“As grotesque as this act of savagery was, the aftermath was even more unsettling,” Mark Steyn writes in his latest column, on the Islamic terrorist attack in London this week:
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.”
Which mundanely happened in again in France. “French soldier stabbed while on patrol near Paris,” the Reuters headline mundanely reads. As Andy, one of Ace’s c0-bloggers asks, the infamous one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter “news agency” makes the attack “sound like just another day at the office, don’t they?”
A police union spokesman said surveillance footage of the attacker showed him as tall and bearded, aged about 35, possibly of North African origin and wearing a white Arab-style tunic.
Beard? North African? Arab-style tunic? I don’t know about you, but if I were a criminal profiler, I might flag the suspect as a member of the Euro-Tea Party. Or it may possibly have been one of those damned Lutherans … they’re known for doing stuff like this all the time.
Three days after a British soldier was killed in a London street by two men who said they acted to avenge violence against Muslims, the attack near Paris raised questions about a possible copycat attempt to kill a French soldier.Interior Minister Manuel Valls noted the similarity in an interview on France 2 TV saying the attacker was clearly trying to murder his victim, but he added that it was too early to offer any theories.
“Let’s be prudent for now,” Valls said of the attacker’s identity and motivations. “Everything is being done to arrest this individual.”
Yes, yes. Let’s be prudent. Mustn’t leap to any conclusions.
As Steyn adds on this Memorial Day weekend:
Come to think of it, why are armed soldiers patroling a commercial district just west of Paris?
The soldier was on patrol as part of a heightened security plan initiated in certain areas following France’s intervention in Mali earlier this year, French President Francois Hollande said.
The “heightened security” doesn’t seem to heighten security:
The 23-year-old was patrolling in uniform with two other soldiers as part of France’s Vigipirate anti-terror surveillance plan when he was approached from behind around 6 p.m. and attacked with a knife or a box-cutter.
He has apparently lost a lot of blood. The very names of these crime scenes mock the fin de civilisation west: Drummer Rigby was killed on Wellington Street, named for the Iron Duke, and the French soldier stabbed in La Défense, named after the famous statue commemorating the French resistance against the Prussians in the Siege of Paris.
Concurrently, Sweden is seeing the same sort of flaming cars caused by those pesky “youths” which have been plaguing France in recent years. “Here’s a hint,” John Hinderaker quips at Power Line. Those ‘youths’ in Sweeden “aren’t named Erik or Gustav.”
Which perhaps explains why Swedish authorities are remarkably laid back about the whole thing. Hinderaker dubs it a case of “Fecklessness, Swedish Style:”
In Stockholm, riots have taken place for six consecutive nights, with windows smashed, cars and schools set on fire, and policemen pelted with rocks. This would normally be considered a major problem, but the Swedes seem to be taking it pretty casually:
Since last Sunday, May 19, rioters have taken to the streets of Stockholm’s suburbs every night, torching cars, schools, stores, office buildings and residential complexes. Yesterday, a police station in Rågsved, a suburb four kilometers south of Stockholm, was attacked and set on fire.
But while the Stockholm riots keep spreading and intensifying, Swedish police have adopted a tactic of non-interference. ”Our ambition is really to do as little as possible,” Stockholm Chief of Police Mats Löfving explained to the Swedish newspaper Expressen on Tuesday.
”We go to the crime scenes, but when we get there we stand and wait,” elaborated Lars Byström, the media relations officer of the Stockholm Police Department. ”If we see a burning car, we let it burn if there is no risk of the fire spreading to other cars or buildings nearby. By doing so we minimize the risk of having rocks thrown at us.”
Apparently, the clash of these violence-oriented “youths” and passive-obsessed “authorities” has caused Sweden to have a second thought or two about immanentizing the eschaton, according to an article in the London Telegraph, with the brilliantly absurd headline, “Stockholm riots leave Sweden’s dreams of perfect society up in smoke.”
But perhaps Swedish authorities are simply misjudging what they’re up against. They’re not blood-spattered Muslim “youths” and crazed Islamic terrorists — they’re the proud spiritual brothers of slaves seeking emancipation. “MSNBC host compares terrorist ‘hunger strikers’ in Gitmo to American slaves,” as spotted by Right Scoop:
“I also appreciate that the hunger strikers are not trying to die. They’re trying to generate autonomy in the context of something that strips their humanity–something we certainly know about from the experience of American slavery. And that the language of before I would be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free. Just that idea of creating human freedom within the context of horrible human conditions.”
The analogy by NBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry is right up there with Michael Moore comparing al Qeada to “the Minutemen,” shortly before being tapped by Jimmy Carter to sit next to him in the box seats at the 2004 Democrat National Convention in 2004.
Finally, Moe Lane writes, “I have only one real comment about the rioting/attacks in Europe:”
And it’s this: if the current people in charge over there don’t come up with an acceptable answer to the problem of Islamist (note suffix*) violence, the people on the sharp end of that violence will go looking for groups that do have an acceptable answer – or at least one that’s acceptable to the people on the sharp end. And Western Europeans have a profoundly sh*tty track record when it comes to peaceful wholesale revisions of the social contract**.
Don’t be silly. That wasn’t a wholesale revision of the social contract; merely a brief pause to sort out “The European Civil War,” the EU’s latest euphemism for what their subjects still quaintly like to call “World War II,” speaking of Europe’s century-long attempt at finding various ways to immanentize the eschaton.
Related: From Tim Blair, “Message Unheard:”
You can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for your average Muslim terrorist. They go to all the trouble of blowing up children in Boston, killing US Army personnel in Texas, detonating bars in Bali, flying jets into New York skyscrapers and now basically removing a soldier’s head in a London street, all in the holy name of Islam.
And yet somehow, the news media just can’t seem to pick up on that relatively simple and easy to understand message. Read the whole thing.
More: Daniel Pipes on a decade worth of “Muslim Acts of Beheading in the West,” almost all of which are airbrushed by the MSM into the memory hole from the moment they are initially reported.
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