It began on Tuesday in Woolwich, London, when two young men in a car deliberately ran over an off-duty British soldier who was walking to a nearby military installation, then “hacked and chopped” at his body and attempted to decapitate him as they shouted “Allah akbar!” They forced witnesses to film the scene, saying: “We swear by Almightly Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day.” When police arrived, the murderers “charged at them wielding firearms, knives and a machete.” They were apprehended alive, and are now in hospital. It has since emerged that one of them, a son of Nigerian immigrants, was born in Britain as Michael Olumide Adebolajo, converted to Islam in 2003, changed his name to Mujaahid (i.e., jihadist), and for several years attended meetings of the group Al-Muhajiroun, founded by terrorist preacher Omar Bakri Mohammed. Late Thursday afternoon, U.K. time, the murdered soldier was identified as 25-year-old Lee Rigby, a drummer in the 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and the father of a two-year-old son.

Just like this week’s nightly riots by “youths” in Stockholm, the brutal slaughter in Woolwich was plainly a jihadist act. Yet just as the Swedish elites are continuing to dance around that uncomfortable core truth, their British counterparts are engaged in some fancy footwork of their own – led by Prime Minister David Cameron, who described Tuesday’s atrocity as “not just an attack on Britain and on the British way of life” but “also a betrayal of Islam and of the Muslim communities who give so much to our country.” (Does it need to be said that for a British leader to haul out this ragged, repulsive lie in the year 2013 is itself a betrayal – a shameless, craven betrayal of precisely what Cameron pretends to be standing up for, namely “Britain and…the British way of life”?)

The papers were full of the standard-issue stuff. The Muslim Council of Britain made the usual assertion that the latest heinous act committed in the name of Islam had “nothing to do with Islam.” Baroness Warsi, a Pakistani-English Muslim who serves as “Communities Secretary” in the current government, painted the familiar pretty picture of “faith communities coming out together” in the wake of said heinous act “and showing a unified condemnation of this.” The Guardian ran the obligatory hand-wringing article about the “fear of backlash” against Muslims in the wake of the heinous act in question. (The headline of another Guardian article actually indicated that there had been “Anti-Muslim reprisals after Woolwich attack”; it turned out that one man was “in custody on suspicion of attempted arson after reportedly walking into a mosque with a knife in Braintree, Essex,” and that “police in Kent were called to reports of criminal damage at a mosque in Canterbury Street, Gillingham.”) And Ken Livingstone, the loathsome ex-mayor of London (which he described as “the most successful melting pot in the history of the world and the city of the free”), warned those less evolved than himself not to “scapegoat entire communities for this barbaric act.” This from the sometime host, defender, and chum of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is famous precisely for encouraging such barbaric acts.

Newspaper commentaries on the atrocity added up to a depressing profile of the pathetic, obstinately reality-challenged psychopathology of the British elite when confronted with Islamic violence. The prize for sheer inanity of approach must go to Laborite Dan Hodges, who spent a whole column in the Telegraph elaborating on the theme that “for me, yesterday’s barbaric act of terror in Woolwich was literally senseless. None of what happened actually made any sense.” The murder, he asserted, was “confusing, horrific, bizarre.” He proceeded to repeat this refrain in one paragraph after another: “none of it made sense….Still none of it made sense….It didn’t make sense….It didn’t make any sense….Yesterday was the senseless day.” Reading this feeble, embarrassing nonsense, one could not help wondering: was Hodges equally stumped by 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Bali, Beslan, the Boston bombings? One of the things that didn’t “make sense” to Hodges was that one of the murderers spoke of “our lands,” meaning the Muslim world, even though “he had a south-east London accent.” It was as if the Woolwich killers were the first “home-grown terrorists” to ever come to Hodges’s attention. How remarkable that during all these years when the non-Muslim world has been racked by one death-dealing jihadist assault after another, Hodges’s contemplation of these incidents has apparently yielded absolutely nothing in the way of awareness or insight.

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