The Hammersmith Silver Fox

It strikes me that peace and friendship is really just conflict plus time.  If people look at the big picture of what these idiots are doing, it’s clear that terrorists are waging war - not just against the West, but against anyone who doesn’t share their twisted world view wholesale.  We need to stop looking at is as something that is happening in isolated incidents in Westminster or Manchester or Southwark, or Paris, or Brussels or Kabul.  It’s not Muslims against Christians, it’s Islamist extremists against the rest of the world.  It’s not Mr Patel in the corner shop, or Aisha in your office, or Ali in Chicken Cottage against your family.  Mr Patel, and Aisha, and Ali are targets too.

I know it’s hard to remember that, especially if you’re a teenager and you don’t remember the Troubles, but we’ve been here before, and it’s crap.  When I was growing up, I heard all the same things we hear about Muslims now about Catholics in general and Republican Irish Catholics in particular.  I remember the car bombs, and the letter bombs, and the sniper attacks.  I remember the explosions in shopping centres and pubs, and the names and faces of children murdered by the IRA.  And I also remember that there were terrorists on the Protestant Northern Irish side of the conflict too.

And I remember the distrust, and the blind hate people in the UK expressed towards Irish people, the anti-Catholic rhetoric I heard every day.  I heard it not from people I would normally label as hateful or prejudiced, but ordinary people, my own family and friends. And yet despite that, some of my closest friends at school were Catholic (one to the extent that sometimes when you went to visit, her mum would be entertaining nuns for tea), and they weren’t terrorists, and they had no sympathy with terrorists, and they were just as afraid of the terrorists as everyone else - but this fear was wrapped in more wariness that people were going to hate them simply for who they were.  

So it hurts my heart to see that same old rhetoric being dusted off again.  If you’ve not lived in a diverse community, if you live on the Cornish coast, or a Welsh valley, or the heart of Norfolk - somewhere everyone you meet is more or less like you - of course you’re going to be wary of anyone different.  There are 2.8 million Muslims in the UK, and if the only ones you’ve ever seen are angry young men and women determined to attack our way of life, of course you’re going to be concerned.  But I went to university in Southwark, and I know the area that was attacked last night pretty well.  I live in a city that has a large and visible Muslim community and for three years I lived around the corner from a busy mosque.  And none of my neighbours ever - ever - treated me with anything other than respect and friendship.  I felt safe there, because I was surrounded by families who just wanted to get on with living their lives.  Some of them wore traditional dress, some of them didn’t.  Some of them covered their hair, some didn’t.  A few wore the niqab.  And absolutely none of them ever attacked anyone or tried to blow anyone (or themselves) up or drove a vehicle into anyone.  They were too busy living their lives like the normal people they are, through the same filter of wariness that their Catholic and Irish neighbours lived with for so long.

But here’s the thing.  Conflict plus time equals peace.  A few weeks ago, I, a British person, was in Germany with a friend from Poland.  Take a moment to think about that, because it’s not that many decades since that would have been unthinkable.  And we were there with people from all over the world.  A week later, I met up with a group of friends that included two British-German couples.  We move on, and we learn to love and to trust, because we know that not all Irish people or Catholics are terrorists, and that German people are not Nazis.  Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we understand that the people who claim to be Muslims we see on the news are not representative of their community as a whole either.  

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Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.

“Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet,” states the Tory manifesto. “We disagree.”

Senior Tories confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online.

While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn’t published, the manifesto suggests.

Germany remembers the victims, has zero statues of the perpetrators of evil.