Melanie Phillips - Laying the groundwork for the Toulouse massacre

When the Toulouse school massacre happened, the media rushed to say that the perpetrator was a white far-right racist. The lone gunman had mown down at close range a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, wounding several others. He was thought to be the same killer who a few days earlier had murdered three black French paratroopers in two separate attacks. A killer who targeted Jews and blacks – must be a far-right white racist, right?

Wrong. The suspect who the French police have now cornered turns out to be a jihadi Islamic terrorist with self-declared links to al Qaeda, who has made trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan in the past. Well, there’s a surprise.

Jews throughout the world are all potential targets for attack in a terrifying manifestation of global incitement to murder. Islamists regularly declare their intention to kill Jews wherever they can find them. Hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza at southern Israel over the past couple of weeks bear out daily the frenzied attempt to murder as many Jews as possible. In the Mumbai massacre in 2008, it turned out that the attack on the tiny ultra-orthodox Lubavitch centre was for the Islamic perpetrators of that atrocity the most important target. There have been repeated Islamic terrorist attempts on Jewish targets around the world. Oh -- and Islamists have been murdering black people in Libya because they are black.

Yet all this is ignored by the mainstream media. Desperate to sanitise Muslim genocidal terrorism and prove that racism and Jew-hatred is confined to white people and the ‘far right’, the media simply did not entertain the possibility that the perpetrator of the French killings might have been a Muslim. So a range of likely perpetrators was canvassed – but they were all variations on white racists.

And even when the perpetrator turned out to be an Islamic terrorist the media were still trying to spin it away, with Sky News stressing the deprivation of the killer and his family and interviewing a French female journalist living in London who claimed that this was ‘an attack against diversity’.  As blogger Edgar Davidson observed here:

‘She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.’

Not only are the media and ‘progressive’ commentators in the west desperate to sanitise Islamic terrorism and genocidal incitement; they also join in. The Toulouse jihadist said he was

‘seeking revenge for Palestinian children and French military postings overseas.’

But no Palestinian children have ever been targeted by Israel for murder. Quite the reverse: Israel regularly puts its own soldiers in harm’s way in order to any minimise civilian casualties in military operations against Palestinian terrorists and their infrastructure which  it undertakes solely to protect its own people from further murderous Palestinian attacks. Any Palestinian child casualties in such operations occur solely as a tragic and inadvertent by-product of war – and as often as not because the Palestinians have put their own children in harm’s way.

Yet this deranged belief that the Israelis deliberately kill Palestinian children is not only pumped out daily by the Arab and Muslim world inciting their people to hate Jews and to murder them as a holy act; not only do western progressives ignore this incitement and pretend instead that Islamic terrorism arises from legitimate ‘grievances’; these same western progressives themselves pump out precisely the same lies and incitement -- and then suggest that the deliberate murder of Jewish innocents is the moral equivalent of attempts by Israel toprevent the slaughter of yet more innocents.

Thus the EU foreign affairs chief, the British Baroness Ashton, seemed to equate the murder of the French Jews in Toulouse with the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza in Israeli military operations there. Although the EU now claims she was misunderstood and that she was merely referring to all violence against children, that does not let her off the hook – indeed, by underscoring the fundamental amorality of the remark, it not only attaches Lady Ashton to that hook yet more firmly but also now attaches the EU itself. And now Hamas itself, no less, has sprung to her defence:

‘“Ashton’s declarations are worthy of appreciation and support due to Israel’s attempts to pressure her,” said a senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, on his Facebook page.’

As a fine article in The Commentator points out:

‘No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.’

The terrorist who carried out the French killings may now have been caught. But those in the west who provide an echo chamber for the diabolical discourse that incubates genocide have yet to be brought to account.