Imagine if on Saturday evening a
white neo-Nazi had stabbed three men to death. Imagine, furthermore, if in the
wake of the killings it had turned out that all three of the victims were gay.
Or ‘members of the LGBT community’, to use the lexicon of the time. And then
imagine if two days later nobody in the UK or anywhere else was very interested
in any of this. So what if the victims were all gay? Why bother sifting around
for motives. What are you trying to say? Bigot.
Well something that might well be
analogous to that happened in Reading on Saturday evening and over the days
since.
On Saturday evening, Khairi
Saadallah went on a stabbing spree in Forbury Gardens, Reading. His victims
were three gay men, James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett. It has
since emerged that the 25-year old suspect, who is now in police custody, came
to the UK from Libya in 2012. He is reported to have come to the attention of
MI5 last year as an individual who had the potential to travel overseas for
terrorism purposes. The Security Service apparently decided that he was not an
immediate risk.
The families of Furlong, Wails and
Ritchie-Bennett might beg to differ on that last point. But who knows. So far
there has been almost no interest expressed in the possible motives of the
attacker. Quite possibly there is a mental health component. In which case I
would expect that to be looked into. Quite possibly there will be some
drugs-related component. In which case I would expect the usual voices to
demand an investigation into that. But anything else to see here? Any other
reason why a migrant from Libya who was given asylum in the UK might want to go
around stabbing gay men? Well who would even ask such questions? What do you
want to find? Bigot.
So far the most analysis there has
been has been to inform us all of the wonderfulness of the victims. We can
learn that the victims were not just ‘proud gay men’ who attended Reading
Pride, but that at least one of them – Furlong – was also ‘a strong advocate
for the Black Lives Matter movement.’ Perhaps Saadallah didn’t get that memo.
Perhaps if he had known how involved in social activism his victims were then
he would have left them alone and stabbed some people who never much bothered
with such things, or kept themselves to themselves.
For the BBC – among most other major
news outlets – every question that this case throws up remains stubbornly
unaddressed and unaddressable. On Monday night’s News at Ten, the BBC managed
to talk about the three Reading victims without once saying that the police
think they might have been targeted because they were gay. All that there was
that nodded to that possibility was a tribute from someone who said that the
victims were part of the LBGT community.
Why leave nearly all the analysis
out? Of course there were will be a trial, the due process of the law and so
on. But if the attacker from Saturday night had been a white skinhead, or a
neo-Nazi or had been wearing a big red MAGA hat I am fairly confident that the
gay press and all of the mainstream media would be crawling over every angle of
this story by now with an unparalleled fury, hurling allegations of ‘adjacency’
against all of their favourite enemies. As it is I am reminded of nothing so
much as story after story over recent years. Stories like when Omar Mateen
walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida four years ago and gunned
down 49 people.
People know after a story like this
that it isn’t good. They know that there’s more to say and doubtless more to
see here. But they have made a very basic calculation. The calculation is that
dead gays aren’t good. But they aren’t as bad – indeed they are a price worth
paying – compared to asking any of the questions that sane people would ask
after an attack like this. Sure we have a societal piety that is opposed to
homophobia. But the societal piety which says that we should not risk
‘othering’ Libyan asylum seekers is stronger. The fear will be that talking
about Islamic homophobia as a potential motive in this case might increase
prejudice of some other kind. It's a calculation of a very cynical and inept
kind.
That is why the media is silent on
this. It's why the gay press is so muted. They are willing to take this sort of
thing, absorb it and just hope it doesn’t happen too often. It’s a matter of
hierarchies. And the gays aren’t as high up this one as people like to think.
