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”
GhostofJimMorisson
They don’t hate our freedoms? Utter rubbish. To the Islamist, democracy, liberalism and the rule of law are heresies. The only law is god’s law. Just out of interest, what do you think motivated the terrorists who murdered the Charlie Ebdo staff? If it is, as Milne suggests, French colonialism in Algeria and poverty, then what better target than a tiny obscure French magazine!
Graham Lester George
How do you know it’s widespread? And if it’s “tacit” then how do you know it exists at all. My, my, Conservative Central Office has been doing overtime on this one.
jj
What is more ‘disgraceful’ is the frankly woeful way this Guardian ‘journalist’ has attempted to blame everybody else except for the actual murderers. He is making his own excuses for massacres and seems to care not what the victims of such massacres are feeling. Maybe if he removed his bias and looked at all those affected by whom are frankly fanatic fascists, he would be a respected journalist. Because he seems to give excuses for any fanatical action (thus merely fuelling a self righteousness terrorists already has) he is making the world a worse place. This is one of the few LFF articles that I strongly agree with, the comments section shows widespread support for this commentary and support for Adam, the fact that this article has over 300 shares, instead of the mere 100 or so Adam usually gets, tells you something also.
jj
Where is the logic? The Charlie Hebdo massacre was perpetrated by those that were upset by the lack of respect for their prophet. They merely want us to bow down to them, keep silent or die is their premise. This article isn’t ‘clickbait’ or ‘silly’, it is an analysis of a biased, skewed form of journalism that excuses the actions of murders by attempting to argue that they have a genuine motive. Milne overcomplicates his own arguments to enforce the belief that we are to blame for every terrorist act.
jj
They hate the fact that we dare ‘insult’ their prophet. They were ‘offended’ and upset that we have the free will to criticise others when they deserve criticism, of course they hate our freedoms, that’s why they want us to keep silent and let them carry on with their atrocities.