After the July 7th attacks which killed 52 and injured 770, Tony Blair denied that the attacks were as a result of British foreign policy although the bombers themselves had left video messages explaining that their actions were directly because of what Britain was doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obviously as he was directly responsible for the madness and mayhem he along with George W Bush unleashed, Blair was anxious to deflect any blame that he was in anyway responsible for the blow-back from his faulty decision making.
As happens with all these attacks, the condemnation is so loud that it drowns out the justifications of the warped minds but although their actions should be condemned, should we be so quick to ignore their message?
The two men involved in the chilling murder of Royal Marine, Lee Rigby, told us what motivated them, the killing of the soldier was in response to the killing of Muslims by British soldiers in other countries.
The bombers in Boston last month were similarly motivated but if we cast our minds back a decade to the rush to remove the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power, the increasing threat of home grown terrorism is exactly what we were warned would happen.
It is an uncomfortable feeling that those of us who protested against these wars find ourselves condemning the act but having sympathy with the underlying message behind it.
The government and military will go out of their way to avoid drawing the conclusions that they should from the attack, instead keeping the focus on the abhorrent act and radicalisation of the two perpetrators but there is a difference between listening to what the people who do things like this have to say in order to understand their motivation, and accepting their actions as an excuse or justification.
It appears that we should not even try to understand why these two men were so motivated to kill because to pay attention is to somehow reward the killing, easier to dismiss it as an isolated act of terrorism and question Muslims and Islam but ignore the elephant in the room that this is exactly what we were told would happen when we launched our wrong-headed wars a decade ago and to ignore that is dangerously ignorant.
5 comments:
I wondered when and what you might write about this story. Your words regarding this latest act of vengeance ring true, to me.
Annie, I'm so pleased to see another intelligent commenter is helping and encouraging Lucy and giving a hand to offset the pedestrian comments from the dreary, predictable twins, Cheezy and Q.
Lucy tries to deal with serious issues quite often but the twins are more interested in applying their combined intelligence (might reach 50)to trivia.
Take care, Annie. I know you are a serious blogger too.
Disgruntled kids like these will attribute their murderous tantrums to whatever the big cause happens to be that day. These kids have no more of a message than the People's Church or the Symbionese Liberation Army. There are surely many people who honestly object to various wars. 18-35 males who kill people don't honestly object to anything. They're just bored, unemployed, and overcome with boredom and low intelligence.
They do have a message and they are telling us why they feel so moved by it to do these things. It is wrong to just dismiss it before listening to them and then deciding whether it is valid or just a murderous tantrum. We were told way back if we do this (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc) then it will lead to this type of attack, and it has. Just something else to consider when we get into yet another war.
Excuses are very different things to explanations. Sadly, it seems to be in the interests of many people to say "Stop excusing these actions" when all you're really trying to do is explain it.
So, in my opinion, there's blood on Blair's hands just as there is on Michael Adebolajo's.
Ultimately though, whatever shameful events happened a decade ago, I'm in full agreement with the statement released by the Muslim Council of Britain (I'm paraphrasing here): 'If you genuinely hate everything about this country, and can't effect the change you want by force of rational argument (probably because it's not exactly rational), then there's an easy solution for you and it starts at Heathrow'.
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