The Cowardice That Enables Islamism

Why Western institutions fear honesty more than fanaticism.

Photo by Brett Wharton on Unsplash

On 2 October 2025, worshippers gathered for morning prayers at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester. It was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. After speeding his car into a crowd, an attacker leapt out with a knife, stabbing a security guard before calling police to declare allegiance to ISIS. Two men died in the attack. Many others were injured.

The response to this appalling act of violence followed a script so familiar it could have been written in advance. First came the shock, naturally. Then the condolences, then the vigils. Politicians condemned antisemitism. The police warned about “community tensions”. And journalists, keeping to tradition, noted that the “motives remain unclear”.

Through all this, the word “Islam” was conspicuous by its absence.

It’s a curious but familiar etiquette by now. Speak softly, avert your eyes, and discuss the angle of the vehicle or the security guard’s uniform. The car may have been radicalised online. The knife had a difficult childhood. Anything, any thing, to avoid the screamingly obvious.

Within days, the Manchester attack had been absorbed into Britain’s quiet archive of moral evasions. Another incident filed away under “complex”, “isolated”, and “unclear”.

We’ve seen it all before. A teacher in Batley went into hiding for showing a cartoon of Muhammad – newspapers refused to reprint the image. Grooming gangs in Rotherham preyed on girls for years while officials looked away, too frightened of being called racist to act.

The script plays out internationally, too. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage, and commentators fretted about whether he’d been “provocative”. Samuel Paty was beheaded for teaching free expression – coverage focused on the “inflexibility” of French secularism.

Different incidents, yet a similar pattern: violence, evasion, and finally accommodation.

Fanatics have always existed. What makes our moment unusual is the institutional machinery that protects them, what I think of as three related strands: strategic bafflement, professional confusion and institutional bewilderment – all different names and postures for the same basic moral calculation that puts safety ahead of clarity.

Watch how it works. The Manchester attacker shouted “Allahu Akbar”. He livestreamed his intentions and declared allegiance to ISIS while stabbing people. His social media overflowed with jihadist content. His name was Jihad!

But his motives “remain unclear”.

This phrase appears after almost every Islamist attack, a rhetorical marvel of professional confusion. Never mind that the attacker helpfully provided a manifesto, shouted the ideology, and livestreamed the justification. Institutions respond with furrowed brows and thoughtful chin-stroking. How terribly complex. We mustn’t rush to judgment. These matters require careful consideration.

It’s nonsense, of course – a performance so absurd that it would be comical if people weren’t being stabbed to death while taking the dog for a walk.

But the strange persistence of this response – and what sustains it – is how bafflement mimics virtue. It signals thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and nuance. We’re being careful, they say. We’re refusing to oversimplify.

As always, it’s the vocabulary that does the heavy lifting. Murder becomes an “incident”. Clearly stated ideological motives become “matters for interpretation”. A distinct pattern becomes “isolated cases”. Each euphemism functions as a small dose of semantic anaesthetic, an attempt to numb the public to reality while appearing to engage with it thoughtfully.

But why go to all this trouble? What explains this calculation? The answer is simple but perverse. Being specific about Islamic extremism carries immediate, personal costs – social media campaigns targeting individuals by name, accusations of bigotry amplified across news outlets, internal complaints, lost partnerships with “community leaders”, disciplinary action, and the risk of career destruction.

These obfuscations serve to protect careers, relationships and status. The spotlight doesn’t land on a single individual; it’s diffused across the entire institution. No one carries the cost of saying the uncomfortable thing.

The psychological motives are easy to ascertain. State the obvious and you’ll be the headline, a news clip played over and again, analysed by the commentariat, traduced and misinterpreted by dishonest politicians and used by demagogues to provoke the mob. And so they make a choice: to bear the enormous personal cost of stating the obvious or let it be borne by victims, reformers, ex-Muslims, and society itself.

Because we know how this ends. The Batley teacher – someone with a family and now a target of fundamentalist cranks – was practically abandoned by the political establishment, and now forced into a life of hide and seek.

Compare that with the officials who looked away while grooming gangs operated under their noses. Better to follow the protocols and processes of the institution. These people faced no consequences because their cowardice was collective and their complicity institutional. No individual can be blamed when everyone participated in the same strategic bafflement.

This is why nothing changes – because clarity destroys careers while bafflement preserves them.

Acknowledging the pattern would mean admitting that decades of multiculturalism haven’t worked as advertised, that some cultural and religious claims are incompatible with liberal values, and that certain forms of tolerance enable intolerance. Better to treat each incident as mysterious, each attacker as inexplicable. Far easier never to connect the dots or draw conclusions that would require difficult choices.

Islam is a set of ideas, open to analysis like any other ideology. Muslims are people, entitled to dignity and equal treatment. We routinely critique Christian conservatism, corporate capitalism, and the Chinese Communist Party. Nobody assumes this means hating Christians, businesspeople, or Chinese individuals.

Yet with Islam, institutions have accepted a different standard – one that treats any ideological scrutiny as inherently bigoted. “Islamophobic”. Why? Because strategic bafflement requires it. Maintaining the distinction between criticising ideas and attacking people would permit honest discussion. But that would require clarity. And clarity, as we have seen, is what institutions have traded away.

The result abandons the people who need support most: Muslims seeking to reform their tradition, ex-Muslims needing protection, and women fighting for equality. Organisations supporting ex-Muslims gain little institutional backing because acknowledging them requires admitting that people have reasons to leave – including that traditional interpretations of Islamic law treat apostasy as a capital offence.

Instead, we put them on panels once a year, applaud their courage, give them a medal and send them home with a bake-off tray. The brave are abandoned while the cowardly congratulate themselves on their sensitivity.

The beneficiaries of institutional bewilderment aren’t ordinary Muslims but theocratic conservatives who’ve learned that Western institutions will retreat if pushed hard enough. Liberal guilt, they’ve discovered, can be weaponised.

Meanwhile, actual anti-Muslim bigotry often gets a pass because institutions lack the vocabulary to distinguish between legitimate ideological criticism and prejudice against people. When everything is “Islamophobia,” nothing is.

Every successful cultural integration involves friction. Catholics didn’t wake up one day enthusiastic about contraception. Mormons didn’t cheerfully abandon polygamy. These evolutions required external pressure – the insistence that certain practices couldn’t coexist with liberal values. Not so with Islam.

Western institutions have decided that Islam gets to play by different rules. Not because the theology is uniquely fragile, but because the consequences of honesty feel too expensive.

But it’s a terrible bargain – because what institutions preserve through professional confusion isn’t peace but the conditions for worse conflict later on. With every retreat, they broadcast the same lesson: threat works, institutions fold, and authority belongs to whoever pushes hardest.

Strategic bafflement is surrender masquerading as moral sophistication, protecting institutional comfort while sacrificing the welfare of the vulnerable. It may preserve careers, but it abandons principles and the people those principles are meant to serve.

The Manchester attack is already a fading memory. The Batley school teacher remains in hiding, and the young survivors of the rape gangs will live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. Salman Rushdie survived the fatwa, but his translator didn’t. Neither did the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists nor Samuel Paty, nor the 130 people enjoying a night out at the Bataclan.

Each incident teaches anyone watching that institutions will protect their own comfort above others’ safety; their own reputations above others’ lives.

Two men died on Yom Kippur. The attacker, called Jihad, declared allegiance to ISIS while stabbing Jewish people to death.

The motives remain unclear.

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