The attack on a young member of the armed services this week has shocked the nation and our hearts go out to his loved ones, friends and colleagues.
Yesterday afternoon a man was run over and then set upon by two men with various knives and cleavers. They then dragged his body into the middle of the street and waited for the inevitable showdown with armed Police. In the intervening minutes the men seemed to talk with members of the public in an attempt to spread their message and justify their brutal and pointless murder of an innocent man. In a bizarre video, one suspect with blood soaked hands is seen clutching two knives as he explains in a London accent, "You people will never be safe".
In the immediate aftermath of the incident there are already troubling, and all too inevitable, signs of a backlash against the Muslim community here in the UK. Last night masked English Defence League supporters clashed with Police near the scene of the crime. According to a report on the Mail Online, one local said that a brick had been thrown through a mosque during the march. Elsewhere in the UK there have been arrests for attacks on Mosques in Braintree and Gillingham.
However, I would argue that this backlash is, in fact, more of a 'lash' without the 'back'. Of course, some lunatic Islamists miles away from the UK will probably praise yesterday's events as some sort of deranged moral victory. But for most of us Brits (whether Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Agnostic or other) this will be seen for what it really is, a heinous crime committed but two brutal dullards.
Because the most striking thing I found about the aforementioned video is how the suspect is clearly as thick as two short planks. His rant already seems bizarre as he refers to "you people" in his London accent...in the middle of London. Then he demands that we must "bring our troops back so we can" before correcting himself "so you can all live in peace". To me, this reeks of a copy and paste job where he has tried to replicate the ramblings of some loony preacher, most likely posted on the internet - a task he seems to have struggled with. One suspects that he would have trouble reading and understanding The Hungry Caterpillar, let alone the Quran.
My point is that we know lunatic radical preachers exist in the world. And unfortunately those with the lowest IQs and the least to lose will always be the most gullible and most easily influenced by those proclamations. Britain is a nation based on waves of immigration, and from the Romans through to the present day we have always had a range of different communities. To deny this and place blame on whole communities is to deny our history and everything that has made us a wonderful nation. We are capable of rationalizing this situation so let's not turn in on ourselves now Britain, that way the lunatics really will have won.