I don’t feel united. I have had enough of taglines, and I am not alone.
On Monday 22nd May 2017 I was rather surprised to find myself wake in the early am, with what felt like a toilet brush (with steel bristles, rather than plastic) being inserted into my throat. This is of course, a metaphor and once I had tried a glass of orange juice and a small drag on a roll-up cigarette a doctor was not required for a diagnosis. It was that pesky villain I had managed to evade for at least six or seven years since my last outbreak – Tonsillitis. I only make this point to say that I wish it were the only reason I didn’t sleep for the next three nights.
My current residence finds me in one of Manchester’s northern Muslim communities, I have lived here for two years now and by and large it has been without incident. We did have a dawn raid twelve months ago next door but one but that’s par for the course, and we still don’t know if it was drugs or terrorism related. I am a 30 year old, white, working class, atheist, Tory-voting, pot-smoking, but very friendly male. This part of Manchester heeds me no concern, no reason to call the police frequently and we and our neighbors get on well (we have exchanged Eid and Christmas presents, like some sort of left-wing Corbynite utopia) I mean, it’s a shit hole, but it’s friendly and it’s my shit hole.
I have recently reminded myself of a brief conversation that took place after the Orlando Nightclub Massacre with a gentleman who runs the local newsagent. As any person would I stated “Awful what’s happened in Florida, what drives somebody to take innocent lives in a nightclub” I admit, the question is slightly loaded but I wanted a feel for who I share my surroundings with, “To be fair” he said, “they need to stop dropping bombs on Muslim land in the middle east”. Now it was 10:30 pm and I was buying milk and tobacco, not the time for discussing American foreign policy and the causes of radicalisation.
The reaction after Khalid Masood drove a rented vehicle over Westminster Bridge and took the lives of five people was one of defiance, one of unity. The reason for this, I suspect, is that due to the demographic of the people killed and the locality of the atrocity. We in a sense owed it to the nations of the people killed and the police force and because of the British stiff-upper-lip not to let our emotions get the better of us in this particular case. Slaughtering children and their parents at a concert by way of a bomb brings a different reaction.
And so it should. Stop reading this and watch the appeal from Charlotte Campbell from Tuesday. The utter desperation, the raw emotion as a mother does anything, without prior rehearsal to get her little girl home safe. No the reaction to this latest horrific attack in this country is and shall remain quite different. Everybody is angry, very very angry.
If I were a Muslim who is complicit in this act in any way, I would be extremely scared. You no longer only have the Intelligence Services and Anti-Terror Services looking for you. The hate of a nation now concentrates its purpose on where the Government is failing on these issues – finding people like you. People who are not well read on the Quran, will become well read. People who have tolerated the shutting down of debate on this issue because they felt they didn’t have a voice, will now speak up. The populace will remain credulous no more, skeptical they will become. You will be treated with suspicion.
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