When it comes to acts of Islamic terror, the word senseless is both banal and dangerous

PHOTO: AP PHOTO/IANHODGSON

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ew words succeed in being both vapid and dangerous at the same time. As a response to tragedy, the perfunctory Thoughts and Prayers message favored by a certain type of politician is merely vapid; grating in a trendy, right-on way.

“Shocking, absolutely tragic — thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers,” the big political beasts pronounce over the latest tragedy, before roaming on surefootedly across the moral high ground.

But when it comes to acts of Islamic terror, the word senseless is both banal and dangerous. It distorts and trivializes deliberate acts of religious violence as inexplicable eruptions of randomness.

Look no further than the response to the terror attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park shul on Yom Kippur where the word became a mantra.

Speaking to the Jewish community a few days after the attack, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy declared, “We must stand in grief for the innocent lives that were taken so cruelly, senseless murders carried out on the holiest day in the Jewish year.”

A search for “senseless violence Heaton Park attack” generates a flood of responses. A police watchdog, a slew of local councils and mosques, an anti-hate outfit, a Corbynist lobby group, participants in a multi-faith vigil — all resort to the formulation.

While many are undoubtedly well-meaning, the idea that the violence involved is in any way mindless is a very damaging one. Islamist terror is many things — abhorrent and murderous come to mind — but it’s not senseless. In fact, it makes a lot of sense given its perpetrators twisted goals. It is designed to inflict fear on its targets in pursuit of certain goals.

Islamists hate Jews and they hate the West. They dream of a worldwide caliphate. They want sharia law first in their neighborhoods, then in their cities, and finally their countries.

To that end, some will use demographics and democracy to build strength and ultimately take over. Some use violence to speed things up.

That’s radical and evil — but not mindless and random.

Even if Jihad Al-Shamie, the Heaton Park terrorist, was unable to quote the finer points of jihadist theology and its plan to take over the West, the effect is the same. He was clearly raised in an atmosphere of casual radicalism that inspired his murderous actions. His surgeon father tweeted in support of Hamas after October 7. The imam at his mosque preached anti-Semitism.

That’s where the “senseless” catechism is dangerous. Because a threat that you won’t acknowledge is one that you can’t tackle. And currently, those who use the word do so because to use any other adjective means admitting that the country is in deep trouble.

Significant portions of Britain’s Muslim community are anti-Semitic. They’re hostile to Western liberal values. They have elected multiple so-called “Gaza MPs”  — politicians whose brief is short on local issues, and long on pro-Hamas politics.

In cities like Manchester, the Jewish community is surrounded by people who hold these radical views. Revisiting the area of my old elementary school recently I was struck by the Palestinian flags festooned around a house that I’d driven past countless times as a child.

“We can’t breathe since 1948,” reads a prominent sign, visible for the many local Jewish residents to see.

When politicians say that a terrorist raised in this culture acted senselessly, they really mean to say that they’re too afraid to look the facts in the face, and would much rather pretend that the unpleasant facts don’t exist.

So instead of dealing with the world as it is, they hide behind language.

No less a left-wing eminence than George Orwell famously wrote about the politician’s deployment of euphemism and vagueness to avoid uncomfortable realities.

There’s nothing more euphemistic, vague, and Orwellian than “senseless.”

A month on from the attack that shook Britain’s Jews, the word’s continued use signals that for all their declared intentions to take on anti-Semitism, Britain’s leaders aren’t prepared to tackle the uncomfortable problem that they refuse to name.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1085)