The terrorist attacks in London and Manchester have prompted many questions, including questions about what the authorities knew and how they responded to what they knew.
The Manchester suicide bomber Salman Abedi had been to Libya – a country in violent turmoil – and had links to violent and extremist groups.
Even in Brighton and Hove, links with Libya and to the conflict in Syria and Iraq have prompted important questions. Five boys and young men from Brighton are known to have joined the fighting in Syria and Iraq. Four are now dead. A serious case review is under way.
Twenty two people died in Manchester and 120 were injured when Abedi blew himself up at an Ariana Grande concert packed with children and young people.
Given that the former teenage actor is an idol of young teenage girls, it is likely that the bomber understood very well that most of the victims would be very young and female.
It may be, as some commentators have said, that the bomber simply didn’t care that the victims were children but went for soft targets at an event with little security. Or that he deliberately aimed to attack children, knowing the distress and terror this would create.
Few have acknowledged the probability that this was a deliberate attack on girls. Journalists and politicians who had no difficulty describing the 2016 Orlando attack as an assault on LGBT people, struggle to identify the Manchester bombing as a targeted hate crime, aimed not at “children” but at girls.
Yet this attack is entirely consistent with previous evidence of targeted attack against females.
In 2004, young islamists were recorded by British police while discussing a possible attack on a London night club.
The men commented that no one could “turn round and say ‘Oh, they were innocent’, those slags dancing around”.
The journalist James Harkin has pointed out that in 2007 a car bomb outside Tiger Tiger night club in London’s Piccadilly “seems to have been designed to coincide with a ‘ladies’ night’ at the venue in which the perpetrators might have hoped to kill and maim scantily clad young women drinking alcohol”.
ISIS, the extremist islamist organisation that has claimed responsibility for the Manchester attack, has many similarities to other Jihadi groups such as the Taliban, Al Qaida, Jabhat al-Nusra (now Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) and Boko Haram.
Their adherents are islamist Sunni Muslims, influenced by salafism, a sectarian system of thought rooted in Saudi wahhabism.
Funded by the Saudi government, this ideology is now deeply embedded in British mosques and has taken root in universities, museums, libraries and schools.
At its heart is the forced subordination of women and girls.
The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, like Boko Haram in Nigeria, regularly attack girls, often in their schools, subjecting them to fire bombs, rape, kidnap and murder.
The most famous victim of this sort of attack was Malala Yousafzai, who was shot on a school bus in Pakistan because she campaigned for girls’ education.
Malala rejected the highly confined role conservative sharia law permits to women and in so doing asserted her right to freedom and self-determination.
She was supported in her free choice by her loving parents – as were the teenage girls attending the Ariana Grande concert – but to salafist jihadis this would make no difference.
While young men like Abedi treat the women of their own Muslim communities with contempt, they reserve their deepest loathing for rebellious women and those in particular who are “apostate” or non-Muslim.
They view them, as the journalist Sarah Vine puts it, as “barely human, the lowest of the low, for whom no punishment or suffering can ever be enough”.
She said: “We see this in the treatment of young Nigerian schoolgirls captured by Boko Haram and sold into sexual slavery. We see this in the mass rape of Yazidi women by Islamic State guerrillas. We’ve even seen it in our own country, in the systematic sexual abuse of young girls in Rochdale by so-called ‘moderate’ Muslim men who wrap their own daughters in the hijab while simultaneously defiling other parents’ children.”
Politicians have for decades sacrificed young Muslim girls on the altar of multiculturalism, allowing powerful community leaders and domestic tyrants to deny girls equal rights to inheritance, freedom and even control of their own fertility.
They have allowed generations of boys to grow up believing that they have a right to control female lives and domestic labour – whether this takes the form of untrammelled sexual access to obedient wives and control of their children or the sexual abuse of white girls from Rochdale, Christian schoolgirls from Nigeria or Yazidis from Sinjar.
A young unveiled Muslim woman on Question Time on BBC TV on Thursday 25 May spoke out against wahhabism in British mosques, calling for Saudi funding to be stopped.
This brave young woman was supported by panelist Nazir Afzal, the former crown prosecutor of the north west of England, who had a key role in ensuring that the organised abuse of white working class girls by groups of men of Pakistani origin was eventually prosecuted.
These brave Muslims, like the Amadiyha Muslim women who stood on Westminster Bridge in protest against the murderous violence of Khalid Masood, deserve our respect, support and gratitude.
Jean Calder’s blog is at brightonranter.wordpress.com.
read this book by a muslim woman
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3371607-cruel-and-usual-punishment
muslim men are taught by imams in mosques to bully women and treat women as possessions. Muslim men are promised sex by imams 4 teenage wives and even sex with 72 virgins when dead if they die as martyrs killing non muslims. This 7th century so called religious book of ialmic muslim rules was supposedly dictated by the illiterate mohammed who raped a 6yr old and then married her, Ayesha.
Read the koran, muslims are taught to procreate to dominate – 1.8billion muslims in the world – only banned in Japan.
If the 3.5m Islamic muslims in 1834 mosques in UK had been banned then those girls in Manchester and London would be alive. Muslim men hate women and are brainwashed to kill all non muslims. Pakistani muslims in Rochdale were told that to rape non muslim girls was allowed by Mohammed. Make up your own mind.
If we had a plague of venomous snakes attacking people, what would be the appropriate course of action?
Would we say “it’s not all snakes” and we just have to “be strong” and live with the problem, even though it means sacrificing some of our children on the altar of political “correctness”, or would be do the only sensible thing?
Primitive beliefs are incompatible with our traditional way of life, and even IF it’s only “some” immigrants causing problems, as we’re continually being told by lying politicians, the only SENSIBLE thing to do is to close our borders to even more economic migrants while we sort things out in what used to be OUR country.
Genuine refugees, yes by all means. Parasites that openly hate us, NO, and if caring about the safety and survival of my own people makes me a “racist” in the eyes of some brain-dead bigot, so be it.