murder of drummer Lee Rigby - anyone remember Baha Mousa?

As Peter Cranie says, when someone is brutally murdered in the way that drummer Lee Rigby was, it’s important to think first and foremost of the family and friends and their grief and pain: the shock, the horror, the anger and sadness of bereavement.

Once people have dried their tears, it’s important to be clear-eyed about the way our media and discourse treats the killing of Black people as less important than the killing of White people and see events like this in their social and political context. My prediction is that the name of drummer Lee Rigby will go down in history along with others in a long-running discourse of White Martyrs Murdered by Crazy Black People: for example WPC Yvonne Fletcher, shot by Libyans outside their Embassy in London in 1984 and PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death by a mainly Black mob in the Broadwater Farm riot in Tottenham, north London, in 1985.

How many people remember the name, Baha Mousa?  In September 2003 British soldiers arrested the Iraqi hotel receptionist in Basra and beat him to death and a year-long inquiry found the Ministry of Defence responsible. How many people remember the name, Cynthia Jarrett? It was her death in a police raid that triggered the Broadwater Farm riot. Or Mark Duggan? He was the unarmed black man shot by police, whose death triggered the riots of August 2012 (which also started in Tottenham).

There are many unpeople – unnamed and unremembered and unwhite –  like the wedding parties killed by drones, the boys gathering firewood on a hillside in Afghanistan shot and killed by US helicopter gunships, and the Reuters journalists and the carload of children seen in the wikileaks “collateral murder” video.

For every brutal murder of a white person in a western country there are, I'm sure, many more killings of people of colour in non-western countries dating back to the Vietnamese villagers massacred at My Lai in 1968 and beyond. 

PS. I also liked this By Tony Jaques at Othona
As I write this the media – and many people’s conversations – are full of the murder of drummer Lee Rigby and its repercussions. You may have heard about the mosque in York where the Muslim worshippers responded to an ugly demonstration by the English Defence League by inviting EDL members in for a cup of tea and a chat. What better way to show the revulsion of most Muslims at what happened in Woolwich? But elsewhere, of course, somebody persuaded the men who killed Lee that they were serving their religion.