Friday 24 March 2017

London attack not a terror attack?

As much as many people want to, I can't see the terrorism really in the London attack this week.


I found myself not too far away at all at the time (I have a long, dull anecdote about how many times I have been at the scene of terrorism, which in précis, means don't be friends with me).


But thinking about this idiot who committed this atrocity, I can't see the real radicalisation here that is terror related.


This looks more, sadly, like the American school massacres. A certain kind of drop-out of society wants to make a name for themselves and off they go on a death-spree.


We don't label the American school attacks terrorism (or Dunblane, here). They are acts of individual madmen, they are copy-cat ways of committing suicide by harming others.


Because of ISIS there is a section of muslim society motivated to commit atrocities, but without ISIS would they be doing equally as crazy things - after all in this case, as with many before, there does not seem to be much planning or any kind of political statement made.


With no political statement, it is not a political act- and therefore not really terrorism.


Of course, if it were me, I would be closing Wahabi mosques down in the Country as they enable this kind of atrocity - but the Government is too weak for this. Preferring to hope the security forces are up to it rather than making difficult political choices.


What do you think Terrorism or not?

18 comments:

Professor Pizzle said...

I see your point but I think there's something unique about Islam in this situation.

Your typical 'loser' school shooter is generally a failure, unable to cope with bullying, or a sociopath. Some of them may even be seeking a vicarious posthumous fame or notoriety. But they are all creang their own narrative and world view. There is no over-arching story tying them all together.

The 'genius' of Islamism is its ability to offer a get out of jail free card for life. Like the medieval papal dispensation of sin for embarking on the crusade, modern Muslims can wipe-out a life of failure, sin, and crime by wiping out unbelievers. It by-passes the modern mind and appeals straight to the medieval underpinning of salvation, and by wrapping itself in a religion that is, in itself, now beyond criticism, insulates the actions in a moral bubble.

It's very clever ideological trick.

But it would it wouldn't last two minutes if the West wasn't currently disappearing up it's own arse of PC. Then we'd be free to just point at Islamists, laugh at them, and call them the ignorant savages they are.

Steven_L said...

I'd agree there has to be some kind of political 'cause', to be 'terrorism'. A political cause wrapped in a religious movement is also terrorism.

But if someone does something like this because they actually believe God wiled them to, they are simply a schizophrenic.

Where religion is concerned, there is of course a grey area.

Raedwald said...

Even losers, disturbed and abnormal persons are vulnerable to external influence; Western societal norms strongly condemn terroristic actions as 'mad' 'deranged' or 'psychopathic' but where there are contrary norms that praise such actions as heroic, just or even as a holy duty then those who survive on the cusp lose their balance.

This was no schizo teen but a man who had managed his psychiatric disturbance for a long time.

Anonymous said...

Judging from his criminal record, this man was a psychopath. The Islamists know how to use such characters as cannon fodder and for scary publicity.

Whether the attack was entirely his own idea, whether somebody suggested it to him, or whether his head was full of Islamic rubbish, will be very hard to determine. Certainly ISIS will be delighted that we bought into the idea that they are running a vast organised conspiracy of which he was a part. They do want a heroic war with "the West".

Compared with what goes on in Syria and Iraq, this was a very minor incident.

Don Cox

CityUnslicker said...

Excellent professor. Good points. Religion is a crutch- just because the Americans have some deluded self-made up ideology (or that loon in Norway a few years ago)rather than a 2 millennia old text book to dream about - the result is the same - suicide with needless innocent deaths.

I forgot about that batshit pilot from Germany who did the same too, again not terrorism.

This is different to the concept that people used with IRA of calling political inspired acts 'criminal' to deny the underlying motive.

In this case to date, we have no note, not even shouts of Allu Al Akbah to corroborate this as a truly political act. ISIS had never even heard of this guy.

Bill Quango MP said...

Its a terror attack in that it created terror. It scared us. It will reduce tourism. Especially from the USA who are particularly sensitive to these things. Though maybe less so than in the past now they too have terrorism.

But its not 7/7. A coordinated, planned bombing of the transport network. That had a copycat or maybe a follow up, now forgotten, attack just two weeks later in which the five bombs failed to go off. The detonators did. But not the explosives.

So this one does look not like the same sort of attack at all.
I'd say Lone Wolf.Except for the arrests/

Which may just be unrelated jihadists under surveillance rounded up as intelligence gathering is deemed less essential than preventing them going off on one.

Anonymous said...

BQ - I found it interesting that within 24 hours that there's was a number arrested. I

If they didn't have foresight of any attack on what grounds were they arrested...
Had they received tip offs after the attack?
Had GCHQ spent the day/night going through anyone he'd had recent contact with to find evidence?
Did they just arrest anyone connected by him on a arrest first/find the charge afterwards approach?

It'll be interesting to see if any of those arrested get charged.

barnacle bill said...

I support Mr Quango's view that it was a terror attack. Whilst it may not have had the participantss involved, or the affects and numbers killed/maimed as Paris or Bruxelles. It was still a terror-ist attack upon us.

As for our PM's response;another one of our political elites sleepwalking us into (this is putting bluntly) a future religious civil war.

AndrewZ said...

Of course it was a terrorist attack. There's no need to issue a political statement when the act speaks for itself - it's propaganda of the deed.

But there is also a significant overlap between political terrorist attacks and "death-spree" attacks. The terrorists' ideology can give violent losers a sense of purpose and an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway. ISIS also encourages its followers to improvise attacks on whomever they can using whatever means they have to hand. Therefore both types of attack can appear very similar in how they are carried out.

However, you are right that the British government's response to Islamist violence and subversion has been very weak. I think it's due to fear. The political class is afraid that any crackdown might lead to Muslim riots and anti-Muslim riots, and that the police might lose control. They're afraid of being called racist by the Guardian, the BBC and prominent showbiz idiots. They're afraid of the ECHR and the leftist "human rights" groups that value the rights of terrorists more highly than those of their victims. They're afraid of any controversy that might lose more votes than it gains. Perhaps most of all, they're afraid of being (rightly) blamed for letting this situation develop in the first place.

Sobers said...

"Not terrorism. Just some nut-job"

Yes, but a nutjob that had been enabled/encouraged/given a purpose in his nuttery by Islam. A lot of these lone wolf terrorists are mentally ill, yet they are all inspired to act by the same religion. I mean we're not getting mentally ill Baptists attacking Parliament, or mentally ill Sikhs beheading people in the street are we? There will always be mentally ill people and they will always do terrible things to people due to their illness, but only one religion appears to be using them as weapons..............put it this way if a mentally ill man starts going to church and talking about murdering the infidels in the name of the Lord, he's going to get reported to the cops and sectioned pretty damned quickly. Do the same at a mosque and we can see the results.............

Electro-Kevin said...

Two things to point out:

- He was a violent body builder. I bet he was on steroids. I see these pumped-up fuckers coming out of Exeter prison daily and they are loons and that's before ideological radicalisation.

- The radicals have adopted and publicised it as a terrorist event, therefore it is.

They aren't using terrorist cells anymore. They are using lone Manchurian Candidates - usually on drugs of some sort.

Ultra religion + skunk/steroids = a heady brew.

Electro-Kevin said...

Andew Neil can be as Churchillian as he likes.

The problem the west has is not radical Islam, nor terrorism but self censorship. The satirists dare not scrutinise nor mock this strand of ultra dogma - nor even the moderate version of it. This privileged position above all other beliefs, and the demography, shows our civilisation's direction of travel.

Other than that - and the introduction of an armed police state, limitations on movement and of free speech - it's all going swimmingly.

andrew said...

Please do not forget that the

set of nut jobs committing suicide by cop post doing $something_nasty

is not necessarily distinct from the

set of terrorists causing terror for political/religious beliefs happy to die post doing $something_nasty

In fact ISIL are reported to actively filter for nut jobs.



Anonymous said...

EK - If you want to see some good satire that mocks Islam check out SyeTen on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9bEkGd1AVo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvLPJEkrlxo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQBgrUObbHw

CityUnslicker said...

Damn right Dearime, firm kick up the backside needed.

Anonymous said...

It wasn't very long ago when the usual suspects were hanging 'Build Bridges Not Walls' banners from London's bridges.

AndrewZ - "The political class is afraid that any crackdown might lead to Muslim riots and anti-Muslim riots, and that the police might lose control"

That's not what they say though - they say explicitly that the worry is of further radicalisation leading to more terror. "It's a religion of peace, and if you say otherwise they'll get violent" might not make logical sense, but it's what we've been hearing ever since 9/11, let alone 7/7.

I'm not sure they're worried about anti-Muslim riots. In 2001 in places like Oldham and Bradford, millions of pounds worth of damage was done to white-owned businesses (Muslim-owned were left alone) and dozens of pubs were firebombed out of business, yet the reaction of white people in those areas was mainly to get out asap. If deliberately blocking the exits of a Labour Club (Manningham) with 22 elderly Tykes inside then chucking petrol bombs through the windows (they were rescued just before the place collapsed) doesn't raise a stir, what will? Any political leadership explicitly pro-white will come under other forms of attack - I remember Nick Griffin of the BNP was put on trial for making predictions that nearly all came true.

The other factor is that to 'win' a riot you have to get a lot of bodies out there, and in many cities the balance of street power has shifted. Things have changed since the 70s and 80s riots where Asians were more often victims (3 people died in their Handsworth post office) than perpetrators. In the last lot of Brum riots (2005) the deaths were both of young black men.

Anonymous said...

Of course it was terrorism -- any attempt to call it "the act of a nut-job" is merely evasion, as is the usual weaselling of "nothing to do with Islam".

This man was a radical Muslim, copying the actions of the Nice and Berlin truck drivers, and the recent knife and axe attacks in Paris and Germany.

As for the politicians calling it "an attack on democracy", one would have more respect for them were it not for the fact that it has been the political and legal class who have allowed, and indeed encouraged, the mass Third-World immigration which has led us to this position. No democratic electorate in this country ever voted for that, and no political party has ever put it in its manifesto, yet it happened all the same.

And on Wednesday, the politicians were locked up safely in the Houses of Parliament, while ordinary people, and a policeman who was there to guard them (unarmed, because some politicians had called the sight of armed police at the gates "unwelcoming) were maimed or bleeding to death in the streets outside.

Elby the Beserk said...

Muslim convert. Radicalised in prison. Not to mention that the Koran says one should strike terror into the hearts of your enemies. There is no place for a barbaric and totalitarian death cult in the West.

Do read Scruton on this, in an essay entitled "In Defence of the West" in last year's excellent collection of his essays, "Confessions of a Heretic". Sir Rog nails it - and the core is is that the notion of the secular does not exist in Islam, but is at the core of our civilisation, as we long ago split the spiritual and the temporal. Render up to Caesar, eh kiddies? Islam can not and will not go there.

So once we are a demographic minority - 2050 I think at current rates - we're fucked. Given this, that our sole response to Islamic terrorist is to appease Islam, one can only conclude the West has a collective death wish. After all, appeasement worked so well in 1939, didn't it?

Burn a Koran today and every day. It is a truly vile book.