A Bomb, a Megaphone, and a Narrative That Wouldn’t Break

You may have already seen the extraordinary scenes captured on video from a protest in New York this weekend.

For the uninitiated, a group led by American activist Jake Lang were holding an anti-Islam protest outside Gracie Mansion in New York. This is also the residence of Zohran Mamdani, the Mayor of New York and a Muslim.

By all accounts, Jake Lang appears to be a deeply odious individual known for his involvement in the Capitol riots, including assaulting police officers with a baseball bat.

It’s at this point I could bang on about the evils of white supremacy and the dangers posed by the far right. But I think it’s fair to say that sort of criticism has become so ubiquitous and mainstream that it’s almost redundant—so constant and familiar that it takes little courage to say, and adds very little to the conversation. In short, that already gets the attention it deserves. And some it doesn't.

But it’s what happened next, and what remains conspicuously unsaid about it that is long overdue an honest conversation.

Naturally, counter-protestors were in attendance, chanting all the right-on platitudes about immigrants being “welcome” etc. One such megaphone wielding character was Walter Masterson. Walter was in the middle of being on The Right Side Of History™ when something extraordinary (and potentially iconic) occurred.

Walter was shouting into his megaphone about how “we welcome everyone into this city” when a man screaming “Allahu akbar” chose that exact moment to enter the conversation—using Walter as a springboard to lob an improvised explosive device at the anti-Islam protesters.

You can watch a short video of this moment below:

Fortunately, the device failed to detonate. The NYPD have confirmed it was in fact a genuine device “that could have caused serious injury or death”. Two men were arrested and charged with terror offences. According to the BBC ‘the suspects, 18-year-old Emir Balat and 19-year-old Ibrahim Kayumi, allegedly told police that they aimed for the Saturday attack to be "even larger" than the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 that left three dead’. They would also claim they were inspired by ISIS.

You'd think narrowly avoiding death or a face full of shrapnel at the hands of Islamic fascists might compel the Walter Mastersons of this world to engage in a modicum of self-reflection. But the uncanny ability of white progressive “anti-fascists” to overlook the most obvious expressions of actual fascism remains undefeated.

Walter would later take to ‘X’ to reiterate that his beliefs hadn't changed and once again took aim at Jake Lang, rather than the men who had just tried to murder American citizens for exercising their first amendment rights.

Walter was also keen to demonstrate pride in his complete lack of survival instincts by mocking the anti-Islam protesters for reacting as you'd expect when a bomb is thrown at you, rather than laughing it off as he had.

The initial news reporting and headlines of this terror attack were so ambiguous and inexplicably sly as to create the impression that it was the “far-right” protestors that were lobbing bombs into crowds.

Even days later when it became impossible to deny what had actually taken place, CNN posted a take on X that was so egregiously ludicrous that someone really should have been fired.

It read: “Two Pennsylvania teenagers crossed into New York City Saturday morning for what could’ve been a normal day enjoying the city during abnormally warm weather. But in less than an hour, their lives would drastically change as the pair would be arrested for throwing homemade bombs during an anti-Muslim protest outside of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s home”.

CNN somehow managed to turn an attempted murder by Islamic fascists in broad daylight into a sort of travelogue about two teenagers whose pleasant spring day in New York was derailed by events apparently beyond their control. CNN would later delete the post, claiming it ‘failed to reflect the gravity of the incident’.

I've seen our failure to confront the dangers posed by Islam described as “suicidal empathy”. Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think it's a complete lack of empathy that has made us woefully impotent in the face of this threat.

Put simply, too many people are unable to comprehend that Islamic loons are willing to murder innocent people in defence of their faith. No matter how many times they tell us why in plain English or make good on their threats, people still can't accept that someone, somewhere may not see the world as they do. The basic theory of mind required to put yourself in the shoes of someone who thinks like this appears entirely absent from much of the west. Yet the actions and behaviour of Jihadists only makes sense once you grant that they truly believe what they say.

Yet we invent excuses they never asked for and obsess over what we might have done to make them hate us so intensely. The answer is simple: they hate us because we have not submitted to their religious worldview. And no amount of “everyone welcome” platitudes will save you from people who think this way. They hate you too.

But we'll once again look the other way, switch focus to an imagined “anti-Muslim” backlash or waste time banging the drum about “Islamophobia”.

I spoke at Battle fest this weekend in my home city of Manchester, sharing my thoughts on a panel titled ‘Free Speech Emergency: how can we fight back?’

The spectre of Islam hung over nearly every single panel and the audience questions. People continue to fret over what they can say, what could put them in danger, and how to speak freely without being branded ‘bigoted.’

I couldn’t help feeling a pang of depression at the thought that we are still getting hung up about what words, tone or generalisations we can use to discuss people who wish to slaughter us for being sufficiently un-Islamic.

A video of the full panel will be online soon, but you can listen to my opening arguments below: