London Riots

Salam alaykum, I’ve been a bit slow in posting up what we’ve been eating over the last few days just simply because I have been watching television. I, like may others, have been shocked and outraged at the levels of wanton violence that mobs have been using to attack shops and homes. It is beyond disgusting.

For those of you not in the UK, one of the many justifications that is being put about by various people is that the voice of the youth is not being heard, that they are deprived, that they are fed up of a life without prospects, that they have no youth clubs, that they have no where to hang out and that they have no choice but to hang around on street corners!

The truth is that besides leaving a wake of broken shops, burnt out homes and ruined livelihoods, there are another group of people who have suffered even more because of these yobs…the people who are starving because of the drought. Only the day before the riots began there was a story of a little baby boy who was about five months old and after spending two weeks in the refugee camps and being intensively fed, he had gone from a ghost of a baby made of skin, bone and hollowed eyes to what a baby should look like: bright eyed, smiling, happy mash’Allah! Since the riots began these stories have totally disappeared. Somalia and the other countries don’t seem to feature anywhere. They need us, they need our prayers and they need our actual help to help them.

The looters in my area attacked a sports shop and mobile phone shops. These aren’t shops that sell the basics of life, they sell the luxuries of life. They also attacked a petrol pump and threatened to blow that up too. There is no justification for this. Some may try and say that these are similar to riots that led to revolutions, there is no revolution because there is no ideology. Ideology has a purpose. This has no purpose. The objective here is to loot, to damage, to harm, to injure and now to kill. In three short days one man has been shot in London, one Malaysian student badly injured and then robbed, and now three men have been killed in Birmingham while standing outside a mosque trying to protect it.

We need normality back. We need sense back. We need parents to take responsibility. We need calm. Most of all we need the real people who have NEEDS back as the headline of the news.