British lions come up lambs in
Woolwich.
By Mark Steyn
On Wednesday, Drummer Lee Rigby of the
Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, a man who had served Queen and country
honorably in the hell of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, emerged from
his barracks on Wellington Street, named after the Duke thereof, in
southeast London. Minutes later, he was hacked to death in broad
daylight and in full view of onlookers by two men with machetes who
crowed “Allahu akbar!” as they dumped his carcass in the middle of the
street like so much road kill.
As grotesque as this act of
savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling. The perpetrators
did not, as the Tsarnaev brothers did in Boston, attempt to escape.
Instead, they held court in the street gloating over their trophy, and
flagged down a London bus to demand the passengers record their triumph
on film. As the crowd of bystanders swelled, the remarkably urbane
savages posed for photographs with the remains of their victim while
discoursing on the iniquities of Britain toward the Muslim world. Having
killed Drummer Rigby, they were killing time: It took 20 minutes for
the somnolent British constabulary to show up. And so television viewers
were treated to the spectacle of a young man, speaking in the vowels of
south London, chatting calmly with his “fellow Britons” about his
geopolitical grievances and apologizing to the ladies present for any
discomfort his beheading of Drummer Rigby might have caused them, all
while drenched in blood and still wielding his cleaver.
If you’re thinking of getting steamed over all that, don’t. Simon Jenkins, the former editor of the Times of London, cautioned against “mass hysteria” over “mundane acts of violence.”
That’s easy for him to say. Woolwich is an unfashionable part of
town, and Sir Simon is unlikely to find himself there of an afternoon
stroll. Drummer Rigby had less choice in the matter. Being jumped by
barbarians with machetes is certainly “mundane” in Somalia and Sudan,
but it’s the sort of thing that would once have been considered somewhat
unusual on a sunny afternoon in south London — at least as unusual as,
say, blowing up eight-year-old boys at the Boston Marathon. It was
“mundane” only in the sense that, as at weddings and kindergarten
concerts, the reflexive reaction of everybody present was to get out
their cell phones and start filming.
Once, long ago, I was in an
altercation where someone pulled a switchblade, and ever since have been
mindful of Jimmy Hoffa’s observation that he’d rather jump a gun than a
knife. Nevertheless, there is a disturbing passivity to this scene: a
street full of able-bodied citizens being lectured to by blood-soaked
murderers who have no fear that anyone will be minded to interrupt their
diatribes. In fairness to the people of Boston, they were ordered to
“shelter in place” by the governor of Massachusetts. In Woolwich, a
large crowd of Londoners apparently volunteered to “shelter in place,”
instinctively. Consider how that will play when these guys’ jihadist
snuff video is being hawked around the bazaars of the Muslim world.
Behold the infidels, content to be bystanders in their own fate.
This
passivity set the tone for what followed. In London as in Boston, the
politico-media class immediately lapsed into the pneumatic multiculti
Tourette’s that seems to be a chronic side effect of excess
diversity-celebrating: No Islam to see here, nothing to do with Islam,
all these body parts in the street are a deplorable misinterpretation of
Islam. The BBC’s Nick Robinson accidentally described the men as being
“of Muslim appearance,” but quickly walked it back lest impressionable
types get the idea that there’s anything “of Muslim appearance” about a
guy waving a machete and saying “Allahu akbar.” A man is on TV dripping
blood in front of a dead British soldier and swearing “by Almighty Allah
we will never stop fighting you,” yet it’s the BBC reporter who’s
apologizing for “causing offence.” To David Cameron, Drummer Rigby’s
horrific end was “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way
of life, it was also a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing in
Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”
How does he know? He doesn’t seem the most likely Koranic scholar.
Appearing on David Letterman’s show a while back, Cameron was unable to
translate into English the words “Magna Carta,” which has quite a bit to
do with that “British way of life” he’s so keen on. But apparently it’s
because he’s been up to his neck in suras and hadiths every night
sweating for Sharia 101. So has Scotland Yard’s deputy assistant
commissioner, Brian Paddick, who reassured us after the London Tube
bombings that “Islam and terrorism don’t go together,” and the mayor of
Toronto, David Miller, telling NPR listeners after 19 Muslims were
arrested for plotting to behead the Canadian prime minister: “You know,
in Islam, if you kill one person you kill everybody,” he said in a
somewhat loose paraphrase of Koran 5:32 that manages to leave out some
important loopholes. “It’s a very peaceful religion.”
That’s
why it fits so harmoniously into famously peaceful societies like, say,
Sweden. For the last week Stockholm has been ablaze every night with
hundreds of burning cars set alight by “youths.” Any particular kind of
“youth”? The Swedish prime minister declined to identify them any more
precisely than as “hooligans.” But don’t worry: The “hooligans” and
“youths” and men of no Muslim appearance whatsoever can never win
because, as David Cameron ringingly declared, “they can never beat the
values we hold dear, the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free
speech, in our British values, Western values.” Actually, they’ve
already gone quite a way toward eroding free speech, as both prime
ministers demonstrate. The short version of what happened in Woolwich is
that two Muslims butchered a British soldier in the name of Islam and
helpfully explained, “The only reason we have done this is because
Muslims are dying every day.” But what do they know? They’re only
Muslims, not Diversity Outreach Coordinators. So the BBC, in its
so-called “Key Points,” declined to mention the “Allahu akbar” bit or
the “I”-word at all: Allah who?
Not a lot of Muslims want to go to the trouble of chopping your head
off, but when so many Western leaders have so little rattling around up
there, they don’t have to. And, as we know from the sob-sister Tsarnaev
profiles, most of these excitable lads are perfectly affable, or at
least no more than mildly alienated, until the day they set a hundred
cars alight, or blow up a school boy, or decapitate some guy. And, if
you’re lucky, it’s not you they behead, or your kid they kill, or even
your Honda Civic they light up. And so life goes on, and it’s all so
“mundane,” in Simon Jenkins’s word, that you barely notice when the
Jewish school shuts up, and the gay bar, and the uncovered women no
longer take a stroll too late in the day, and the publishing house that
gets sent the manuscript for the next Satanic Verses decides it’s not worth the trouble. . . . But don’t worry, they’ll never defeat our “free speech” and our “way of life.”
One
in ten Britons under 25 is now Muslim. That number will increase,
through immigration, disparate birth rates, and conversions like those
of the Woolwich killers, British-born and -bred. Metternich liked to say
the Balkans began in the Landstrasse, in southeast Vienna. Today, the
Dar al-Islam begins in Wellington Street, in southeast London. That’s a
“betrayal” all right, but not of Islam.
Fuck you, Peter Mandelson, Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, New Labour, David Miliaband, Red Ed, Ed Bawwwwwwls, Gordon Brown, Ron Todd, Andrew
Neather, Labour's 'Progress' think-tank, Arthur Scargill, and the rest
of you traitors that pushed this treasonous plot on a loving land.
Related:
http://tinyurl.com/qbkfks8
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