Brendan O’Neill
Spiked, Jan. 2, 2025
“… something very like the New Orleans massacre happened on 7 October, only on a far larger scale, and back then the activist class celebrated it.”
‘Bring the intifada home!’, cried Ivy League radicals throughout 2024. Well, here it is. On the bloodstained, wreckage-strewn streets of New Orleans. In the shattered limbs of the injured, the extinguished promise of the dead. The very Islamist violence that the West’s woke influencers have been making excuses for, have been glorifying as ‘resistance’, have openly praised from the safety of their leafy campuses, has now struck at the heart of America’s own Big Easy. Is this what you wanted?
The atrocity on Bourbon Street on New Year’s morning would have been horrifying in any era. Fifteen dead, scores injured. All mown down or shot, allegedly by Shamsud-Din Jabbar. He is the 42-year-old US army vet who is suspected of ploughing his pick-up truck through hordes of joyful revellers in the French Quarter just three hours into the new year. He had guns, and improvised explosive devices, and the black flag of ISIS. This has all the hallmarks of an act of Islamist barbarism, visited without mercy on those that Islamists hate above all others: young, carefree Westerners who have the sinful temerity to drink, dance and love life.
The list of the dead reads like a roll-call of those good, everyday Americans who make that great republic tick. Kimberly Usher Fall, the 27-year-old manager of a deli store and mother of a four-year-old boy. Nikyra Cheyenne Dedeaux, an 18-year-old aspiring nurse. Reggie Hunter, 37, a store manager and dad of two. Matthew Tenedorio, a 25-year-old audio-visual technician. Martin ‘Tiger’ Bech, a former football player at Princeton. Here we had the workers, carers and students of the United States butchered by a man who had allegedly committed the most heinous treason of swearing allegiance to the death cult of ISIS. The horror on Bourbon Street is a reminder of the indiscriminate savagery of the Islamist ideology: to these fanatics, every inhabitant of the ungodly West – man, woman and child – is a legitimate target.
Yet in our era, the massacre in the Big Easy hits even harder, it hurts even more. For ours is an epoch of excuse-making for Islamist violence. Ours is a time in which the activist class, the educated, the influential and the supposedly ‘progressive’ issue craven apologias for precisely the kind of ideological sadism that was inflicted on the merrymakers of New Orleans. They’re on record calling such mass murder ‘resistance’. They’ve hailed its practitioners as ‘martyrs’. They’ve celebrated the blow that these religious hysterics sometimes land on ‘evil’, ‘imperial’ nations. What will they say now, as New Orleans reels from what they falsely and madly swoon over as ‘resistance’? ….SOURCE