A reverse Muslim van attack in London?

At midnight, an event that was seemingly just another Islam-powered terrorist attack has taken place in London's Finsbury Park. A van ran over people. It seems that we have been there. No casualties are reported at this point but the event is "novel", anyway: The injured people are... worshipers from the Finsbury Park Mosque.

This adds a new dimension to the messy co-existence of Muslims and infidels in Western Europe.

The mosque is a Salafist-and-Muslim-Brotherhood-supporting one and has co-produced numerous Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in the past such as one 9/11 culprit, one who got famous in the U.S. in December 2001, and numerous holy warriors against the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Despite this productive publication record, the mosque keeps on working just fine. So it would make sense to conjecture that the van attack was organized by a private individual Western anti-terror activist who thinks that he needs to do something that his government fails to do. (Update: The suspect was named as Darren Osborne, 47.)

If that's the case, the incident clearly turns him or her into a terrorist as well but conflicts usually end up more symmetric than the words might suggest.




However, I am not so sure whether this immediate guess is correct. It is equally plausible that the attack was made by another Muslim group in the context of some sectarian tension within Islam – perhaps even ISIS-against-al-Qaeda competition. And yes, it could have been a false flag operation staged by some far left politicians or NGOs that really like to spread the laughable meme that all the Islamic terrorist attacks had nothing to do with Islam and every citizen can perform such an attack, regardless of his or her gender and religion.




So there are question marks and the event is sufficiently unusual so that we will probably have some doubts about the background of the event even after we learn the official name of the culprit and his or her motive.

Another question will be whether the Muslims – including the mayor of London and allies – will react. While hundreds of casualties in terrorist attacks haven't been a problem that would lead them to any policy change, ten injured Muslim worshipers could become an excuse to start quite some terror against the infidels.

Most likely, nothing dramatic will happen because the midnight event didn't end up with excessively serious consequences. But one can't be sure and this event against an unusual group of targets shows how many channels exist that may make the situation in the multicultural societies really messy very quickly.