Police have finally given to the public the name of the man who is suspected of murdering the MP Sir David Amess. It is, as many of us suspected it would be when we first heard of the horrifying attack on Sir David, an Islamic name. After all not many of those who saw this story unfolding expected to find that he was called ‘John Smith’ or something similar.
The suspect’s name is Ali Harbi Ali and it has been confirmed that he is a Somali with British citizenship. It is not known at this stage whether he was born in the UK and acquired his citizenship that way or whether he was one of the tens of thousands of migrants who get British citizenship dished out to them like they are confetti at a wedding. I dare say that we will find out that in due course.
What we do know at present, or rather what has been reported about this suspect and the case is that counter terror police are now searching three properties in London in connection with this terrorist murder enquiry. Previously it was only two properties which suggests to me that this enquiry is expanding and that this savage might not have been operating alone. It has also been revealed that Ali was not among the 43,000 mostly Islamic extremists who are currently being monitored by the men and women at Thames House, the HQ of the UK Security Service MI5. For your information the number 43,000 is slightly more than the population of towns like Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which should give you some idea just how many potentially dangerous extremists that the Security Service and other security agencies are currently having to keep an eye on. As I said in a previous article on the subject of the murder of Sir David Amess, the figure of 43,000 is just those who the Security Service consider to be potentially dangerous and there are many thousands more radical Muslims who are not yet on this list or who are flying below the radar so to speak.
Something that has been revealed about Ali is that although he was not on the list of those being monitored by the Security Service, he had come to the attention of the Government’s anti extremism programme PREVENT. However it appears that his involvement with them was either fleeting or the PREVENT system failed again. Maybe if PREVENT concentrated on where the majority of the extremism threats are coming from, which is from Islamic extremists, rather than trying to, for reasons of political correctness, make it seem as if the still worrying but much less dangerous far right, pose an equal threat to that of Islamic extremists, then dangerous Islamic extremists might not slip through their fingers?
To a certain extent this case has elements in it which we’ve seen in other cases of Islamic terrorism. We have the alleged involvement of a person from a nation which is a cause of terrorism concern, we have the failure of PREVENT to ascertain whether or not a person is a danger or not and we have a suspect who did not come out of nowhere but was, even to a small degree, known to the authorities.
None of what we have seen; the reluctance to state the obvious, the ignoring of the underlying cause, no press hyperventilation about how this “evil ideology must be confronted”, etc. is of any surprise.
Neither is the neglect of the anniversary of the Jihadist murder of Samuel Paty you also wrote about.
Brendan O’Neill at Spiked writes eloquently about the double standards regarding Islamic terror and anything else: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/16/can-we-now-have-an-honest-discussion-about-islamist-terrorism/
Frankly I do not understand how Prevent is supposed to “de-radicalise” an orthodox Muslim.
The only way that such “de-radicalisation” can occur is through persuading the orthodox Muslim to become LESS orthodox (and thus less Muslim with fewer “expressions of Muslimness” to their behaviour, which makes de-radicalisation a form of racist Islamophobia does it not – courtesy of the latest APPG report on Islamophobia?).
Trying that through education about Islam is going to “problematic” (to use a modern buzzword) since orthodox Islam has more support within the Islamic canon than any “milque-toast” version of Islam, never mind the “heresies” such as Ahmediya.
The orthodox Muslim also knows that, through al-wara wal-bara, they must hate the kaffir and all his/her works, so the blandishments of the west are unlikely to move them either.
(It is interesting to note that there are already serious tensions between the elements of the Taliban who where hanging out in Qatar and had been “softened” by wealth and luxury and those who remained in Afghanistan and did not undergo such an “Islamic” softening experience.)
IMO it is far more likely, and so it has proved on several occasions such as the London Bridge attacker – a poster-boy for Prevent and deradicalisation, that the orthodox Muslim will “hate some people in his heart while smiling in their face” (to quote the Hadith) and thus make all the right noises about ‘de-radicalisation’ whilst holding firm to orthodoxy within.
There are though two ways in which I can see a “de-radicalisation” working (at least to some extent).
(1) A turn from Jihadism to Quietism if the person decides that the time is not right for sword-jihad. This does not involve a genuine alteration in views, aims or goals; merely a shift in the methodology of working for them – for example a shift to “Jihad of the tongue/pen”.
(2) An individual orthodox Muslim can decide that (orthodox) Islam is inhumane and evil (which it is) and thus reject these teachings and again their are examples. Consequently they become either hypocrites or apostates (according to Islam itself), but IMO this shift in mind-set is unlikely to be triggered by Prevent (does anyone know of a Jihadist who rejected Islam after enduring Prevent?), in the cases of whichI know it has been either the individual’s experiences within orthodox Islam and/or their innate humanity that has won out and triggered a rejection in part or toto of Islam.
That was an excellent article about the Establishment’s failure to confront extremist Islam. Already we are seeing the pointless but comforting candlelit vigils and the ‘hopes and prayers’ stuff coming out. Also the sorry about the murder but nothing to do with us guv stuff coming out from Islamic groups and mosques. The media are already treating this remarkably different from the story of the other recently murdered MP Jo Cox. There’s no condemnation of the ideology that Sir David’s murderer follows unlike when Cox was murdered. A disgraceful double standard. If it is right and proper to condemn the alleged far right motives of Mair then it’s equally right to do the same for this particular Islamic murderer.
I despise the term ‘Islamophobia’. Whilst it would be morally wrong to harm a person just because they are Muslim, fearing and disliking Islam is perfectly logical. We have 1400 years of evidence to show why this is so.
A lot of Muslims do put aside the more violent and intolerant aspects of Islamic scripture and I praise them for doing so, but we can’t deny that a lot do not.
Like you I believe that PREVENT is a busted flush. A PREVENT style scheme might work with those who are caught up in a political ideology and where the individuals are basically decent people who have gone astray, but I doubt it can work with religious ideologies, they are often too powerfully attached to the individual. If a Muslim wants to give up being an extremist then it that desire needs to come from within and not be imposed from outside.
To stop me having to write about it Tom Slater at Spiked hits another (entirely predictable) nail firmly on the head:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/17/nasty-tweets-did-not-kill-david-amess/
Yet again we see the re-writing of Islamic terror into the leftist narrative, quoting Slater:
“I don’t know who needs to hear this, but nasty tweets, the alleged ‘coarsening’ of political debate, or the salty insults of one Angela Rayner are not responsible for the murder of David Amess.”
…
“A committed public servant has been killed in a suspected terrorist attack, but because it appears to be the wrong kind of terrorism, the one that the great and good for some reason feel deeply uncomfortable talking about, even though it is the most prevalent and deadly form of it we face today, we have spent the weekend talking about civility, social media and online anonymity.”
Ironically perhaps, this piece gives the answer to question posed by Brendan O’Neill – and it is a resounding “NO!”.
I agree. Whilst I cannot in any way condone the dishing out of death threats to MP’s or anyone else for that matter, people are getting mightily pissed off about the political classes and their concerns not being listened to by said political classes. It’s almost inevitable that some people will get a bit ‘pungent’ with their comments to MP’s because of that. I agree with angry comments but not death threats.
I’m already noticing the whitewashing of the Islamic aspect of this horrible murder as Sky has relegated the story down behind their usual virtue signalling about CO2 and Pritti ‘useless’ Patel has tried to divert attention away from the true problem into nothingburger stuff like online anonymity.