Labour's new spin doctor made excuses for the Charlie Hebdo killers
As Guardian columnist Seumas Milne is announced head of communications for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, journalists who now have to deal with him should know how cheaply he values their lives.
Just days after the Paris murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January, Milne took to the pages of the Guardian to rehearse for his new role as spin doctor – only this time for the killers.
In a column titled ‘Paris is a warning: there is no insulation from our wars’, and sub-headed, ‘The attacks in France are a blowback from intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. What happens there happens here too’, Labour’s new spinner-in-chief gets his deniability in early:
“Nothing remotely justifies the murderous assault on Charlie Hebdo’s journalists, still less on the Jewish victims singled out only for their religious and ethnic identity.”
Despite this proviso, Milne proceeds to list at length more justifications than had even occurred to the killers. After explaining that the cartoons and jokes in Charlie Hebdo were a ‘repeated pornographic humiliation’ for French Muslims, he casts a wide net:
“Of course, the cocktail of causes and motivations for the attacks are complex: from an inheritance of savage colonial brutality in Algeria via poverty, racism, criminality and takfiri jihadist ideology.
Everything, in short, except the agency of the killers themselves. (One could argue that the role of religious ideas in the murder of cartoonists for drawing a religious figure is more significant than the Algerian war of independence, which wound down in 1962, but leave that aside for now.) Milne’s apologia hits its stride as he asserts:
“But without the war waged by western powers, including France, to bring to heel and reoccupy the Arab and Muslim world, last week’s attacks clearly wouldn’t have taken place.“
Clearly? Given his articles after 9/11, 7/7 and the Woolwich murder of Lee Rigby, the only thing clear is Milne’s consistent victim blaming when it comes to Islamist terrorism.
Milne goes on to invoke the authority of the dead killers to make excuses on their behalf, repeating their self-serving propaganda in a liberal newspaper:
“Cherif Kouachi insisted the attacks had been carried out in revenge for the ‘children of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria’. Ahmed Coulibaly said they were a response to France’s attacks on Isis, while claiming the supermarket slaughter was revenge for the deaths of Muslims in Palestine.”
He then quickly reassures readers who might be getting the wrong end of the stick that ‘such wanton killings are, of course, entirely counterproductive to the causes they are supposed to promote’. Of course. Poor misguided terrorists. If only you had listened to Seumas!
‘Why does this matter?’ you might ask. ‘Milne has written countless god-awful things. Why is this of particular significance now?’ Well, I think for this reason.
Journalists who cover British politics will now presumably deal with Labour’s new head of comms on a regular basis. Due to this professional necessity, they deserve to know what he thinks of them.
When Milne says there is a ‘gulf that separates the official view of French state policy at home and abroad and how it is seen by many of the country’s Muslim citizens,’ adding ‘That’s true in Britain too, of course’, he means that his apologia for terror would apply to the murder of British journalists as well.
Hacks might have hated Lynton Crosby and Alistair Campbell, but at least they could rely on them to be solid on the right of journalists not to be shot in their workplace.
The same cannot be said for Campbell’s successor.
In Seumas Milne, journalists will be sitting down to lunch or speaking on the phone with a man of whom they know the following to be true:
If a fanatic stormed into their offices tomorrow and stuck a gun in their face – either out of dislike for something they had written or to act out some political grievance – Milne would be willing to say, in public, that this was at least partly their own fault.
Happy lunching, comrades.
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Adam Barnett is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow MediaWatch on Twitter
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141 Responses to “When fanatics kill journalists, Seumas Milne blames something else”
Jeremy Poynton
Brown – Jack Straw’s autobiography notes that he knew Brown was not fit for Number 10, but said nothing, as he didn’t want to hurt the Labour Party. No, he just wanted to hurt the country (as he did). Tribalism at its most base.
MacGuffin
You fear me because you know I am not a Tory troll. Even on Labour List you are outnumbered. Your sweaty Corbynista fantasies are turning into a nightmare before your eyes.
Jeremy Poynton
When they aren’t teaching each other a lesson…
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attack
“”Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.”
I guess that’s all the fault of the West?
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape
Timbo
How silly.
Adam Barnett’s view appears to be that it does not matter how many terrorists there are, or how many vicitims of terrorism there are. The only thing that matters is that we directly blame the perpetrators of terrorism, and that we don’t go near any kind of analysis of what gives rise to terrorism.
As long as blame is attributed in the right place and the right proportion, everything is in happy balance. Fatal terrorist attacks in the UK could double in ten years time from now and we would have no business trying to anlayse why that might be – or how it could be stopped – in terms of the historical, political and cultural contexts. That would be apologism. Just keep on blaming the right people and it doesn’t matter how many victims there are.
Milne is very clear that “Nothing remotely justifies the murderous assault on Charlie Hebdo’s journalists”. But you’d almost think Adam thinks it’s Milne fault for giving them apologist cover!
What next – a witch hunt for psychologists who seek to understand the behaviour of sexual offenders? Many of them claim it can help prevent offending behaviour, but they’re clearly just a bunch of apologists for pedos, innit.
Esmee Phillips
It is the fault of cheap-labour sweaters, who imported these people to undermine the social solidarity of organised labour country by country.
The globalists know no patriotism. They inhabit their privileged and secure world, guarded from the evils they have unleashed on the rest.
The cheerleaders for unrestricted intercontinental immigration are the useful idiots of the 1%, tirelessly enforcing silence or equivocation on the victims of adulteration. But perhaps resentment will not be contained so easily much longer, even in poor docile Sweden.