{"id":38849,"date":"2017-06-08T05:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-06-08T09:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38849"},"modified":"2017-06-07T15:21:42","modified_gmt":"2017-06-07T19:21:42","slug":"celebrating-the-londoners-who-fought-back-against-islamist-terror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/06\/08\/celebrating-the-londoners-who-fought-back-against-islamist-terror\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating the Londoners who fought back against Islamist terror"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill<\/a> on the ordinary people who didn’t just run from the terrorists:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never felt prouder of London, my hometown, than I did on Saturday. When three wicked Islamists rammed a van into pedestrians and then used knives to cut down people whose only crime was to be free and happy and in the throes of nightlife, they caused chaos, yes, but they also brought out people\u2019s heroism. People fought back, confronted the killers, hit them with skateboards, pelted them with bottles, yelled abuse at them. This was the spirit of London in action, defying theocratic violence with the hurl of a beer bottle.<\/p>\n

There were many heroes. There was Roy Larner from Peckham who said possibly the best thing that\u2019s ever been said to terrorists. They burst into the pub he was drinking in, shouting: \u2018This is for Allah!\u2019 \u2018Fuck you, I\u2019m Millwall!\u2019, he fired back. He has since told the press he wanted to \u2018take the piss out of these bastards\u2019, which is about as London a response to terrorism as you will ever get. But he did more than rip the piss and give us all the brilliant image of Millwall fans having an apocalyptic showdown with soldiers of Allah: he also punched the killers to try to stop them from stabbing people, leading to his being stabbed eight times. What incredible bravery.<\/p>\n

Others turned the paraphernalia of a Saturday night out into weapons against terror. Eye-witness Gerard told the BBC that people threw beer bottles, glasses, chairs and stools \u2014 \u2018anything they could get\u2019 \u2014 at the terrorists. Or the \u2018three Muslim geezers\u2019, as he called them, with a brilliant lack of PC that rather rattled the Beeb. There was also Romanian baker Florin Morariu, who ran out of the bakery he works in, Bread Ahead, and into the mayhem to smash one of the terrorists over the head with a crate. He threw a crate at a second terrorist. It wasn\u2019t until the police threw a grenade that Morariu ran back into his bakery. And he took around 20 people inside with him and put down the shutters to protect them from harm. \u2018I didn\u2019t want to be a hero\u2019, he told ProFM Radio, but that\u2019s what he was.<\/p>\n

A 28-year-old pub bouncer called Ozzy, who said the events outside his pub were like a \u2018war zone\u2019, describes how he and his colleagues \u2018launched bar stools, bottles and glasses at them to try and disrupt them\u2019. A cab driver called Chris swerved his car around to try to run over one of the terrorists who was stabbing a young woman. A Spanish man, Ignacio Echeverr\u00eda, was returning from skateboarding in a park with friends when he saw one of the terrorists stabbing a woman. He rushed over and used his skateboard to hit the terrorist away. Tragically, Echeverr\u00eda is now missing and feared dead. He ran towards danger armed with nothing but a skateboard \u2014 that takes real guts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I posted on someone’s Facebook<\/em> status, Mark Steyn noted in a Daily Telegraph<\/em> article in 2002 that the Millwall team anthem is sung to the tune of “Que Sera Sera”:<\/p>\n

Mi-illwall, Millwall
\nMillwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
\nMillwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
\nMi-illwall, Millwall.<\/em>
\n(Repeat until knife fight)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brendan O’Neill on the ordinary people who didn’t just run from the terrorists: I\u2019ve never felt prouder of London, my hometown, than I did on Saturday. When three wicked Islamists rammed a van into pedestrians and then used knives to cut down people whose only crime was to be free and happy and in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11],"tags":[47,350,257],"class_list":["post-38849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-religion","tag-islam","tag-london","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a6B","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38850,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38849\/revisions\/38850"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}