Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and conviction at the end of 2013 has cast new light on what had been the most hideous publicly committed murder anyone can remember. A video of the incident seen by the court showed the killers hacking to death the unarmed soldier in civilian clothes and afterward waving hands dripping with blood and shouting “Allahu akbar!” They mutilated Rigby’s body and dragged it into the street so that passersby could not miss seeing it. Adebolajo handed one of these unwilling spectators a letter saying that “to fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation.”
British police officers do not carry guns, and a special armed-response unit had to be called out. When they arrived, the Muslim killers attacked them, even though the assassins’ only firearm was an old and rusty “cowboy” revolver that was not loaded. They were hoping that they would be shot dead on the spot and become martyrs for Islam. However, they were merely wounded, and British paramedics worked urgently and successfully to save their lives. Adebolajo told those treating him, “I did it for my God . . . Allah gave me this arm and you can do what you want with it.” The pious Muslim was airlifted to a hospital, where he refused painkillers and would not let any of the female staff touch him.
At his trial Adebolajo, covered with a blue blanket, a Koran in front of him, said that he had tried to kill Rigby in halal fashion by cutting his jugular vein, as they do in a Muslim slaughterhouse for animals, because this was the humane way to do it. Leaving aside the fact that halal slaughter is widely condemned as cruel, what his statement tells us is that he saw Lee Rigby, a non-Muslim, as a mere beast. The subsequent mutilation of Rigby’s corpse has reminded everyone of the al-Shabaab jihadists who carried out the Westgate shopping-mall massacre in Nairobi, Kenya, last September and then mutilated those whom they had slaughtered. When rogue Western soldiers damage a corpse, their actions are condemned and punished, but for Muslim jihadists, notably those in Syria today, such behavior is the regular, deliberate, and allowable ritual desecration and defilement of an enemy.
Now the custom has come to Britain.
Adebolajo shows no evidence of mental instability or diminished responsibility, though his follower Adebowale, who did not give evidence in the trial, is probably unhinged. Local people who knew Adebolajo before his conversion have described him as friendly and approachable; he had even paid a parking ticket minutes before driving off to run down Lee Rigby in his vehicle. He is just an ordinary, normal Muslim fanatic who has proclaimed his profound love of Al Qaeda. The two men were known locally for handing out radical leaflets in the streets, and they possessed numerous inflammatory books by Muslim clerics. Michael Adebolajo had previously been arrested in Kenya while leading a group of radical Islamists seeking to join a terrorist group in Somalia. He was deported back to Britain where he was to seek new victims.
There is only one penalty for murder in Britain, and that is life imprisonment. No one has been executed since 1964, and capital punishment has been abolished. It is perhaps as well. Adebolajo deserves to be executed, and before 1964 certainly would have been—an event the British people, most of them strong supporters of capital punishment, would have welcomed. However, it would have made him a martyr and led to revenge killings and kidnappings of British citizens both at home and abroad. What is now important is that there should be severe restrictions on Adebolajo’s associating with other Muslims while in his high-security prison, and also on his visitors. Britain’s jails are places where ordinary Muslim criminals, often imprisoned for sex offenses or for drug dealing, are rendered ultraobservant and recruited for terrorism at the point where they have hit rock bottom psychologically. As it happens, Adebowale had earlier served a sentence of 15 months for possessing heroin with intent to supply, and Adebolajo has been accused of drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl. Those already in prison for terror offenses reject all efforts to rehabilitate them and are probably plotting new outrages. It is important to prevent these activities—and particularly in the case of Adebolajo. The bleatings of the human-rights lobby about the rights of terrorist prisoners must be ignored.
The Muslim killers claimed in their defense that they were not murderers but “soldiers for Allah,” fighting alongside their fellow Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ones whom they said are being or have been killed by the British armies fighting there. The judge rightly treated this claim as irrelevant, and they have been convicted of murder, though one wonders why these two British citizens should not have been charged with treason. Many left-liberals in Britain have enthusiastically gone along with this and are now claiming that local Muslim radicalism leading to violence is entirely a consequence of Britain’s foreign policy—in allying with America, particularly after September 11, to fight Muslim aggression abroad as well as at home. If we had listened to the protests of British Muslims against these wars, say the liberals, there would be no Muslim extremism in Britain, no violence, no Woolwich. The implication is that Britain should have a foreign policy that sacrifices her national interest to the demands of a troublemaking Muslim minority. No one is willing to confront British Muslims with the blunt question, Whose side are you on? Nor is anyone willing to suggest that, if their loyalty is not on the side of the country where they reside and whose citizenship they hold, they should go elsewhere. Muslims in Britain systematically misrepresent the country’s foreign policy, ignoring British and American interventions to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo and the fact that most of the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan (and indeed Syria, Lebanon, Libya, and Pakistan) has been done and is being done by other Muslims.
Most of the leaders of Muslim organizations in Britain have condemned the killings, though the BBC has as usual given airtime to those who do not. The Muslim leaders’ party line—with which Prime Minister Cameron, at least publicly, concurs—is that Islam is a religion of peace. No one in power in Britain is willing to challenge this absurd proposition by citing the numerous hateful verses from the Koran in favor of violence and oppression, the mutual hatred of Sunni and Shi’ite, or Muslim aggression against non-Muslims throughout Asia and Africa. The problem with Christians is that they do not live up to the example set by their Founder; the problem with Muslims is that they do. What makes life tolerable in Britain is that most of our large Muslim population are indifferent Muslims. They prefer leading a quiet British bourgeois life of work, domesticity, and the pursuit of happiness to answering the jihadists’ serious call to a devout, holy, and violent Muslim life.
The Muslims in Britain also want to appear peaceable because they are running scared as a result of the exaggerated stories in the liberal press and on the BBC about massive reprisals against Muslims taking place after the Woolwich murder. In particular, the liberals have demonized the English Defence League, a chaotic assemblage of anti-Muslim lower-class nationalists, and accused it of mounting organized attacks on Muslims. Most of the so-called attacks have consisted of verbal abuse in the street, vituperation on the internet, or the pulling off of Muslim women’s headscarves. After Woolwich there have been acts of vandalism and some incompetent arson attacks on Muslim buildings, which have been given headlines in the liberal press out of all proportion to their importance, in marked contrast to Muslim attacks on synagogues and Hindu temples, which have made only the local newspapers. Whereas the leaders of the Muslim terrorists are often educated individuals, steeped in ideology and well organized, the hostile acts directed against Muslims have been the clumsy and impulsive acts of lower-class ruffians. There has been only one fatality: the killing of an elderly Muslim outside a mosque, which the liberals rushed to blame on the English Defence League. The perpetrator, who was soon caught and convicted, turned out to be a foreigner from Eastern Europe with no local connections at all. The liberals need the EDL as their demon and the fiction of domestic Islamophobia to take the heat off the Muslims, to make it seem as though there is equal hatred on both sides. They used exactly the same tactics to defend the Soviet Union during the Cold War. They will always spring to the defense of the external enemies of Western civilization, which they, in their own way, are seeking to undermine. The British leftists are enemies of the people.
Less than one fifth of British Muslims hold extreme views, but this is enough to provide a reservoir of future terrorists. Hundreds of British Muslims are currently Sunni jihadists fighting in Syria against the Alawites, and when these trained and experienced fanatical warriors return to our country they will constitute a whole army of Adebolajos. It is doubtful whether British politicians are prepared for this. They have not properly understood the meaning of what happened at Woolwich or its implications for the future.
[image from www.bbc.co.uk]
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