Omar Bakri, founder of the banned UK Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, is excited about the “courage” of the guy who hacked Lee Rigby to death on a street in Woolwich.
What surprised me (is) the quiet man, the man who is very shy, decided to carry out an attack against a British soldier in the middle of the day in the middle of a street in the UK. In east London. It’s incredible.
“When I saw that, honestly I was very surprised – standing firm, courageous, brave. Not running away. Rather, he said why he carried (it out) and he wanted the whole world to hear it.”
No. That’s not courageous or brave. Nobody was going to hack him to death. The guy he hacked to death wasn’t given a chance to fight back. That’s not courageous, it’s not brave.
“The prophet (Mohammad) said an infidel and his killer will not meet in Hell. That’s a beautiful saying,” he said. “May God reward (Adebolajo) for his actions.”
That’s a disgusting thing to say. “Kaffir.” And he calls it a beautiful saying. It makes me feel ill.
Bakri said his organization Al Muhajiroun had nothing to do with the attack because members had not seen Adebolajo since 2005. However, Anjem Choudary, who took over the leadership of Al Muhajiroun when Bakri was exiled from Britain, has told Reuters Adebolajo attended the group’s events until about two years ago.
It seems to me people used to call Anjem Choudary a joke. He doesn’t seem to be much of a joke.
If Bakri wants to talk about courage and bravery and not running away he should talk about Ingrid Loyau-Kennett.
He should talk about a female cub-scout leader who saw what she thought were two men giving first aid to a car crash victim and got off the bus she was on to go help. He should talk about her checking the victim for signs of life under the noses of his two weapon wielding attackers. He should talk about her calmly facing them down and holding their attention because she wanted them to keep their focus on her so they wouldn’t attack kids or other passers by.
Alternatively he could just shut the f*** up!
In fact it wasn’t just Ingrid, there were two other women who confronted the killers while they were still brandishing their weapons.
And all while there were plenty of men who needed a sandwich making for them – what do we reckon, attention whores?
Shy!? Standing there waving knives around ranting in the street and gloating waving his blood soaked hands around? That’s not shy – as well as not brave or deserving of anything other than disgust and loathing.
How much courage do you need to run down a better, unarmed, unsuspecting man with a car then jump out and hack him to pieces? That’s utter despicable cowardice not courage.
Wow! I did not know Omar Bakri was still at it. I first learned of Bakri in Jon Ronson’s THEM: Adventures with Extremists.
I highly recommend this book. The best part is when Ronson and Alex Jones infiltrate the Bohemian Grove meeting.
I also recommend Ronson’s The Men who Stare at Goats. ignore the movie with the same title.
… and then not flee but stand there, calling for passersby to film and photograph as you patiently wait for the police to come and kill you.
Why is it that so many people feel such an urgent need to cast suicide attackers as cowardly. If you want to paint them as evil and deluded villains, I get you. If you want to portray them as the pathetic pawns of wicked religious puppeteers, I get that too. Cowardly though, that one I just do not get.
I have to agree with this, as I tend to think this way. A suicide bomber for instance, people say they are always so cowardly, but it actually takes guts to kill yourself, whether as a suicide bomber or just straight up suicide, plus there is the possibility they’ll get caught or shot and injured and then taken POW. In my view religion inspires people to TOO MUCH courage and not enough brains, and that overabundance of courage leads them to do things which people label cowardly, but which are more appropriately labeled simply evil and morally cowardly from a refined ethical perspective. Those acts aren’t cowardly in the practical instance of their execution, but in the moral cowardice of ethical theory, where they are easily shown to be cowardice because the attacker doesn’t have the courage to just accept diversity. The problem is, I think, when those two distinctions get confused into one. I don’t see people are smarter and therefore more ethically courageous in accepting diversity, as being more paramilitarily pragmatically courageous as suicide bombers. It’s apples to oranges comparison of two very different types of courage. If person A is sophisticated Liberal London Urban Dweller that has the ethical courage to intellectually examine hir own social prejudices and live by the courage of their conviction that it’s unethical and therefore immoral to do insane things like hack people to death just because they’re different from you, such a person could possibly (or not) be paramilitarily cowardly when confronted with a situation demanding courage: Scene 1, mr courageous but insane suicide bomber jihadist is running up the side of the highway bridge over water doing a shuffle with TNT strapped to his chest, aiming to throw himself in the middle of a mile long 400 car pileup and do serious damage, and a passerby, Mr Liberal London Urban Dweller doesn’t have the pragmatic paramilitary courage to push the suicide bomber into the river quickly despite being 3 feet away. Mr Liberal London Urban Dweller with sophisticated sensibilities is far more morally courageous than the insane suicide bomber, but paramilitarily, he’s not. And Mr Insane Suicide Bomber running down the bridge thinking he’s in the clear to launch himself into a pack of 30 cars and blow everything to hell is NOT a morally courageous individual, and is most certainly engaged in act act which is simultaneously an act of moral cowardice and ethical failure, as well as paramilitary courage and guts.
It’s not either or, it’s both and.
That may be a long post but you never
the less have managed to emphasise
the important distinction between them
I don’t want to be dragged into a discussion of whether an act of butchery is cowardly or not. That’s a derailment, a distraction and potentially a quagmire. You don’t want to find yourselves, say, making uncomfortable equivalences with undoubtedly courageous men such as the assassins of Heydrich.
I’d rather focus on the morality of the act, where I think you’d be on firmer ground calling it out as an act of wickedness.
Omar Bakri is a vile turd, it must be said.
Lmao, that’s not a derailment, that’s the entire topic, that it was a cowardly, vile act. My nuanced moral argument is that it was both a cowardly moral act and a courageous paramilitary performance given the specifics of what came after the act, as the other person talked about.
It’s easy for armchair warriors to talk about what cowards people surely must be to slaughter innocent people when they sit there and stand around waiting for armed police officers, many of whom shoot them right on the spot, to show up. The courage wasn’t in the act, it was in what followed afterwards, and the moral cowardice wasn’t in the fact either, it was in the intentions in the planning that formed the act in the first place, as well as the execution.
You cannot merely render complicated moral scenarios into blockheaded pronouncements because you prefer cardboard cutout villains rather than the hardwork of sophisticated and nuanced moral breakdown of a scenario.
There’s no derailment in the slightest in my analsysis or what others here have posted debating the act. The act of Butchery As Cowardice is Totally On Topic, and You’ve Nothing Useful to Contribute to the Conversation except to denigrate others’ well thought out and nuanced positions.
Armchair warriors. If it’s so easy to be an insane suicide bomber meticulously planning months in advance and then risking getting caught to do it, and it takes no courage, why isn’t every criminal doing it?
“Armchair warriors. If it’s so easy to be an insane suicide bomber meticulously planning months in advance and then risking getting caught to do it, and it takes no courage, why isn’t every criminal doing it?”
Ummm, cause you tend to wind up dead.
@ 6 – oh do shut up. We heard all that in 2001. (Perhaps you weren’t old enough to participate in such discussions then.) That’s not the issue. The guys with the knives and the axe or cleaver were not suicide bombers. No, what they did did not require courage.
The ethical distinctions I made still stand, as reenforced by another commenter here. It’s not the actions those guys committed,
. Sure had they done what they did and slunk off, no distinctions would have had to have been made, but that’s not what happened.
Regardless, the ethical distinction of their action being broken down into moral cowardice due to not being able to choose diversity (lack of moral courage) is a different distinction from the other one, as I explained above. My argument is not 2001 in the slightest, and is more sophisticated than yours as it’s both and: both your argument and the person here trying to counter it. Both you and them were making apples to oranges comparisons.
People can be both simultaneously cowardly in one dimension and remarkably courageous in another. It happens all the time, whether people commit to morally good or morally despicable and cowardly acts like the subjects of this article.
I beg to differ. I’m sure there are arguments about whether or how courage is involved in initiating an act such as the Woolwich murder, but I’d strongly dispute that courage was required at all afterwards. I watched that bloke on the video talking and carrying on generally with Ms Loyau-Kennett. You can see simultaneously his agitation and his apparent control of what he’s saying and doing.
That’s adrenaline at work there. Once it kicks in anyone can do anything. It might look like moral courage or physical strength or brave sacrifice depending on the circumstances, but it’s mainly the endocrine system doing its job. (I had a recent encounter with adrenaline and it can drive you to do the impossible and to look like someone in control of their behaviour at the same time. But you realise afterwards, it was impossible for you in your normal state. Adrenaline makes impossible things possible.)
@ ^ mildlymagnificent :
Yes.
Also Islam is what enables some cowardly scumbags,terrorists and murderers like Rigby’s killer to try to justify the unjustifable.