A couple of months after my father died, we went on holiday to Ballycastle, a seaside town about sixty miles from Belfast. Back then virtually every Catholic went to mass on Sunday, so anyone wanting to carry out a large scale sectarian attack had a wide choice of easy targets. One August Sunday morning pro-British loyalist terrorists left a car bomb outside St. Patrick’s & St. Brigid’s. It is just as well the church was protected by two saints because the sermon went on longer than usual which meant that while fifty people who skipped out early were injured, the bombers failed to kill the dozens they were hoping for. If memory serves, my least favourite uncle was very slightly hurt. The rest of us had been to an earlier mass.

Only a crook or a moron would conclude from this that every Protestant in the north of Ireland supported the indiscriminate murder of people who disagreed with them on the mystery of transubstantiation. The terrorists were motivated by a reactionary, anti-working class, pro-imperialist ideology.

This brings us to Jihad Al-Shamie, the reactionary sectarian fanatic and alleged rapist who set out to kill as many Jews as possible last week in Manchester and whose worldview is as alien to most British Muslims as that of the bombers was to the average Derry Methodist. For the record, my view is that if the cops kill you when you are trying to murder innocent people you have no grounds to complain.

 Again and again when reactionary Islamists commit atrocities, there are sections of the British left which go easy on them. Shortly after the genocide started, I was shouted down and prevented from offering an unsympathetic political characterisation of Hamas at a local left meeting. That behaviour reflected a wider viewpoint.

This description of Al-Shamie’s antisemitism is irredeemably stupid and wrong:

“Antisemitism is on the rise and must be opposed wherever and whenever it appears. It is a far right ideology and driven by forces such as the Trump movement in the United States and the fascists in Britain—not the left, Muslims or Palestine movement.”

Can any serious person really argue that jihadi hatred of Jews draws inspiration from Trump or Tommy Robinson? At least do these reactionary murderers the credit of being able to arrive at their own positions independently. We don’t know much yet about Al-Shamie as in individual, but it is apparent that his ideological branch of political Islam had a lot in common with the “Christianity” of the Ballycastle bombers. This isn’t the political Islam that fills a vacuum created by an absent left. It is a reactionary, barbarous expression of a reactionary programme. The attack on the synagogue had no more to do with supporting the people of Gaza in the face of a genocide conducted by the Israeli state than the attack on the Ariana Grande concert had to do with supporting Palestinians and Yemenis.

Anyone wanting informed, nuanced accounts of the utterly reactionary and mildly progressive variants of political Islamism which explain them as rooted local traditions which long pre-date Trump could do worse than read The Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective by Gilbert Achcar or Palestine and Marxism by Joseph Daher.