I’ve been trying to find out the reaction to Theresa May’s speech about how the government intends to clamp down on extremism. How it went down with the public and so on.
The BBC did air the speech, but so did Sky. Reactions seem to fall into two camps.
The Islamists didn’t think much of it. Some say they wish to put a knife through her neck, others that they wish cars would run her over.
Other, less fanatical responses range from ‘too little too late’ to “yeah yeah, all talk and no ‘do’.”
Odd that Anjem Choudary has been invited to address the Oxford Union, which you might think a bit of an impudent invitation under the circumstances.
While David Cameron is still insisting that ‘extremism’ is entirely different from Islam, even when it’s called Islamist extremism, Theresa May’s intentions seem decidedly pie in the sky.
She mentioned the Trojan Horse effect. Yet the BBC tells us that there is no evidence that such a thing exists. It all seems to hinge on how one interprets ‘extremism’, ‘plot’ , ‘British values’ and the meaning of the word ‘meaning.’
What irritated me yesterday was that David Cameron’s supposed ‘gaffe’ eclipsed every other item of news yesterday. Everyone on the BBC was hell-bent on making an enormous mountain out of what most people will think of as a small mole-hill. It was an obsessive, media-driven, overblown, explosion of substance-free, boring, manufactured speculation about 'what David Cameron meant' when he said something unremarkable about his intentions for the far off future.
With luck one day the media will eat itself, or push a knife through its own neck; or get run over by a truck that it didn’t see coming because it was completely absorbed in its own irrelevant speculation.
