Terrorism returned to the streets of Britain yesterday when a soldier was murdered by two suspected Islamists who attempted to behead and disembowel him as he left a barracks, in the first deadly attack since the 2005 London bombings.
One of the suspected killers, who addressed an onlooker who had a camera, said the pair had carried out the attack “because David Cameron, [the] British government sent troops in Arabic country”.
As pedestrians stood close by the armed men, he went on: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you,” according to footage obtained by ITV News .
The Independent understands the dead soldier – who was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt – was a member of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which is currently based overseas. He was ambushed by the men as he left the base in Woolwich, south-east London, who attacked him and then dragged his body into the middle of the road to pose for photographs while standing over him waving a cleaver and a gun, according to witnesses.
[…]One witness, identified only as James, said he and his partner saw two black men attack a young man aged about 20 with kitchen knives like he was “a piece of meat”.
“They were hacking at this poor guy, literally,” he told LBC Radio, adding that a group of brave women tried to shield the soldier from the two men.
“They were hacking at him, chopping him, cutting him. These two guys were crazed. They were just animals. They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road and left his body there.”
Two attackers armed with meat cleavers filmed their deadly assault on a man in London, according to Sky sources.
A man reported to be a serving soldier died and two people have been shot in Woolwich, after what Sky sources understand is being treated as a terrorist attack.
Senior Whitehall sources said the two attackers asked passers-by to film them, and they shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great).
In footage that has emerged, one of the attackers wields a bloodied meat cleaver and says: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.”
The black man, dressed in a grey hooded jacket and black woolly hat, apologises to members of the public who witnessed the horrific scenes before making a number of political statements.
In the footage, he is heard to say: “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
“I apologise that women have had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe.
“Remove your government, they don’t care about you.”
Witnesses also described seeing the “crazed” Woolwich attackers “hacking” at their victim and posing for pictures before charging at police wielding meat cleavers.
Here’s a still shot of one the murderers at the scene:
Islamic terrorist on camera: how will the liberal media spin this?
If this happened in the United States, I have no doubt that the fools on the secular left would be blaming this on the Tea Party conservatives and evangelical Christians. I have no doubt that the Democrats in the Obama administration will look at the video and the still images of the murderer and come away thinking that a crackdown on evangelical Christians who are pro-life and believe in limited government is needed. In addition to going after Bible-believing Christians, they would probably want to double welfare payments for people who are in the country illegally.
One other point. A lot of very stupid secularists see stories like this and then have the view that there is something wrong with certainty and conviction in religion. There is nothing wrong with certainty and conviction in religion provided that the religion is not Islam. I have a friend who is a Christian who is very firm in her convictions and she carried groceries Wednesday to an atheist who was sick and on crutches. She is very convinced about the truth of her beliefs and acted on them. Being certain of your views and acting on them is fine as long as the views are rooted in truth.
I had the great pleasure yesterday of attending the debate “Does the universe show evidence for a creator?” at Imperial College, London. Arguing in the affirmative was astrophysicist Hugh Ross of Reasons To Believe, a science-faith think tank from the USA; arguing the negative was Lewis Wolpert, Emeritus Professor of biology and British Humanist.
[…]But, onto the debate itself! A good turn-out. The lecture theatre was packed. It was hosted by Imperial College’s Christian Union, but a decent number of atheists and sceptics showed up too – which is quite something given that AC Grayling was giving a lecture in the next room (he passed by me earlier as I was editing my latest Dawkins-critical video on my laptop… I don’t think he noticed)!
This is where it gets interesting. Hugh Ross went first, and outlined for 20 minutes his Creation Model, arguing that the Bible – and only the Bible – contains consistent, scientifically accurate predictions about the cosmos, the empirical data for which is only being discovered recently in the modern age. His case is essentially that the more we discover about the universe, the more the evidence for design and a transcendent creator piles up and confirms what the Bible has been telling us for the past thousands of years. Of particular note were passages from Jeremiah and Romans, which Hugh claims tell us about the expansion of the universe and the law of entropy. Alongside we have the opening of the Bible, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth – the Big Bang is this beginning. When this was discovered, a great many scientists were reluctant to accept it, fearing that an absolute beginning of space and time gave too much leverage to those who believe in theistic creation.
It was fascinating also to hear Hugh cite an article written by atheist physicists called “Disturbing Implications of the Cosmological Constant”. In this article, its atheist authors were forced to concede that this particular cosmological constant left them no choice but to invoke a transcendent causal agent. Their solution? To “do a Daniel Dennett”: conclude that this cosmological constant must, therefore, surely be false (!)
Go read the whole thing at Apologetics UK blog! It’s great when we have smart guys to give us a ringside report.
If the UK is so secular and socialist, then why are young people rioting? Don’t young people like secularism and socialism? I thought that the enlightened Labour Party would have fixed all the problems of society with their progressive fiscal and social policies over the last decade.
People who are protesting are by nature angry, or at least solemn. They have upraised fists and homemade signs.
But young Britons haven’t even bothered to come up with a slogan or a decent chant. They are blissfully happy as they destroy other people’s property. They are without guilt.
It can be seen in the images of giddy youths hauling flat-screen televisions out of plundered shops. It can be read in the reports where, as one witness described, a young woman looted so many sweaters from a high-end London store she tottered under their weight.
And it can be heard, starkly, in the conversation between a BBC Radio reporter and two women in Croydon who were, at 9: 30 a.m. Tuesday, drinking from a bottle of stolen rosé and talking about their night of adventure.
“Everyone was chucking things, chucking bottles, breaking into stuff,” one said.
“It was good, though; it was madness,” her friend chimed in, giggling about the craziness of it all. The first girl agreed, it was “good fun.”
The reporter asked if they had been drinking all night. “Free alcohol,” one said. Then she caught herself. “It’s the government’s fault, though. The Conservatives. It’s not even a riot. It’s showing the police we can do what we want.”
The reporter gamely tried to crack through the cognitive dissonance she was hearing. These are local people whose shops are being torched, she said. “Why are you targeting your own people?”
“It’s the rich people,” came the explanation. “It’s the people who have all got businesses. That’s why all this is happening, because of the rich people.”
Tell that to the kid, captured on video, who was sitting on the ground with a bleeding nose when someone came to his aid. He was helped up, then had his backpack emptied.
Tell that to the shop owners whose only asset was their inventory and who have lost it all to self-centred, marauding thugs. If only they had known they were “rich,” they might have taken time to enjoy their vast wealth. Instead of, you know, working.
[…]They have convinced themselves someone else is to blame, even if they identify a different culprit in consecutive breaths, and therefore they are off to pillage, loot and burn. If homes are lost to the fires? Blame the rich. Or the police. They started it all, you see.
Does that view sound familiar? Why yes – it’s the view of mainstream Democrats, including Obama and his allies in the news media.
And here’s an article that Mary and Dina sent to me explaining where these amoral children came from.
Excerpt:
An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.
Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.
Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.
When social surveys speak of “deprivation” and “poverty”, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.
[…]But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.
Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.
This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect.
It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.
A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.
So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.
The social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.
[…]This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.
The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.
The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.
“The problem,” said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, “is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.”
Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken “disproportionate” action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from “the feds”.
Figures published earlier this month show that a majority of “lesser” crimes – which include burglary and car theft, and which cause acute distress to their victims – are never investigated, because forces think it so unlikely they will catch the perpetrators.
[…]A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: “The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.”
Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.
The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: “Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.
“I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps… if you are not careful.”
That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.
I think that last example explains the root of the problem.
Here’s the chain of causation. First, people get annoyed with the talk of moral values and moral duties that comes from religious people. They don’t want anyone telling them to set boundaries on their pursuit of pleasure.
Agnostic evolutionist Aldous Huxley explains:
I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.
The secular left government is only too happy to push this philosophy of meaninglessness in the public schools. It makes the secular left elites feel good when they undermine the moral standard that religious people use when making judgments. Judgments are bad because they make bad people feel bad about behaving badly. Judgments have to go. And if religion is the ground for moral judgments, then religion has to go. And the public schools can be used to make sure that it does go.
This new view of morality is called “moral relativism”, and it is the official view of the secular left. Basically, if there is no designer of the universe, then there is no way we ought to be. If there is no way we ought to be, then no one has a right to tell anyone how they ought to be. This is the view that the Labour Party enshrined into law, using all the power of the public schools and the state-run media. The position of the secular left is that making people feel bad by judging them is the only real evil left in the world. Just let people do whatever they want, they say – we can always tax the rich and the corporations more to make everyone come out equal in the end.
You may have noticed that my post about Theodore Dalrymple’s book “Life at the Bottom” is back in the top 10 popular posts today. Check out the post – it has links to all the chapters of a free book that explains exactly what the rioters believe, and why. The thesis of the book is that the secular left elites deliberately cause the poor to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, and to prevent anyone from holding them accountable for their own choices. It’s a must-read.
WINTERY KNIGHT 