In the wake of the third terror attack in our country so far this year, and the second since the beginning of the election process, I find myself numb, pained, in a kind of quiet shock, just wishing it would all end. The thing is, on June 8th, we have a golden opportunity to make a start towards safer times, if we can only grasp it.
If nothing else, recent events have made plain to me that our current policy of intervention abroad – of violence in response to violence, to be blunt – isn’t working. In fact, it’s actually making things worse. It’s helping create the conditions and the attitudes that breed extremists. It’s perpetuating and even magnifying the situation, and has to stop.
Let me give a simple analogy, a little crude perhaps, but hopefully one that’ll make things clear. Imagine a classroom. Imagine a few pupils making trouble, annoying the teacher and their fellow students, disrupting things, maybe even hurting people. Then imagine the teacher’s response is to punish the entire class, not just those causing the problems. What do you imagine the results of that would be?
I don’t have to imagine. I experienced that at secondary school, when a vindictive PE teacher responded to two or three troublemakers by not letting anyone change until the end-of-school bell went. Many perfectly innocent pupils missed their busses home, inconveniencing their families in the process. A man already disliked became even more so by a greater number of pupils, with more disgruntled students more likely to act up, and the difficult ones worsening.
In short, his actions were entirely self-defeating, entirely counter-productive, exactly as our current approach to terrorism is. In hurting innocents as well as the extremists, we’re fermenting ever more resentment, which they can channel right back at us. Our response is to bomb more, to hurt more innocents, and thus brew more resentment, and the cycle just keeps worsening.
Also included in the category of innocents we hurt are the members of the religion the extremists are warping, abusing to their own ends. Real Islam is not terrorism. Real Islam is found in the Muslims who opened their homes, their mosques, their arms to those in need during the attacks, who provided shelter and food and comfort without asking a thing in return. To bundle them in with the extremists is an injustice that only serves to deepen the problems, not ease them.
The irony is, we have our own extremists seeking to divide, in the likes of Katie Hopkins, UKIP’s Paul Nuttall, Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail, and Rupert Murdoch of the Sun, our own hate preachers sowing dissention and distrust, and if anything, they’re more dangerous than the terrorists. They’re exploiting our fears to their own ends, with absolutely no regard for the fallout, no matter how big.
Daesh are a threat. The right-wing hate-mongers so dominant in our media are as much as if not more of one. The right-wing hardliners in our goverment, however, are the biggest threat of all. It’s our goverment selling arms to Saudi Arabia, a repressive, genocidal regime almost certainly supplying and funding terrorism. It’s our goverment maintaining Jihadis in our country to use in Africa and the Middle East, and ignoring the danger they pose right here. It’s our government exploiting war for profit, destabilising entire countries in the process, our own increasingly among them. It’s our government that’s gotten so soullessly corporate that only money matters, regardless of how much blood it’s steeped in.
All of that finds personification in our sociopathic Prime Minister, Theresa May, whose campaign has been entirely woven from fear, smear and lies, who won’t debate, who won’t face the public, who controls and hides and censors, who cosies up to the orange lunatic in the White House, who right now is gleefully exploiting our pain to further his ends.
Theresa May is by far and away the greatest danger facing us right now, a ruthlessly amoral authoritarian who has pared away at our police, our military, our intelligence apparatus and our NHS so much they’re struggling to cope, thus making it easier for the terrorists to attack, just as they have done. She won’t listen, she won’t think, she won’t care, and she definitely won’t keep us safe. Quite the reverse.
There is someone who will, though, someone with a proven record in negotiations, who helped bring about peace in Ireland, who will listen and think and care. They’ll even listen to those they disagree with, as that’s how you build up enough understanding to find a true, lasting solution. The media call them a ‘terrorist sympathiser’, but if you seek to find a solution, to understand, a measure of sympathy for where they’re coming from, for their motivations, is surely necessary? It doesn’t mean you agree with their actions, that you won’t condemn them, but that you have some idea of why they’re acting the way they do, and are better placed to deal with them. Surely that’s to be desired?
His name is Jeremy Corbyn, and with our current electoral system, he’s the only person other than Mrs May with a genuine chance to get into Number 10. I firmly believe he will make a difference, and his restraint will serve us and others far better than Mrs May’s aggression. Certainly, having nukes under the control of someone who wouldn’t use them, rather than someone who would, is infinitely preferable.
Personally, I don’t want us to have nukes full stop – I think they’re a waste, a weapon we can never, ever use. If we do, everyone loses. They level cities, decimate hundreds of square miles, kill millions and render land unlivable for millenia – how they’ve become, in the minds of some, our only line of defence, is bewildering. And terrifying.
That among those are our current goverment, intent on being put back in on June 8th, is most terrifying of all. If we truly value our safety and our future, and that of others, we have to get rid of them, and get Corbyn in. In four days time, we have a chance to save ourselves.
Please don’t miss it.
Foxy Musings 