Woolwich attack: If the whole world's a battlefield, that holds in Woolwich as well as Waziristan
There can't, after all, be the slightest doubt about what Rigby's killers thought they were doing. Michael Adebolajo spelled it out on the streets and in court. This was a "military attack", he claimed, in retaliation for Britain's occupation and violence in "Muslim lands", from Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond.
"Leave our lands and you can live in peace," the London-born Muslim convert told bystanders. The message couldn't be clearer. It was the same delivered by the 2005 London bomber, Mohammed Siddique Khan, and the Iraqi 2007 Glasgow attacker, Bilal Abdullah, who declared: "I wanted the public to have a taste" of what its government of "murderers did to my people".
Mainstream Islamic teaching supports the right to resist foreign occupation, while rejecting violence against non-combatants or outside the battlefield. But it is the US and its closest allies in the war on terror who have declared the whole world to be a battlefield, in which they claim the right to kill whoever they deem to be a threat. British and US special forces have been doing that in Somalia.
The US routinely kills large numbers of civilians in drone strikes across the Muslim world – 12 were reported incinerated last week in Yemen.
By waging a war without borders, often against unarmed or unidentified victims, they have fatally blurred the boundaries and invited their enemies to do the same.
That was Adebolajo's view of the Woolwich attack, his brother Jeremiah told al-Jazeera TV: "The geographical location of the battlefield, since this war on terror, has basically disappeared."
What is clear is that denying the role of US-British wars and killing in fuelling domestic terror attacks can only inflame Islamophobia – and absolve politicians from their responsibility for years of bloodshed and backlash. Unless the pressure grows to halt the terror war abroad, Woolwich certainly won't be the end of it at home.AND IF THAT'S A JUSTIFICATION FOR THE BEHEADING OF LEE RIGBY, THEN I WOULD BE JUSTIFIED IN MURDERING SEAMUS MILNE.