Political correctness can be deadly.
This may seem hyperbolic until you consider the fact that a security guard at the UK’s Manchester Arena told an inquest that he was suspicious of the bomber just minutes before he detonated a suicide vest, ultimately killing 22 and injuring over 800.
He didn’t alert his higher-ups, however, because was worried about something else.
He was worried that he’d be branded a “racist” for noticing that a seemingly out-of-place, nervous looking Middle Eastern man that he just felt in his gut may have been up to something.
The moment that anyone tasked with maintaining public safety is more worried about being racist than they are about public safety is the moment that we need to slam the breaks on the deceptive groupthink that is political correctness.
If we continue to allow this backwards, morally devoid ideology to influence society, it won’t be long before we value feelings above life. And it won’t be long before terror organizations like ISIS exploit this skittishness.
If we’re not already at this point.
The BBC reports that Kyle Lawler noticed Salman Abedi, who would detonate a bomb packed with thousands of nuts and bolts just eight minutes later, and felt something was wrong with him.
He was standing about 10 or 15 ft away from Abedi and told police that “I just had a bad feeling about him but did not have anything to justify that.”
Abedi, who had been noticed by a member of the public dressed in black and carrying a backpack and his presence made aware to Lawler, appeared to be “fidgety and sweating.”
Yet Lawler, who was 18 at the time, “gave up” after trying to get through to the security control room and went back to standing guard.
“I felt unsure about what to do,” he told the inquiry, which is ongoing.
“It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male,” he explained. In the UK, “Asian” is the term they use to describe those of Middle Eastern origin.
“I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race,” he continued.
“I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant,” he said. “I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by overreacting or judging someone by their race.”
He is not alone. Here in the US, the FBI’s PC policies allowed the 9-11 hijackers to hide in plain sight before pulling off their attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Recall the Phoenix memo that alerted FBI higher ups about Arab males taking flight lessons only wanting to learn how to make a plane take off, not land the plane. Political correctness allowed Omar Mateen to pull off a mass murder at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida that killed 49 people and wounded another 53 and it allowed Army Lieutenant Nadal Hassan to kill 13 US service members and injured 30 others at Fort Hood in Texas. The FBI PC culture also allowed the Tsarnaev brothers to blow up the Boston Marathon in 2013 after being alerted by Russian intelligence sources of all people about them attending terror training camps in Chechnya and returning to the US.
All these mass murderers were, “on the radar screen” of the FBI by their own admission. Their policies however were drafted not to be preemptive but instead not to offend anyone.
Lawler is responsible for his failure to act, this is true, and he’ll have to answer for this one day. We should pray that he repents before God. But he is not responsible for the toxic culture of hyper-sensitivity to race.
22 people are dead and hundreds were injured thanks to the inaction and misplaced concern of this young man, because he rightly presumed he’d get called a “racist” for profiling a terrorist based on his outward appearance.
These were hardly the first casualties of political correctness—but they won’t be the last.
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