I confess: I was an accomplice to the terrorist attacks here in Paris in January. Straight after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, I dashed to the murder site. I then tweeted and wrote about the attacks nonstop, which was exactly what the terrorists wanted me to do. In my defence, I didn’t act alone. Western journalists, politicians and policy makers are working together to encourage the latest wave of jihad.
The west talks about “fighting terror” but our reactions to terrorism would make more sense if you assumed that our goal was to promote it. The US responded to 9/11 by invading a random Islamic country, Iraq. Then it spent years creating images of Americans torturing and killing Muslims. Now the west’s leading voices are acting as unpaid PRs for Salafist jihad. Terrorists control the narrative.
Terrorism is PR. To scare people and win adherents, jihadis produce TV content. The content that works best on primetime news is beheadings of white people. And because nothing excites the journalistic imagination more than murders of journalists, jihadis kill lots of journalists.