Sorry Owen Jones But Orlando Was More Than Just a Case of Souped-up Gay-Bashing

orlando
James Delingpole

With a self-parodic idiocy which quite defies satire, the usual suspects on the liberal-left have decided to rebrand the latest appalling Islamist-inspired atrocity as just a more extreme version of routine hate-crime – this time one driven by ‘homophobia’.

“This was a deliberate attack on LGBT people. This was a deliberate attack on the LGBT community,” as left-wing commentator Owen Jones put it in a fraught debate with radio host Julia Hartley-Brewer on Sky News’s newspaper review programme last night.

When Hartley-Brewer and Sky’s moderator Mark Longhurst tried to dispute this claim, an upset Jones – who as a gay man himself had chosen to take the attack very personally – removed his microphone and stormed off the set.

How wearisomely predictable this kind of response is becoming. Whenever a hideous new act of terror is committed by a member of the Religion of Peace in the name of the Religion of Peace, the knee-jerk reaction of all enlightened people on the liberal-left is to explain away why, no actually, it’s really about something else…

So in this case, the killing and maiming over 100 people in an Orlando night club becomes not a manifestation of militant Islam’s clearly stated war on Western liberal values in general (which includes, of course, their well-documented hatred of homosexuals – whom their religious authorities enjoin them to kill) but merely a manifestation of the kind of “homophobia” liberals love most especially to condemn when it comes from safer, more politically correct targets like the “religious right”.

One of the more desperate points Jones struggled to make before he stormed off was that as a gay man he was in a better position to feel the full awfulness of the Orlando massacre than his straight co-presenters.

This is only true if you also believe that you really had to be French or a rock fan to get properly upset about the Bataclan massacre, or that you had to be a cartoonist or a journalist to feel the full horror of Charlie Hebdo.

So here, to present an alternate perspective is another journalist who very much disputes the line being taken by Jones, the Guardian and his many fellow travellers on social media.

Murray is also gay. Furthermore – as he usually is – he is absolutely right.

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