This latest attack has hit closer to home than any attack before. I have students at Finsbury Park mosque; I have a student living on Seven Sisters Road; it’s two tube stops from me. There were friends-of-friends on Facebook whose mums go to that mosque and hadn’t heard from them yet; an old National Union of Students LGBTQ acquaintance goes there. Today has not been my best day ever. And given that both ISIS-inspired dickheads and Islamophobic terrorists seem to love attacking during Ramadan I am worrying a bit about Eid.
I keep thinking about the imam there, Mohammed Mahmoud. He’s just thirty years old, and he heard the crash and ran out. By then a group of men had the suspect pinned down, and they were beating him - incredibly scary, but understandable, given they’d just seen him mow people down. (And specifically mow down people who had circled round an elderly man having a medical emergency, wanting to help. I don’t understand.) And the imam yelled at them - don’t hurt him, just wait for the police. Then he and a group of others stayed there, protecting this person they’d just seen gleefully murder people they knew, for what must have been an endless eight minutes until the police arrived.
A few hours earlier I’d been watching Cursed Child again with two good friends.
HARRY: She’s a murderer, and we’re not.
HERMIONE: We have to be better than them.
RON: It’s really annoying but it’s what we learnt.
This was originally posted at
http://lokifan.dreamwidth.org/360541.html. Comment wherever you like :)