By Melanie Phillips
24 May 2013
Prime Minister David Cameron, joined by London Mayor Boris Johnson, stressed that the attack was a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities
There’s been some stiff competition over the past 24 hours for the coveted award of Most Fatuous Reaction to a Jihadi Atrocity.
I hooted at the commentator visiting from planet Zog, who had thus totally missed all the barbaric snuff movie beheadings and eviscerations and human bomb attacks carried out by jihadists over the past two decades across the world and who wailed, poor dear, that ‘none of it made any sense’.
I enjoyed the pointed satire of the commentator who intoned that we were all guilty of causing the two jihadis to hack poor Drummer Rigby to death and tried to behead him, while claiming they were fulfilling the edicts of the Koran and waiting for the police to arrive in order to try to murder them too – but then I realised that it wasn’t satire at all.
I marvelled at the languidly superior commentator who drawled that the problem in Woolwich had been caused by ‘testosterone’ and that the real threat to all of us was actually from the collapsing EDL and the all-but collapsed BNP. And at the even more languidly superior commentator, who flicked barbs at Britain’s ‘hyperbole’ and ‘hysteria’ and implied that in Woolwich Britain kind of had it coming to it since it had been perceived as indifferent to ‘the appalling impact of a drone attack on a Pashtun village’.
Nice.
But worthy contenders as all these are for this prestigious award, I have decided that two further notable contributions tie in equal first place. In a statement described by the Spectator as ‘sensitive and calm’ the Prime Minister, David Cameron, told the nation that the Woolwich attack ‘was also a betrayal of Islam’ ,’ there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act’ and the fault lay ‘solely and purely with the sickening individuals who carried out this appalling attack’.
In similar vein the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson said:
‘It is completely wrong to blame this killing on the religion of Islam but it is also equally wrong to try to draw any link between this murder and British foreign policy or the actions of British forces who are risking their lives abroad for the sake of freedom. The fault lies wholly and exclusively in the warped and deluded mindset of the people who did it.’
So to the Prime Minister and the Mayor, there was nothing to connect the Woolwich atrocity to Islam at all. But on his little video rant, one of the killers drew explicitly on the Koran as the inspiration for his attack:
‘Surat at-Tawba through...many, many ayat throughout the Qur’an that...we must fight them as they fight us...’
which refers to a number of exhortations to ‘fight the unbelievers and ‘kill the polythesists wherever you find them’ and other such stuff in similar vein..
Nothing to do with Islam? It’s as absurd as saying the Inquisition had nothing to do with the Catholic Church, or the Holocaust had nothing to do with Nazism but these things were just the product of a few warped and deluded individuals.
If indeed such terrorism is noting to do with Islam, why is it justified by the Islamic high establishment? As the liberal Egyptian thinker Tarek Heggy wrote last year:
‘The cornerstone of the theory, which is the essence of Islamic thinking, is that humans must not set the rules governing relations between people, but that these can only be set by the Almighty. To this day, not a single leader of any movement of political Islam has reconsidered the idea of hakemeya [the Islamist view of man-made laws] introduced by Sayed Qutb in his famous treatise, “Signposts Along the Road” … Thus the Islamist has a constant problem with man-made constitutional and legal rules.…
‘Certainly the leaderships of most schools of political Islam refuse to describe the suicide attacks launched by Muslim fanatics against civilians as terrorist attacks. Certainly too none of them consider Osama bin Laden a terrorist. Indeed, most hold him in high regard…’
What’s bizarre is that jihadis are treated as genuine Muslim spokesmen -- see the way broadcasters were giving one of them air-time yesterday -- but when it comes to analysing an Islamic terror attack, that very same political and media establishment falls over itself to agree with those extremists that its perpetrators are not real Muslims at all.
Even more absurd, these craven politicians are now being left behind by Muslims themselves. In the Guardian, for example, Usama Hasan has written:
‘British society, including its Muslim communities, needs to move beyond the routine condemnation of terrorist attacks and plots – there have been dozens since 9/11. We need instead to address the extreme Islamist ideology that al-Qaida and its sympathisers promote to incite attacks against soldiers and civilians worldwide in both war-torn and peaceful countries. Muslim leaders need to take ownership of the specifically religious aspects of the problem, that is to say the twisted theology that easily brainwashes vulnerable people, some of whom are intelligent university students and graduates.’
Maybe Usama Hasan could have a quiet word with the Prime Minister and Mayor of London.
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