Despite a few isolated incidents of thuggishness
and much hot air from the online fraternity of the far-right, the
aftermath of yesterday’s gruesome events in Woolwich passed off
relatively peacefully.
On the whole as events unfolded most people simply looked at their television sets in shock and revulsion.
The media’s attention will now likely turn to
what might have been done to prevent the atrocities. A number of
questions will immediately be asked. Had the suspects already been
picked up by the security services? Do they have links with
foreign Jihadists? Has the UK government taken its eye off the ball
when it comes to Islamic extremism?
It is important, however, to be clear on two
points: the men who carried out the attacks do not represent Islam and
they do not represent Muslims. Nor do the attackers have ‘legitimate
grievances’ about British foreign policy.
Outside of the UK, the vast majority of those
who die at the hands of terrorists are themselves Muslims. Those who see
fit to carry out such brutal attacks on British service personnel are
about as representative of Muslim opinion as Anders
Breivik was of ‘white’ Western Europeans. Muslims should not feel
pressured into collectively apologising for the horrendous acts
committed by one deranged ideologue, just as the ‘white’ community isn’t
obliged to grovel every time a far-right thug attacks
a Mosque.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to see
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), the English Defence
League (EDL) leader with a chequered history of violence and run-ins
with the law, encouraging a show of aggression on the streets of
Woolwich last night. It is often said that the far-right
are guilty of discrimination. The truth, however, is that they are
guilty of the opposite. They are cognitively incapable of discriminating
between the isolated acts of an individual and the entirely separate
lives of millions who simply share a religion or
are part of the same ethnic group. One also suspects that in their
hearts the EDL secretly long for an incident of this kind so as to puff
themselves up and appear relevant to a fraternity wider than a few
overweight drunks sporting football shirts.
Very little is known at this point about those
who carried out the attacks. One of the suspects was caught on camera
blaming British soldiers for killing Muslims, which would indicate
Jihadi inspiration. The shouts of Allahu Akbar (God
is Great) as the assailants carried out their crimes would appear to
support this conclusion.
However blaming yesterday’s atrocities on UK foreign policy makes no more sense than does blaming them on Islam.
One of the attackers apparently called on the UK
government to “bring our troops back so you can all live in peace”.
Ignoring for a second the fact that bringing British troops home would
contribute very little to the cause of peace in
a place like Afghanistan (in fact quite the opposite for Afghani
women), those words sound almost pacifistic. Delve a little deeper into
Jihadist ideology, however, and historically one finds that it isn’t
only troops stationed in “Muslim lands” that they
have a problem with, but almost all the tenets of a modern liberal
society, be that unveiled women, openly gay men and women as well as
those who choose to believe in a different god or none. Like the
extremists who sought to blow up the Tiger Tiger nightclub
in London’s Haymarket in 2007 with the aim of slaughtering “those slags
dancing around”, the grievances of yesterday’s attackers probably
aren’t reserved strictly for British troops stationed overseas, but for
all the freedoms that make Britain a country worth
living in.
Eight years ago another group of deranged
fanatics tried to declare war on London. Despite his (to me anyway)
disagreeable political views, the great English writer Samuel Johnson
was right to say that “by seeing London, [he had] seen as
much of life as the world can show”. It was this that so disgusted the
murderers of 7/7 – the sheer diversity of life in the capital,
represented by everyone from the young people partying in the Haymarket
to the insufficiently pious Muslims who practiced
in the capital’s Mosques. It is also this same diversity that so
disgusts those who will use the attacks as an excuse for
opportunistically inciting bigotry and racism. Much like the terrorists
they claim to despise, it is modernity in all its variety and
colour that they really have a problem with.
No doubt we will soon get a more thorough idea
of the process of indoctrination the killers underwent prior to them
carrying out their pointless acts. Until then, don’t give the attacks a
meaning they don’t deserve, and view those who wish
to use the attacks to push their own abhorrent ideology with the purest
contempt.