The story of recent stabbings in Great Britain is familiar. The culprit was known to the law enforcement agencies of having jihadist leanings, and yet could not be stopped from killing innocent people.

The man who on Saturday allegedly murdered three people at a park in Reading, 60 km from London, was known to MI5, the UK’s security service. Khairi Saadallah, 25, a Libyan migrant resided in the same town.

The London Bridge attacker, Usman Khan, who was of Pakistani origin, was also a known jihadist. He was even imprisoned on terrorism charges in 2012. Apparently, the punishment didn’t reform or deter him, as seven years later he went on a stabbing spree, killing two and wounding three.

Similarly, Sudesh Mamoor Faraz Amman, a London student of Sri Lankan origin, injured three people in a terror attack in south London in February this year. He too was convicted at the age of 18 in December 2018 on the charges of possessing and circulating terrorist material.

The question is: why were the police, security, and intelligence agencies not able to prevent such attacks? The UK is one of the most advanced nations. So why couldn’t the authorities, with all the resources at their disposal, restrain Saadallah, Khan, and Amman? The answer is simple: because they are constrained by the dangerous doctrines of Islamophobia, multiculturalism, and political correctness.

They are constrained by the peddlers of these ideas. The mainstream media, a large section of academics, sundry intellectuals, Left activists, and many politicians keep mouthing politically correct slogans; they promote multicultural policies; and anything that could effectively check radical Islam is dubbed as Islamophobic.

Khairi Saadallah was scrutinized by security personnel in the past. “Security sources told the BBC the suspect came to the attention of the security services after they received information he had aspirations to travel to Syria—potentially for terrorism,” BBC reported. “It is understood the information was further investigated, and no genuine threat or immediate risk was identified. No case file was opened which would have made him a target for further investigation.”

It is evident that the Reading attack was not the result of incompetence on the part of security services and police; they knew about Saadallah—as they also knew about Khan and Amman—but their knowledge proved to be useless. Knowledge, Francis Bacon said, is power; and this power can be put to good use. But this can happen only when one has the moral courage to do that. In the current milieu, however, cops and security services in the West are thoroughly demoralized; they are extremely wary about acting against radical Islam and known jihadists for the fear of being called racist, Islamophobic, etc.

In fact, any tracking of such characters is also criticized as racial profiling; it si presented as a violation of individual liberty and civil rights. In intellectuals’ scheme of things, only Muslim fundamentalists and violent protesters like Black Lives Matter have any rights; others are always wrong.

By relentlessly and vociferously denouncing the West, Leftists and jihad-compliant intellectuals have enervated and completely demoralized it. The result is that it is not able to restrain jihadists even when they have prior information. As in the case of Saadallah.