Nothing to do with islam... again

It had to happen sooner or later. Poor Owen Jones has finally taken himself too seriously and has become Laurie Penny. As he took umbrage because it wasn’t all about him he flounced out of Sky’s Press Preview leaving behind his dignity and quite possibly his career as baby-faced spokesman for the progressive set. No doubt he will recover some composure and write a nice, long article about the event and what led up to it, but it will be with the benefit of hindsight and reflection. His normally well-rehearsed, if wrong, rebuttals – even though he has occasionally floundered for want of a meaningful comeback – deserted him as he wallowed in his own grief for people he never knew, from a community he so desperately needs to be special.

But there’s the crux of the problem. In fighting for recognition, the shriller voices of the LGBT community have demanded supra-human rights and behaved in the bullying ways they accuse the rest of us of. Most of us – and this includes the majority of LGTBs, the disabled, the welfare dependents, the refugees, the freaks and geeks and simples – just want a quiet life. But the activists just can’t leave it be. Owen was demanding that the Orlando massacre be the exclusive possessive grief of his people and nobody else. The now familiar shouting of ‘allahu akbar’, which gives access to grievance from the wider, non-islamic world must be expunged from all accounts of the shooting.

Owen’s problem was that he wasn’t going to allow anybody else’s views air time. And this is so often the way this works. The set of feelings and hopes and desires and challenges of your own specially defined group has to be a unique model. You don’t understand because you’re not gay/disabled/female/short/bald/poor/rich/thin/fat... where does it end? “You don’t know man you weren’t there!” Because here’s the thing that everybody (nearly everybody) outside of the LGBT world and its intersecting Venn satellites can’t grasp: Why couldn’t it be both homophobic AND islamic?

This theme was pursued in an elongated Twitter exchange with writer Emma Kennedy, whose cognitive dissonance was a thing of wonder to behold. No matter how many people suggested, politely, that the Orlando attacks could have been motivated by both homophobia and the rabid teachings of an unenlightened theology this, to her, was ONLY about homophobia, one of the modern seven deadly sins. Omar Mateen would just have happily gunned down any passing dirty kuffar, gay, straight or any station in between.

None of this is bringing any of the fifty dead back to life. None of this is helping to join hands in fighting this modern scourge from the middle ages. None of this is helping radical LGBT activists and their camp followers to join in the wider narrative about making our societies better. So maybe it’s time to all get your special interest heads out of your arses and start manning the barricades, unless defending the west, which gave you your freedoms is less important than nursing your own unique feelings.