The lessons of the Reading terror attack - "The tale of Reading jihadist, 26-year-old Libyan Khairi Saadallah, is one we have heard all too often in our recent history – so often, perhaps, that only a renewed sense of outrage prevents a lapse into boredom. Saadallah, like so many before him, was a fighter in a conflict overseas. He went on to claim asylum in Britain in 2012, and rewarded his host by robbing, stealing and beating its citizens, for which he was imprisoned on several occasions. Saadallah eventually came to the attention of MI5 in 2019, who feared he might join the Islamist uprising in Syria. Not that MI5 did much about it. This meant that on 20 June last year Saadallah was free to venture into Forbury Gardens, Reading, and murder three men enjoying the summer sunshine. It was the first day after lockdown and just 16 days after Saadallah had been released from prison. There is little surprise or nuance in the Saadallah scandal, although this is a car crash that involves two different vehicles. The first vehicle is that of the British political class, and the country’s legal system, which has once again proven incapable of keeping people out of the country who would do us harm. spiked columnist Rakib Ehsan has revealed in a new report that, over the past 20 years, 45 terrorist offenders from overseas have managed to remain in the UK after completing their sentences. Fifteen per cent of these had a criminal record prior to committing a terrorist offence, with a chilling proportion – 40 per cent – having ties with proscribed organisations, such as Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and Al-Muhajiroun. Human-rights law protects individuals like Saadallah, who are not deported to their countries of origin because those nations are considered either too dangerous, or use torture. Sadly, human-rights law is less effective at protecting men like David Wails, Joe Ritchie-Bennett and James Furlong, murdered in what Saadallah called a ‘jihad that I done’. Our senior politicians, well-guarded by armed police officers, and our human-rights lawyers, secure in the intellectual sanctity of their North London bubbles, do not pay the price for this folly. It is the general public, unprotected by a legal system they pay for, who suffer. The second dangerously driven vehicle in the Reading car crash is the shameful, amoral history of Anglo-Libyan relations. It is fashionable today to sneer at Tony Blair for his central role in the ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003. Yet former prime minister David Cameron and then home secretary Theresa May enjoy little or no public censure or opprobrium for the equally ill-advised British/French/US intervention in Libya in 2011 and its aftermath. The uprising against Colonel Gaddafi, by a ragtag and bobtail of Islamists, nationalists and tribal leaders, appeared doomed to defeat until French president Nicolas Sarkozy, Cameron and a slightly more reluctant President Obama directed NATO air power against the Libyan Air Force. This tipped the conflict decisively in favour of armed fighters on the ground, including eventual terrorists Saadallah, the Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem. A significant number of British-Libyans fought both in the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime and in the conflicts that have scarred Libya since. It is unclear if then home secretary Theresa May sought to prevent would-be fighters leaving these shores for Libya, and what risk assessment was taken in allowing them to return. Some Islamist fighters have claimed they were allowed to leave the UK after control orders restricting their movements were lifted. In 2014, eventual Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi was even rescued by the Royal Navy and taken to Malta. What investigation was conducted into Libyans, such as Saadallah, who sought asylum here after their country collapsed into chaos? The Reading and Manchester terrorist attacks should also bring to an end two myths propagated by the identitarian left and fellow-travelling Islamists. The first, which became fashionable after the 7/7 London bombings, insists that such attacks are a response to the invasion of Iraq. This ignores the fact that British Islamists had been threatening violence and murder to those they disagreed with since the Rushdie affair way back in 1989 – indeed, the first British jihadist terrorist case dates to 2000. Moreover, in Libya, the UK intervened on the same side as the Islamists. That did not stop the massacres in either Reading or at the Manchester Arena. Determinedly viewing jihadist terrorism as merely ‘blowback’ for our own actions removes agency and responsibility from the terrorists themselves. And it also impedes our understanding of what motivates jihadi terrorists. After all, perhaps the problem is not our beliefs and our actions, but theirs? Secondly, it exploded the myth that the faith of jihadi terrorists is irrelevant... consider the centrality of religious terminology to the Reading attack"
Terror in Reading: look back in anger - "So who is to blame for the terror in Reading? What ‘climate of hate’ provoked this mass stabbing? Which ‘culture’ caused Khairi Saadallah, a refugee from Libya, to pick up a knife and wield it against innocent people sitting in the sunshine in a park? Which newspaper columnists or politicians or tweeters have blood on their hands for spreading prejudiced ideas that get into the heads of people like Saadallah and drive them to kill? Whenever there is a far-right terrorist attack or act of racist violence, it is always followed by a hunt for ‘the cause’; for the book or the idea or the political climate that gave rise to these hateful monsters intent on slaughtering people for no other reason than the colour of their skin or their religious background. It was the Daily Mail’s fault. It was Boris Johnson’s. It was down to Brexit. It was critics of mass immigration who inspired this, who did this. Far-right violence is always viewed as a mere manifestation, a fleeting physical embodiment, of something larger and more evil – of a culture of hatred built or at least enabled by people in the political mainstream. Will we witness a similar moral investigation post-Reading? Will we see the opinion-forming set and political class dig down to discover the intellectual and prejudicial origins of what seems to have been an act of Islamist violence in which three people were massacred for the sin, it appears, of being British citizens?... Of course not. They never do this after an act of Islamist violence. They never apply their investigatory zeal to acts of barbarism carried out by radical Muslims. On the contrary, they urge us not to do that. Don’t ask awkward questions. Don’t wonder why a relatively significant number of young Muslims hate Britain so much that they will attack its people. Don’t even think about these attacks for very long. ‘Don’t look back in anger’, as they said about the slaughter of pop fans at the Manchester Arena in 2017, an attack that is seldom talked about anymore; an attack that has faded from the daily collective consciousness. Whether it’s the Manchester bombing, the London Bridge mass stabbing, the Westminster Bridge vehicle-and-stabbing attack, or this weekend’s terror in a park in Reading, the response is always the same: ‘Lay a flower. Shed a tear. Move on. Don’t think about it. And absolutely don’t get angry about it. What’s wrong with you – are you Islamophobic?’ The double standards are staggering... Remember when thousands of football fans – men, women and children – peacefully marched with wreaths to signal their horror at recent terror attacks? They were denounced as fascists. This is the situation we find ourselves in now: we are told we must organise against far-right violence because these people are fascists, and we are told that if you organise against Islamist violence then you are the fascist. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral and political contortionism. The double standard is best captured by the gaping disparity between what has been said in the UK about the brutal police killing of George Floyd and what is likely to be said about the killing of three people by a suspected Islamic terrorist in Reading. Despite happening 4,000 miles away, Floyd’s killing, and its aftermath, has dominated news coverage here. It has galvanised the activist middle classes. It has become the catalyst for change (smashing statues, ‘decolonising’ curricula, etc). The three victims of a suspected act of Islamist terror, in contrast, will swiftly be forgotten. It always happens. Their deaths will not come to signify anything. Islamist violence is always removed from the moral universe that other political and violent acts are said to inhabit. It apparently has no cause, no meaning, no impact beyond the sad deaths it causes. It is not to be dwelt on, far less made the subject of any kind of wide-ranging public discussion. A culture of amnesia is deployed almost instantly in the wake of Islamist terror attacks. People’s emotions are policed (don’t get angry), their speech is monitored (don’t be ‘Islamophobic’), and they are encouraged to move on and forget. ‘Don’t look back in anger.’ Which really means: ‘Don’t look back.’ Make no mistake: this invoking of amnesia, this memory-holing of Islamist violence, is designed to suppress difficult discussion about social and communal tensions in 21st-century Britain... It is significant, surely, that the Reading attack occurred at the end of a week in which the cultural elite and chattering classes continually told us that Britain is a disgusting racist country and all white people are complicit in racism. There is a relationship, surely, between the anti-Western self-loathing that is now so fashionable among the intellectual elites and the rise of Islamist extremists in the UK and other European countries who view the West with hateful, violent contempt. It is interesting, surely, that Islamist violence against ordinary Brits should have intensified just as the political elites promoted new cultures of grievance that depict ethnic-minority groups, and especially Muslims, as victims of an ignorance and prejudice that is rife among ordinary Brits. It is important, surely, that a country that has largely given up on the project of assimilating migrants and their offspring into British values and culture, in favour of promoting an ideology of multiculturalism that invites people to remain in their own values bubble, should have a problem with community separatism, community tension, and even anti-British violence."
What isn't being said about the Reading attack victims? | The Spectator - "Imagine if on Saturday evening a white neo-Nazi had stabbed three men to death. Imagine, furthermore, if in the wake of the killings it had turned out that all three of the victims were gay. Or ‘members of the LGBT community’, to use the lexicon of the time. And then imagine if two days later nobody in the UK or anywhere else was very interested in any of this. So what if the victims were all gay? Why bother sifting around for motives. What are you trying to say? Bigot. Well something that might well be analogous to that happened in Reading on Saturday evening and over the days since. On Saturday evening, Khairi Saadallah went on a stabbing spree in Forbury Gardens, Reading. His victims were three gay men, James Furlong, David Wails and Joe Ritchie-Bennett... So far there has been almost no interest expressed in the possible motives of the attacker. Quite possibly there is a mental health component. In which case I would expect that to be looked into. Quite possibly there will be some drugs-related component. In which case I would expect the usual voices to demand an investigation into that. But anything else to see here? Any other reason why a migrant from Libya who was given asylum in the UK might want to go around stabbing gay men? Well who would even ask such questions? What do you want to find? Bigot. So far the most analysis there has been has been to inform us all of the wonderfulness of the victims. We can learn that the victims were not just ‘proud gay men’ who attended Reading Pride, but that at least one of them – Furlong – was also ‘a strong advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement.’ Perhaps Saadallah didn’t get that memo. Perhaps if he had known how involved in social activism his victims were then he would have left them alone and stabbed some people who never much bothered with such things, or kept themselves to themselves... the BBC managed to talk about the three Reading victims without once saying that the police think they might have been targeted because they were gay... It’s a matter of hierarchies. And the gays aren’t as high up this one as people like to think."
Reading stabbings: Khairi Saadallah refused appeal against whole-life term - "The court heard Islamic extremist Saadallah "executed" the men as an "act of religious jihad"."
Reading park killer had long history of violence - "In 2019, police recovered a mobile phone from Saadallah that he had used to view social-media images of himself in Libya as a boy, holding firearms, wearing military fatigues, and showing off bullets arranged into a letter "K" for "Khairi". By then, he had spent years in and out of prison for a range of violent offences, including:
multiple assaults on police officers and emergency workers
racially aggravated harassment
possessing knives
causing suffering to animals
On one occasion, while being arrested, he called a female officer a "slave" and spat in her face, with the victim saying it was the "vilest thing" she had been subjected to in the police... The day before his release in June, two weeks before the attack, he was told in a letter that the home secretary had "decided that your deportation is conducive to the public good" but it was not legally possible given conditions in Libya. A fellow inmate, Anthony Bloomfield, says that, in the months before he was released, Saadallah:
openly threatened knife violence
discussed "jihad"
said he wanted to "rape Britain"
Speaking to BBC News, Bloomfield recalls Saadallah telling others: If he "could get away with it, he'd kill as many people as possible" "He'd be the front line for when it comes to drawing a sword and drawing blood and attacking people" "People used to laugh at it as a joke," Bloomfield says. But maybe it was a "bit more serious than we took him for"... The night before the attack, local officers visited Saadallah after his brother Aiman rang police to raise concerns about his mental state. His brother, Aiman, who raised the alarm, says his warning was "very serious". "I said that my brother was at risk of harming himself or others," he tells BBC News. "I asked for the police to detain him under the Mental Health Act because he was in no state to be left by himself. "I do believe that a lot could have been done. "And, if it had, lives would have been saved that day. "And I'm saying this not to defend my brother. "But I think victims and victims' families deserve to know the truth."... Examined by psychiatrists, he was found to have no mental illness. Earlier symptoms suggesting otherwise had been short-lived and attributable to drug misuse at the relevant times...
He had an "antisocial personality disorder" and had "rather crudely attempted to feign madness in police custody"
His "offences were conducted in a pre-meditated, planned and carefully executed manner".
He "knew that what he was doing was wrong"...
The judge found Saadallah had committed a terrorist attack motivated by his Islamist extremist ideology."
Liberals claim that the way to stop Islamist terrorism is to welcome more "refugees", so the terrorists won't be upset at the country
We may never know why he did it
Britain’s Libyan Islamist problem - "British Islamism has undoubtedly established itself as a major problem in England’s two largest cities – London and Birmingham. In London, it is the capital’s eastern boroughs – Tower Hamlets and Newham – that are a particular cause for concern. Both incorporate largely segregated Muslim communities, with many having their origins in deprived agricultural parts of Sylhet in north-eastern Bangladesh. A number of Birmingham wards, such as Springfield and Sparkbrook in the city’s Hall Green parliamentary constituency, contain poorly integrated, predominantly Pakistani-origin, deprived neighbourhoods. Much of Birmingham’s Pakistani-heritage population originates from economically dislocated rural villages in the Azad Kashmir region. But a notable trend from another one of England’s major cities, Manchester, is Libyan Islamist extremism. Indeed, the UK’s counter-terrorism police chief, assistant commissioner, Neil Basu, has previously suggested that the ‘British Libyan jihadi nexus’ had not been given sufficient attention by British public authorities. Salman Abedi was born in Manchester after his family was granted asylum in the UK from Libya, where his father, Ramadan, supported Islamist forces seeking to overthrow Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi’s regime. With the help of his brother, Hashem, who is currently serving a minimum prison sentence of 55 years, Salman carried out the 2017 Manchester Arena Islamist suicide bombing, which killed 22 people. British Libyan dual national Abdalraouf Abdallah was imprisoned in 2016 for helping others to join Islamic State militants in Syria, but is soon due to be released. Abdallah set up a ‘hub’ of communication for would-be jihadist fighters – including his imprisoned brother Mohammed – from his home in Manchester... The May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing did not emerge from a vacuum. Clusters of British Libyan Islamists, associated with organisations such as Islamic State, al-Qaeda and the formerly proscribed anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) have become embedded in parts of inner-city Manchester. The Abedi brothers, behind one of the most devastating terrorist attacks on British soil, were conditioned in this Islamist milieu. Having a background of close family links with extremist figures in their own community, they proceeded to develop bonds with local fundamentalists – with Salman even visiting Abdalraouf Abdallah at two separate prisons. Britain’s Libyan Islamist problem is a fine example of how its exuberant altruism has been, in some ways, to its detriment. But it also exposes how the British political establishment has traditionally overestimated how willing people from vastly different religio-political contexts will be to integrate into mainstream democratic society, and underestimated the need for a robust social-cohesion policy as a pivotal element of counter-extremism strategy. This has even led to some describing Britain as the ‘weak link’ in Europe’s counter-extremism network. This all tells a story of the misplaced idealism contained in the modern politics of diversity – one which fails to understand the potentially devastating social effects of poorer integration outcomes in Britain’s failed inner-city neighbourhoods. Whether it is Bethnal Green in east London, Sparkhill in inner-city Birmingham or Cheetham Hill in Manchester, the UK has been sleeping at the wheel on this front. The government needs to take the existence of ‘parallel communities’ and ‘counter-societies’ more seriously – failed neighbourhoods characterised by social segregation, material deprivation and historically high levels of Islamist activity. Looking to the future, Britain must adopt a hardheaded approach to border security. Along with the prioritisation of English language skills, the nature of legal, social, political and cultural norms in foreign regions of origin should be given serious consideration in a revamped immigration system that has integration at the heart of it. An integral part of post-Brexit national security should be a significantly reformed asylum system that better prioritises social cohesion and public safety... The core essence of state-supported multiculturalism – promoting cultural difference over social cohesion and prioritising minority rights over collective responsibilities – has not served Britain well. To support its efforts to create a more socially trusting and democratically stable society, the UK government needs a security-oriented immigration and asylum framework which better prioritises collective British safety."
