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The Finsbury Park attacker's trial shows us the
route to hatred
David Shariatmadari
“He should answer for his crime in a court, and not in a court in the
street.”
Those were the words of Mohammed Mahmoud, the imam of Finsbury Park mosque, who
shielded Darren Osborne from the crowd of worshippers he had just rammed with
his van. I don’t suppose Mahmoud was being compassionate. But he recognised that
the situation called for calm. “We are handing him in unscathed to the police,”
he said. In other words, we need justice to be done – and justice works slowly,
deliberately and in full view of the public.
Sure enough, seven months after that night, Osborne has been convicted of murder
and attempted murder. The jury concluded he had sought to kill as many Muslims
as possible.
It is relatively rare that we get to see a terrorist in the dock. As we know
only too well, they often prefer to kill themselves in the act of murdering
others, or at least before they get caught. (Osborne told one onlooker: “I’ve
done my job, you can kill me now.”) In Iraq and Syria, followers of Islamic
State die in battle. Some would say that a long trial in a wood-panelled
courtroom is too good for them.
But this misses a crucial point. Justice requires that the evidence of the
crimes, and the thoughts and beliefs that led to them, be set out. That pays due
respect to the victims, as well as helping all of us understand what leads to
violence. This is even more important in the case of terrorism, the causes of
which go beyond the individual and give society something to reckon with too.
So what did we learn about Darren Osborne? We learned that he had not worked for
10 years, had poor mental health and problems with alcohol and drugs. We also
learned that he was radicalised very rapidly. He watched Three Girls, a drama
about victims of sexual abuse mostly committed by Muslim men in Rochdale. After
that, according to his estranged partner, he became “obsessed with Muslims,
accusing them all of being rapists and being part of paedophile gangs”.
He did “research” on the internet, finding plenty of encouragement for his new
ideas. One email circular he read from a far-right group said: “There is a
nation within a nation forming just beneath the surface of the UK. It is a
nation built on hatred, on violence and on Islam.” The court was told that he
received messages from far-right leaders and accessed an article on the InfoWars
website entitled “Proof: Muslims celebrated terror attack in London.”
There is a lot to unpack here. First of all, Osborne was clearly vulnerable.
It’s a trait he shares with some, but not all terrorists, and certainly isn’t
the end of the story. It may have made his exaggerated response to a TV
programme more likely. Three Girls was noted for its sensitive handling of race
and religion and the care taken by its writer to avoid giving credence to
far-right narratives. Most viewers would not have concluded from it that all
Muslim men were predators. The point is that when Osborne did, there was a
wealth of material out there to back up his interpretation.
That material is the product of a particular historical moment, and the
unthinking, prejudiced reaction to it. Anti-Muslim sentiment is mostly driven by
a perception that Muslims cause problems: wars and violence in the Middle East
and acts of terrorism there and in the west. An easy, but false, explanation for
this troubling pattern is that Islam is a uniquely violent religion (the
arguments are as complicated as the facts, but people who disagree with me need
to start by showing why Muslim cultures produced less violence at other moments
in history). The general suspicion of Muslims extends to other areas, so that
when they are convicted of horrible crimes, it’s the religion that obsesses
people beyond all the other factors that might be at play.
An environment in which this kind of anti-Muslim sentiment is rife is one in
which people such as Darren Osborne can, in the space of a few weeks, become
virulent Muslim-haters.
We all want do as much as possible to prevent Islamist radicalisation. As a
nation we have funnelled millions into community initiatives, law enforcement
and intelligence. There are things we should be doing outside those areas, too:
peacebuilding, aid and development help to shrink reservoirs of jihadism abroad.
With the Osborne trial, we have an opportunity to think hard about what can be
done to prevent Islamophobic radicalisation. Already, almost a third of
referrals to the government’s counter-extremism programme are for those with
far-right views. And as a result of Osborne’s conviction, a review into the
extreme right has been launched by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre.
But there is another piece of the jigsaw: the mood music, the background hum,
public opinion. Does this newspaper piece, this clickbait article, this tweet or
bit of TV punditry promote anti-Muslim sentiment? Because another Darren Osborne
could be out there, soaking it all up.