Why US diplomats tweet from the hip in response to Henry Nowak murder | Trump administration
In past administrations’ foreign ministries, how to respond to an incendiary event like the murder of British student Henry Nowak required deliberations, memos, and meetings. Given how it shook the United Kingdom and inflamed tensions over immigration and race, wary diplomats in Foggy Bottom probably wouldn’t have said anything.
Now they’re tweeting from the hip. “Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of the decline of civilization,” the ministry said in an official statement on Thursday. “They need to be rejected throughout the West.”
This was, after all, the foreign office that hosted far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson for a tour earlier this year, crowdsourced targets for X’s deportation, and portrayed the UK (as well as much of Europe) as an ideological prison celebrating censorship.
And it’s an argument that returns again and again to a thesis shared by most of the right-wingers in Europe: Mass immigration threatens the integrity of western society and now it needs to be reversed.
US vice president J.D. Vance continued the refrain late Friday with a provocative tweet that explicitly linked Nowak’s death to the decline of civilization.
“Henry Nowak died as a civilization dies,” Vance wrote to X.
He added: “Because we love the West, we want to protect it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children.”
Nowak was fatally stabbed by Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh man, in Southampton in December and was later sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. Nowak was handcuffed after Digwa falsely claimed that Nowak had racially abused her and dropped her hijab.
Body camera footage released by police shows Nowak in handcuffs, pleading with officers that he had been stabbed. “I can’t breathe” and “I was stabbed,” he told police. An officer responded: “I don’t think you know, man.”
Some US diplomats believe it came from England. Senior figures in the Labor Party, including deputy prime minister David Lammy, voiced their support for George Floyd, a black man killed by a white police officer in Minnesota in 2020. Now, they argue, U.S. officials are simply doing the same and speaking their conscience, this time to defend a white man against what they say is the scourge of immigration and double standards.
The charge against UK politics is led by elected officials including Vance, the Foreign Office’s culture warriors and Elon Musk, one of the world’s richest men, who has posted enthusiastically supporting Robinson and recent anti-immigration “unite the kingdom” rallies. “Send the video showing how disgustingly Nowak was treated by the police in the moments of his death to everyone you know,” Musk wrote in one of several posts on the social network he owns, X.
On Friday, Keir Starmer responded: “Musk has been intervening in our politics once again over the last few days, trying to foment division; that’s not who we are in Britain.”
US hostility towards the modern face of the UK comes from above: Trump has engaged in a personal feud with London mayor Sadiq Khan, whom he accuses of unfairly trying to impose sharia law and says the UK capital has become rife with “stabbings, filth and filth” during his term in office.
Online censorship and criminal cases triggered by social media comments have been another focus of U.S. authorities. Vance confronted Starmer in the Oval Office about this issue last year, saying in his infamous speech at the Munich Security Conference: “I fear freedom of expression is in decline in Britain and across Europe.”
Among the State Department diplomats promoted to key positions in public diplomacy and democracy promotion, there are standouts who take aim at issues that particularly anger conservative commentators.
They include Samuel Samson, deputy assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, who has promoted money for a legal defense fund for far-right French politician Marine Le Pen and advocated labeling Germany’s Alternatif für Deutschland party as “extremist”.
Samson wrote: “Governments across Europe have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our common heritage… Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has become a hotbed of digital censorship, mass immigration, restrictions on religious freedom and numerous other attacks on democratic self-government.”
