The report, or at least part of the report into the 2017 Jihadist bombing of the Manchester Arena in which 22 people were murdered, has been published. From what I’ve seen of it so far and from the commentary that has emerged about it, many chances to stop this murdering Jihadist bastard who carried out the attack were missed. The police missed chances to stop this bastard before he committed mass murder, the ‘Big Brains’ at Thames House (MI5) in London also missed opportunities to stop him and police who should have been patrolling the area where the bomber was hanging around, behaved utterly recklessly and took a two hour meal break instead of the one hour break they were supposed to do.
But there was another thing to blame for a failure to either monitor the bomber or prevent him from carrying out his murderous plan and that is ‘wokery’. It was wokery and an unreasonable fear of being called ‘racist’ felt by security staff which prevented them going with their gut feeling that the sweaty, furtive Muslim man with a suspiciously stiff backpack was bad news.
Yes, wokery played a big part in the deaths of 22 people at the hands of a violent Islamic murderer because wokery stayed the hands and voices of those who should have spoken up and acted swiftly and confidently when the Islamic murderer was first observed in the Arena complex.
This is part of the report from Sky News on the evidence given to the Manchester Bombing enquiry by a security guard.
Sky said:
During the inquiry, security guard Kyle Lawler admitted he had a “bad feeling” about Abedi but did not approach him for fear of being branded a racist.
Mr Lawler, who was 18 at the time of the attack, said he “felt unsure what to do” and it was “very difficult to define a terrorist”.
“For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male,” he said.
“I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.
“I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble.
“It made me hesitant.
“I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.”
Few civilised people would want to unjustly judge someone by their race. However this was a situation where concerns about misjudging someone should have taken second place to concerns about safety and security. At the time of the Manchester attack it was well known that Muslims were more likely than for example Indian Methodists to commit mass casualty terror attacks and therefore it would be reasonable to have a suspicion that a person of North African or South Asian appearance who was acting suspiciously, may well have been up to no good. The suspicious man who turned out to be the bomber should have been approached as it may have prevented the bomber carrying out his plan.
I feel dreadfully sorry for Mr Lawler. He was placed in an almost impossible position for such a young person. He was possibly caught between the woke brainwashing and the weaponising of race that the left wing educationalists have engaged in and which he was probably subjected to at school and the plain facts on the ground and before his eyes which was a man who turned out to be very dangerous indeed.
There were lots of failures that led to this murderous savage being able to kill 22 people at a pop concert. The police failed, MI5 failed, the Home Office failed by allowing the bomber into the UK, and the security company failed by not giving all of its staff working that night two way radios or not giving them radios that actually worked properly.
However there is one thing that stands out amongst all these failures and that there was a chance to stop the bomber but which was missed because those who could have acted were inhibited by ungrounded fears that the judgement call that they should have made might have been seen as ‘racist’. Woke culture created a situation where those who should have acted failed to judge when necessary, failed to be suspicious when justified and failed to act on suspicions.
From reading what I’ve read so far I direct no blame to Mr Lawler for thinking the way he did. Instead I will aim all of my ire and condemnation on those who forced him to think like that.
I’m always a little wary about being really well informed by hindsight. You may well be correct that really obvious signs were missed and that the police were reluctant to challenge a guy that looked just like a stereotypical suicide bomber. But it is so easy to point such things out after the event.
You make a good point about seeing things in hindsight, it’s all too easy to see the things that can go wrong after they’ve gone wrong. The problem is that the security services have too often missed people who they should have been more aware of or, in the case of Islamic terrorism, wrongly classified dangerous people as being little to worry about. It makes me wonder whether the lessons of 7/7 and other similar attacks really are being properly learned? The case of the security guard being reluctant to go with his gut feeling that a suspicious person was indeed suspicious and his reasoning for his course of action does I believe represent a mindset of ‘let’s not unjustly judge’ that has been inculcated in people. As I said in the main piece, I don’t blame the security guard, I blame those who taught him that it is a worse thing to make a judgment on a person’s appearance than to make a challenge that in this case needed to be made. Sometimes things are what they seem. For example a scruffy unkempt looking individual wandering around a country estate might be a tramp or it might be the Lord who owns the estate having a ‘dress down day’, but chances are its more likely to be a tramp.
I agree that hindsight is a wonderful thing.
One of its wonders is that it allows the shifting of blame from the perpetrator and his orthodox Islamic beliefs onto the “authorities”, thus exonerating Islam from Islamic terror. Which seems to be standard practice in the UK with much said about failings in MI5/Police/security etc. and nothing about the Islamic teachings that give rise to Islamic terror.
If it wasn’t for orthodox Islam there would be no Islamic terror and no need for all the security at airports etc. I’m old enough to remember when you more or less just turned up at the airport, handed over your baggage and ticket, got your boarding pass, smiled at the girls and wandered onto the plane.
In defence of MI5 at least; there are so many orthodox Muslims around of whom a worrying number are either proto-Jihadists (i.e. those that might carry out an attack) or known Jihadists (ISIL returnees for example) that all those who are “of interest” simply cannot be properly monitored (as the Jihadists know), thus some Jihadists are bound to slip through the net.
That said, given his family’s attitudes he probably should have been higher up the list and a better eye kept. That it was not might, in fact, indicate how many very dangerous Jihadists MI5 is (trying) to keep tabs on.
As for Mr. Lawler I too feel nothing but sympathy. He would know well that if he misjudged Abedi then there was a high likelihood of him being declared a racist and an Islamophobe and losing his job; I’ve no doubt at all that the company employing him would have sacked him to virtue-signal had that happened.
“Judging unjustly” (which is an obvious wrong) is not the issue here. It is that we are not supposed to judge at all and especially where BIPOCs (Black Indigenous & People Of Colour) are concerned since their cultures are all equal to ours (thus since orthodox Islam teaches that killing Kafirs is a Good Thing we must, presumably, accept that too – see first paragraph). The exception is “white” (Anglophone) culture which is “genetically racist” (what utter tosh), “toxic”, “patriarchal” (compared to which other?) etc. and thus of less value than all those others.
For the record let me state that there is much to be commended in Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, other and (some) Muslim (e.g. Ahmadhi) cultures, but all cultures have their Achilles’ heel(s) as well.
Thus the Islamic child-rape gangs got (and get) away with what they do because no-one was allowed/is allowed to say “this is wrong” and those who did were threatened with the sack and sent on “diversity training”. Even today, after the hundreds of convictions no mention is made of the Islamic teachings that caused this phenomenon, the clearly religious motive of these Jihadists (almost exclusively non-Muslim girls were targeted, their “asian” victims were Sikh girls – though this was, ludicrously, trumpeted to rebut the religion motive). Even that most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani extraction has been used to exonerate Islam on the grounds that “others” were involved too, but most of those “others” were north-African (or other) Muslims (this is usually NOT stated – I wonder why?), the number of non-Muslims taking part can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Wokery is the culmination of this:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_institutions
Again, clear with hindsight but it’s been frighteningly successful so far. Can it be reversed or suitably dealt with?
I think that Wokery can be rolled back but it will take a critical mass of people to say ‘no’ to it. However I believe that this point will not be reached until enough people see the dissonance between the world as woke sees it and real life. The position which the security guards were placed in at Manchester was a perfect example of what happens and what the consequences are of a woke mindset meeting reality.
Brendan O’neill at Spiked on the same issue: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/18/is-it-racist-to-confront-a-suicide-bomber/
Superb article from Mr O’Neill.