Mass murder in Reading was driven by Covid-19, cannabis, mental health but not racism, homophobia and Islamism
How did James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett die? The three men were at a pub in Reading when someone stabbed them to death. Khairi Saadallah, 25, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
In the BBC’s profile of the suspect we learn that Saadallah was arrested under the Terrorism Act. Can we guess why he might have attacked three white, middle-aged gay men? If we see everything through the prism of gender and race, as those on the far-Left and far-right insist that we should, isn’t the men’s identify relevant? Does the identity of victims and the alleged perpetrator play a role in the way political leaders and media respond to attacks? Let’s see what the BBC says about the heinous crime.
We’re told that Saadallah arrived in the UK from Libya in 2012. The police noticed him. MI5 had him marked as a person who might travel abroad for terrorism purposes.
Why? What is driving such thoughts and suspicions?
The BBC cites someone who knows Saadallah. They say the suspect suffered from “post-traumatic stress from the civil war”. We read that his “long-standing mental health problems had been exacerbated by the coronavirus lockdown.” Last year he threw a TV from his top-floor flat window. He had a “mental health key worker”.
If this is a care in the community or health issue, why has the suspect been arrested as a suspected terrorist? If he is a terrorist, can we guess at his ideology? The BBC notes that police are “keeping an open mind as to the motive for this attack”. Keep an eye out for news that he played video games or watched ‘video nasties’.
The head of counter terrorism policing, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu, says the attack was “unrelated to a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest held hours earlier in the park”.
So what is it related to? In the language of identify politics, was it a homophobic attack? Was it a racist attack? Was it a revenge attack?
BBC’s home affairs correspondent Daniel Sandford reports that Saadallah seemed to be a “normal, genuine guy” who smoked cannabis. Did normality or marijuana drive him to it?
In his analysis of the horror the BBC’s home affairs correspondent Dominic Casciani says: “Saturday’s horrifying killings may be another example of what security chiefs call a “lone actor” attack where a single individual turns extremist beliefs into murderous actions.”
What beliefs? Religious beliefs? We’re not told. Why not? The Mail says Saadallah was on the MI5 watch list “because of a tip-off that he wanted to join Islamic State”.
Conservative chairman of the defence select committee Tobias Ellwood stated:
“At the time of the Bali bombing there were 26 proscribed organisations by the Home Office, that number has risen to 86. It isn’t just a problem for the UK, but we need to look wider afield. The reasons why these things are happening is because there are fanatics working in ungoverned spaces, preying on vulnerable individuals, promoting a false interpretation of Islam. We pat ourselves on the back to say we defeated Daesh, but that’s only territorially, that ideology lives on and continues to grow. The threat is there and until we address this wider picture, the threat of terrorism in the UK will continue.”
So, about that cannabis…
Posted: 23rd, June 2020 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
