Britain has a long and complex history with many, many places. This includes not only the vast stretches of the world which it colonised, invaded, claimed as its own, or uses for a military base, but also its own land. Celts are considered the oldest population in Britain, existing before the Roman invasion in 43AD. In the following years, many Celts were pushed into the far end of England – known as Cornwall. Cornwall has, up until around the 1600s, been considered to have a group of people ethnically distinct from the rest of the UK, who even have their own language.
Britain has a long history of oppression, even within its own land. The issues between the Celts and the Anglo-Saxons go back hundreds of years.
Things have been relatively peaceful between the Cornish and the rest of England for over one thousand years though Cornwall, like most parts of rural England, has had plentiful instances of racism and Islamophobia.
On June 12th, a restaurant belonging to Rick Stein caught fire. Cornish terror group known as the Cornish Republican Army came forward to claim the blaze as their own work, though it has been stated by the fire services that the blaze resulted from a bin catching fire.
The terror group also claims to have own suicide bomber who is “[…] prepared to sacrifice herself […]“.
Cornish terror group the Cornish Republican Army claimed to have firebombed Rick Stein’s restaurant and to have a suicide bomber within their ranks.
The odd thing is, I’ve seen little outrage about this. No “Cornish people are dangerous”, no “Get back to your own region of the UK,” no “Not all Cornish people are terrorists, but all terrorists are Cornish”.
Now, this could be because this entire thing is considered sort of ridiculous. A lot of people who are aware of the incident have brushed it off as non-threatening, leaving comments like “Cornish Republican Army? Are they like the other well known Cornish gangs. Penzance pie smashers, Helston helmet brigade and the Saltash subway army?”
Cornish terror has been brushed-off as non-threatening.
But oddly enough this doesn’t happen with brown people. Brown people committing terror attacks or making threats threats are never taken lightly. When ISIS claim an attack, there is very little doubt that they are involved. Despite the fact that ISIS/ISIL exist thousands of miles away, we take their word on involvement in terror in Britain. When a brown person does an act of terror, it is seen as representative of their country, their ethnicity, or linked back to ISIS. But nobody is seeing the issues at Cornwall as representative of the “backwardness” or “violence” within the Celtic community.
Cornish people don’t watch the news after a terror attack and think “Thank god it’s not someone like me,” despite the fact that the Cornish Republican Army has been around for 11 years now. This is likely due to the fact that white people are very rarely considered terrorists, even when members claim to be willing to do a suicide bombing. Recently a member of right-wing political party The English Defence League claimed he wanted to be the “First white suicide bomber“.
Why is the phrase “home-grown terrorism” reserved for brown people?
Where are the headlines about “Home grown terrorism” which would be circulating if a British Asian or British Middle-Eastern person had claimed to set fire to a restaurant, and have a suicide bomber in their group? Why is it that I feel the need to delve into the history of the English and the Cornish when writing about this terror group, but we get little to no detail about the complex and violent history that we have had in the Middle East and Asia when others write about terrorism?
Where’s the media bias against white terrorists and the focus on white identity when writing about crime? Why is it that criminals, or people who have been arrested, are reported as “Man” or “Woman” until they have an identity like “Indian” or “Muslim” or “Syrian” to put on the headline?
The media needs to educate people on our history in places like the Middle East and show people how far the West has gone in the past to support groups we now deem terrorists, how leaders will literally lie so we can go to war, and how we alienate those who come to the UK to the point where terror becomes an option. Either that or the media needs to take every white terror group and present them as a serious problem, a serious threat, and most of all representative of the violence, hatred and religious intolerance within the white community. Or is that unfair on white people?
