Woolwich attack: If the whole world’s a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan ~
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Denying a link between western wars in the Muslim world and the backlash on our streets only fuels Islamophobia and bloodshed.
- The videoed butchery of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks last May was a horrific act and his killers’ murder conviction a foregone conclusion. Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn’t terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians.
The killing of an unarmed man far from the conflict, by self-appointed individuals with non-violent political alternatives, isn’t condoned by any significant political or religious tradition. Quite apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby’s killers claimed to be defending, as Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.
But the determined refusal of the political establishment to recognise the link with the wars they have been waging in the Muslim world is toxic and dangerous. Echoing the recycled nonsense of his predecessors, David Cameron claims Woolwich was “an attack on the British way of life”.
The answer, he insists, is to “confront the poisonous narrative of extremism”, ban the “hate clerics” – anything but mention the war. More than a decade after the launch of a campaign that has delivered mass slaughter, torture, kidnapping and destruction across the Muslim world, such deceitful inanities are simply designed to hide the political elite’s role in the violence.
There can’t, after all, be the slightest doubt about what Rigby’s killers thought they were doing. Michael Adebolajo spelled it out on the streets and in court. This was a “military attack”, he claimed, in retaliation for Britain’s occupation and violence in “Muslim lands”, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.
“Leave our lands and you can live in peace,” the London-born Muslim convert told bystanders. The message couldn’t be clearer. It was the same delivered by the 2005 London bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and the Iraqi 2007 Glasgow attacker, Bilal Abdullah, who declared: “I wanted the public to have a taste” of what its government of “murderers did to my people”.
To say these attacks are about “foreign policy” prettifies the reality. They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others in eight direct military interventions in Arab and Muslim countries that have left hundreds of thousands of dead. Only the wilfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be that there haven’t been more such atrocities.
Mainstream Islamic teaching supports the right to resist foreign occupation, while rejecting violence against non-combatants or outside the battlefield. But it is the US and its closest allies in the war on terror who have declared the whole world to be a battlefield, in which they claim the right to kill whoever they deem to be a threat.
British and US special forces have been doing that in Somalia. The US routinely kills large numbers of civilians in drone strikes across the Muslim world – 12 were reported incinerated last week in Yemen. By waging a war without borders, often against unarmed or unidentified victims, they have fatally blurred the boundaries and invited their enemies to do the same. That was Adebolajo’s view of the Woolwich attack, his brother Jeremiah told al-Jazeera TV: “The geographical location of the battlefield, since this war on terror, has basically disappeared.”
What is clear is that denying the role of US-British wars and killing in fuelling domestic terror attacks can only inflame Islamophobia – and absolve politicians from their responsibility for years of bloodshed and backlash. Unless the pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad, Woolwich certainly won’t be the end of it at home.
‘The impact of the Woolwich murder was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby’s killers claimed to be defending.’ Photograph: Handout/Reuters
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- Denying a link between western wars in the Muslim world and the backlash on our streets only fuels Islamophobia and bloodshed.
- The videoed butchery of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside Woolwich barracks last May was a horrific act and his killers’ murder conviction a foregone conclusion. Rigby was a British soldier who had taken part in multiple combat operations in Afghanistan. So the attack wasn’t terrorism in the normal sense of an indiscriminate attack on civilians.
The killing of an unarmed man far from the conflict, by self-appointed individuals with non-violent political alternatives, isn’t condoned by any significant political or religious tradition. Quite apart from morality, the impact was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby’s killers claimed to be defending, as Islamophobic attacks spiked across Britain.
But the determined refusal of the political establishment to recognise the link with the wars they have been waging in the Muslim world is toxic and dangerous. Echoing the recycled nonsense of his predecessors, David Cameron claims Woolwich was “an attack on the British way of life”.
The answer, he insists, is to “confront the poisonous narrative of extremism”, ban the “hate clerics” – anything but mention the war. More than a decade after the launch of a campaign that has delivered mass slaughter, torture, kidnapping and destruction across the Muslim world, such deceitful inanities are simply designed to hide the political elite’s role in the violence.
There can’t, after all, be the slightest doubt about what Rigby’s killers thought they were doing. Michael Adebolajo spelled it out on the streets and in court. This was a “military attack”, he claimed, in retaliation for Britain’s occupation and violence in “Muslim lands”, from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.
“Leave our lands and you can live in peace,” the London-born Muslim convert told bystanders. The message couldn’t be clearer. It was the same delivered by the 2005 London bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and the Iraqi 2007 Glasgow attacker, Bilal Abdullah, who declared: “I wanted the public to have a taste” of what its government of “murderers did to my people”.
To say these attacks are about “foreign policy” prettifies the reality. They are the predicted consequence of an avalanche of violence unleashed by the US, Britain and others in eight direct military interventions in Arab and Muslim countries that have left hundreds of thousands of dead. Only the wilfully blind or ignorant can be shocked when there is blowback from that onslaught at home. The surprise should be that there haven’t been more such atrocities.
Mainstream Islamic teaching supports the right to resist foreign occupation, while rejecting violence against non-combatants or outside the battlefield. But it is the US and its closest allies in the war on terror who have declared the whole world to be a battlefield, in which they claim the right to kill whoever they deem to be a threat.
British and US special forces have been doing that in Somalia. The US routinely kills large numbers of civilians in drone strikes across the Muslim world – 12 were reported incinerated last week in Yemen. By waging a war without borders, often against unarmed or unidentified victims, they have fatally blurred the boundaries and invited their enemies to do the same. That was Adebolajo’s view of the Woolwich attack, his brother Jeremiah told al-Jazeera TV: “The geographical location of the battlefield, since this war on terror, has basically disappeared.”
What is clear is that denying the role of US-British wars and killing in fuelling domestic terror attacks can only inflame Islamophobia – and absolve politicians from their responsibility for years of bloodshed and backlash. Unless the pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad, Woolwich certainly won’t be the end of it at home.
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‘The impact of the Woolwich murder was violently counter-productive for the Muslims that Rigby’s killers claimed to be defending.’ Photograph: Handout/Reuters
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| Exclusive: Is Woolwich killing blowback? [1:15]
Footage has emerged showing a man wielding a bloodied meat cleaver and making political statements after a serving soldier wearing a Help for Heroes t-shirt was brutally killed near Woolwich barracks earlier today..
This ITV film shows a black man, dressed in a grey hooded jacket, saying: “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
He added: “I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government – they don’t care about you.”
A few moments later both he and his accomplice were shot down by the Metropolitan Police’s Armed Response Unit.
Home Secretary Theresa May has summoned a meeting of the government’s emergency response committee COBRA.
Emerging eye-witness accounts point towards this being a terrorist incident possibly inspired by a Jihadist ideology.
If so, this would be the first death-causing instance of someone other than the perpetrator since the 7/7 London suicide bombings in 2005.
Mrs May said she had been briefed by the director general of Security Service MI5, Andrew Parker, and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe on the “sickening and barbaric” attack.
“It has been confirmed to me that a man has been brutally murdered,” she said. “Two other men were shot by armed police and they are currently receiving treatment for their injuries.”
Speaking in Paris, Prime Minister David Cameron said there were “strong indications that this is a terrorist incident”.
The Muslim Council of Britain spoke out this evening, in the strongest possible terms, calling it a truly barbaric act that has no basis in Islam and condemned it unreservedly, adding:
“Our thoughts are with the victim and his family. We understand the victim is a serving member of the Armed Forces. Muslims have long served in this country’s Armed Forces, proudly and with honour. This attack on a member of the Armed Forces is dishonourable, and no cause justifies this murder.”
It shouldn’t be forgotten that this sickening atrocity in London is exactly what the UK government is funding the same kind of people to do in Syria — remember the heart-eating Syrian rebel commander last week?
‘Blowback’ – as originally coined by the CIA – simply means unintended negative consequences to a country of its own foreign policy disasters.
URL: http://youtu.be/FtLpBvjJFVo
| Exclusive: Is Woolwich killing blowback? [1:15]http://wp.me/p1xXtb-2Gm
Related articles
- Woolwich attack: If the whole world’s a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan | Seumas Milne (theguardian.com)
- Adebolajo brother blames Woolwich murder on UK foreign policy (itv.com)
- Woolwich murderers convicted by British court (aljazeera.com)
- The Woolwich Killers Must Not Be Allowed to Drive a Wedge Between Communities (alternativenewsalert.com)
- Adebolajo’s brother: Woolwich attack ‘won’t be the last’ (itv.com)
- Lee Rigby murder: Adebolajo’s brother says killing was justified (theguardian.com)
- Video shows Adebalajo’s brother warning of more attacks after ‘inevitable’ Woolwich killing (standard.co.uk)
- Woolwich trial: The culture of hate that drove Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale to murder | Nick Lowles (theguardian.com)
| truthaholics 
Reblogged this on | War Crimes International.
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I absolutely agree with the large part of this article, and frankly I applauded the killer’s speech, and the clearly honourable way in which he made his speech and took the consequences. I sincerely hope someone listens to him.
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While his actions are reprehensible his words are accurate and speak more to our society’s failings than his!
Our own political war-mongering causes inestimable cycles of chaos in this world.
Time to stop it, end corruption and behave responsibly – better late than never.
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