From The Sun Newspaper (UK)
By Russell Brand
THE news cycle moves so quickly now that often we learn of an event through other people’s reaction to it.
So it was when I arrived in Los Angeles to find my Twitter feed contorted with posts of fear and confusion.
I caught up with the sad malice in Woolwich and felt compelled to tweet in casual defence of the Muslim community who were being haphazardly condemned by a few people on my time line.
Perhaps a bit glibly (but what isn’t glib in 140 characters) I put: “That bloke is a nut. A nut who happens to be Muslim. Blaming Muslims for this is like blaming Hitler’s moustache for the Holocaust.”
As an analogy it is imperfect but I was frightened by how negative and incendiary the mood felt and I rushed.
I am not proposing we sit around trying to summon up cute analogies when Lee Rigby has lost his life in these horrific circumstances. I simply feel that it is important that our reaction is measured.
There is something about the arbitrary brutality, humdrum High Street setting and the cool rhetoric of the blood-stained murderer that evokes a powerful and inherently irrational response.
When I heard the word “beheading” I felt the atavistic grumble that we all feel.
This is inhumane, taboo, not a result of passion but of malice — ritualistic. “If this is happening to guiltless men on our streets it could happen to me,” I thought. Then I watched the mobile phone clip.
In spite of his dispassionate intoning the subject is not rational.
Of course he’s not rational, he’s just murdered a stranger in the street, he says, because of a book.
In my view that man’s severely mentally ill and has found a convenient conduit for his insanity — in this case the Koran.
In the case of another mentally ill and desperate man — Mark Chapman — it was The Catcher In The Rye.
This was the nominated text for his rationalisation of the murder of John Lennon in 1980.
I’ve read that book and I’ve read some of the Koran, and nothing in either of them has compelled me to do violence.
Perhaps this is because I lack the other necessary ingredients for extreme anti-social behaviour — mental illness and isolation, either economic, social or both.
After my Hitler tweet I got involved in a bit of back and forth with a few people who said stuff like: “The murderer said himself he did it for Islam.”
Although I wouldn’t dismiss what he’s saying entirely, I think he forfeited the right to have his views received unthinkingly when he murdered a stranger in the street.
Someone else regarding my tweet said: “Hitler’s moustache didn’t invent an ideology that sanctions murder.”
That is thankfully true but Islam, when practised by normal people, is not an advocacy for violence.
“People all over the world are killing in the name of Islam,” someone added.
But this is the most tricky bit to understand.
What I think is that all over our country, all over our planet, there are huge numbers of people who feel alienated and sometimes victimised by the privileged and the powerful, whether that’s rich people, powerful corporations or occupying nations.
