[Ramrod]

Terrorism teaches a lesson that some still refuse to learn

After last month’s attack in Westminster there seemed to be an even more concerted effort than usual to say that the perpetrator – a Muslim convert called Khalid Masood – probably suffered from some mental illness, was a mere madman, criminal or drug addict. Various Muslims who knew Masood promised in the media that he hadn’t really been religious at all.....
This swiftly became the story. Man drives car into pedestrians on Westminster bridge and stabs a policeman to death. Nothing to see here. Certainly nothing to do with Islam. Probably to do with everything else in the world. But nothing to do with Islam.

The Church of England helped to spread around this fudge. At an interfaith service held in Westminster Abbey shortly after the attack (and before PC Keith Palmer was even buried) the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend John Hall declared that the nation was ‘bewildered’ by the attack.....

as the excellent Kim Sengupta reports this morning, the final WhatsApp messages sent just minutes before Masood began his rampage have become available. These messages, sent to a friend, reveal that the 52-year old convert:

‘Declared that he was waging jihad in revenge against Western military action in Muslim countries in the Middle East’

I wonder if the Dean of Westminster and the wider society will now drop the ‘we may never know’ stuff? I would guess not. Not because people like the Dean of Westminster are stupid. Far from it. But because it would mean having to learn the only lesson that they refuse to learn.