‘They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He shends one of yoursh to the hospital, you shend one of hish to the morgue.’ Thus Sean Connery in The Untouchables, explaining how you fight a war ‘Chicago-style’. How would you adapt that, do we think, for our collective response to the Paris attacks? ‘They pull a gun, you pull a hashtag. They send 132 of yours to the morgue, you start calling them a slightly rude name.’
As they say on the internet: srsly?
Imagine you’re in Raqqa, having at last made hijrah from the family semi in Dudley. You’re chillaxing, maybe having a bit of a kickabout with the head of an apostate, when your friend calls you over to his laptop.
‘Look, brother. The kufirs have reacted to the blessed martyrdom operations in the hated capital of prostitution and garlic!’
‘What are they doing? Launching a ground invasion? Closing their borders?’
‘No — they’re — haha — they’re… you’ll not believe this, bruv. They’re still arguing over what to call us.’
‘You mean Isil or IS or Isis? I get a bit confused between those myself, if I’m honest.’
‘No. They’re really pissed off this time. They’ve started calling us Daesh, because they read somewhere that it offends us. Oh, except the BBC, which worries we shouldn’t be called terrorists because of bias, and they’re all arguing about that, too. ’
And there we can leave our jihadists, as they also say on the internet, rofling.
It’s perhaps symptomatic of a culture where name-calling is policed with a vigour once reserved for incitement to violence that the reaction to an act of real violence is to think of how we might retaliate by hurting someone’s feelings. It’s as if the giving and taking of offence — as recently seen on a university campus near you — has acquired the aura of a credible weapon of war.
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