Monkey see monkey do, or an eye for an eye
[ by Charles Cameron — or, I suppose you could say, symmetry ]
.
The Finsbury Park Mosque attacker drove a car into a crowd because he was disgusted by the Westminster Bridge attacker who drove a car into a crowd:
Ah well, bin Laden back in the day had a more sophisticated form of the same practice. As he put it in a speech to America::
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Sources:
SPLC, What We Know: Finsbury Park Attack Telegraph, Westminster attack: Everything we know so far Zenpundit, Close reading, Synoptic- and Sembl-style
June 20th, 2017 at 10:45 pm
I think it possible that hurting those Muslims on the sidewalk was the driver’s secondary consideration. I think his primary goal was to get himself killed. Since he was in Great Britain the American phenomenon of suicide by cop was not a certain option; so, as strange as it may seem, he tried to commit suicide by Muslim. There are a number things that point to this. Given there was no damage to the van and it came to a rest in front of a wall only about three van lengths from the road after having made a 90 degree turn from the near curb into the cul-de-sac it could not have been going very fast. The driver had no other weapons on him and didn’t try to attack anybody after he exited the vehicle. He did try to provoke them and even stated “Kill me.” The driver is also reported to have been very distraught over his personal life. In the US he may have provoked an officer to shoot him. That happens a lot. That option is not available in the UK so he tried to provoke some people he figured were very provokeable into killing them. But instead of driving into a group of jihadi killers he drove into a group of regular people who held him for the cops.