Britain’s day of reckoning
May 26, 2013, 6:33 pmThe brutal killing by two fanatics of a British soldier in London on Wednesday has triggered an anti-Muslim backlash in the UK. There have been scores of incidents where the Muslims became targets of outrageous slurs and even physical harassment. The latest terror attack has brought the anti-Muslim campaign closer to the tipping point and the law-abiding Muslims are living in fear.
Wednesday’s incident has rightly been condemned by the civilised world. It was an act of savage terror perpetrated in broad daylight and the criminals responsible for it as well as their confederates, if any, must be brought to justice. Deterrent action is called for. Terrorists may not be able to carry out large scale attacks on civilian targets in the UK owing to the extraordinary security measures Britain has adopted following London bombings, but they could unsettle an open society with attacks like the recent one against which there is no antidote; all it takes to plunge London, or any other city for that matter, into chaos is a group of terrorists ready to die for their macabre cause.
In July 2009, the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that terrorism had to be fought in Afghanistan so as to make the streets of London safe. But, that strategy has gone awry as evident from the increasing vulnerability of Britain in spite of its involvement in anti-terror operations overseas. Living with terror is the price that country is paying for having gone steady, as it were, with the various terrorist outfits all these years. It may have thought that the best way to protect its interests was to harbour terrorists on its soil in spite of their crimes against other nations so that they would be beholden to it. Its duplicitous policy towards terrorism has not paid dividends. Instead, the great wen has become a den of criminals from the four corners of the earth. Having sowed the wind, Britain is now reaping the whirlwind.
While the Cameron government is promising to remove the scourge of mindless terror, Lord Naseby, the Chairman of the All Party British Sri Lanka Parliamentary Group, has in a letter to British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, pointed out that Adele Balasingham, a key LTTE leader, responsible for crimes against civilians including forcible child recruitment, is living comfortably in southern England. It will be interesting to see what the British government has got to say to this.
British Prime Minister David Cameron, upon receiving the news of the Woolwich murder on Wednesday, minced no words when he said, sounding just like Churchill: "We have suffered these attacks before, we have always beaten them back … we will not be cowed, we will never buckle." Yes, Britain must beat its terrorists back with might and main and the democratic world must not give in to terrorism. But, Cameron’s reaction to the killing of one British soldier is in sharp contrast to the manner in which Britain acted while the LTTE, having assassinated Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar and made an attempt on Army Commander Gen. Sarath Fonseka’s life, was killing scores of military and police personnel in claymore mine attacks in violation of a western-backed truce. The British government together with other so-called Tokyo Co-Chairs forced Sri Lanka to stick to that crumbling ceasefire and talk peace with the perpetrators of those crimes! How would Britain react if terrorists operating on its soil happened to assassinate a British prime minister and a foreign secretary, massacre civilians in churches and streets, bomb trains and buses and carry out mine attacks on its military and police personnel?
It is high time Britain, while doing everything in its power to ensure the protection of its citizens, abandoned its double standards on terrorism and stopped harbouring terrorists who commit heinous crimes against other countries.