Today is one of those days when Britons especially remember two of the acts of horror that the followers of the Islamic cult of death have inflicted on us. Four years separate the two terrible incidents we remember today and although the murderers were different in each case, the reason for the murders was the same. That reason was Islam.
On the afternoon of the 22nd May 2013 two converts to Islam went to South Woolwich in South East London and deliberately searched for a member of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces in order to kill them. These savages, who chose a path of violence and who attended for a while a mosque run by an Islamic extremist that is still worryingly open, set their sights on Fusilier Lee Rigby. The two Muslims attacked Fusilier Rigby and killed him. They used a car, knives and a machete to do this in a horrific attack that was witnessed by sickened local residents. The savages tried to behead Fusilier Rigby and mutilated him to such an extent that he had to be formally identified through dental records.
The savage Muslims who murdered Fusilier Rigby were eventually captured by armed police and are currently serving whole life sentences for their truly appalling crime. This attack marked a watershed moment in Britain, this was the moment that many people saw for the first time the sheer bestial nature of Islam and the sort of people it too often produces. Nothing was the same again after this attack. This attack had consequences, big ones. A lot of people who I encountered at that time, those who had previously been somewhat apathetic and disinterested in matters of politics and religion, suddenly decided to learn more about Islam and what they found disgusted them. They found a supremacist, backwards, hate-filled violent ideology which although it doesn’t infect every Muslim with these sorts of madnesses, does infect enough Muslims to be considered as a serious threat to the rest of us.
People started to protest this ideology of death that many Britons, mostly those who had not had to live close to the followers of the cult of Islam, had previously thought was relatively peaceful. The slaughter of Fusilier Rigby disabused them of this naivety.
The reaction of the political establishment was, as to be expected, dire, with a few exceptions such as Tony Blair the former Prime Minister who did admit that this was not an isolated incident but was part of a ‘broader problem with Islam’. Yes we got an anti extremism task force, but we also found out about intelligence failures such as data about the murdering savages that should have been passed on, but was not. The government of the time, led by David Cameron, gave us the now familiar ‘Islam is a peaceful faith’ line, a statement that has become increasingly laughable as the number of Islamic attacks on us and our neighbours and friends has inexorably increased.
The BBC, the broadcasting entity that Britons should in theory be able to rely on at a time of national emergency for accurate and impartial information, went into full virtue signalling mode and had speakers on who claimed that this was just a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and not a widespread problem (yeah right!). The BBC and other broadcasters gave more than ample airtime to various Islamic grievance mongers and ‘hate crime’ charlatans to claim that the reaction to the killing of Fusilier Rigby constituted a ‘massive rise in Islamophobia’. The claims of one of the groups, Tell Mama, were later attacked by many Britons after Tell Mama’s figures and claims were examined and found to be inaccurate in the extreme.
We also had statements from various Islamic religious and community leaders following the murder. These ranged from the outright refusal to condemn the attack, as was what Anjem Choudhary chose to do, to crocodile tears from other Muslims such as Asghar ‘The Jews stole my shoes’ Bukhari. There seemed to be very little real public contrition from these Muslim leaders and nor was there any proper acknowledgement that the murderers of Fusilier Rigby were inspired by Islam. There was a circling of the wagons by Muslim leaders and from what I could see and now remember, very little in the way of theological and cultural self examination by any of Britain’s public Muslims.
Little or nothing effective was done by the State to curb what should have been an obvious and growing problem of Islamic extremism following the Lee Rigby murder. Rather than recognise that Britain had an Islamic violence problem and go in hard to stop the problem before it got out of hand, Cameron’s and later Theresa May’s governments decided to appease Islam and its followers instead. The government gave the impression to me that they may have decided that being nice to Islam and giving it a seat at, for want of a better phrase, the High Table, then the violent extremism could be tackled from within the Islamic community. This has not happened. Despite various government ministers in recent governments fawning over Islam and Muslims, Islamic violence has not stopped. It has not stopped at street level nor has the terrorism that Islam encourages gone away either.
This brings me to the second of the two Islamic horrors that we in Britain are remembering today. On the 22nd May 2017, at the closing of a concert by Ariana Grande in the Manchester Arena, an Islamic savage struck the audience with a suicide bomb that killed 23 people and seriously injured 139 others. There was a large number of children and young people in the arena that night and the Islamic savage’s bomb took the lives of ten people under the age of 20 with the youngest victim of the attack an eight year old girl.
I recall looking at the story as it unfolded on my screens with absolute horror. I commented at the time that people in Britain should not tolerate the murder of our children by Islamic savagery. As with the murder of Fusilier Rigby, the Manchester Arena Bombing was another watershed moment.
We knew from this attack that there are some followers of Islam who are so deranged by Allah inspired hatred for others that they will even deliberately kill children. We now knew that there was no depths to which those who take seriously the doctrine of Islam and jihad would go to achieve their aim of subjugation of the world.
This attack, because of the scale of it and the choice of target by the suicide bomber, sparked off a wave of protest including a big 3000+ demo in June in Manchester addressed by Anne Marie Waters and others. Although the protest was very peaceful when it came to the supporters of those opposed to Islamic savagery, the Leftist counter protesters were not. I attended the protest with my son (we had a babysitter problem so I had to take him) and some Leftist threw a beer bottle at me that smashed on the floor rather too close to my son’s pushchair. I also saw the Left throw military grade thunderflashes at the anti terrorism protesters in the city centre. I was disgusted at the actions of the Left that day, I used to be on the Left myself many years ago and the old left that I was acquainted with back then, would never have attacked anti terror marchers. How on earth could anyone consider it justified to oppose an anti terrorism and anti extremism demonstration? Normal people wouldn’t but the SWP that seemed to have a big presence in Manchester that day, seemed to think otherwise.
Much of what I’ve written regarding the Government’s reaction to the Lee Rigby murder also applies to the Government’s reaction following the Manchester Islamic Atrocity. We had similar ‘but Islam is peaceful really’ statements from the great and the good, from politicians and from members of the liberal intelligentsia as we had in 2013. There was of course still no acknowledgement from the Establishment that this terrible mass murder was down to Islam. The mass mainstream media seemed to want to bury the core of the story, the fact that a Muslim whom Britain had given sanctuary to, had murdered British children, in favour of a naive, huggy, ‘don’t look back in anger’ policy. Whilst I agree that people should be allowed to grieve this terrible Islamic mass murder in any way they chose, the state did promote, via the media,that the proper way to respond to the killings were to ‘keep calm and carry on’, parrot phrases like ‘not all Muslims’ and sing together etc. Those of us who know and understand Islam and the threats that it poses to us and our societies looked on with bewilderment and anger as the Government lost yet another chance to openly name the ideology that kills Britons and will go on to kill again.
As with the aftermath of the Rigby murder, the Government failed to properly get to grips with an ideology that is implicated in a horrific amount of violence across the world and now in the United Kingdom. In both cases the results of an Islamic atrocity was not tough action to deal with Islamic extremists and the mosques who harbour and support them. We got instead yet more appeasement, yet more useless ‘terror initiatives’, yet more empty words about ‘togetherness’ and ‘counter extremism’ plans that really only show just how big the problem is with Islamic extremism, rather than dealing with it.
Since 2013 oodles of taxpayer cash have been spunked away on everything from groups that whine about ‘Islamophobia’ to attempts to deal with the symptoms of Islamic radicalism and not the cause of it. The government needs to realise that no matter how much money they throw in the direction of censorious Islamic grievance mongers, or into training for Islamic clerics to enable them to spot potential radicals, that this will not stop Islamic terrorism and other Islam related violence. Unless we are governed by those who recognise Islam for what it is, which is a violent political ideology with a small and very thin veneer of spirituality, then things will continue as they are or get much worse. If government still continues to make the mistake, which they seem to be carrying on doing, in thinking that unreconstructed Islam is compatible with our society, then we will have more attacks by radical Muslims and many many more Britons killed in such attacks. Islam is the source of both of the atrocities we are remembering today. As we remember those who died in such horrific circumstances, we should also continue to remember and be angry about, the ideology behind these murders.
