What drove Adebolajo To Kill —In His Own Words
As a Muslim in this time of oppression the topic is a serious one — Adebolajo , the man who killed the soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich and who in the process outraged a country.
The topic is a difficult one, not because explaining it is hard, that is simple, but because the passions of unthinking men, often right wing white men cannot and do not want the view of anyone else apart from another right wing white man. And right wing white men rule the world right now.
To say something contrary to their liking at best means demonisation (cue propaganda words like Islamist, Jihadist, extremists, hate preacher, radical …and any other word that makes it easier for them to destroy your life without good white people being too upset about it) - at worst of course you end up in prison or dead.
So I write this, knowing full well, I will get into a whole heap of trouble someday soon for trying to teach the good white people out there what is really going on.
It was with this in mind that I wanted to understand Adebolajo from his own mouth. As I took my seat in the public gallery of his trial, I admit I had a preconceived idea of him, just like most of those people reading this. I expected a South London thug, a man of low I.Q. who was driven to his abhorrent act by anger at the foreign policy of this country.
I was only partially right.
He was nothing like I thought he would be …
I don’t know why I was so shocked at his words but I was. When he spoke, he spoke in a measured tone, articulately, intelligently and with purpose, he believed more than any man I have ever heard in my life in his cause.
He believed so much in his cause and in his faith, that at times I wondered about my own belief. I had always thought I was a firm believer, but in comparison, sitting there, I wondered if I had ever believed at all —his belief was beyond anything I had seen or experienced in my entire life. I can’t say hearing him, didn’t shake me - it did to my core.
What truly shocked me — apart from his absolute, unshakeable belief, was that as he spoke in court, with the world’s media listening to him, guards around him, knowing he would never see the light of day again, he spoke like a reasonable man, not a mad man, not a fanatic, but a man who did what he did for a cause that he would give his life for.
What I was listening to, was a man whose thought process had led him to conclude, that the only way to stop Britain from killing people abroad was to use violence to stop them — to take up arms.
It was the exact opposite of what I expected. There was no hint of gangland street thug, instead I found a man who spoke like a revolutionary, no different from many others throughout the ages who fought for their causes and all too often took to bloody acts in their struggle.
And this is important….
Stop being angry and think
Not because as Islamophobic right wing nuts will claim about anyone who tries to give some insight into the matter that we are all secretly linked to ISIS, but because, we as a people, humans, need to understand, truly understand what we are dealing with if we want to solve it.
I understand why British people are angry — anger is natural, but it is no replacement for analysis. Worse, propagandists and the political elites who want to continue their barbaric foreign policies abroad use your anger to back their continuation of those very policies. They need you to be angry, angry enough not to think, for thinking men ask questions, angry men don’t.
And so wars keep killing Muslim men, women and children, they in turn grow to hate the west and radicalize and innocents on both sides inevitably keep dying. Nothing changes.
By the time Adebolajo stopped speaking, I realised that he as a person was highly important (I don’t mean that disrespectfully to Lee Rigby’s family), but understanding him, was the key to British people understanding Muslim terrorism and to ending this global war of terror that these right-wing nuts see as a solution.
To stop terrorism you have to be brutally honest. Are we going to deal with the political anger, that produces men like this, or are we going to keep spinning propaganda narratives that stop people thinking of why it is happening.
An unjust world
The world is changing. Muslims are starting to read, to pick up books, to wake up to what is happening across the Muslim world. Muslims are learning about the millions oppressed by western backed dictators, or by our troops, or by countries we support to torture, kidnap or just kill.
They are learning about the millions of Muslim people living in countries that the west invented for them, carved after the first world war. Countries they have no say in. They are learning about how the West enforced these manufactured Muslim states in the following decades by arming brutal strongmen and if that failed — by directly invading.
The dead children in Iraq, the ethnically cleansed in Palestine, the kidnapped and broken families tortured and rotting in dark American prisons across the world (3000 of them). All roads led back to our foreign policy. And that makes people mad, not so called ‘hate preachers’, not the Quran, nor any of these fake propaganda fairy tales — but facts of destroyed lives.
Muslim terrorism is not as the right wing media want to claim, religious fanatics hating the freedom of the west — it is the exact opposite — it is young Muslims, intelligent Muslims, thinking Muslims, who have lost all hope that the West will ever give them their freedom — and who are no longer willing to allow that.
A Cause Worthy Dying For…
In short, there is a Cause. A struggle. A vision and a political trajectory that these men believe in. And that cause without any hope, will turn to violence as sure as night follows day — and history has proven this. In every single struggle where people feel they are denied what is just and right, men take to violence to fight that injustice and Adebolajo was proof of this. No man will ever be denied freedom forever. He will invent a method to obtain it.
Adebolajo’s anger is not an aberration of British policy, he was a creation of it, root and branch. Extreme policies that have denied the freedom of millions have led to an extreme reaction to those policies.
These are my thoughts, you will have your own, but I will leave you with some of the words that I heard Adebolajo say, as I sat in the courtroom scribbling them down, for you to ponder on yourself:
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Adebolajo in his own words — ‘Why i killed Lee Rigby’
Prosecution Lawyer: “How could you be sure that you would kill a soldier and not a civilian”
Adebolajo: I could not be totally sure. I believed he was a soldier because of what he was wearing and where he was, no soldier can be totally sure, just like your armies cannot be sure of who you kill when you fire your missiles into peoples homes, but I had prayed all night to Allah to only allow me to kill a soldier and not a civilian. I begged Allah that I would not kill an innocent person and Allah granted me that wish.”
Prosecution: The family is in court today how do you feel
Adebolajo: I bear them no animosity. They loved him, just like every soldier has someone who loves them. I do not want any harm to come to them. I understand that I killed someone they loved, but Muslims feel pain too and we have people we love too. I know I killed him, but perhaps my actions will stop this Government sending troops over to kill Muslims and thus I may have saved their life and I may have saved the life of the soldiers being sent there — and Allah knows best.
Prosecution: Why did you have an unloaded gun that could not be fired
Adebolajo: We took the gun because we knew whoever held that gun would die, because the police would see a man with a gun and shoot him. Me and my brother argued the night before as to who would have the gun because we both wanted to die in God’s cause.
Prosection: You did this to intimidate the public.
Adebolajo: The only reason I did this was because of foreign policy. Not to intimidate the public. If I wanted to intimidate the public, I would have killed a member of the public, I didn't — I chose a soldier. We were both soldiers.
Prosection: The solider could cause you no harm.
Adebolago : No, he was no danger to me, but he was a danger to Muslims abroad. Jihad is not about me, it is about the weak and the oppressed as written in Quran in Surah Nisa.
Prosection : Why did you think it was important to talk on video about this.
Adebolago: The Government would have lied to the public and claimed my actions were due to something else other than British foreign policy. They would have claimed it was because “they hate our freedom, or our way of life that we hate McDonald's” — that is not true, it is only because Jihad becomes obligatory for the sake of God when British foreign policy attacks Muslims.
Prosecution: What peaceful methods did you take to bring about the change to foreign policy?
Adebolago: I went to a number of marches in the hope it would bring some change, but I was arrested. I swear by Allah the Police lied about me attacking them, I didn't attack them but I was still sentenced. It was then I started reflecting that this would not work. This was the actions of the impotent and that Blair had not listened to a million people marching let alone me.
