Memoriam

"Good night mum, I hope you had a fantastic day today because you are the most fantastic and one in a million mum that anyone could ever wish for. Thank you for supporting me all these years, you're not just my mum, you're my best friend. So good night, love you loads."
Ian Rigby, London, England

Isn't that just the most inspired message of love and appreciation a mother could receive from a grown son? Well, the memory of how her son felt about her, and his appreciation of her as his mother may help Ian Rigby's mother in the long run to adjust to the fact that her son died a truly atrocious death right after sending her that message.

Whatever might have inspired that message at that very time, shortly before the end of his life? At the present time, raw with the pain of having lost him at 25 years of age, despite his daunting experience as a British soldier who had seen more than his share of conflict, it will without doubt be of little help.

Ian Rigby's family is in deep shock, despair and mourning. How might it be possible that their son, a soldier of the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers won't be coming back to them, to share all the joys of having a loving family, to help raise his  two-year-old son, to grow old with his wife, as a normal person would?

He fought in Afghanistan and survived that mission in a foreign land rife with attacks against both civilians and foreign troops.

It was in his home country that he was sacrificed to a pathology of hatred and revenge. The very people whom his country sent him abroad to help protect from a savage insurgency that used murder of civilians as a way of reasserting its authority viewed him back home in Britain, as an interloper whose activities were inimical to the welfare of Afghan Muslims.

Two London fanatics had conspired to slaughter Drummer Lee Rigby, and they succeeded.

One of his assailants shouted "Allahu akbar", meat cleaver in hand, as the two attempted to decapitate their victim after having run him over with a car. And then they busied themselves hacking his body, and inviting horrified onlookers to take pictures. Until one middle-aged woman, a mother and a teacher, attempted to resuscitate an already-dead Lee Rigby, confronting the two lunatics with her common-sense practicality.

Informing them, before the arrival of police with arms, that their mission would not succeed; the larger mission, that is, of destroying faith in a democratic country, replacing it with a Sharia-led Islamic tyranny.

These transplants from another continent, worshipping a religion its faithful claim to be one of peace, even while it is a religion whose call to jihad has been claimed by those like Lee Rigby's killers, have succeeded in one signal manner: inspiring in others abhorrence, dread, rage.