No man is an island, as John Donne said. Every murder changes the world a bit. I suspect the murder of Jo Cox, the young British member of Parliament killed in Birstall last Thursday, was the sort that changes the world a lot. I wish I could say the same about the murders of the 49 people who lost their lives in Orlando a week ago.
Beyond the stark fact of tragedy, and the obvious fact that many more people perished in Orlando than in Birstall, the two events have a superficial resemblance. In each case, the killer appears to have had an ideological motive. It was reported on Friday that police found Nazi regalia and white supremacist literature in the home of suspect Thomas Mair. The Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, pledged his support for Islamic State on Facebook before the massacre and again on the telephone during it.
One yelled “Britain First!” The other yelled “Allahu Akbar!” And yet it was not long before, in each case, we were being told the familiar story of mental instability, as if sane people would commit such acts. Mair had “a history of mental illness,” said his brother. Mateen had been “an angry, disturbed, unstable young man,” said President Obama.
There is a temptation, then, to conclude that we are dealing with two facets of the same monster called “extremism” — two acts of roughly equivalent terrorism, with the principal difference being the vast superiority of Mateen’s firepower.
And yet to equate Birstall and Orlando is to miss two crucial differences. To be sure, neo-fascists like Mair are as odious as Islamists like Mateen. And, as an ideology, fascism is as lethal to human freedom as Islamic extremism. Today, however, the scale of the neo-fascist threat is significantly smaller than the scale of the Islamist threat.
There is no state in the world that pursues as a matter of policy the ideas of Britain First or the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization with which Mair is said to have had contact. Nor am I aware of any territory currently under the control of these or similar groups. By contrast, the goals of Islamic extremists are supported to various degrees by several states, and the self-styled Islamic State still controls parts of Iraq and Syria.
As for the number of terrorist attacks carried out by neo-Nazis in recent years, they are dwarfed by the numbers carried out by Islamic groups. On the basis of data published by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, which is led by researchers at the University of Maryland, I estimate that Islamic extremist groups were responsible for more than 85 percent of deaths due to terrorism around the world between 2006 and 2014.
The second big difference between Birstall and Orlando is the different reactions to the crimes. In the wake of any atrocity, American politicians unhesitatingly seek to score political points. In the immediate aftermath of the slaughter in Orlando, President Obama laid the blame on lax gun laws. Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for the presidency, claimed vindication for his proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Representatives of the LBGT community blamed homophobia. Spokesmen for the Council of American Islamic Relations exonerated Islam and blamed Islamophobia. And on it went, with Trump winning the prize for the most grotesque exploitation of the tragedy.
The contrast with the political aftermath of the murder of Jo Cox was complete. Far from seeking to score political points, politicians on both sides of the debate on Britain’s EU membership suspended their campaigns and closed ranks to express their shock and offer condolences. A few journalists — notably Alex Massie — could not resist the urge to blame the proponents of “Brexit” for Jo Cox’s death, but most people exercised restraint. I confess, my initial, unthinking reaction was to agree with Massie. My wife, who has received more than her share of death threats, rightly chided me. “What is admirable about your country is that almost no one is saying such things!”
I do not know what would have happened if Jo Cox’s killer had been a Muslim yelling “Allahu Akbar!” I like to think the response would have been equally restrained. I also hope — not least for Jo Cox’s husband and children — that the politicians’ restraint will enable British voters to draw the right conclusions from what happened last week. I am certain that the intemperate American response to Orlando has had precisely the opposite effect.
Remember Donne’s words: “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” Today, no island is an island.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford.