Hurting and killing people for their beliefs is wrong. Period. When somebody launches a terrorist attack and openly states why he’s doing it, I’m not going to pretend I don’t know his motive. No matter what that motive is. Facts don’t care about my feelings.
A number of casualties have been reported after a van plowed through a group of pedestrians in London Sunday.
One person has been arrested after a vehicle struck pedestrians in Seven Sister Road in north London. The incident took place outside a mosque, according to Mail Online.
Now it sounds like this attack was intended as revenge for the London terror attack a couple of weeks ago:
Video shows an angry crowd pinning down the apparent van driver after his vehicle ploughed into worshippers at a London mosque #FinsburyPark pic.twitter.com/BTT6JH3ddy
— Sky News (@SkyNews) June 19, 2017
If this guy openly stated, “I want to kill Muslims,” I’m not going to be like our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters. I’m not going to ignore his openly stated motive or try to explain it away. I’m not going to blame the victims, just because some other people who share their beliefs did something bad.
This man is responsible for what he did. I condemn it, and I condemn him.
As Jim Geraghty at NRO puts it:
He became, quite literally, what he thought he was fighting, the kind of murderous lunatic who tries to kill as many people as possible in the name of a cause.
I don’t expect this attitude to change anything. The next time there’s an Islamic terror attack, we’ll get reports of the terrorists yelling “Allahu Akbar” and other clear indicators of motive. And then we’ll get the usual suspects telling us we can never really know why it happened, and we can’t blame all Muslims (even though you haven’t blamed all Muslims). We’ll get the candlelit vigils and the hashtags and the rest of that ineffectual nonsense. Over and over and over.
And now, I guess we’ll get bloodthirsty idiots like this one, doling out their own twisted form of justice.
I reject double standards and I’m not going to adopt one. Islamic terrorism is wrong, and so is anti-Islamic terrorism. What James T. Hodgkinson did was wrong, and what this man did was wrong. Political violence is wrong.
Wrong is wrong.
You have the right to be angry, but you don’t have the right to attack people for believing things you don’t like. Full stop.