Why does “transphobia” make the progressive Left angrier than Islamic terrorism does?

By Jonathon Van Maren

(A few more thoughts after my column on the Manchester bombing yesterday.)

In order to keep track of what people of every political stripe are saying, I follow media sources from across the spectrum—from Salon.com to Breitbart, from Mother Jones to the Drudge Report. And so in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing, I’ve seen two storylines play out. There is rage from the Right, with commentators demanding to know if now that a suicide bomber hit a pop concert, we can finally have a discussion about Islamic extremism. The pundits of the progressive Left expressed their sorrow while attempting to squash this new horror into their Oppressor versus Oppressed Marxist binary, which tells them that Muslims are oppressed but perhaps anti-feminism is the root cause of such attacks.

Ordinarily, a cautious tone after a tragedy is something to be welcomed. Ensuring that all of the facts are known and that grief and sorrow are not used as gas on fiery tensions is a good thing, and thus the Left spends the immediate aftermath of such attacks posturing and tut-tutting, full of concern that if we get too angry about such things, perhaps someone will say something Islamophobic. What they don’t seem to understand is that the reason rage is mounting with each new terrorist attack and the subsequent refusal of the Left to honestly confront what is happening is that we can see what does make the Left angry. A few questions to illustrate the point:

Why is it that the possibility of a transsexual getting “misgendered” results in molten Old Testament wrath from the Left but little girls getting nails exploded into them by a suicide bomber who chose a pop concert as his target triggers musings that we need to make sure this doesn’t result in any Islamophobia?

Why is it that a man like University of Toronto professor Dr. Jordan Peterson can get accused of violence on television for refusing to use recently invented gender pronouns but actual Islamic violence is explained away as something the West has brought upon itself?

Why doesn’t the Left understand the insensitivity of their anti-West enthusiasm when it amounts to explaining that the girls who died perished for the sins of their ancestors before the corpses have even cooled?

Why is it that Republicans passing laws to protect life in the womb results in hysterical screaming, marches, and rallies, but children being blown up after a night out has the Left warning us not to allow the event to create any “anti-immigrant sentiment”?

Why don’t the progressives realize the hypocrisy of their anti-Israel fury, when gay men are murdered virtually everywhere else in the Middle East? Why don’t they realize that when they are more passionate about boycotting Israel than condemning violence against minorities everywhere else in the Middle East, it looks rather strange to the rest of us?

Why does “mansplaining” and “transphobia” and “Islamophobia” and “homophobia” make the Left angrier than people being butchered in their own towns and cities? And if it doesn’t, why does it seem like it?

It makes us angry that the Left sees conservatives as more dangerous than Islamic terrorism. It makes us angry when we see that the Left has more vitriol for a professor who disagrees with them than they do for men who murder children. And it makes us angry that the only things that make them angry is any hint of deference to God and country. Terrorist attacks like the atrocity in Manchester show us one thing, crystal clear: what progressives and Islamic terrorists have in common is that they both hate what the West stands for. That is why the terrorists slaughter children, and why the Left keeps explaining why we had it coming in the first place.