Responding to the Woolwich Murder

Talk on Trinity Sunday 2013 at St Bride's by Steve Shakespeare Today is Trinity Sunday. But what is dominating our news this week is the attack in Woolwich, in which the soldier Lee Rigby was killed. The implications of that event are ones we need to consider urgently, so I hope you will forgive me if we focus on that, and who knows, we may even return to the Trinity at the end!

Let’s set out some of the key issues we need to take on board.

First: the attack was carried out by two individuals who were probably not part of any large organisation. They were converts to Islam, and at this stage it is understood that the killing was motivated by anger at British military action, which they believe has led to the death and humiliation of many Muslims.

Secondly, the attack has been strongly condemned across the political spectrum, as we might expect, and also by Muslim leaders. The Muslim Council of Britain said it had ‘no basis in Islam’.

Thirdly, there has been a huge increase in attacks on Muslims and mosques since the murder. According to one source, over 150 such incidents occurred in the four days following the attack, compared with about half a dozen in the equivalent period before it. The English Defence League are holding demonstrations up and down the country. Fascists have been congregating on Liverpool streets intimidating those they see as Muslims.

Those background factors need to be taken into account when we look critically at the way the killing and those who carried it out have been represented. Many of us will have seen the picture of Michael Adebolajo with hands covered in blood holding a cleaver. The Sun carried the picture with a headline about the ‘face of evil’. In the Daily Star on Friday, a follow up front page labelled Adebolajo a ‘drug-taking waster’.

Such images serve to distance us from the killers, to paint them as evil, and to associate them with others (drug-users and ‘scroungers’) who are considered parasitic on ‘decent’ society.

But over and above all this, there has been the consistent labelling of the murder itself as an act of terrorism, against which we should all unite. Terror is, by definition, an attack on ‘our’ nation and culture, it seems.

The problem, of course, is in giving any real content to what terrorism is. What makes something an act of terror rather than a crime, or an act of war, for instance? The word serves as a marker of distance, of ‘othering’, and it plays into the other language of scapegoating that we have heard used.

The reality is that, however horrific the attack was, the British state is hardly going to be brought to its knees by two people with knives. Our culture (setting aside what that loaded term means for a second) is simply not under threat. But the images and language say something different:  suddenly to be British is to be ‘against ‘terror and ‘for’ the military.

David Cameron and many other political leaders have rightly said that this is not about Islam as such. We should welcome these words. But there is an elephant in the room: the continuing ‘war on terror’ remains an inescapable part of the context for what is unravelling now. It is a war that has played fast and loose with legality, that has left hundreds of thousands dead. And it is a war the majority of whose victims are Muslim. While Palestinians were left to rot in an apartheid state, Iraq and Afghanistan were invaded, in actions which were driven more by the self-interest of great powers than any real desire for liberty. Even now, the president of US authorises drone strikes which have anonymously killed swathes of civilians, including children. Where are the full page colour spreads naming those victims? Where are the calls for us to unite in opposition to that form of ‘terror’?

The hyberbole about the Woolwich case smothers all of this (which is not in any way to condone it or to minimise its horror and its impact on Lee Rigby’s family). Suddenly, the government anti-terror committee COBRA is convened, as if somehow the whole country is under attack. Above all, Britishness, symbolised by the military, becomes the defining factor of ‘our’ identity. As David Cameron put it: "The terrorists will never win because they can never beat the values that we hold dear. The belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values." Note how the rhetoric slides, from freedom to democracy, to Britishness to the ‘West’ – imaginary ideals which presumably have to be set over against a foreign world which is other, Eastern and anti-democratic.

The web of scaremongering weaves its way through even the public and left-leaning media. BBC’s Nick Robinson initially reported that one of the killers was of ‘Muslim appearance’. One has to ask what on earth that statement means – presumably it can only be a racial one (i.e. ‘looks like an Arab or an Asian’). In fact, of course, the killers were black men in casual clothes. Robinson later claimed he had been given the information from a Whitehall source, who had got it from the police – and so we see how public media, government and security forces work together.

In another example, the Guardian wrote about the ‘al-Qaeda rhetoric’ used by Adebolajo in justifying his act. Adebolajo’s words were in fact these:

“We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We must fight them. I apologise that women had to witness this today, but in our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don't care about you."

The words are clearly radical and angry. But to call them ‘al-Qaeda rhetoric’ is a way of putting them in a box safely labelled ‘terrorist’.

Richard Seymour, the political blogger, exposes the emptiness of this manoeuver in the following stark comparison:

‘of all the freelance racists who have murdered black people in the UK over the years, sometimes in groups and sometimes individually, how many have been characterised as 'terrorism'? And it seems worth asking what is left of the term 'terrorism' once one has discounted for the consistent inconsistency of its usage?’ http://www.leninology.com/2013/05/death-by-barracks.html

Seymour argues that what is going on in all this is that Islam is racialised – racialised not in merely biological terms, but as a ‘culture’ with its own implicit ethnic otherness. ‘Good’ Muslims can be tolerated as long as they publicly support ‘British’ values. Those who do not support such values are foreign bodies. That can include the drug taker and the waster as well - they are not part of ‘us’. But by far the biggest target is Islam. The implication is that it is a foreign intrusion, and the political question becomes whether it can be safely domesticated, or whether it needs to be opposed. This shifting of the political terrain is intimately linked to the renewal of the English Defence League, but also to the rise of UKIP and anti-immigration rhetoric, which was in full swing before Woolwich. 

As Seymour argues, the racialised hatred of Islam is playing a key role in this:

‘The consequence of over a decade of syncopated Islam-baiting has been a pronounced political turn to the Right, especially on questions of immigration, nationality and 'race'. Coterminously, 'Britishness' has increasingly been merged with militarism. The ultimate test of one's integration, one's loyalty to 'British values', is to fight for said values. The ultimate proof of one's betrayal is to insult the soldiers who defend them. One can be against war, on the ground that it is too much benevolence for an undeserving mob, but one can't denounce the troops themselves.’

The result is that no critical argument possible. There is nowhere to stand other than on Britishness (and we should note how this serves the ‘we’re all in it together’ ideology of austerity, even though we know that this is blatantly untrue. Those facing eviction for non-payment of the bedroom tax are emphatically not in it together with those who continue to make fortunes out of finance and political influence). The extremes of war on terror become part of ‘normal’ life (one newspaper wrote that Baghdad had come to Woolwich – this in a week when scores of people had been killed in bomb attacks in Iraq). This state of constant war helps to enforce a national unity premised on rejecting what is other. And our British, Western complicity in perpetuating conflict, war and oppression is passed over in silence.

So what should a Christian response be to this?

Negatively, it must have nothing to do with ‘Britishness’. Nationality is an imaginary category, and if we turn it into an ideal, a reality, it becomes a tool to scapegoat. So a Christian response must have nothing to do with scapegoating either. The revolutionary implication of the early Christian claim that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is important here: there is no other ultimate power in the world than the power of the exploited victim. There is no other salvation except from the scapegoat.

And this is where we can come round to the doctrine of the Trinity, for this is worked out in response to this claim that Jesus is Lord. It breaks open the idea of God as a simply a one way act of power. The historical, scandalous event of Jesus weakens the power of God, and says the real love and liberation comes from the margins of history – not the empires, nations, states, not the military, not any fable of race or culture, but from the exploited, silenced, victimised ones. They are the ‘nothing’ which confronts the ruling power with its own emptiness and deceit.

Let’s be clear: it is not that calling God Trinity is ‘better’ than talk of the ‘one God’ of Jews or Muslims. The idea, for example, that the Christian God is all about love whilst the Jewish or Islamic God is all about law and revenge is sheer fantasy and triumphalism. No, the point is that the Trinity is one resource (among many others) which stops us narrowly defining the reality of love and solidarity with any one orthodoxy or identity. The idea of God does not drop from the sky. It is born out of historical events, material struggles. It always has to be set in motion, from the margins. The classical image of the Trinity as dance (the phrase used of the Trinity in patristic authors is ‘perichoresis’, literally, moving or dancing around) bears witness to this necessary dynamism in our ideas of God, the need to root them in real practice and struggle for liberation.

Christian orthodoxy was always an unstable compromise, because its very existence depended on human reaction to the surprises of experience and events of history. At its best, orthodoxy tries to preserve the mystery and radical challenge of those events, but it easily hardens into the policing of what can be said and done, another way of excluding what is other.

The Trinity open us to many faces and voices and ways of embodying and desiring God. There should be no need to fear that. What is the trinity? It is God as a name of revolutionary love: God in creativity, wherever life comes to be; God in the scapegoat, the love and justice that comes from the margins; God in the Sprit which blows where it will. None of it is in our power, or the church’s power. None of it serves a ‘nation’ (remember how the early Christians refused to join armies or take part in gladiatorial games – the spectacle of empire at its most obvious). .

The challenge to us is to stand publicly with our Muslim sisters and brothers, to stand against the myths of Britishness. Locally, we will need to respond: there will be acts of solidarity, demonstrations to attend, statements to make. There will also need to be longer term initiatives to forge bonds of friendship between communities (as we saw when Muslim and Christian women and children from our communities met together recently). A church does not face the awful pressure and prejudice a mosque faces. So let us, who do not have to ward off the accusation of being terrorists and extremists, let us burst this bubble of the existence and superiority of British or Western values.

We should not be defined by arrogance and fear, but by a love so radical it made people talk about God in a new way.