The Wall Street Journal: Britain Has Been In Denial About The Islamist Threat, And It’s Time To Face It Down

Qur’an Sura 8:12b, “… terrorize and behead those who believe in scriptures other than the Qur’an.”

For Peaceful Purposes

By DOUGLAS MURRAY, The Wall Street Journal – “How many ignored warnings does it take? That is one question that should hang over Britain after the horror of the daytime murder of a British soldier on the streets of south London. On Wednesday afternoon, Drummer Lee Rigby was killed in Woolwich by two men wielding large knives and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’—God is great.

Islamists have been saying for years they would do this. They have planned to do it. And now they have done it.

The attack itself is not surprising. What is surprising is that British society remains so utterly unwilling not just to deal with this threat, but even to admit its existence. Politicians have called the Woolwich killing ‘unforgivable’ and ‘barbarous.’ But expressions of anger should not really be enough.

Attempts to attack military targets in Britain go back to before the millennium and even before, it is important to note, the war on terror. In 1998 Amer Mirza, a member of the now-banned extremist group al Muhajiroun, attempted to petrol-bomb British army barracks. In 2007, a cell of Muslim men was found guilty of plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier in Birmingham. The plan had been to take the soldier to a lock-up garage and cut off his head ‘like a pig.’ They wanted to film this act on camera and send it around the world to cause maximum terror.

In 2009, al Muhajiroun protested at a homecoming parade in Luton for British troops returning from Afghanistan. Carrying banners saying ‘go to hell,’ ‘butchers’ and ‘terrorists,’ the group was protected by British police officers from an increasingly irate crowd of locals. The resulting outrage toward the police gave rise to the deeply troubling English Defence League, a street protest movement that often turns violent.

Now comes the attack in Woolwich, which the perpetrators—as with the earlier cell—wished to be observed and even filmed. Reports suggest that they invited people to capture their actions on video. The perpetrators gave interviews, machetes in hand, to bystanders with cameras. This horrific scene is something that will stick in the memory.

But it should also have been foreseen.” Read more.