Yet another terrorist attack in Europe has unfolded, this time in Manchester. The mayhem unleashed by a single suicide bomber in the Manchester Arena on Monday night claimed the lives of 22 people, and left more than 50 injured.
The frightened British authorities, who have recently been busy countering the “Russian threat” by sending troops and hundreds of armored vehicles to the Baltic states and Poland, are now looking for an opportunity to protect themselves.
In an interview with BBC Radio 5, a former member of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, Lee Doderidge, announced that according to his sources the attack on the stadium in Manchester was carefully planned. It is noteworthy that no security measures were taken to protect those who decided to visit the show. One eyewitness, Chris Pawley, in an interview with Fox News, boldly stated that there was no security at all.
Although just two months separate this latest incident of senseless violence with the attack on the Westminster Bridge near the British Parliament, which resulted in five people killed and another 40 wounded, British authorities did not take any precautionary measures that could allow them to protect the public better. As before, it appears the government has done little about Britain being divided into ghettos, where foreigners are forced to address all of their troubles on their own.
Birmingham, or rather, the “Birmingham Caliphate,” as the British press dubbed it, has become in recent years a European Mecca for Muslims. Here we can see the newly formed Muslim enclave in the south-east of Birmingham – Sparkbrook, which was formerly known as a paragon of multiculturalism. Today this area is known as the cradle of British jihadists who refuse to call themselves British, those willing to die in the “struggle for faith”. Ethnic Englishmen have abandoned this area since they have suddenly become unwelcomed strangers on their soil. But all that really matters for British politicians is that local Muslims are willingly voting for the sitting British government, which has turned a blind eye to the spread of radical views in the very heart of England.
This strip of land, which occupies only a few square miles, used to be the typical working suburb with monotonous rows of red three-story houses, but it’s anything but typical anymore. Today’s Birmingham is a city divided into several large zones. The fastest growing community in the city is the Muslim community, with every fifth inhabitant of Birmingham professing Islam. A few years ago, one of Fox News’ talking heads was even forced to apologize for him describing Birmingham as a purely Muslim city where there’s no representatives of other religions.
All through the 1990s, refugees from troubled regions of the world, including Somalia, were moving here to enlarge the already massive Pakistani and Indian communities. It goes without saying that the decade of instability in the Middle East and the artificially created Muslim crisis in Europe have drastically aggravated the situation here.
These days unemployment is soaring in Birmingham , and young people, some of which are longtime drug addicts have nowhere to go except in the streets. It is here, as police officers say, that the Muslim youth is being transformed into radicals, since sooner or later every child regardless of their background receives a dose of terrorist propaganda. Usually this happens in educational institutions, which radical preachers infiltrate effortlessly. Recently, the whole of Birmingham was shocked when local sermons urging the murder of “infidels” ended up on the Internet. As the scandal got worse, a number of Islamist teachers were fired, but how many more of them still profess these “teachings”?
Just recently, buses of the Al-Muhajiroun Salafi radical organization were traveling up and down Coventry Road, one of the busiest streets in Birmingham. And even though it was pushed out of the streets by local authorities, the radical network established by Islamists across the city has not gone anywhere. In Muslim neighborhoods, which police officers do not dare enter, it’s easy to get lost, and radical mosques will always point a lost soul toward massacre.
It was this district that “presented” the country with more than a dozen terrorists. The police are fully aware of the fact that some of the local residents received training in ISIS camps and that some of those have real life combat experience. At various points in time the organizers of terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels – Abdelhamid Abaaoud and Mohamed Abrini, were roaming these streets before going onward to war against the world for what they believed was “pure Islam.”
In the summer of 2014, when the so-called Islamic State began its propaganda campaign after the seizure of vast territories in Iraq and Syria, it began filming its executions, beheading all sorts of people, including Western journalists. The executioner on the tapes had a distinguishable British accent and, therefore, received a lot of nicknames in the media, including Abu Abdullah Al Britani, Jihadi John, etc. Only a year later Western intelligence agencies were able to establish the identity of Jihadi John. It turned out that he was a graduate of Westminster University, a programmer named Mohammed Emwazi.
Undoubtedly, any terrorist attack provokes a wave of anger and indignation in those willing to live their day-to-day lives, and it’s perfectly justified. But one cannot judge the whole population of Birmingham based on a small number of its representatives who have committed the unthinkable at certain stages of their lives. Who deserves condemnation, however, are the British authorities, who were so busy jumping on the anti-Russian bandwagon that they could care less about the rapid spread of terrorist propaganda a hundred miles from the Tower of London. It’s about time to admit one’s wrongdoings and address the situation at home before any more innocent souls are killed in yet another act of senseless violence.
Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”