The circumstances surrounding the tragic death of Lee Rigby, an off-duty fusileir, on Wednesday in a crazed attack on a street in south London by two islamic extremists may have political implications beyond the simplistic, kneejerk reactions that we might expect.
What struck me about this incident was the extraordinary footage captured on a witness’ mobile phone of Michael Adebolajo, a convert to islam, delivering a soapbox rant in the immediate aftermath of the crime. There’s an old saying that there’s no zealot like a convert, but that became somewhat insignificant when I began to think about the nature of Adebolajo’s comments. For someone claiming to be killing in the name of religion, his rant was ominously devoid of religiosity – it was however highly political.
This got me thinking further about the political nature of radical Islam. I remember being at secondary school before the 2001 attack on the twin towers and talking to muslim friends about Osama Bin Laden when he was still a niche subject, obsessed about only by security services and religious clerics. Bin Laden’s basic contention, rejected unanimously, was this; if western societies are truly democratic, then the people of those democracies are ultimately responsible for the actions of the government they willingly elect and are therefore valid targets for reprisal in protest or resistance against the actions of those governments. In his view, you could hold Jeremy Somebody in Walton-on-the-Naze directly responsible for the daisycutters dropped on Islamic lands the world over.
The multi-faceted rejection of this always centred around two axioms which even as secondary school kids we managed to comprehend with clarity; firstly “if western societies are truly democratic…” is a question in itself – to which the answer is “they aren’t”. Representative democracy, in which executive power is vested in a small group of individuals is not the same as participating in the decision making processes of government. We all know that three quarters of the shit that comes out of parliament simply wouldn’t exist if it first had to pass through the court of public opinion by referendum.
The second objection was collective responsibility for the actions of the few. Perhaps my friends from ethnic or religious minorities were slightly more aware than most of the “tar with the same brush” fallacy when it’s proposed in reverse as an excuse to justify atrocious acts. These contentions are why politicised islam bent on violence remains a relatively small-scale problem in the UK as opposed to some kind of Turner Diaries scenario – the average teenager can reason their way out of the proposition with relative ease. The question perhaps is why the political viewpoint offered by islamic extremism does appeal to a small number of individuals dispite being rejected by the vast majority – what is the key difference which leads to its adoption by people like Michael Adebolajo? We may learn more about this as a clearer picture of the two men’s lives begins to emerge.