The technical issues seem to be resolved, at least until my provider see’s fit to change things again without letting me know, work has even calmed down a bit which is why I’m sat in a hotel room eating room service pizza. With that all said I thought I should probably add my hapeth to the masses of words that have already been written about the tragic events in Woolwich. I’m afraid that I’m going to follow a well worn path and go on about the various ways people have reacted to it. I doubt if I’m going to say anything new so if you’ve read more than enough on it already I’d stop about now go get a drink and come back when I write something else.
Facebook and everywhere has been full of commentary about the events in Woolwich which is hardly surprising, but how various groups have treated it has been quite a study in itself. In the immediate aftermath some seemingly left week groups were talking about the “purported Muslim attackers”, I guess self identification only counts some of the time as as far as I recall the same people had no problems deciding that Brevik was exactly what the press claimed. In the same way now that the murderers are facing trial I note that the BBC at least are being very careful with their “allegededs”. This is of course a good thing as despite committing probably one of the best witnessed and recorded murders of recent times in the UK our laws do state that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. It’d just be nice if the BBC and the press in general remembered this when reporting other alleged offenses.
The of course there was the popular meme of why did this murder deserve so much attention when so many other killings had happened:
“Here’s a list of violent killings, all on British streets from 1991-1999. They include: being punched to death, stabbed to death, thrown down stairs, run over by a car, set alight in a car, throat slashed, stamped to death, hit repeatedly with a chair leg, and – in one particularly brutal case – being chased and murdered by an axe to the head (which remained embedded in the head when the body was found). These attacks were fully intended to cause others to feel something akin to terror. But as the victims were all of African, Asian, Arab or Caribbean descent, they aren’t terrorist attacks, there won’t ever be an emergency Cobra meeting, and white people won’t ever have to feel guilty for the actions of their lunatic and murderous compatriots.”
They apparently seem to have not noticed the rather important differences between those cases and the events in Woolwich in that in none of those cases wander around afterwards still carrying their weapons making political statements to camera, wait until the police arrived and then try and attack the police. The nearest examples I can think of to the events in Woolwich are those involving Brevik in Norway and our own homegrown Raoul Moat who did in fact both get similar levels of coverage. So just maybe there is a difference. I would agree though that the murder of Drummer Rigby makes a very poor showing as a terrorist attack, as a political murder though it rather fits the bill and those are also really quite rare in the UK and in fact in Europe in general and again those have tended to get quite a bit of coverage. It would be unfair of me to observe that in recent times one of the better reported political murders of an individual would have been Theo van Gogh which again involved people claiming a similar religious belief.
Then we have the informative and predictable UAF Vs. EDL fight, though on this occasion the UAF do have a slight handicap. It would seem that one of the people who has been charged with murdering drummer Rigby has been at speaker at UAF demos. Saying such delightful and not racist in anyway at all things like:
“We are not scared of Kufar … my brothers remain in your ranks and do not be scared of these filthy Kufar. They are pigs … Allah says they are worse than cattle.”
This seems to have largely escaped the attention of the mainstream media and a lot of social media as well. The latter point again I find rather interesting as there has been a trend on at least the bit of Facebook I inhabit for people to denounce as racist, fascist and worse anyone who so much as likes a sympathy page if it was set up “as a front for the EDL”. The “logic” seems to be that like a page which expresses sympathy for a murdered soldier and if it was set up by the wrong groups and your evil and must be ostracized, but actively support a group that has given a platform to a racist, intolerant (alleged) murderer – well that’s just dandy.
Never a group to miss a chance of publicity Anonymous jumped on the band wagon, threatening to bring down the EDL to stop them using the murder of Drummer Rigby as “another excuse to further spread your campaign of hate, bigotry, and misinformation”.. Anonymous decided to do this by publishing what they claimed were details of senior members and donors. Whilst we there’s no way to know how accurate this list is, and previous incidents would suggest it’s probably not very, this sort of intimidation in response to a view you disagree with, is hardly in line with a group that generally claims to be in favour of free speech – though it’s fairly typical of Anonymous. We can of course be sure that it was Anonymous as they’re forever telling us that anyone/everyone is Anonymous so they can hardly disavow anything done in their name. I just wish they’d stop claiming they talk for everyone, especially when trying to say some other random group doesn’t speak for the people they claim to speak to. That little prank did at least generate this rather awesome response:
And so the differing treatment of one group of unpleasant people compared to another continues all in the name of tolerance, multiculturalism, unicorns and fairies and other nice things. Perhaps if groups like the UAF and Anonymous and our politicians and great and good didn’t turn a blind eye to the behaviour of some groups over others then the likes of the EDL wouldn’t have the support they did. Claiming it’s just racists thugs looking for an excuse for violence is far too simplistic and ignores some very real problems with behaviour being carried out in the name of Islam. Various bits of the media expect bishops to respond to every idiot thing that people claiming to be their supporters do, so why not the same with Islam? Every time someone claiming to be Muslim says that they don’t like gays much say, well drag as many senior Imams as you can up in front of the press to respond to it, they do it with Christians. No weasling out of it with calls to cultural relevance or it being untypical it doesn’t wash for Christians so why except it from Muslims. I know that the events in Woolwich have been widely condemned but generally that’s the exception as the BBC prove with how gently they handle the likes of Anjem Choudhary.
The difference in response to the various groups jumping on the bad wagon of the murder of Drummer Rigby have been really quite enlightening, and have led me to ponder a rather radical idea. That possibly the likes of the BBC and UAF (and well meaning types on social media sites) might be doing just as much to create disharmony as the likes of the tabloids and EDL and such that they so like to attack by turning such a determinedly blind eye to the behaviour of some of the people they claim to want equality for? Or is it possible that they don’t actually think everyone is equal and thus some groups need to be given more leeway as they’re not as civilised?
I do apologise if I’ve been even less coherent than normal I may be suffering from the joint joys of a cold and jet lag.
