When Mohamed Atta commanded a group of islamic fascists to hijack four jet aircraft and fly them into public buildings, I don’t remember the media referring to them as “mentally ill”. Nor the four suicide murders who caused carnage in London on 7/7. Or the sick killers of Lee Rigby, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. They were “soldiers of Allah” and the vicious murder was an act of war. The same goes for all the other islamist fascists and fanatics who blow themselves up in the name of religious superstition. They are never “mentally ill”, though. Apart from, that is, from Tommy Mair, the main suspect for the murder of Jo Cox.
The Daily Mail – who else? – has a brazenly cynical headline today, asserting that Mair was a “loner” and that he was “mentally ill” and the Sun went to great ends to make it crystal clear that Mair was indeed a loner. Not only a loner, but a “crazed loner”. I am not, for one moment, going to condone a single heinous act by terrorists of any background at all. I deplore everyone, from islamic fascists to Irish terrorists, who murders innocent people; actually anyone at all.
I am not going to even attempt to make any form of political capital out of Jo Cox’s murder. Like many of you, the tragedy has shaken my faith in humanity in general and British humanity in particular. But let’s be very clear about this: the two best selling newspapers in our country have, quite deliberately, sought to separate the murder of Jo Cox from all aspects of everyday life and our current political discourse.
I am going to take this further. What do the papers mean by Mair being a “loner’? I lived on my own for many years. I said hello to neighbours, but I never socialised with them. I would spend evenings on my own after work, I would spend weekends on my own. The socialising I did was away from my street. Would people have perceived me as a “loner”? Secondly, this “history of mental illness”. Well, me too. A lifetime of it that persists until this day and always will, kept under control by drugs and therapy. That loner and that person with a history of mental illness could be me. But not every mentally ill person will go round shooting and stabbing people. The people I know, whose lives have been blighted, to varying extents, by the black dog, have lived “normal” lives, whatever they are supposed to be and have been a threat to no one.
You know as well as I do why the right wing red tops want to portray Mair in this way. It doesn’t suit their agenda. Well, sorry: only a fool would not realise the utter cynicism by which these people operate. With Nigel Farage fearing that people would die on our streets because of, yes, you’ve guessed it, migrants, it has come as a shock that the main suspect in this tragedy appears to be “one of our own”. So he has to be a “loner”, someone with a “history of mental health problems”.
It may well emerge, in the fullness of time, that Mair really does suffer from mental health issues, perhaps something that might help explain what happened yesterday. That is not a conclusion which we can reach today. No one has even been charged with murder yet.
I am not sure that anything can excuse such a terrible killing. Mental health, lonerism, extremism and so on. As I write, less than a day has gone by since the carnage on the streets of Yorkshire. This may take weeks, it may take months; we may never know what possessed a man to take the life of a wife, a mother of two young children and a wonderful campaigning charity worker and MP. In the interests of political expediency, the Mail and the Sun have already acted as judge and jury. The killer was a loner, a one-off, he was mentally ill. The truth will out soon enough.
The likes of Paul Dacre of the Mail and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of the Sun, have no conscience at all. They take a story, twist it in order to fit in with their twisted agenda and then put it out there as fact when the full story, the truth, is not even known. And what they print is propaganda, under the guise of a free press. It is just about impossible to sink to a new low in Britain’s tabloid world, but every day Dacre and Murdoch somehow manage to do it.
I leave you with the brave words of her husband Brendan Cox:
“Today is the beginning of a new chapter in our lives. More difficult, more painful, less joyful, less full of love. I and Jo’s friends and family are going to work every moment of our lives to love and nurture our kids and to fight against the hate that killed Jo.
“Jo believed in a better world and she fought for it every day of her life with an energy, and a zest for life that would exhaust most people.
“She would have wanted two things above all else to happen now, one that our precious children are bathed in love and two, that we all unite to fight against the hatred that killed her. Hate doesn’t have a creed, race or religion, it is poisonous.
“Jo would have no regrets about her life, she lived every day of it to the full.”
Hate killed Jo Cox. Only love can save the day.
