By the time the bodies had been counted at the Bondi Beach massacre, the familiar machinery of moral confusion had already started turning. As with every atrocity of the kind this century – and there have been too many to count since 9/11 – the language is the first sign that something has gone horribly wrong with our response to evil.
Through the media that speak on their behalf, institutions reach for a tried-and-tested lexicon of calculated evasion. These are words and phrases designed to create the appearance of a sober and humane response.
In reality, they are empty of meaning. They function as an anaesthetic, numbing public outrage and buying just enough time for things to restabilise without having to say anything of substance.
Here are eight examples you’ve heard dozens of times before – by no means exhaustive – that should have been retired years ago but persist out of habit, even as fewer people pretend to believe them.
1. “This has nothing to do with Islam”
Translation: Ignore everything you just saw and heard.
It doesn’t matter that the perpetrator has done everything short of handing out annotated copies of the Quran to justify his actions. It’s irrelevant that he shouted “Allahu Akbar” while stabbing people, or that he livestreamed a statement pledging allegiance to ISIS in the aftermath. Ignore that his social media is a catalogue of jihadist justifications for violence. He may even be called Jihad, but that’s a reference to “spiritual struggle” – just so we’re clear.
Remember: this has nothing to do with Islam.
The brazenness of the lie is obvious – any fool can see it. But worse is the demand that you participate in it. The authorities are effectively asking that you ignore reality and absorb the institutional message that none of this was religiously motivated.
It’s gaslighting on an industrial scale. As the line often attributed to Solzhenitsyn puts it:
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”
Many of the other phrases on this list are downstream of this one or its variations that talk about a “poisoned offshoot” or a “grotesque distortion” of Islam – supporting characters in a fiction we’ve heard too many times before.
2. Concerns about “Islamophobia / far-right rhetoric / divisive language”
Translation: The problem is you.
Norm MacDonald’s famous line is evergreen and rolled out on Twitter/X following every new atrocity:
“What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?”
It’s become a meme and one that neatly captures the grotesque inversion: that the danger is not the barbarism we have just witnessed, but the outrage we feel in response to it.
Speaking clearly about Islamist terrorism invites accusations of “Islamophobia”. Question immigration policy, and you’re enabling “far-right” violence. Notice patterns, and you’re using “divisive language”.
3. “We condemn all forms of extremism”
Translation: We refuse to name the problem.
When a terrorist incident comes from the far right, you can practically hear the sigh of relief from the authorities. See? Extremism is a problem everywhere. Oddly, there is no equivocation here. Names and motives are stated plainly; judgement is quick and rightly damning.
But when the massacre is at the hands of an Islamist, suddenly the authorities condemn extremism in all its forms, filing the specific incident and motives alongside the far-right ones.
This is a diagnostic evasion presented with a straight face by people who know better. By collapsing every motive, ideology, and act into the single category of “extremism”, the statement erases the distinctions that would force them to say who did what to whom, and why.
4. “The motive remains unclear”
Translation: We are strategically confused.
Paired most closely with the first phrase on our list, this is deployed when the motive has not only been shouted in front of a crowd but helpfully explained in advance by the perpetrators themselves.
This phrase is strategic and does not describe genuine uncertainty. Nobody is unclear about why it happened, but it buys time and protects reputations. It’s the verbal equivalent of placing the facts in a binder and sticking it in a drawer while everyone nods that the matter needs “further investigation” – preferably much later on, when the story has vanished from the news.
When Salman Abedi detonated a bomb at an Ariana Grande concert, killing 22 people, including children, he did so after months of contact with Islamist networks and travel to Libya. The investigation would later confirm the ideological motivation. But in those crucial early days, the “motive remained unclear”.
5. “Known to authorities”
Translation: We followed the procedure, which is what matters.
The purpose here is to inform you that boxes were ticked and databases updated. Procedures were followed to the letter and meetings were held to review the matter. Note the passive tense. Note how accountability is spread so thin, responsibility so diluted by process, that no one can be blamed.
The Manchester Arena bomber was known to authorities. So was Axel Rudakubana, the “Welsh choirboy”, before he murdered three children in Southport.
The phrase is utterly damning. The system did everything except the one thing that mattered: act. For all the risk assessments and monitoring, nothing was actually done to stop the inevitable.
The phrase is essentially a disclaimer designed to transform institutional failure into proof of protocol compliance.
6. “We must come together”
Translation: Shut up and stop asking questions.
Unity is invoked here not as a moral good but as narrative glue. You must resist the urge to ask questions or make judgements because judgement threatens the narrative, which must be preserved at all costs.
University administrators say it after campus encampments block Jewish students. Police chiefs say it after protesters vandalise synagogues. Politicians declare it after joining marches where antisemitic slogans are chanted.
The cost of this moral evasion is borne most of all by victims: the Jewish communities facing harassment; the victims of grooming gangs, the families on a beach. Their suffering becomes the price of maintaining the fiction that there’s nothing to see here. We must come together. And move on.
7. “Antisemitism has no place here”
Translation: Ignore the antisemitism we just enabled.
This phrase appears every time Jewish communities face intimidation and violence. The authorities deliver the line (one senses with irritation) as though reading from a script.
Like all phrases on this list, it grates in its obvious dishonesty. These same authorities spent the last two years cultivating antisemitism either explicitly or through indifference. Consider the police escorting marches through London while turning a blind eye to genocidal slogans and excusing intimidation as “passionate protest”.
But when the consequences become impossible to ignore – a beach massacre, synagogues requiring armed guards – they pretend to be shocked and issue solemn declarations about values they abandoned months ago.
8. “Lessons will be learned”
Translation: Nothing will change.
The closing incantation: a hollow and mechanical utterance designed to close the matter and have us move on. Note the future tense. No present action required – we’ll get to this later.
Again with the passive construction. Not “we will learn lessons” and certainly not “we will act on what we’ve learned”. Just a platitude delivered through a stifled yawn and a rehearsed look of solemnity.
But institutions don’t survive by learning lessons. They survive by surviving, which is exactly what they intend to keep doing – and what this phrase actually means.
What this language is really for
It’s tempting to think that what we’re hearing is just clumsy language uttered by people under pressure who genuinely believe what they say. That’s naive.
What we’re really talking about is a professional lexicon, refined over decades and woven into the fabric of institutional culture. These phrases are explicitly designed to blur reality while preserving the illusion of engagement. They work like a Pavlovian response to Islamist violence – unthinking and automatic.
They are deliberate evasions that show up by design because speaking truthfully would mean acknowledging the policies and compromises that created the very conditions we are encouraged to ignore.
It’s a calculation that has worked for decades, which explains why it endures. But the response is no longer tenable. The will to go along with the narrative is vanishing fast, perhaps even among those who prop it up.
When the language of evasion finally loses all power to anaesthetise, institutions will face a choice they’ve spent decades avoiding: tell the truth, or lose what remains of their authority.
Enough with the moral evasions and polite fictions. The victims and their families deserve the truth.
What phrases did I miss? There are plenty more where these came from.
Fair warning: I suspect this piece will attract some of the wrong people. If you’re here to perform outrage, pretend not to understand what’s being described, be abusive, or waste everyone’s time, I’ll block you without ceremony.
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The Islamists have found the Achilles' Heel of the liberal West and will not be letting go anytime soon, esp as every time they press it, they get their way and turn any opponents into quivering jelly.
The Western liberal Achilles' Heel is simply: our sacred inviolable commitment to universalist egalitarianism and concomitant inability to ever judge any other tribe or faith as perhaps wrong, ugly, backwards, misguided or at the very least simply incompatible with our beliefs and culture (this is standard multiculturalism mixed with the performative xenophilia that's become a class and status marker). All the smartest people from our former colonies know that all they have to do is utter the magic incantation—racist imperialist colonial -phobic white-supremacist etc—and the Western liberal has no ability to object and no moral vocabulary to fight back or even enunciate a different perspective. They (meaning mostly our progressive aristocracy) have been conditioned as much as Alex in "A Clockwork Orange" to never contradict a minoritized Other, esp if they have a darker skin tone, this is both a thought crime and breach of etiquette, the social equivalent of kicking a kitten. It's simply not done.
And this is even more extreme when it comes to Israel and Gaza. Holding up a picture of a dead child and shrieking Baby Killer! not only destroys the possibility of discussion, it also paints the person who doesn't immediately genuflect as a heartless brute. And if you try to respond with simple basic facts from this conflict—the Palestinians have turned down their own state repeatedly for decades, they don't want their own state they want to destroy the Jewish state, Hamas had full control of Gaza for almost 20 years and used it to launch a brutal massacre and war while using their people as human shields and disposable martyrs etc—the Western liberal mind cannot possibly absorb and accept this as true, it sounds insane and impossible to them. It's much easier to run with the mob and blame it all on the Jews, who have too much power anyway.
The Islamists have transformed the paradox of tolerance—tolerating the intolerant—from a loophole into a highway, and they will keep rolling from victory to victory as long as opposing them is taboo for Western liberals. Since our ruling classes have very nice lives and since they and their families are mostly shielded from street violence and hate crimes, they've decided to rebrand their cowardice as tolerance and exalted compassion. Their impotence and hypocrisy means their days are numbered, but something much uglier will most likely replace them.