Some Thoughts on Drummer Lee Rigby

Lee Rigby was the British solider who was killed the other day by two maniacs wielding knives and meat cleavers.  This event has been huge in Britain, with a massive investigation by law enforcement and a lot of questioning about why it all happened.  While I think it was evil, I'm not going to waste time denouncing it (although it obviously was a criminal, horrific and terrible act (and kinda of cowardly, they hit him with their car first before they attacked him with knives, not wanting to risk that he could fight back)) because other people can talk about that much better than me. And I'm not going to talk about about why these sorts of acts of terrorism are against Islam, because people who know more about this that me have already pointed this out.

The point I want to make is that Rigby death, while tragic and horrible, is actually evidence of something much more important than the fact that there are some horrible people in the world.  As President Obama pointed out in his big speech the other day:

Today the core of al Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan is on the path to defeat. Their remaining operatives spend more time thinking about their own safety than plotting against us.

They did not direct the attacks in Benghazi or Boston. They’ve not carried out a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11.

In short, al Qaida has lost their war.  They are now a shattered and shrinking organization without leadership or direction.  And I'd like to think that this world, a world were would be terrorists are forced to stab people rather than do something much worse was the world that Drummer Lee Rigby fought for, and died for, in Her Majesty's service.

This is not to say that "terrorism is over."  Knife wielding maniacs and disturbed weirdos might still break our hearts and scare us to death with crudely built bombs and butchery.  But their fantasy of the revolutionary overthrown of societies through violence and terror is increasingly becoming a fading ghost.  Like a nightmare you have last year.  Indeed, the greatest political changes in the Middle East since World War II are happening while you read this, with these guys as an almost total irrelevancy.  Osama won no votes in Pakistan recent election, the first free and open one since 1999.

Nothing I write on my stupid blog can ever make up for a wife whose lost a husband, or a son whose lost his father.  But I would like to think that Rigby's noble deeds did in fact make the world a better place.  And that truly, is worth fighting for.