The hypocrisy of the Brexit blame game

One looked in vain for the words ‘Islamic extremist’ in the Guardian’s reporting of the Westminster attack a fortnight ago. Even after Isis claimed the attacker, Khalid Masood, as one of its own, the paper declined to accept him as a terrorist motivated by religious extremism. And who knows, maybe it was right. Masood had had a violent past, even before he had converted to Islam. It is still far from clear whether he had been influenced or was controlled by an Islamist group, or whether he was a freelance operative motivated entirely by his own internal anger and frustrations.

But if you are going to take that line and refuse to undertake any speculation into incidents of this kind you ought at least to be consistent. On this, the Guardian fails badly. When news broke at the weekend about the despicable attack on Reker Ahmed, a 17-year-old Kurdish-Iranian asylum-seeker, the paper’s website started to spin a narrative that this was an attack which came about as a result of negative public attitudes towards migration.