Piers Akerman: Darren Osborne is a madman in a van, yes, but not a jihadi

WITHOUT defending Darren Osborne, who drove at Muslims outside a London mosque, let’s be clear: he did not go to a place of worship to learn to hate, Piers Akerman writes.

London mosque attacker Darren Osborne.

THE luvvies couldn’t help themselves when a white male drove a rented van into a crowd outside a notorious London mosque.

Delirious with delight they finally had their murderous white supremacist Islamophobic terrorist — or did they?

I think they, and the politicians who lined up to signal their virtue, significantly overreached in their ambition to show support for the fashionable minority.

Not that I condone in any sense any violence though condemnation of Islamist atrocities does tend to send the lunatic fringe into a frenzy of hate-filled vicious online, verbal and even physical attacks with sufficient menace to have, on occasion, warranted reporting to security officials.

Darren Osborne, the man dragged from the van which he had driven into a crowd outside London’s notorious Finsbury Park mosque, was a known drunk, suspected to have severe mental illness, who had been living in a tent and occasionally sleeping in his rented vehicle after being kicked out of home.

Thrown out of his local pub after ranting against Muslims he had watched television news ­reports of the annual Al-Quds Day anti-Israeli demonstration at which one speaker ­reportedly made links between the lethal Grenfell Tower fire and Zionists and some supporters waved the flag of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Police guard a street in the Finsbury Park area of north London where a van hit pedestrians outside a mosque earlier this month. Picture: AFP Photo/Daniel Leal-Olivas

He drove to London, asked where the Finsbury Park mosque was located and smashed into a group of people who were trying to resuscitate an elderly man who had earlier collapsed with a heart attack.

Eight people were injured though the Left-wing media claimed more were hurt and attributed the heart patient’s death to Osborne’s battering.

Malcolm Turnbull condemned the attack in fairly general terms but Bill Shorten plunged in with: “This attack was not revenge, it was not retribution, this was terrorism. This was violence aimed at the innocent, designed to spread fear and incite hatred and, ­despite the injuries it inflicted, despite the pain it has caused, the attack has failed.”

Hmmm. Without supporting retaliatory attacks, Shorten seems to have forgotten three Muslim men left seven people dead and 48 injured on the June 3 London Bridge attack.

He’s also overlooked the May 22 Manchester bombing (22 dead, 59 injured) and the March 22 Westminster attack (six dead, including the ­attacker, 50 injured).

It is just possible that these events had some impact on the deluded Osborne’s alcohol ­affected view of the world as he sought out the Finsbury Mosque, once home to the ­notorious one-eyed, hook-handed imam, Abu Hamza al-Masri.

RELATED VIDEO

It’s Hamza who once ­declared: “Allah likes those who believe in Him, who kill those who do not believe in Him. Allah likes that. So if you Muslims don’t like that because you hate the blood, there is something wrong with you.”

Under Hamza the mosque was a meeting point for militant Islam’s most notorious: Zacarias Moussaoui, 9/11’s ­alleged 20th hijacker, shoe bomber Richard Reid and ­others.

It was closed by the UK Charity Commission in 2003 for two years, and Hamza was arrested and charged with ­numerous UK offences including encouraging the killing of non-Muslims, and intent to ­incite racial hatred.

He was found guilty of 11 charges in 2006 and jailed for seven years.

US authorities then extradited him and Hamza was convicted in New York in May 2014 of conspiring in a deadly kidnapping of 16 Western tourists in Yemen in 1998, trying to set up an al-Qaeda training camp and aiding al-Qaeda.

He was sentenced in 2015 to life in prison without parole.

After the change in leadership, the mosque is now said to be at the forefront of building better community relations.

Well and good — and good luck.

Osborne certainly had a destination in mind and it seems that he was also insanely ­inflamed with booze.

Written tributes of unity are displayed after being placed by the scene of an attack where Osborne drove into a group of people near a mosque in London. Picture: AP Photo/Matt Dunham

Australia’s celebrated public Muslim Waleed Aly believes the unemployed Welshman was a far-right terrorist and equates his action with those of Islamist terrorists.

“It seems like that on the wings of our society we’ve got extremists, whether they’re ­Islamist extremists or, in these recent cases, far-right extremists that are kind of tearing away the centre, they’re making it so that there is nothing in the middle, nothing can hold and everyone has to choose a side in this fight,” he said during a regular appearance on The Project.

Actually, he’s wrong. While a van is now a weapon, ­Osborne is another league compared to someone like Adam Djaziri, who rammed his car into a police van on the Champs Elysees last Monday and was found to have a ­Kalashnikov assault rifle, two handguns, ammunition and a gas bottle in the vehicle and a cache of weapons at his home.

Across the Middle East, in Africa, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, southern Thailand, the Philippines, Europe and here, in Australia, we have no shortage of Islamist terrorists but so far very few far-Right terrorists and almost none who have ­declared their faith in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism or any other “ism” before striking out.

In an attempt to deflect ­attention from the ­religion of this murderous majority, the taxpayer-funded advocacy network, the ABC, has even stopped reporting the “Allahu Akbar” call the Islamists like to identify themselves with as they engage in their murderous ­attacks, preferring to say the perpetrator(s) were heard to say “God is Great” in Arabic.

Without defending the ­deranged Osborne, let’s be clear he did not go to a place of worship to learn to hate and he didn’t bang on about the Bible or any other holy book to ­justify his action.

Come  on,  Waleed, think for  a  moment,  there  is  really no equivalence between ­Osborne’s actions and those we now routinely suffer.