Sad news gripped the UK on Saturday as three people were killed during a knife attack and three more people were injured. Police have arrested a suspect who is Libyan, 25 year old Khairi Saadallah.
James Furlong, his friend Joe Ritchie-Bennett and one other person lost their lives in the deadly knife attack. Joe Ritchie-Bennett was American and had lived n the UK for 15 years. James Furlong was a teacher and the head of the History, Government and Politics department at The Holt School in Wokingham.
His Religion
Oftentimes when a terrorist attack takes place, UK mainstream media will drop in words such as “Islamic terrorism” and US media will call it “Radical Islam”. This time such words were used, but less.
The terror suspect Khairi Saadallah fought for and then later against ISIS. He converted to Christianity and loved to drink whisky and smoke marijuana. He even got a tattoo of a crucifix, a representation of a cross with a figure of Jesus Christ on it, on his arm.
Rightly so, no media outlets called him a “Christian terrorist”, or spoke of “Christian terrorism” or “radical Christianity”. In fact most media outlets have failed to even report on his religion at all.
The Guardian went as far to hint that he was a Muslim. There is a whole article on the suspect, which doesn’t mention his religion clearly but they say he “…had faced anti-Muslim abuse after the family’s arrival in the UK” they quote his neighbour saying “I heard people shouting anti-Muslim abuse at him” . The Guardian article then mentions the Manchester bombings and the Libyan terrorist Abedi whose family “links to the Libyan Islamic Fighting group, an Islamist group that helped oust Gaddafi”. After reading the Guardian, one would be convinced that he was Muslim. Not once was his actual Christian faith mentioned.
The BBC and Sky News also fall silent on the terror suspect’s religion. The BBC’s “What we know so far” goes into many details but doesn’t mention his religion either. Surprisingly only the Daily Mail, Telegraph and The Times have reported on his Christian faith.
No doubt his Christian faith had nothing to do with radicalising him or making him carry out such atrocities, the same is true for terrorists who profess the Islamic faith. British Muslims often voice their frustrations at why their religion is always linked to terror attacks carried out by Muslims.
Saadallah’s cousin said that he had started dating a British woman who was ‘very religious’ and he started going to church, eventually converting to Christianity around 2 to 3 years ago. The cousin said “He’s not Muslim any more. It’s like he’s always been in the UK”
Many people point to the fact that with so many terror attacks being carried out by people who are Muslim, there is always a suggestion that Muslims follow a violent religion. This is untrue on two levels with the first being that the threat of home-grown non-Islamic terrorism is now significantly higher than that of Islamist terrorism.
Secondly the terror suspects are almost always linked to countries which British or American foreign policy has interfered. The suspect is from Libya where the US, the UK and France had a large role in removing Gaddafi. Often times terror suspects are from other such countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria.
If it were Islam motivating such attacks then we would find Muslim terrorists from countries where the UK and USA foreign policy has not interfered. This is why there has not been a terrorist attack in the west from a Malaysian terrorist or a Brunei, Indonesian, Maldivian or Uzbek terrorists. The list of Muslim countries is many, and the terrorism only comes from those countries where foreign policy plays a part.
This shows that so called “Islamic” terrorism has no part to play in radicalising these people, instead we find it is socio-economic pressures brought about by military invasions and sanctions which radicalise.
This is why research has shown that almost all Muslims surveyed around the world reject the idea of terrorism in any form and condemn group such as ISIS, and that Muslims fear terrorists as much as non-Muslims.
