Yet another attack on a mosque has been attempted, this time involving a home-made explosive device rather than arson. Some have been asking whether it would be accurate and appropriate to describe this as a terrorist attack.
A bomb was placed outside a building [mosque] and people had to be evacuated. If it had exploded without warning, it could have caused significant damage and possibly even loss of lives. About 150 people were evacuate
d from homes around the mosque in Rutter Street, Walsall, after bomb disposal experts were called to the scene.
So why wasn’t this headline news everywhere? And why wasn’t it treated as a terrorism act? Oh, because the bomb was found outside a mosque, one would say.
Also quite tellingly, the police are treating it as merely a ‘hate crime’ rather than a terrorist incident aimed at indiscriminately hurting innocent civilians.
Terrorism does seem to be a rather fluid and subjective term, and I think there is a case to be made for saying it is applied more readily to certain sorts of crime, and certain sorts of perpetrator, than others. This is, I infer, the view taken by those who were questioning why the word ‘terrorism’ isn’t being used of the Walsall mosque incident.
Terrorism does not have to involve killing – and I think it is reasonable to see some of the actions associated with anti-Muslim bigots as ‘terrorist’, though these are not at the worst end of the spectrum generally, neither so calculated nor so murderous as the foiled plot to target EDL protestors (an incident which surely satisfied most definitions of terrorism).
This scenario of a bomb being found outside a mosque does seem to me to fit the profile of semi-organised anti-Muslim activity reasonably well.
It’s very important to remember that the word ‘terrorism’, in so far as it is meaningful at all, does not equate to ‘the worst sort of crime/murder’. Many of the most distressing murders of all, those involving children for example, meet none of the key criteria of terrorism.
