Surgery
Definition No. 5 (Wiktionary):
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/surgery
Clinic
Definition No. 6 (Wiktionary):
No doubt it will become clear in court, but the obvious assumption is, simply because he was there - the nearest thing to “the government/system” available to the assailant.
The people who carry out these kinds of atrocities seem to be most interested in their own notoriety. For this reason, I fully support the current trend to give them as little publicity as possible.
Why this MP? An easy high-profile target. MPs at these constituency surgeries don’t usually have much in the way of security.
In this case, it appears the attacker was a radicalized Muslim:
Sir David Amess: MP murder suspect held under Terrorism Act
That Muslim terrorists commit such acts primarily to enhance their own notoriety is dubious.
Why do Muslim terrorists commit such acts?
Adopting a warped belief system that involves terrorism doesn’t preclude a desire for notoriety. It may be an unconscious or semi-conscious cover for it.
I think a major factor is because Western countries are intervening in the affairs of Middle Eastern countries; look at things like the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Israel/Palestine. Japan doesn’t intervene; do you ever hear of Muslim terrorist attacks on that country?
I don’t disagree that that’s an important issue in aggregate but I was more interested in personal motivation.
I confess I’m surprised that no-one as yet has made anything of the opposition deputy leader very recently saying this about conservatives
“We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile … banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian … piece of scum,”
I seriously doubt it had anything to do with this murder but I can’t imagine that such rhetoric helps make MP’s lives any safer, not to mention that it flies in the face of the sort of person that David Amess appeared to be.
You make a very good point.
If we start pulling on that thread who knows where we’ll end up though. British politics is riddled with violent and inciting language on all sides, a lot directly as “comment” from the media. Theresa May had members of her own party making throat-slitting gestures at her in the House of Commons; “Enemies of the People” as a headline over the pictures of three named judges; “Labour must kill vampire Jezza”; any amount of “Surrender Act”, “Betrayal” rhetoric; straight up Great Replacement theory in the Times and Spectator; Cameron smearing the Muslim candidate for Mayor of London by falsely linking him to ISIS… there’s something very unpleasant and poisonous running through British politics but changing it is going to require a lot of Very Important and Serious people to a) admit that they’ve been getting it badly wrong and b) stop doing something that’s getting them the results they want.
I think it often comes down to a young Muslim male, whose job prospects are poor due to a variety of reasons, maybe he didn’t do well in school, maybe he has family issues / discrimination issues that affected that. He is marginally employed, spends time on social media and links up with other angry young men in his same situation. Those people then refer him to various radical Muslim “influencers” online, just like we have influences for various prattle in pop culture, there are indeed influencers for radial Islam. He finds an influencer he likes and digs deeper and deeper into their stuff. Suddenly he finds mean. His religion, which maybe he wasn’t all that serious about, his parents were more devout and he just kind of viewed it as whatever, now becomes core to his identity. Where before he was upset and angry about his life, now his life has purpose. Now he knows he can turn that anger against enemies of Islam.
Sometimes this will involve private conversations with bona fide Muslim terrorist organizations overseas, who will help the individual plot / plan the attack, but very often in these one-off attacks that hasn’t occurred. It’s often just an unstable, angry young male who has gotten radicalized online and now decides to do something about it.
Those words will return to haunt her career.
She is trying to make a name for herself within the Labour party as a radical class warrior but those remarks were ill judged.
Her defence was that this was the language of her Northern working class background to the various condescending and prejudicial insults Boris Johnson has made over the past few years. Boris Johnson, however, seems to be able to get away with it because he has cultivated an image of a jocular maverick who gets carried away with his colourful metaphors, which seems to work. She made those remarks at a meeting during a Labour party conference and other politicians were keen to distance themselves from that sort of language.
This kind of ‘Punch and Judy’ politics does not impress the electorate and falls below the standards of politeness and respect for the opposition that are required of Parliamentary language. It made a few headlines. Now with this hideous murder of a well respected MP, there are more calls for her to take back the remarks and apologise. She says she will only do that if Boris Johnson does the same…
But I guess the old political maxim ‘Never apologise, never explain’ applies here.
This murder has really shaken the political class in the UK and there is some soul searching going on and fears that such terrorism will undermine the public accessibility to MPs that are an important feature of the democratic system in the UK. There is talk of how to protect MPs from some homocidal maniac turning up when they open their doors to meet to public. Many MPs have had to endure death threats from Internet trolls and are understandably worried.
This is also not the first murder or attack on an MP meeting the public in this way.
There are some very psychologically unstable people out there that are made worse by the anonymous mischief makers on social media. Anyone in the public eye seems to be a target.
And the UK can ill-afford the cost of guarding all or most MPs when they’re out in their constituencies, to say nothing of the unquantifiable damage to British civil society if people have to be frisked or wanded before sitting down with their MPs.
The UK has an anti-terrorism strategy called Prevent that is intended to act on signs of people being radicalised to commit acts of terror. The main concern is ISIS, but there is also a threat from the Alt-right groups. It involves police being in contact with faith and community leaders, teachers, medical staff and others to alert authorities about individuals.
The attacker was identified by Prevent, but considered low risk and was not monitored. There are often stories in the press of people being reported for rather trivial reasons.
I guess it is an intelligence gathering system and filtering out false alarms is part of that process. But it seems to come in for a lot of criticism and there are questions about whether it is working effectively. There are inquiries going on, but they seem to be slow.
Ministers usually defend such things by insisting the Social Media companies should do more to tackle ‘hate speech’, however it is defined. As if that is an easy task.
Given that many individuals regard trolling celebrities and winding up crazy people as a popular past time. I expect there is an awful lot of work to be done to separate mischief makers from more organised terror groups.
Terror threats are taken very seriously, there are big budgets. Conversely mental health services for people going through a crisis are often very poor. They have to commit serious crime to get treatment sometimes.
I am sure the authorities will be trying to work out whether someone was pulling the attackers strings to encourage him to commit this crime, or was it something he came up with himself? His victim, MP David Amess, was not a high profile figure.
The suspect is charged:
Very often once something does happen there is a lot of hand-wringing and loud lamentation and criticism about why was not more done, the “red flags” not acted upon. But that may not have been as obvious as it looks after the fact. As stated, authorities have to triage for what are the most likely threats and for false alarms, they can never afford to hire enough agents to tail everyone who is on record as a religious/political ass. And we don’t hear of ten thousand other people “at risk” or another thousand who did express radical or hateful things… and then just carried on with their day causing no major trouble.