Alan Henning Did Not Have to Die

Let me start by saying that Alan Henning’s death was tragic and brutal. From what I have heard he was a lovely, cheerful guy wanting to only help the people of Syria and my heart goes out to his family. No one wants to hear that a loved one has been killed – never mind in such a brutal way. It is a difficult thing to deal with and live with.

But my heart also goes out to the families of the hundreds of others ISIS has coldly slaughtered in as much a brutal way as Alan Henning – if not worse.

Most of these victims are nameless to us -there was hardly any media coverage, no vigils, no remembrance, no outcry -maybe because they did not have the same privileges as Alan Henning: White, British and (dare I say it) non-Muslim. Yet on the other side of the land all three privileges also got him killed.

And we ask ourselves why? Why did ISIS kill an innocent man? Why did they hate him being white, British and a non-Muslim? And we look at each other shocked cursing the brutality of ISIS, the cruelty, exclaiming how we have never seen anything like this kind of inhumanity.

Understandably so. Because here in Britain, or indeed in the West, we have not seen the kind of brutality and oppression that has plagued the Muslim world for decades.

We have not witnessed the killings in Iraq, bodies of the dead mutilated and tortured, the Western soldiers who admitted shooting Iraqi civilians and ‘keeping scores’.

We did not witness the half a million people dead, corpses decomposing in houses, gardens and on the streets, the smell of death in the air. Bodies rotting where they had fallen – men, women and children, many half eaten by wild dogs.

We did not witness our families being shot in front of our eyes, our sister being raped by a Western soldier and then killed.

In Palestine we have not witnessed over 60 years of war crimes by Israel against innocent civilians, while the West continually supplies them with millions in aid and weapons. We did not even witness the tiny bloodied bodies of more than 500 children who were slaughtered in the current Israeli attacks while Western politicians’ spoke of Israel’s right to defend itself.

In Egypt and Syria we did not witness the propping up of Western backed dictators who tortured and oppressed their people to death, while they danced to their Western masters strings.

Killed, slaughtered, tortured, brutalized, bombed, bulldozed, occupied…thousands and thousands of nameless victims. These are the nameless victims of Western foreign policy.

So yes we are understandably shocked when we hear what happened to Alan Henning because things like this hardly happen to us. In Britain we are free.

The reality is that ISIS is small fry compared to Western foreign policy in Muslim lands. It is not even the most evil group on the planet.

Muslims are getting upset over it because the pressure has been put on us and we are responding to it by desperately trying to prove it is not in our name. I can’t blame the community. When a people are constantly under attack the natural response almost becomes a cringe like ‘oh not us again, please leave us alone – we are not like that.’

And we conveniently forget that ISIS is a response to the oppression in Muslim lands. Let us not forget the chilling words uttered by Alan Henning:

“I am Alan Henning. Because of our Parliament’s decision to attack the Islamic State, I as a member of the British public will now pay the price for that decision”

Yes Alan Henning was a tragedy but we need to ask ourselves some hard, brutal questions about our interference in other lands, about our foreign policy. Ask ourselves why Alan’s death is far more well known than those of the thousands that have died at the hands of Western foreign policy and groups like ISIS that it creates.

The truth is Alan’s death did not have to happen. Our government’s reckless actions, and historic role of our country’s foreign policy in denying Muslims their freedom, have meant that Alan is no longer with us.

It isn't us in the West that are under attack and oppressed. It is the Muslim world that suffers this fate. And this oppression causes a small minority to turn to violence. And groups like ISIS emerge. Groups that Western powers need to justify their atrocities.

And then Alan Henning happens and the most oppressed people on the planet are seen as the worst oppressors. This is what we call ‘the war on terror’.

It is about time Muslims stopped apologising, stood up and started demanding their freedom. Because we are not responsible for ISIS or Alan Henning. Western foreign policy is.