Yesterday there was a serious random stabbing incident in Burnley, a town that at 9.9% has a Muslim population that is almost double that of the country of England as a whole which is 5.0%.

The incident involved a man going apeshit and stabbing two women in a branch of Marks and Spencer, a shop that it needs to be said was started by a Jewish family and had for the first 115 years of its existence, familial senior management. The attacker targeted one shop worker and another random person in the shop and one of the women injured was stabbed in the neck. The knifeman was tackled by members of the public who held him down until police arrived. Reports from the incident, reports that Lancashire police have acknowledged exist, tell of how the knifeman ‘shouted something’ either before or during the attack.

The person whom the police have apprehended is a 57 year old Muslim man and pictures of the arrest show police with a handcuffed man who is dressed in identifiably Islamic garb with an equally identifiable Islamic style beard as you can see in the image below which was screen-grabbed from the page of the Sun newspaper. It was screen-grabbed just in case the image was ‘disappeared’ from later editions of the story as some stories and images that are unflattering to the ideology of Islam tend to do.

The very Islamic looking suspect who has been apprehended for the stabbing attack in a Burnley M and S.

Because of the allegation that the man ‘shouted out something’ as part of the attack, Lancashire Police have brought in anti-terror investigators. However, Lancashire Police, in a video statement made after the incident, are heavily pushing the mental health line something that can be seen in the video below.

Another group that is really heavily pushing the ‘mental health’ line with regards this incident are those who claim to be from the family of the alleged assailant. A social media post, one that looks as if it was put up on Facebook, was relayed to users of the Gab platform by one of its users called Let Him Without Sin, who can be found on Gab as @ThrowTheFirstStone

This post is chock full of ‘mental health’ excuses for this incident and was allegedly put up by the suspected attacker’s nephew. You can read this family post below.

Whilst I’m willing to entertain that there may be a ‘mental health’ aspect to this case that may not be the whole story. I certainly don’t completely buy the idea that this is a regular Joe who is mentally ill and off their medications. If this was the case then why bring in the counter terror police over something that the man said? Was what this man allegedly said the Islamic war cry of ‘Allah hu Akbar’ perhaps?

If this was a random ‘mental illness’ based attack why did the attacker, who we can be quite certain now is Muslim based on both the photographs and the family statement. choose to attack people in a shop that was started by Jews and has a long association with the Jewish community? The Burnley attacker could have lost it anywhere but he seems to have chosen a shop with a Jewish association in which to do it. Hmmm! Maybe there’s much more than ‘mental illness’ afoot here?

I’ve known enough fraggles in my life to know that violent mental illness episodes where others are injured or are in danger of injury, are frighteningly random and relate to whatever delusion that the sufferer may be experiencing at that point. They can happen on a bus or a train or in the home or in the street or in a random shop or pub. They can be triggered by the deluded person thinking that the person they are attacking is some sort of demon or an enemy that needs to be defeated. There are in addition often clues that a person may be losing it mentally as we saw in the case of Christopher Clunis who carried out a random murder in Finsbury Park in London in 1992, but in that case these clues, such as a random screwdriver attack and threatening children in the street, were missed by both the NHS and social services. It also needs to be said that that those who are mentally ill are more often than not a danger to themselves and not others. I have to ask: Were there no clues that the suspect in the Burnley case was losing it? If there were clues why wasn’t anything done to stop this case escalating as it did?

I would be less cynical about the claims that this incident is wholly ‘mental illness’ related were it not for the fact that the media and the police in Europe tend to use ‘mental health’ as a way of diverting attention away from what may be the true motive behind many similar attacks, the motive of Islam. The overuse of the ‘mental health’ excuse after incidents that are plainly terrorism doesn’t exactly make me want to trust the police’s statement that there was a mental health reason behind this attack or that an unbalanced mind is the sole reason why a 57 year old devout Muslim should slash at the necks of random women in a shop with strong Jewish associations. The alleged attacker could indeed be mad in a psychiatric sense, but he also could have been maddened by Islam and we should not dismiss that as being a strong possibility as to the motive in this case.