West needs a new response to terror

We’ve come to accept that terror is like the weather — always there and beyond our control. How have we let this happen?

A young girl after the Manchester attack. Picture: AFP

Having scarred so many European cities and made horrific inroads into the US, is terror spreading to Australia?

The police say the mowing down of pedestrians on Melbourne’s Flinders Street doesn’t seem to have been terror-related.

It was deliberate and “evil”, ­officials say, but whether it was politically motivated is up for question.

Yet even as we wait to discover what fuelled this attack, it has ­already added to today’s dreadful sense that terror has become a normal part of everyday life.

It has contributed to today’s weird acceptance, almost, that strange violent incidents, the ­occasional truck attack or stabbing rampage or bomb, are part and parcel of living in the West in the 21st century.

This strange, muted sense that terror is like the weather — always there and beyond our control — has become more and more pronounced during the past year.

Even in a city as brash as New York, terrorism feels like the new normal, akin to crowded subway trains or stacked pancakes for breakfast.

Consider the response to the failed pipe bombing a couple of weeks ago. Within a couple of hours of the early detonation of Akayed Ullah’s homemade bomb as he walked through Port Authority Bus Terminal on December 11, New York was back to its bustling, breezy self. It was as if nothing had happened.

Mercifully, nothing too horrific had happened. Ullah’s pipe failed to fire out the nails and screws he had viciously packed it with, meaning only he was badly ­injured.

Yet while Ullah failed to execute the kind of spectacular Islamist horror that has rocked Paris, Nice, London, Manchester, Berlin and Barcelona in recent years, the fact is he wanted to.

This was an attempted apocalyptic strike at the heart of one of the West’s great metropolises. And as with all the other attempted and successful Islamist assaults on life, limb and liberty in recent years, that should give us pause for thought, no?

According to investigators, Ullah was inspired to try to slaughter New Yorkers by a combination of warped grievances. He was ­apparently repulsed by Christmas-themed adverts on New York’s transport system. He was angry about Israel’s actions in Gaza. He was anti-Trump.

This mishmash of moralistic and religious resentments hints at a feverish mind, but also one that harbours a deep hatred for Western society and its inhabitants. That is, a mind that isn’t only ­intent on injuring and killing but that wants to do so to send a message to the West: “You are depraved and you must be punished.”

In Melbourne, the man accused of ramming his Suzuki Grand Vitara into pedestrians is a refugee who attributed his act to the “perceived mistreatment of Muslims”.

This 21st-century phenomenon, this growth of an extreme religious intolerance for Western values, deserves far more debate than it gets after such attacks.

I am based in New York at the moment, and I was 800m from the Hudson River bike path five weeks ago when there was a more successful terrorising of New Yorkers. Sayfullo Saipov, a migrant from Uzbekistan, ploughed a truck into cyclists and runners, killing eight.

There was concern across Lower Manhattan. To a creepy soundtrack of non-stop sirens, we briskly walked northwards, up the island, to get away from the horror we were reading about on our phones.

Yet I found myself more disturbed by what came after this worry among the public: nothing. Calm. Normality.

The slaughter wasn’t even big news for long. It was as if it had been a standard truck accident, rather than the transformation of a truck into a weapon with which to strike at America’s greatest city, and by extension America itself.

Something alarming is happening in our response to terror. We’re increasingly shrugging our shoulders over it. We’re accepting it as part of life. We’re made sad by it, of course, but we aren’t angered by it. We don’t seem very moved by it at all.

This year might just be the one in which we gave in to terrorism, in which, horrifically, we came to see the occasional obliteration of scores of our fellow citizens as simply something that happens — like a storm.

The number of people in the West falling victim to radical Islamist violence is extraordinary.

Hundreds have been slaughtered in Europe during the past three years.

This includes deeply disturbing attacks we all remember, such as the massacre of 89 people at a rock concert at the Bataclan in Paris in 2015; the killing of 86 people last year with a 19-tonne truck in Nice; truck attacks on tourists in Barce­lona (killing 14) and Christmas shoppers in Berlin (killing 12); the Brussels bombings (killing 32); the bombing of a pop concert packed with children in Manchester this year that killed 22.

But it also includes smaller ­attacks many will have forgotten. The stabbing to death of two women in Turku in Finland this year. Or the killing of five shoppers with a truck in Stockholm, also this year.

Now there are awful stirrings of this violent Islamist zealotry in the US and Australia.

The US has had the recent New York events, the Orlando mass­acre in which 49 people in a gay club were killed by an Islamic State sympathiser and the San Bernardino massacre that killed 14.

Australia has had low-level ­assaults. This year police foiled an Islamic State-inspired plot to down a plane flying out of Sydney. CNN reported that even in Oz, Islamic State has a “powerful allure”, albeit for a “tiny minority”. It remains to be seen if the Melbourne guy is part of that minority.

Increasingly, the response to this terror is to say: “Let’s just carry on as normal — that will show the terrorists.”

And in one sense this is a positive response. When Parisians ­responded to the Bataclan massacre in 2015 by going out the next day and packing out cafes and bars, that was moving. When Londoners flooded the eateries around London Bridge when they reopened a few days after the truck-and-knife attack on June 3 this year that killed eight, that was good.

Yet while it’s good to move on, it’s not good to refuse to look back. It’s not good to avoid asking questions, having debate, “feeling something”.

After the Manchester attack on pop fans, the Oasis song Don’t Look Back in Anger became the ­anthem of the nation. It captured the sentiment that now takes hold following terrorist attacks: don’t be angry, don’t dwell on it, just lay a flower and move on.

We’re discouraged from asking difficult questions. Debate is frowned on.

Wonder if radical Islam is a major problem for the West and you’ll be branded “Islamophobic”.

Ask if it was wise of Angela Merkel to welcome hundreds of thousands of migrants from the Middle East into Europe in 2015 and you’ll be called racist.

Even to argue that there are certain French, British, American or Australian values that are good, and that we should encourage newcomers to adopt, is to risk being viewed as a sinner against the multicultural idea that all values are ­equally valid.

We always see this post-terror: the chilling of debate. The aim is to tame moral thought, dampen dangerous emotions. It sometimes feels like the political and media elites fear us, the public, more than they do the apocalyptic terrorist. After every ­attack their first ­response is to say: “There had better not be an Islamophobic backlash in response to this.”

It is becoming clear that the perversely chilled response to terrorism is not an act of defiance. Rather, it speaks to a reluctance in the West to ­engage in robust debate about terror, religion, immigration and values. It speaks to such a deeply entrenched culture of relativism, PC offence-avoidance and intellectual and moral cowardice that some now think occasional acts of barbarism are a price worth ­paying if it means we can avoid asking deep, difficult questions about Western society, Islam and multicultural tensions in the 21st century.

We need to change this post-terror culture. We need to recognise that a society that will not even permit anger or moral soul-searching when an eight-year-old girl at an Ariana Grande concert is blown apart is a society that has already been defeated. It is a ­society that is already dead.