Why the Twitterati hates Hopkins more than Abedi – Spiked

Whats most striking about the backlash is not its censoriousness. Yes, the calls for a boycott, the ratting-out of Hopkins to the police for something she said, reminds us of the illiberal age we live in. But Hopkins has had her collar felt for saying much less. As shes found out, slagging off Scottish people or accidentally accusing a food blogger of defacing a monument is enough to see you fall foul of the New Inquisition.

No, whats striking is the profound moral cowardice, and the contempt for ordinary people, that the PC age has fostered. Over the past 24 hours, as information about Abedi has seeped out, commentators have been refusing to make him a martyr, refusing to talk about him these are the people we must remember, they say, retweeting images of the dead.

In any other context, this might have been an admirable thing to do a refusal to give him the status he craved. But thats not what is going on here. If this is supposed to be about the victims, why bother with Hopkins? Why not ignore her, block her, tell her to fuck off? Why waste breath on her? Its because really they are incapable of reckoning with the disturbing questions that Monday night once again raised.

Why have some of those born and raised among us as Abedi was grown to hate us? Why, among a minority of Muslim youth, is this nihilism brewing? And what might we have done to foster it, to cultivate it? These are questions theyd rather not answer. To do so would be to inflame, in their minds, the only hate they really care about the hate of lumpen plebs, the sort of people they imagine lap up Katie Hopkins every tweet.

Hopkins tried to make Manchester all about her. But through the response it generated, it told us more about the mainstream, about the cowards who tell us to treat Islamist terror like a natural disaster, a time only for sympathy and thanking the emergency services; the cowards who would rather shriek at cretinous columnists than reckon with the real hatred in our midst; the cowards who seem to get more exercised by tweets than bombs.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

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Why the Twitterati hates Hopkins more than Abedi - Spiked