Woolwich

Woolwich

A young soldier has been killed in a crazed, unimaginably brutal and hideous attack. His two attackers tried to behead and disembowel his body. One of them was filmed. He said:

"We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reason 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 must fight them. I apologise that women had to witness this today.

"But in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don't care about you."

He gestured with a bloody left hand. In his right were a cleaver and a large knife.

Twenty years old. Unarmed. It is impossible to imagine what and how his family must feeling. The reports, photos and film have left numbness and incomprehension.

David Cameron has said that we will never buckle in the face of such attacks. Easy to say from behind the bullet-proof glass and armed guards. Easy to say on the assumption that this is an isolated attack. A couple of fanatics, operating on their own initiative, a random killing, a one-off.

The unthinkable is that this might be a new way of terrorists operating. Impossible to track, unpredictable, off the radar, absolutely unpredictable. Impossible to secure against. A nightmare where individual people will either suspect no-one, or everyone.

It was impossible not to think, before the film of the attacker was posted, that some sort of religious motivation was likely. Any sort of professional hit, or gang or drug-related violence wouldn’t see the attackers waiting at the scene twenty minutes for the armed police to arrive, then charging at them in order to get shot. The red mist of religion inspired hate has ruined three young lives, although it is difficult to feel any compassion for the attackers, who are unlikely to see freedom for the remainder of their days.

"You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don't care about you."

I don’t think we’ve ever been entirely safe. We’re not as safe now as we sometimes have been.

We can’t remove our government, not without replacing them with replicas, we now have just the one flavour. They’ve not cared about us for a long time now, only about themselves. We’re grown ups, we should all recognise that.

Perhaps, instead of killing defenceless twenty year olds, if your gripe is with our government, you should attack them. Whatever the goal, the motive, the thinking (if any) – nothing good can ever come out of acts like this. Nothing is better now than it was before committing this atrocity.