This summer’s gruesome defining image
Last week, millions of British people woke up to a see a creature from a nightmare on the front page of their newspapers. Every paper that day had a picture of a crazed black man in a woolen hat carrying a meat cleaver. He had apparently just hacked a man to death. A typical headline was ‘Blood on his hands; hatred in his heart’.
The gruesome murder was committed in broad daylight in Woolwich, South-East London. But the most chilling part of the picture were his hands which were completely stained with blood. It was as if he had soaked his hands up to the elbows in a bowl of human blood.
The authorities are still trying to piece together exactly what happened. It seems that one black man deliberately drove his car into a man walking on the pavement just outside the historic Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich .The victim was an off-duty soldier.
When he had knocked the victim over, the assailant was joined by an accomplice who drove up in another car. They then leaned over the corpse. Passers-by at first thought that they were trying to help him by offering first aid. In fact, they were hacking his head off with the knives and meat cleavers. They then dragged his body into the middle of the road. But bizarrely, instead of running away, the assailants waited for the police and wandered round proudly waving knives and a gun. They even invited people to photograph them.
One of the killers delivered the following speech into a camera: “We swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We apologise that women had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don’t care about you.”
When armed policemen eventually arrived, they shot, but did not kill, the men and bundled them both away. They are now in hospital.
But this is the era of the citizen journalist. So, as well as the official accounts, a young black eyewitness described the incident in a series of vivid tweets: “Ohhhhh myyyy God!!!! I just see a man with his head chopped off right in front of my eyes!… Right next to a primary school!… The two black bredas run this white guy over then hop out the car and start chopping man’s head off with machete!!…The first guy goes for the female fed (police woman) with the machete and she not even ramping she took man out like robocop, never seen nutn like it!… Then the next breda try buss off the rusty 45 and it just backfires and blows man’s finger clean off… Feds (police) didn’t pet to just take him out!!”
The incident is being described as a terrorist attack. But there are a number of possibilities. The two young black man could just be crazed lone assassins or they could have been studying terrorist literature on the Internet and are freelance “terrorists”. The other possibility is they are part of a genuinely internationally co-ordinated conspiracy. In the coming days it will all become clear.
But the question is, what are two young black man doing having embraced Islam to such an extent they attempt to hack off a man’s head in broad daylight? It is the worst horrors of the Middle East on a British high street. There have always been numbers of black people who convert to Islam in Britain, many of whom get involved whilst they are in prison. But it’s not clear whether these two men are recent converts or are from Muslim regions of Nigeria, etc.
In 2012 the defining image of the summer was Usain Bolt. You saw his picture everywhere, newspapers, magazines, television ads and billboards. It was a celebration of masculine power and strength. But sadly, this summer’s defining image may be a black man with blood dripping from his hands and madness in his eyes.
— Diane Abbott is a British Labour party MP and spokeswoman on public health
