The world woke up yesterday to yet another Groundhog Day. The beheading and butchering of soldier Lee Rigby, outside the Woolwich military barracks in East London by two UK-born converts to Islam is just another stomach-churning example of what the religion of peace is capable of.
The practice of beheading in Islam is not new. It goes back to when Muhammad ordered the execution by beheading of seven hundred Jewish men of the Banu Qurayza tribe for allegedly plotting against him. Bringing us nearer to the present, ditto the Fogel family, ditto Daniel Pearl and ditto Nick Berg.
And yet both British Prime Minister and London Mayor insisted that what we could see plainly with our own eyes was simply not so. David Cameron stated that the terrorist attack was a “betrayal of Islam” while Boris Johnson was busy making the “obvious point” that it is “wrong to blame the religion of Islam” for the killing.
Try telling that to the blokes who sawed and hacked their way through Lee Rigby’s neck screaming Allahu Akbar and then cavorted around with bloody hands demanding passersby to photograph them. One of the killers, Michael Adebolajo, 28, a convert to Islam and self-styled Muslim preacher, even had a little sermon prepared just for the occasion. He stated that the attack was in revenge for the killing of Muslims in Afghanistan. And that “We swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. The British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!”
Afghanistan eh? No mention of what’s going on in Syria, where chemical weapons and Scud missiles have almost certainly been used by Government forces against civilians. Where nearly 100,000 people have lost their lives in two years in one of the world’s most brutal and intense conflicts. Where Assad’s mainly Alawite troops have been encouraged to use rape and torture against the Sunni women and children of entire towns and villages that have been left devastated. Where in revenge, the rebels have mutilated bodies and justified eating human organs in front of the camera.
What about other conflicts where Muslims are being slaughtered right now, today?
The Darfur genocide is a Muslim on Muslim conflict that, like Afghanistan, has been waging for a decade or more. Yet whereas Afghanistan’s deaths and casualties run into the tens of thousands, Darfur runs to the hundreds of thousands with over two and a half million people forced from their homes and many millions more now dependent on humanitarian aid. Thousands are being hacked to death by machetes every month as we speak. That’s pretty labor intensive work. And yet, still silence.
So let’s get it straight. It’s not Muslim deaths that led these bestial young men to act like 6th century barbarians. The killers have no problem with the murder of men, women or children.
Their problem is with who is entitled to carry out that murder and in who’s name. President Assad can and Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir can. Iran’s Ahmadinejad can. In fact any thug dictator from Saadam to Mubarak to Quadaffi to Ben Ali could and did for years without so much as a peep from the representatives of Islam either in Europe or the Middle East. Many of these leaders are still much admired in the Arab world today.
So the question is not one of morality as we in the West know it. For it if was, Muslims would be fire-bombing the Sudanese and Syrian embassies in London right now as we speak. But they are not.
And this should tell us something vitally important about the strain of Islam that is driving young Muslims in Britain, Europe and the Middle East today. That Islam is a political ideology just as much as and perhaps even more so than a moral one. And therefore some are allowed to murder and butcher and behead. And some are not.
The Islam that killed Lee Rigby is growing and gaining confidence day by day. It’s time that Britain woke up to the fact that it’s already too late to fight it on the beaches. The battle is already here on the streets.