The simple answer is we don’t know, the reason I know we don’t know is because those carrying out the atrocities like the ones in Manchester on ‘soft targets’ are winning.
They’re winning because they are killing people, people who had no idea what was going to happen, targeted when they were leaving in high spirits and off guard. Winning because they divert and disrupt our way of life, they make ordinary people question themselves, should they go the concert, the theatre, even to a popular tourist spot?
The reality is in our modern world, nowhere is completely safe, any public space can be targeted by one depraved individual with a strong enough will to kill – Westminster, Nice and the German Christmas market are all terrible reminders of this. The attacks on the Bataclan, Parisian restaurants and now so very sadly Manchester show what IS want.
In their mind it is us that is wrong, those innocent young people singing along to a favourite pop star, (who it should be remembered is only young herself and probably terribly traumatised like all who were there!) are apparently evil. I acknowledge that the particular brand of hate preached by IS is limited to those that follow it and for many years religion or particular beliefs have been used as excuses to perpetrate heinous acts!
This is what they are though – excuses for barbarism. I cannot believe that whichever religion you follow any god or being would welcome blood shed and carnage in their name to glorify them. So in that way IS are losers, and not just because Donald Trump says so – although his words and ideas not to call them monsters because that is what they want to be called is not entirely ridiculous. I cannot believe that getting on a train and setting off a bomb, or in a concert hall or anywhere else in the world gets you eternal heaven or glory, it just makes a tragedy.
Somewhere there are people that know what was going on, I am sure over the next few days there will be raids in other areas showing that the person who was the cause of the most recent horror had a support network, just as there was after the Westminster attacks. There will be fear about other plans for similar events and those too we will know nothing about until they happen. This is the problem, those that carry out the acts are awful, and they take themselves away with those they kill or injure but for those that help to get the parts to build the bob, to get the bomb to the selected venue and who claim responsibility afterwards are worse. They are proud of their acts and they are going to keep doing it until something changes, and what needs to change is the ideology! The idea that because someone is doing something you don’t like or you feel is disrespectful to your god you can kill them, or bomb them to make your point then the problem lies with you!
I am proud to live in a country where we have freedoms to choose, what to wear, where to go and what to believe. I am happy to chat and debate my own ideas and accept that I don’t have all the answers and I don’t know what lies beyond this plane if anything and therefore I choose to try and be nice, respectful, friendly. This is not what is happening here though and whilst we saw the best of Manchester yesterday in the response the very fact that we needed to respond to more violence, that people are not coming home ever again is us losing. Standing together and keeping those affected in our hears and minds does not bring them back nor necessarily does finding the perpetrators who helped the bomber – they may have other information regarding future attacks but knowing who did something does not erase the event itself!
What doesn’t help is turning on one another IS is not Islam – it is a part of it but somehow we need to stop their message getting through but this just isn’t happening, more and more of theses attacks are coming from so called homegrown terrorists. On a day when we should have been listening to the politicians churning out their endless streams of soundbites for the upcoming election we are instead mourning youngsters who were out having fun with their parents. This hurts us because it is what many of us have done, we go out with friends or family, I have taken Imp, Pixie and Hpops to events lots of time and I have never really stopped to think that it wasn’t safe, that we night not come home. There are still people missing, maybe in hospital maybe out of contact and social media is helping here!
What we need to do is pull together to change the ideology, saying terrorism is not winning is not helping – the images of the tragedies stay with us for so long and affect people long after the seconds the bomb takes to trigger! SO does the process of radicalisation, this is not an overnight process, we know people travel abroad and then come back – recent attacks have been carried out by people known to security services. I am due to go to several events over the summer, just as densely packed as the one in Manchester and it occurred to me having seen the events unfolding that I will now have to have a plan for those I attend with my children for them to meet me safely if we get separated. My usual fear at these sort of events is that one of them feels unwell and we have to miss it or they wander off from the toilet queue or we spend too much money on over priced merchandise! I have never really thought about what happens if the place gets attacked, just as the people attending yesterday probably didn’t!
The sad thing is someone somewhere knows where the next attack is being planned and that is the scary part, until it happens we don’t. Having said that we can’t be held to ransom – if we stop going out, celebrating with friends, using the freedoms we have been granted we lose. This doesn’t help anyone who has already paid the highest price of their lives or the future unknown victims but until we can get on top of the ideology and hate and everyone is granted the freedom of choice without violence if we disagree nothing will change and violence will still be used history has shown us this for centuries and we still haven’t worked out how to live on this ball of rock without killing one another in the name of a being we may never know!
