You will of course be familiar with what happened in Woolwich, so I have no desire to rake over it nor to dwell upon the specifics, instead I’d like to comment on the reaction to it all.
It has been incorrectly labelled an act of terrorism, but it was no such thing, instead it was a knife attack by two delusional and rather pathetic lunatics. They might indeed claim to have acted for all Muslims, but making such a claim does not make it a factual statement, and the fact that their delusion just happens to be a religious one does not suddenly transform it into a terror attack. Sadly what this does do is to stoke a seam of xenophobia that generates a backlash against many innocent people.
Lets be clear about a few things:
- Islam is not a unified belief but is instead, like all beliefs, an umbrella that shelters a vast diversity of conflicting thought.
- While there are indeed a few lunatics in the mix there, the vast majority are decent honourable human beings who strive to do what is right and have no desire to murder anybody … ever.
- Do you equate the word “Muslim” with the word “Nutter”, well think again, because as many as 25% of Muslims are not religious at all, they are simply cultural Muslims. They like their heritage and are proud of it, but happily dismiss all supernaturalism as superstitious silliness.
In the past several months there have been several hundred murders in London, and tragic as each of those were, none of them motivated the PM to comment, nor did any of them trigger COBRA into meeting. If these two nutters had claimed “aliens”, or “Freemasons”, the media response would have been quite different, yet because they mouthed some religious lunacy, it suddenly becomes “terrorism” … why is that?