National Post (National Edition)
Ringleader linked to ISIL executioner, hate preacher
LONDON BRIDGE ATTACKER PARADED EXTREMISM ON TV
Khuram Butt, left, and Rachid Redouane were identified as two of the three London Bridge attackers Monday. LONDON• Two years before becoming an execution erin Syria for the Islamic State group, Siddharha Dhar was filmed in his garage in London waving the black flag of ISIL and preaching hate.
The documentary, The Jihadis Next Door, by Britain’s Channel 4, about the rise of militant Islam in Britain, was praised for showing how the words of extremists can soon be turned to violent action by those who hear them.
“The reality is that the hatred of these horrible, cowardly men can inspire others to action,” The Daily Telegraph wrote after the documentary’s release last year.
On Monday, it was revealed that the ringleader of the London Bridge terror attack — Khuram Butt — also featured in the documentary.
Butt was seen praying with a group of radical Muslims in Regent’s Park, London, including Mohammed Shamsuddin, who was filmed warning that the black flag of Islam would one day fly over Downing Street and calling for Britain to adopt Shariah law. Shamsuddin was also filmed laughing at videos of ISIL drowning men in a cage.
By the time the documentary was aired, Butt, 27, a British national who was born in Pakistan, had already been under investigation by the police and MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence service, for six months.
But despite receiving calls from concerned members of the public about Butt’s increasingly radical views, police concluded he was not a threat and the investigation was scaled back.
The revelation will add to pressure on the authorities over whether enough is being done to tackle extremism, after it emerged that Butt is the third terrorist in recent months to carry out an attack despite being known to security services. See TERRORISM on Page A2 Colby Cosh, A8
HA woman places flowers on a floral tribute in the area of London Bridge area on Monday. istory repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce: so said Marx. He was making a joke about the second Emperor Napoleon, and it is still the first thing everybody remembers about the man; it is thus one of the greatest bon mots in the history of journalism. And it is, incidentally, the only law of history devised by Marx that actually works.
We have seen it applied in England by Muslim fanatics this past fortnight. The May 22 attack on Manchester Arena by a radicalized local seems to have involved high technical sophistication, and possibly assistance from an international network of terrorism suppliers. The target was chosen so as to victimize children and to involve a celebrity. (Ariana Grande had been on nobody’s list of people likely to provide a shining global example of civil courage, but here we are!) The killer’s plan was followed through with heartbreaking competence.
Then came the Saturday night attack on London Bridge. I have to be careful in discussing it: seven people are dead and dozens more have suffered life-altering injuries or horror in the rampage. But we are also under an important obligation to keep these things in perspective. Next to the attack on Manchester the London Bridge assault—undertaken with a van, some knives, and fake (!?) suicide vests — looks like a poorly considered, even improvised, terrorist lark. You would say it sounded like something out of a satirical movie parody of Muslim terrorists if Chris Morris hadn’t already made Four Lions.
The UK has an acquired psychological immunity to terror, and a system of political reaction to terror, that it gained at great expense from dealing with the spillover of the Irish troubles. As important as it is to remember this, it is also easy to overstate. The last minor Irish terrorist outrages on English soil took place in 2001: the timeline runs almost exactly up to 9/11 and then comes to a sudden, near complete stop. Not a coincidence.
The last really consequential IRA operations — notably the Docklands explosion — happened in 1996 during the breakdown of a ceasefire, and were preceded by warnings intended to preserve life. Nobody under 30 can quite remember the social atmosphere of a sincere, all-out terror war on British institutions, and for those who are older the memory must be fading.
If Britain experienced five attacks of the same scale and nature of the Manchester bombing in quick succession, I guess — and it is a guess — that there would be genuine hysteria, anguish, and uncontrolled social reaction. But a sequence of attacks like the ludicrous, ugly one on the London Bridge could never last long enough to represent a serious interruption of British life. Motivated suicide attackers are not in such great supply that they can be traded three at a time for the lives of seven innocent civilians for very long. If the London Bridge attackers thought that mock suicide vests would somehow discourage police from shooting them to bits, it seems they made a misjudgment. All it seems to have done was to guarantee that once they did get shot, their remains would then be blown up deliberately.
This Marxian two-step has raised a question of etiquette that Canadians should probably consider sooner rather than later. The attacks have happened in the context of a general election campaign. When the Manchester incident took place, all major or even semi-major parties “suspended campaigning” for a period of two days, by mutual consent. After the second attack, the national campaigns were again suspended for a day — but with one exception: Paul Nuttall, leader of the UK Independence Party, proposed that election campaigns are an important feature of a British life and that interrupting them is “what the extremists would want.”
UKIP, having completed its historic task of detaching Britain from the European Union, may be dwindling into irrelevance; but a few observers who would never otherwise give Nuttall the time of day have had to admit he has a point. There were even a few calls to delay the general election, which is scheduled for Thursday. Those pleas did not make much headway. Again, the experience of the Irish troubles, which sometimes featured bombings on general election dates, has provided the British public with a useful quantity of experience.
Even the “suspension” of political activity by the major parties was more hypothetical than real after the London Bridge incident, with both Prime Minister Theresa May and Opposition Leader Jeremy Corbyn using the time to needle one another in public statements. May is a former home secretary, and was thus a longtime head of a public security apparatus that seems to have been deaf to warnings about the murderers behind both terror incidents. Corbyn, meanwhile, spent decades as the sort of leftist-bookshop-haunting radical uncle who never has an unkind word for a terrorist or rogue state.
An election campaign is not a good time to stamp out talk about terrorism. And under these circumstances, the argument between the main parties could not fail to be somewhat sharp and personal. But what are the general principles for interrupting or diminishing election campaigning in the face of terror? We can imagine harder cases than this one. And the problem is not quite the same as the mere logistical issue of when an election must be delayed or prolonged because of terrorism. It is, as I say, an issue of etiquette, one that perhaps defies formula.