If I were the parent of one of the 22 people – mostly young girls – brutally murdered by the Manchester Arena Muslim suicide bomber in May 2017, I’d be spitting blood right now.
As we’ve just learned from the public inquiry, every one of those deaths — plus the life-changing mutilations on the myriads more wounded — was entirely avoidable.
The security authorities, it turns out, had numerous ‘missed opportunities’ to spot the threat posed by Libyan suicide bomber Salman Abedi. But they failed to take remedial action because of a mix of inertia, incompetence and, worst of all, political correctness.
Here is one of the more damning revelations:
A witness, Julie Merchant, approached BTP [British Transport Police] officer Jessica Bullough, around 32 minutes before the deadly bombing, to point out Salman Abedi.
Paul Greaney QC said Ms Merchant cannot recall the details of the conversation with the officer but that it was “to do with praying and political correctness”.
The officer cannot remember the conversation taking place, the hearing was told.
No, I bet ‘the officer cannot remember the conversation taking place.’ I mean put yourself in the officer’s shoes: it’s your job to help maintain law and order at a public event — and a member of the public comes up to you so concerned about a man with a huge rucksack on his back acting strangely that she takes the highly unusual decision to report it. You reply something — I speculate, but this is the likely gist — to the effect that he is a Muslim man in the act of prayer and that one shouldn’t jump to racist or Islamophobic conclusions, let alone intervene. Then, just half an hour later, that suspicious Muslim detonates his enormous and ungainly rucksack, killing lots of little girls and wounding lots more.
Yeah. Sure that earlier conversation you had with the worried member of the public would clean slip your mind.
It wasn’t just the police officer who screwed up. So did the security staff at the arena.
According to the Mail‘s account:
Paul Greaney QC, counsel to the inquest, said a witness had spoken to the suspicious person, asking him ‘What have you got in your rucksack?’ but received no reply.
Mr Greaney added: ‘[Witness] A then said, ”It doesn’t look very good you know, you with a bag in a place like this. What are you doing?”
The man replied: ‘I’m waiting for somebody, mate. Have you got the time? What time is it?’
Witness A then spoke to Mohammed Agha, employed by venue security firm Showsec, but said he was ‘fobbed off.’
Mohammed Agha then spoke to fellow Showsec employee Kyle Lawler about the suspicious man and what they should do, the inquiry heard.
Mr Lawler is then said to have tried to radio his security control but could not get through. He then spotted the man get up and start walking towards the arena entrance.
His statement continued: ‘I just froze and did not get anything out on the radio. I knew at that point it was too late.’
Mr Greaney QC said the accounts of Showsec employees differ about what happened with ‘gaps and discrepancies’ between their accounts and the CCTV evidence captured at the arena.
Let’s just pause for a moment and consider how rare it is for any of us to report ‘suspicious behaviour’ by a member of an ethnic minority. We all live in a world where we’ve been conditioned not to be judgemental, let alone racist or Islamophobic. That’s why, I think most of us can agree, someone of North African or Middle Eastern appearance would have to be behaving exceptionally suspiciously before we took the risk of embarrassing ourselves by going up to a policewoman or a member of security staff and reporting them. Most of us would look at whatever Abedi was doing and go: “Naah. I’ve just got an overactive imagination. And anyway, I came out here for a quick pee/to buy a drink/wait to collect my daughter, not waste time being stonewalled by security…”
This to me is what makes the failure of the policewoman and the security staff to respond so culpable and inexcusable. Those witnesses would not have approached them unless there was a clear and present danger.
At the opening of the Inquiry, the chairman Sir John Saunders declared ‘we are not looking for scapegoats.’
Perhaps this is right. I’m not suggesting that the policewoman or the security staff should lose their jobs or be reprimanded because I very much fear that most other police officers and security staff would have behaved just as uselessly had they been in the same position.
This is because British culture is crippled by political correctness. The Army is woke, the fire services are woke, and the police are certainly woke — to the extent that more effort goes into training police not to be racist or Islamophobic or homophobic etc than goes into teaching them how to prevent crime. “Better a dozen school girls be blown to bits than that anyone ever accuses us of Islamophobia,” could be a motto of this culture…
….Look, for example, at how West Midlands police is covering up for the mystery ‘black’ man who stabbed seven people, one of them fatally in Birmingham at the weekend.
West Midlands police’s main priority appears to be ruling out the most likely motivations for this stabbing spree:
Today, police chiefs revealed how they believed the victims were targeted ‘at random’ and that there is ‘no suggestion’ at this time that the stabbings were related to terrorism, gangs or hate crime.
Love that use of the word ‘revealed’ in the unusual sense of ‘lied through their teeth.’
If Sir John Saunders’s Inquiry does its job, it will make it damningly, brutally clear that Britain’s police are not fit for purpose because they are so riddled with political correctness that they can no longer do their main job of preventing crime and protecting the British public.
Britain’s police, not just the ones in Manchester, but across the country ought to have the deaths of those little girls — not to mention the thousands of other ones raped by Muslim grooming gangs — on their consciences forever.
But they won’t. And I’m not holding my breath for this inquiry to tell it like it is either.