If we stand together, terrorism cannot win

ANOTHER week, another grotesque terror attack on peaceful civilians going about their everyday business.

While other recent outrages in London and Manchester were carried out by Islamist fanatics, this time it was a middleaged, white racist who drove his hired van into a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque in Finsbury Park.

But though the perpetrator of this ghastly crime may have different coloured skin from the others, their motivation was the same – to sow hate and division in our tolerant society.

With depressing predictability, extremist groups immediately began trying to exploit the attack for their own malign political purposes. Tommy Robinson, former head of the far-Right English Defence League, described it as ‘a revenge attack’ and accused the mosque of having ‘created radical jihadists’.

The vile Islamic State group issued a statement telling British Muslims they were at war with ‘Jews and Christians’ and that they should ‘wake up’.

Meanwhile, the usual crowd of Left-wing celebrity attention- seekers were busily inflaming the situation on Twitter. Pop singer Lily Allen claimed the attacker had been ‘radicalised by the British media’, while author JK Rowling accused newspapers of ‘victim-blaming’.

If they weren’t so self- obsessed, these tedious people might realise that it is the media’s duty to investigate and report incidents like this and – unlike those who plaster social media sites with vacuous opinions and fake news – they take that duty extremely seriously. To blame newspapers and television for the actions of terrorists is not only absurd, it’s also deeply offensive.

The proper response to sickening crimes like these is not to apportion blame but to present a show of unity and defiance. Whether it’s Islamic State or the far-Right, we must let them know that we stand together against them and that an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.

If we allow the terrorists to divide us – setting one racial group against another – they have won.