Why the Greens are so scared of saying the word ‘Islamist’

It was the look of terror in Hannah Spencer’s eyes that was most telling. There she was, the gurning Green candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election in Greater Manchester, being asked the simplest of questions. What was the cause of the Manchester Arena bombing of 2017? Her face froze into a rictus of fear. She stuttered but the words clogged in her throat. She couldn’t believe it – she was being pressed on live TV to say a word that her morally supine kind have sworn never to utter in public. Islamism.

It gets worse. Her gentle interrogator was Matt Goodwin, the Reform UK candidate in Gorton and Denton. After Ms Spencer spouted the usual kumbaya bullshit about how Manchester ‘came together’ after the arena atrocity, he quizzed her again. Okay, fine, but ‘why are [these] things happening?’, he asked. Then came what will surely rank as the dumbest reply of 2026, a remark that should make Spencer cringe in ignominy every time the memory of it invades her mind. It’s ‘because people like you are dividing people’, she told Goodwin.

He was startled. So was everyone else whose brains haven’t yet been fried by that moral spinelessness that gets dolled up as ‘progressivism’. ‘So I’m responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing?!’, he said. ‘That’s not what I’ve just said’, Spencer protested. But it is what you said. You were asked why Britain has been rocked by such sadistic acts of misanthropy as the slaughter of teens at an Ariana Grande concert, and instead of giving the correct answer – which is that our nation is ailed by the pox of Islamist militancy – you said it’s because people like Goodwin have hot takes on immigration, etc.

This is a serious matter. That a candidate in a Manchester by-election cannot tell the truth about the murderous ideology that caused such suffering and sorrow in that great city is profoundly troubling. Twenty-two people were butchered that night, 22 May 2017. Ten were under the age of 20. The youngest was an eight-year-old girl. Their crime? Enjoying pop, being free, being British. That was why Salman Abedi – say it, Hannah: an Islamist terrorist – laid waste to their lives. This was an act of Islamist savagery against the city that Orwell called ‘the belly and guts of the nation’.

To refuse to name the homicidal creed that motored that massacre of innocents is a betrayal of the dead and the survivors. Ask yourself: if it had been a neo-Nazi bloodbath, do you think Ms Spencer would have held back from saying the word ‘Nazi’? If the killer had been a devotee of the knackered old National Front, do you think Spencer would have squirmed in her seat when asked why that atrocity happened? Of course not. She’d have shouted from the rooftops the names of those poisonous ideologies. But when it comes to Islamism, there’s a conspiracy of silence. ‘Islamism’ is the equivalent of ‘Voldemort’ to our chickenshit chattering classes – a taboo word never to be uttered lest it turn thick oiks into an ‘Islamophobic’ mob.

That’s the thing: Spencer’s physical inability to form and say the word ‘Islamist’ is not unique to her. The entire cultural establishment has excised that word from its vocabulary. In the immediate aftermath of the arena atrocity, the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, would only call the killer an ‘extremist’. As Morrissey quipped, ‘An extreme what? An extreme rabbit?’ When then UKIP leader Paul Nuttall described it as an Islamist attack, the then leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, branded his words ‘completely outrageous’. So the Greens have form when it comes to snivelling self-censorship in the face of the Islamist mass murder of working-class children.

At points, the establishment has even sought to institutionalise its craven dread of the i-word. In 2020, three years after the barbarism in Manchester, counter-terrorism police openly discussed dropping the term Islamist ‘when describing terror attacks’. And instead of saying ‘jihadist’, perhaps we should say ‘terrorists abusing religions motivations’, the cops mused. Rolls off the tongue. In the end they scrapped their demented Orwellian plans to erase the word Islamist in the service of the state’s sainted ideology of ‘diversity’. They probably clocked that such brutish speechpolicing was unnecessary. After all, the elite is stacked with fainthearted finger-waggers who are more than happy to bark ‘Bigot!’ at any mortal who dares to name the ideology that has slain a hundred souls in Britain these past 20 years.

A nauseating mix of classism and paternalism motors the elites’ memory-holing of Islamism. They fear that the ‘gammon’ – the working classes – will be whipped into a Muslim-baiting frenzy if any derivation of the word ‘Islam’ is used in relation to terror attacks. And they have a deep patrician impulse to protect Muslims from offence. Quite why our Muslim citizens would feel offended by a frank discussion of the scourge of Islamism is anyone’s guess. From their distant sanctums of lazy correct-think, these people cannot see that the white working classes and the Muslim working classes have a shared interest in driving the poison of Islamist dogma from their communities.

The Green Party has a particular problem. It is now the chief candle-carrier for that most suicidal strain in British politics – the Islamo-left. Its ranks are stuffed with bigots who celebrated the fascistic slaughter of 7 October 2023 and who call rabbis ‘animals’. The Greens are currently flirting with the idea of branding Zionism a form of racism, which would further isolate Britain’s already beleaguered Jews, a large majority of whom identify as Zionists. And Hannah Spencer has given an interview to 5Pillars, the vile, pro-Taliban website that frequently platforms neo-fascist lowlifes like Nick Griffin. Imagine calling Matt Goodwin ‘divisive’ when you rub shoulders with such despicable people. Next year is the 10th anniversary of the Islamist slaughter of Manchester kids. If you’re still refusing to speak the truth about that anti-British abomination, then you should be nowhere near Manchester’s levers of power.