The senseless murder of drummer Lee Rigby, was an abhorrent, horrific act, my thoughts are with his poor family who I'm sure must be struggling to understand why this has happened. My initial response was of anger, sadness and disbelief, but all under an umbrella of fear. Fear that this could happen in our so called, civilised society. An apparently arbitrarily selected target, butchered in the street in broad daylight.Â
The hijacking of this tragedy by far right fascists is contemptible, it is an affront to a nation with a rich history of fighting fascism. This, however, is the result of uneducated oafs being manipulated by the media and our corrupt parliamentarians (and I stick by uneducated, no amount of representatives, that clearly have a vocabulary that stretches further than "it’s that muslamic law that’s to blame", trying to express their organisations views, will convince me that the EDL are anything but thick, thuggish far right opportunists).
David Cameron, along with the media, jumped on it immediately, why steam-roll straight down the terrorist angle if not to create the divisions and unrest we've seen on our streets this past week? Cameron himself claimed in his speech afterwards that the best way for us to win against the terrorists, was to continue on with our lives as normal, surely this idea would be better served by telling the truth, that two men, two English men, with clear mental health problems, mindlessly murdered a citizen in cold blood on our streets. Now of course I am not saying we should cover up the fact that these men claimed their actions were in the name Allah, and that their views were developed and radicalised by fundamentalist Islamic preachers, but to focus on this aspect to the extent the politicians and media have done is surely stoking the flames of hatred, helping to further the fallacy that the radicals are representative of the Muslim community.
Murder on our streets, is murder on ours streets, the intention is irrelevant.Â
A few weeks before the horrendous events in Woolwich, in an unprovoked attack based on the colour of his skin, a 75 year old Muslim man was stabbed to death on a Monday evening as he walked home from his Mosque. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/02/birmingham-murder-racially-motivated-police). Where was David Cameron’s rabble rousing speech  on that day, showing our deepened resolve to refuse to accept acts of racism on our streets that result in our citizens being murdered? Where was the Diana-esque outpouring of national mourning? (Rigby is now, in some circles, being referred to as ’The Nations Drummer’ and ’The Peoples Soilder’) Are we to believe that a brown man being murdered on our streets is not quite as important as a when a white man is? The media’s attempts to distance the ‘Britishness’ of the black assailants in the Rigby case has been blatant. When Michael Adebolajo is mentioned in the media is it always, without fail, followed by ’of Nigerian descent’. He was born in the London borough on Lambeth and spoke with a thick London accent, like it or not, the man was as British as fish and chips. Channel 4 news even sent a reporter to Lagos, Nigeria to speak to his distant cousin for an 'exclusive with the killers family!' 25% of the population of Great Britain are non white. A white skinhead, draped in the Union Flag is not the face of Britain, much as the EDL would have you believe otherwise, and the nation is much the better place for it.
Perhaps it is not a race thing then, look at the senseless murder of Kieran Raiswell (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jan/17/student-stabbed-great-manchester). A young man needlessly stabbed to death in broad daylight as he got off a bus. Where was the national outpouring of grief for this young man? The ocean of flowers on the roadside? Where was the EDL condemning inner city violence that causes an innocent, 18 year old student to lose his life for a mobile phone?Â
The sad truth of the matter is the fact, that a Musilm man getting murdered because of his race, or a young white English man being murdered in a botched robbery simply will not sell as many newspapers, or garner as many viewers to the sensationalist news channels as a solider’s murder, that is connected to radical Islam. The Sun on the day reported on the incident, within the report was printed the phase 'Go to thesun.com to see the video in full’. Printing pictures of pious, mourning faces and a few solemn words, do not equate to respect for the dead. You were using this poor man death to flog your rag before his body was even picked up off the ground, everyone involved should be ashamed.Â
David Cameron and the Tories are now attempting to strike while the tragic iron is hot and use this opportunity to push through illegal snooping laws to assist them in the 'fight' against our never ending threat of terrorism. Anyone in favour of this should heed Benjamin Franklin’s warning - ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’. The right wing press, who went into meltdown when faced with the prospect of regulation so they could not print whatever lies they like, about anybody they see fit, claimed it was an affront to the freedom of speech. They are now demanding that anyone with views they dislike are censored, and the state have control to access every single piece of personal information exchanged online or over our telephones without our permission. The Mount Everest of contradictions in an industry rife with them.Â
Fascists would not be gathered in their thousands on our streets had the media and the politicians not provoked them. We should be showing a united front in the face of recent events, a nation that will not stand for violence in ANY of it’s forms, standing together in our condemnation of such acts with no regard to the incentive behind the actions. Why these men did what they did does not concern us, their opinions are not valid, we repudiate them with every fibre of our being. We do this because of what they did, not because of the book they chose to base their beliefs on.
