
In the old days, these coppers would have been looking for the modus operandi, patterns of behavior. But now every little incident anywhere on the planet apparently testifies merely to the glorious mosaic of our multicultural societies. Or as the Associated Press puts it, “Diverse Group Allegedly In British Plot“:
LONDON – They had diverse backgrounds, coming from countries around the globe, but all shared youth and worked in medicine…
Were they really that “diverse”? Hey, who ya gonna believe? The Scotland Yard diversity outreach coordinator or your lyin’ eyes?