Delingpole on Friday: Woolwich – it was all Nick Robinson’s fault…

OK so which would you say is the worse crime?

a) killing an unarmed man with meat cleavers in a London street and then trying to slice his head off?
b) describing the alleged killers as “of Muslim appearance” on BBC news?

Call me old-fashioned but I would have gone for a). Which just goes to show how badly out of tune with the times I am because the correct answer is in fact b). I know so because I checked on Twitter.
Sure there were one or two reactionary old farts like me coming up with the usual hysterical guff about how barbaric and awful and shocking it was. But the clever Tweeters knew straight away what the real problem was.
It was that bloody Nick Robinson, that’s who was really to blame for all this. He’d actually gone on to BBC news and used the phrase – “of Muslim appearance.” Which as any half way educated person could tell you is about as inflammatory and wrong as you can get.
For a start, how can anyone be “of Muslim appearance”? It’s a religion, damn it, not a race, which embraces everyone from dark-skinned Africans in Nigeria to oriental-looking islanders in Indonesia to pallid Caucasian types in Chechnya. (I’m not sure whether any of these sophisticated Tweeters went into such detail but they could have done, I’ll bet. Probably they’ve got a really good degree in Cultural Relativism studies at SOAS – or similar – because they’re not ignorant these kids. Fuck no! They went to Bali and Kathmandu in their gap year)
And for another thing, what an outrageous assumption to make when the facts of the case were still unknown! I mean, OK, sure, there’d been eyewitness reports of the men yelling “Allahu Akbar” as they went about their business; and, all right, there was video footage of one of the men telling passers-by “We swear by the mighty Allah we will never stop fighting until you leave us alone.”
Even so, that’s still no reason for Robinson to have jumped to the conclusion that this crime had anything whatsoever to do with the men’s religion. Or perceived religion. What if they were in fact Christians or Buddhists or atheists trying to give the religion of peace a bad name? Or, supposing for a moment they were Muslims, how do we know had their faith had anything to do with the killing? And even if it did, why draw attention to it? Like, when a Christian murders somebody, does his religion get mentioned? What about Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper: he said he heard the voice of God in his head telling him to do it – but no one ever mentions his crime as a Christian crime, do they?
On occasions like this I really do feel a bit of an intellectual lightweight, I must say. There am I, stuck in the fuddy-duddy mindset where you see a 25-year old father of a one year old boy being hacked to death with meat cleavers on a busy London street and all you can do is respond with the gut feeling that “This is wrong. This is totally wrong!”
Whereas if I were a bit younger, less reactionary and I’d had a proper educational grounding somewhere serious like the LSE, what I would have realised is that you just can’t judge things like this at face value. Sure, there’s a temptation to dwell on what a terrible way to go it must have been for that poor young man; to think about what his family must be going through – his wife and mother especially, who will surely be re-living his imagined death every day from now on till they die; to get quite angry, even, about the perverted political values and warped mindset that led to this barbaric act – and also about the cultural relativism that helped make it possible. But succumbing to this temptation would, of course, be a serious mistake.
No, if you’re a truly enlightened citizen of the modern world, the correct way to respond is the way all those sophisticated intellectual types on Twitter did. You recognise straightaway that the horror of the murder is just a distraction from the real issue. The real issue being, of course, that this regrettable event was the sadly inevitable consequence of Britain’s racism, intolerance and Islamophobia – as demonstrated by Nick Robinson’s bigoted, ignorant and inflammatory use of that reprehensible “of Muslim appearance” comment on BBC news for which he has since, quite correctly, apologised.
Until, as a society, we learn to face up to our collective responsibility for Drummer Lee Rigby’s death, young men like Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale ought to have every right to go on drawing attention to this rampant injustice in whatever way they deem fit. It is frankly outrageous that in order to make their point they had to resort to the blunt instrument of execution by motor vehicle and butcher’s knife. A truly considerate society would have made public funds available for them to afford some properly functioning automatic weaponry. That way these gallant, oppressed freedom fighters could have made their vibrant and refreshingly direct contribution to our national debate with a lot less fuss and a lot less mess – perhaps preventing the disgraceful public overreaction we have witnessed over the last couple of days, everywhere from the hateful, violent racist English Defence League to the hardcore, fascist right-wing BBC.