It has finally happened. Here in Britain, a man has driven a van into a group of people he sees as evil.
Clarification: it has finally happened in Britain that a man has driven a van into a group of muslims.
If we followed PC precedent, we should be as cautious in assuming this man was not a muslim as we were told to be of assuming earlier perpetrators were muslim. How could it be safer to treat a reported shout of “I want to kill muslims” as more decisive than a reported shout of “Allahu Akbar”? Murder of a gang rival with collateral damage; killing a group of not-muslim-enough muslims with ingenious collateral propaganda advantage; anything is possible. But I suspect he wasn’t a muslim.
In the well-armed US, it has not yet happened – that I have heard, and I think it would have been blazoned forth by the media (no doubt will be if and when it does). But the US is exceptional. In third world countries (whose cultures it is racist to regard as more flawed than our own), tit-for-tat retaliation has long been part of the culture.
In its quieter, understated way, British exceptionalism has always been as proud as US exceptionalism – and as hated by the politically correct. They decided to “rub the British people’s noses in diversity” in order to get rid of it.
We are less exceptional today than we were yesterday.
“When will this end? What will the government do? Why are so many innocent people losing their lives?”
BBC Bullshit.
Will be interesting to see what tactical awareness the left have here. Bigging this up to the sky after trying to minimise the previous capers from the other side would be a poor move tactically.
Least said soonest forgotten is their smart ploy . But can leftist haters tone it down even when that would be wise?
Also–having looked into it a bit more it may not be as advertised.
3 men with the driver described as white? Who then jump out stabbing?
One native nutter maybe. But 3 of them? The RoP have their promise of Paradise (whatever its worth) but whites could expect nothing except a likely life or very long sentence in a shithole jails increasingly run by islamics.
The Ethiopian in the fire flat was described by the neighbour as “white” in initial reports. Because there are degrees of shade. Is the driver white or merely light? Because this sounds more like some in-house dispute rather than white retaliation.
Even a cursory examination of English and British history suggests that violence is the norm rather than the exeption.
TPH: The same as everywhere else on Earth. So what?
My point is that this kind of suicide attack caper is not a Western tradition. Suicide is frowned on by Christianity (and murder/suicide even more so) not approved of.
RoP followers might hope for Paradise. Jail or death (and a disapproving Deity if Christianity is true) is all 3 white men could hope for.
I noticed that the BBC’s early website report neatly got round the Tomasky Uncertainty Principle, with clever use of third party spokespersons. So rather than the BBC itself speculate about the motives of the van driver, they had a couple of paragraphs of quotes from the Muslim Council of GB denouncing Islamophobia up front and centre. So just prime media real estate for third parties to leap to conclusions.
No doubt next time an Islamic nutter mows down some people, the BBC will be getting a spokesman from the English Defence League to comment on the dangers of Islamism in paras 2 and 3 of their first report 🙂
We are all individuals, all responsible for our own actions. We have had murders before on the basis of race or religion, and politics, and there will be others, that is a virtual certainty.
I suspect that there are many Lefties relieved that their narrative of the ‘backlash’ appears to be being played out.
So now, either:
– Muslims and fellow travellers will get serious about tackling ‘radical islam’, or
– They will get serious about tackling Islamophobia
If I was a betting man….
Glad to see that the MSM is not jumping to any conclusions about the attack. As of 11am this morning their headline describes him as, “CRAZED TERRORIST.”
“But I suspect he wasn’t a muslim.”
Muslims killing other Muslims is not a rare occurrence… Take a look at the Middle East, home to Islam. That is what they do. Though not exclusively. They are also fond of killing Jews, Christians and Kurds.
Besides – look at this:
“In 2013 an extreme right-wing Ukrainian man murdered a Muslim grandfather in Birmingham and tried to bomb three mosques.”
So it might well be that the attacker was not English but some other kind of immigrant. Greek, Pole, Romanian…
The only witness reports I’ve seen so far are from muslims, which makes them instantly unreliable. Until I see some independent evidence, I will make no judgements.
Regarding it being racist to criticise other cultures for being inferior to our own. Ambush Predator has a story about Strathclyde university where you are not allowed to criticise foreigners who don’t know how to use a toilet.
http://thylacosmilus.blogspot.com/
Very sad news – murder is murder, there is no excuse for it.
The problem is Islam – not Muslims as people, and the way to deal with that problem is by showing, with facts and reasoned argument, that Mohammed was a bad man (not a “perfect model of conduct”) who taught bad things. However, the moral relativism of the modern West (and the equality fetish) undermines rational argument.
For fucks sake…
Driving a van into people you have no previous contact wiht is either terrorism (in the loose sense of murder for a purpose) or very bad driving. Police seem pretty clear this was not the latter, so why the hell are people here messing around with definitions. Just because the murdering scumbag in this case killed Muslims and doesn’t appear to be one doesn’t make him any different from a Muslim doing the same thing.
If we believe in freedom, we believe in freedom for all – and freedom certainly involves not being hit by rampaging vans driven by idiots fueled on hatred. If we believe in freedom for only those we approve of, how the hell do we differ from social justice workers. If you really hate Islam, fine, but don’t hate the people who follow it unless they openly offer harm to you (see Paul’s sensible comment above), because they are people first and Muslims second, and if you miss the fact people are people first you start to think like those who see people as inconvient barriers to their plans for “improving” things.
So your choice – be somewhere in the Jeremy Corbyn-Josef Stalin continuum, or believe in freedom. I don’t see another option.
Assuming this is a retaliation for the several Islamic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the UK over the past few years, I regard it as less of a consequence of those previous attacks themselves than a consequence of the mincing, politically correct, willfully blind way that the UK government has dealt with them.
Ultimately, the upholding of the law serves not only to protect the innocent from the violence of criminals, but also to protect the criminals from the violence of mobs.
The modern lefty Fascist Brigade (aka Antifa) and the mayor of Berkeley learned this lesson recently, to their chagrin.
This is NOT to justify the attack; rather, it is to point out the importance of stepping up to effectively deal with such attacks when they occur, regardless of the skin color or religion of the perpetrators. If the state will not keep order, then the people will do so themselves – and the hand of the people is stronger and crueler than the hand of the state.
I’ve not heard the ‘lone wolf’ explanation offered yet.
I expect that is because we are all implicated in this crime.
No one is innocent.
We are all to blame.
No Pete, I am not to blame for this crime.
No, not for this crime or any other I have not committed.
If you wish to use your guilt to signal your virtue then by all means please do so.
But in doing so do NOT presume to pronounce on my culpability.
Well, it isn’t good, but I can’t help thinking some Muslim dude that wanted to blow something up might decide not to now, because he’d feel bad if his Grandma got run over by a bus.
This is the kind of crap bad governance leads to.
Governments like to believe that whatever they do or don’t do, the matter ends there. The government of the UK has (apparently) just been informed that this is not always the case.
The investigation is underway, we do not have anything like enough information to comment with authority and we should presume innocence and avoid comments that might have the effect of prejudicing a fair trial on whatever charges might be laid. The golden thread that ran through English law was that the prosecution had to prove every element of its case, or else the Court must acquit. I’m not convinced that this thread has not been broken.
I think your sarcasm receptors need a polish, Confused’Old Misfit
Since the Finsbury director supports attacks on Israelis and a member of the mosque’s board is a Hamas commander, is this where we say the chickens have come home to roost?
Personally, I wouldn’t. Murder is murder and to be condemned in civilized society.
But this sits along side the awful truth that Finsbury is run be despicable people.
No idea what you’re on about Mr Ed.
What has the legal presumption of innocence got to do with folk speculating away on blogs ?
I could not agree more.
Back in 2001,’the great and the good’ made it ever so clear that the main danger they saw in this 9/11 thing was that we, their deplorably prejudiced subjects, would indulge our vulgar prejudices if not subjected to stern penalties of law. Free speech was all very well in the past – it was OK to preserve it astonishingly well in WWII – but giving themseves the power to punish prejudice was better. So they brought in laws and ensured we understood:
– For 9/11 fans, punishment awaits murderous deeds.
– For 9/11 foes, punishment awaits unguarded remarks.
Be part of the PC establishment and express yourself in the approved ways, garnished with the approved cringes; or keep your head well below the public-domain parapet; or else.
Lee M,
If comments were made that ‘X’ is guilty of a crime, and it becomes widespread, there are two possible outcomes:
1. Where someone has been charged, the defence may argue that the commentary has prejudiced the trial and a fair trial is no longer possible, and so the court must acquit on the charge. This is contempt of court and is actionable by HM Attorney-General for England and Wales.
2. Even if someone has not been charged, pre-charge commentary after an arrest may make a fair trial impossible as in 1, with the accused walking free, regardless of the evidence.
Crown Prosecution Service guidance here, excerpt below:
Watchman (June 19, 2017 at 12:09 pm), whom do you imagine disagrees with you? I see no plausible candidates in this thread.
We may never know the suspect’s motive. It’s a head scratcher.
“This is contempt of court and is actionable”
Extraordinary, and outrageous. I understand the part about the defendant not being able to get a fair trial due to pre-trial publicity (we see that regularly with “notorious” crimes, and the trial venue ends up being moved to a different jurisdiction), but to claim that public comment by parties not involved in the matter is somehow criminal is, well, outrageous. It is clear that despite the common origins our two legal systems have moved in divergent directions.
A followup to my last comment: I fail to see how someone not properly before a court can be found to be “in contempt” of it (in a legal sense; I am clearly developing a generalized contempt for your judicial system!).
Laird: I dimly recall a case, in the early-ish days of the web. I think it took place in Scotland, which has a separate legal system from England and Wales.
A juror, ignoring instructions not to delve into the defendant’s background, searched the web and found articles detailing the defendant’s prior convictions in a newspaper’s online archive. They had all been first published prior to the trial.
The judge found that serving the articles via a website constituted an act of publication and held the newspaper in contempt.
I confess to losing track of the matter but recall being confident that it was clearly the juror who was in contempt, not the newspaper and that matters would be resolved sensibly.
It appears that I was wrong. Perhaps Mr Ed or someone else over there can enlighten us as to the current state of case law on the matter?
Laird – I agree. But there’s no 1st Amendment in the UK.
Moreover the legal establishment (who create these absurd rules) have absolutely 0.00% faith in the common man. A jury has to be protected from information which might lead it to the wrong conclusion. Ideally we would do away with this dangerously unpredictable part of the system, but it would look bad.
Is being exceptional like being ‘special’? I’ve always thought America was ‘Special’!
Nicholas (Unlicenced Joker) Gray (June 20, 2017 at 7:28 am), “American Exceptionalism” is a phrase often met with in its defenders – and sometimes in its PC attackers, though they mostly prefer more denigrating ways of naming it.
“You are exceptional” can mean “You are special”. “I take exception to you” means you are specially objectionable. To be called “unexceptionable” is to be praised in a Jane Austen’s novel – and uncomprehended by many today (else I might have used the word in a bitter jest in my post).
According to the lefty Stop the War playbook, he was provoked by other people, as that’s the only reason people commit terrorist attacks. Maybe Muslims need to work out what they did wrong that caused this.
Yeah, we’re Special. It’s awful. It’s so bad, we’re discussing building a physical wall on our borders just to keep our people from escaping.
(The “Special bus” aspect of your comment may not translate well.)
I always suspected that Americans were ‘special’ on the uptake, with honourable exceptions.
Until now, the non-muslim world had the high moral ground! We didn’t do that sort of thing! So couldn’t we go back to that? Did the Welshman really say, ‘Kill All Muslims!? Couldn’t we print that as ‘Kill All, Oh muslims!’ Couldn’t we portray him as a recruiter for the jihadists, and get our moral high ground back?
@Laird, the common law has the concept of “sub judice”, where a matter awaiting trial or actually under trial by a court cannot be discussed in a manner likely to prejudice the outcome of the trial. English law has limited this to sub judice only applying to those cases that are actually being tried when the discussion is made.
Mr Ed is thus wrong to say that these statements may be in contempt. Had publication happened while the accused terrorist was being tried, then that would be a breach of sub judice, and the publisher could be and would be found in contempt of court for so publishing.
It’s happened. During a trial for grievous bodily harm, The “Sunday Mirror” published an interview with the victim’s father while the jury was still deliberating its verdict. This led to the judge declaring a mistrial, the conviction of the newspaper’s owners of contempt of court, the resignation of the editor, and a hefty fine.
The First Amendment to the Constitution, and its subsequent incorporation, means the possibility of contempt proceedings in reporting a trial does not exist under the laws of the United States, or any of them.