The West is suffering from Stockholm syndrome when it comes to terrorism

THERE’S nothing immoral about avenging the lives of the innocent, and no amount of hashtags or keeping calm and carrying on will stop terrorism, writes James Morrow.

WHEN the meat-is-murder brigade thinks it’s time to muscle up in the fight against terrorism, it’s a sure sign we’re badly off course.

Posting to Facebook in the wake of the terrorist attack in Manchester, the vegan activist and former Smiths frontman Morrissey offered some thoughts about the way officialdom has handled the problem of terrorism.

“In modern Britain everyone seems petrified to officially say what we all say in private,” wrote Morris­sey. “Politicians tell us they are un­afraid, but they are never the victims. How easy to be unafraid when one is protected from the line of fire. The people have no such protections.”

He didn’t spare the Queen, Theresa May or city mayor Andy Burnham in his post, writing: “Manchester mayor Andy Burnham says the attack is the work of an ‘extremist’. An ­extreme what? An extreme rabbit?”

The singer even mentioned the ­I-word — immigration.

When even vegan rocker Morrissey is decrying our head-in-the-sand attitude to Islamic terrorism, it’s a sign we’re badly off course. (Pic: Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP)

Of course, for stepping across the boundaries set by progressive propagandists and social media enforcers, Morrissey was branded as “bizarre”, “an embarrassment” and, unsurprisingly, a Trump supporter in sad rocker’s clothing.

But in many senses he was right.

After the candlelight vigils and ­reassurances that “love conquers all” and warnings against hate, the victims and their families will be left to grieve and recover anonymously until the next attack, when the cycle will surely start again.

Because, of course, to terrorists the tolerance of the West is like a red rag to a bull.

Indeed Manchester has, over the past several years, gone out of its way to make all the right noises and crack down on “Islamophobia”, hoping like all appeasers that the crocodile eats them last.

In May last year, the local cops even offered a grovelling apology after they staged a terror drill simulating a suicide bomber in a shopping centre in which the man who played the attacker yelled “Allahu akbar” ­before “detonating” himself. (Perhaps he should have yelled “oy gevalt!” or chanted “om…” instead.)

And none of that stopped an ­assault which, in targeting joyful girls and decadent pop music and the free and easy mixing of the sexes that characterises the West, scored a bloody trifecta for ISIS’s Islamist grievance mongers.

It is as if the West is suffering from a collective Stockholm syndrome.

Faced with an ever-growing list of terror attacks we must ask: Do we genuinely want to defeat ISIS and ­Islamist terrorism? Or do we want to repeat the usual pattern of hugs and hashtags while we wait for the next atrocity to occur?

Sadly for all of us, the push is on to make sure that the West goes the second route, dressing up “carrying on as before” as an act of resolve rather than one of slow suicide.

Because, the way it stands, the only thing left is for Sting to re-record his Cold War anthem to remind us that, hey, ISIS loves its children too.

But contrary to the kumbayah crowd, there is nothing immoral about avenging the deaths of ­innocent.

Indeed civilisation cannot survive if it allows its young to be targeted with impunity.

James Morrow is the Daily Telegraph opinion editor.