The
London Horror and Jihad Denial
Posted
By Bruce Bawer On May 24, 2013 @ 12:40 am In Daily
Mailer,FrontPage
It began on
Tuesday in Woolwich, London, when two young men in a car deliberately ran over
an off-duty British soldier who was walking to a nearby military installation,
then “hacked and chopped” at his body and attempted to decapitate him as they
shouted “Allah Akbar!” They forced witnesses to film the scene, saying: “We
swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we
have done this is because Muslims are dying every day.” When police arrived, the
murderers “charged at them wielding firearms, knives and a machete.” They were
apprehended alive, and are now in hospital. It has since emerged that
one of them, a son of Nigerian immigrants, was born in Britain as Michael
Olumide Adebolajo, converted to Islam in 2003, changed his name to Mujahidin
(i.e., jihadist), and for several years attended meetings of the group
Al-Muhajiroun, founded by terrorist preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed. Late Thursday
afternoon, U.K. time, the murdered soldier was identified as
25-year-old Lee Rigby, a drummer in the 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers
and the father of a two-year-old son.
Just like this week’s nightly riots by
“youths” in Stockholm, the brutal slaughter in Woolwich was plainly a
jihadist act. Yet just as the Swedish elites are continuing to dance around
that uncomfortable core truth, their British counterparts are engaged in some
fancy footwork of their own – led by Prime Minister David Cameron, who described Tuesday’s
atrocity as “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life” but
“also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our
country.” (Does it need to be said that for a British leader to haul out this
ragged, repulsive lie in the year 2013 is itself a betrayal – a shameless,
craven betrayal of precisely what Cameron pretends to be standing up for,
namely “Britain and…the British way of life”?)
The papers were full of the standard-issue stuff.
The Muslim Council of Britain made the usual assertion that the
latest heinous act committed in the name of Islam had “nothing to do with
Islam.” Baroness Warsi, a Pakistani-English Muslim who serves as “Communities
Secretary” in the current government, painted the familiar
pretty picture of “faith communities coming out together” in the wake of said
heinous act “and showing a unified condemnation of this.” The Guardian ran
the obligatory hand-wringing article about
the “fear of backlash” against Muslims in the wake of the heinous act in
question. (The headline of another Guardian article
actually indicated that
there had been “Anti-Muslim reprisals after Woolwich attack”; it turned out
that one man was “in custody on suspicion of attempted arson after reportedly
walking into a mosque with a knife in Braintree, Essex,” and that “police in
Kent were called to reports of criminal damage at a mosque in Canterbury
Street, Gillingham.”) And Ken Livingstone, the loathsome ex-mayor of London
(which he described as “the most successful melting pot in the history of the
world and the city of the free”), warned those
less evolved than himself not to “scapegoat entire communities for this
barbaric act.” This from the sometime host, defender, and chum of Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, who is famous precisely for encouraging such barbaric acts.
Newspaper commentaries on the atrocity added up to a
depressing profile of the pathetic, obstinately reality-challenged
psychopathology of the British elite when confronted with Islamic violence. The
prize for sheer inanity of approach must go to Laborite Dan Hodges, who spent a
whole column in the Telegraph elaborating on the theme that
“for me, yesterday’s barbaric act of terror in Woolwich was literally
senseless. None of what happened actually made any sense.” The murder, he
asserted, was “confusing, horrific, bizarre.” He proceeded to repeat this
refrain in one paragraph after another: “none of it made sense….Still none of
it made sense….It didn’t make sense….It didn’t make any sense….Yesterday was
the senseless day.” Reading this feeble, embarrassing nonsense, one could not
help wondering: was Hodges equally stumped by 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Bali, Beslan,
the Boston bombings? One of the things that didn’t “make sense” to Hodges was
that one of the murderers spoke of “our lands,” meaning the Muslim world, even
though “he had a south-east London accent.” It was as if the Woolwich killers
were the first “home-grown terrorists” to ever come to Hodges’s attention. How
remarkable that during all these years when the non-Muslim world has been
racked by one death-dealing jihadist assault after another, Hodges’s
contemplation of these incidents has apparently yielded absolutely nothing in
the way of awareness or insight.
Brendan O’Neill, also writing in the Telegraph, was
also purportedly baffled beyond all hope by Tuesday’s events, professing to
find it “shocking” and “bizarre” (that word again) that one of the terrorists
“claimed to be acting on behalf of all Muslims,” speaking “as if he were a
representative of the ummah.” Again, one would have thought that this was the
very first time such a thing has ever happened. “How can a couple of men,”
O’Neill asked, “so thoroughly convince themselves that they speak for all
Muslims, to the extent that they seriously believe their savage and psychotic attack
on a man in the street is some kind of glorious act of Islamic resistance?”
Unlike Hodges, however, O’Neill had a theory. A certain kind of thinking, he
posited, had led directly to the Woolwich atrocity. Jihadist ideology? Nope:
contemporary British identity politics. You see, “in this era in which any old
fool can claim to be a ‘community spokesperson’, and can be treated seriously
as such, these murderous loners seem to be trying a psychotic version of the
same trick – claiming that by dint of shared skin colour or common religious
sentiment they have the authority to speak on behalf of millions of people they
have never met or whose lands they have never visited.” Somehow, O’Neill would
appear to have missed the news that it’s not only in Merrie Old England that
jihadists have proudly proclaimed themselves to be jihadists.
Some observers emphasized that it was crucial to
“keep calm.” Writing in the Independent, sociologist
Frank Furedi urged Brits
not to “over-react” – and, moreover, not to “redefine” this “incomprehensible
act of violence” (yes, he was mystified too) as “an act of political
terrorism.” If O’Neill saw the two killers as products of British identity
politics, Furedi, calling it “unlikely” that they had “been busy reading
al-Qaeda’s terror manual,” cast them instead as products of “reality
entertainment” culture, noting their decision to record their monstrous actions
on camera. “The murderers may have adopted the role of idealist jihadists as
one of them chanted ‘We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting
you,’” wrote Furedi, “but what they really meant was that we will never stop
performing.” Furedi’s advice to his readers: don’t give “recognition to two
self-obsessed killers who did not deserve it.”
Michael White made a similar argument under
the headline “Woolwich attack: let’s try a bit of keeping calm.” Hey, here’s a
thought: could it be, just possibly, that official Britain has been too damn
calm for too damn long? How about finally getting a little angry? Just
to begin with, how about reforming the insane immigration and deportation
policies that have made London a sanctuary for some of the most contemptible
preachers of Islamic terror on the planet? How about cutting out all the smooth
lies, the slick euphemisms, the talk of “Asians” when the subject is really
Muslims? How about somebody in a position of authority screwing up a little
courage and facing a few facts – and thereby maybe, just maybe, causing
Churchill to stop spinning in his grave?
White had a lot to say. Protesting that the
publication of photos of the Woolwich perpetrators’ “rusty knives and meat
cleavers” was “indecent” and “voyeuristic,” he proposed that today’s Brits
adopt the “Keep Calm and Carry On” attitude of their World War II-era forebears
– in other words, turn away from the gruesome images and don’t exaggerate the
importance of these evildoers (who might just as easily have been members of
some street gang unrelated to Islam rather than “ill-educated and unemployed
young men…who have been watching jihadi video nasties on the internet”).
Suggesting that the Woolwich killers are “lone wolfs” (sic) whose acts have no
wider meaning or organizational backing, he maintained that “the only visibly
organised conspiracy” in the picture is the English Defense League (that tacky
pack of unspeakable rowdies). He went on to insist that, in any event, ordinary
street gangs are “a greater problem for life in our big cities than wannabe
jihadis.” And he found it appropriate to add that British soldiers of the
non-Islamic persuasion are, after all, sometimes “attacked” or “even
occasionally murdered” by “their drunken co-religionists.” So why make a fuss
about the Islamic roots of this unfortunate affair? (For good measure, White
worked in a passing reference to the nightly riots in Stockholm by “the
unemployed.”)
What artful dodgers! The lesson was clear: with very
few exceptions, the British elite is terrified to call jihad by its rightful
name. It would rather condemn the English Defense League for the thousandth
time than choke out even the most muted, gracefully nuanced acknowledgment that
there might, in fact, be something of a causal connection between the
instructions to the faithful spelled out in the Koran and the actions carried
out in Woolwich on Tuesday afternoon. Yet it’s precisely that elite’s
dishonest, irresponsible, lily-livered response to abominable transgressions
like this one that is driving more and more people into the arms of the EDL.
For while Cameron, Livingstone, and company were responding to the Woolwich
killing by defending Islam, feigning perplexity, and/or dismissing the idea
that this murder had any larger significance, EDL leader Tommy Robinson
was speaking the
plain and simple truth, accusing the country’s leaders of being “scared to say
the word Muslim” and flatly rejecting the fatuous falsehoods about Islam that
are proffered in Britain’s classrooms and endlessly reiterated in its media.
Said Robinson on Tuesday: “Our next generations are being taught through
schools that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s not. It never has been. What
you saw today is Islam.”
Freedom Center pamphlets now available
on Kindle: Click
here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/the-london-horror-and-jihad-denial/
No comments:
Post a Comment