Basildon Islamic Centre burnt down

I hope you don’t mind me making a serious post every now and then. This one is about some local news here in Essex.

At the weekend the Basildon Islamic Centre was gutted by fire. It was almost certainly an arson attack.

I have two questions:

1) What drives someone to do such a thing?

2) Why wasn’t this news anywhere except the local Basildon newspaper? Not even BBC Essex seems to have picked up on it. Doing a search on Google news one finds that sources such as ITV picked up on the ‘Sunshine delays train by 7 minutes‘ story, but no one covered this horrible racist attack half a mile up the road.

Anyway, well done to our local bishop, Bishop Laurie, who is making moves to bring people of different beliefs together.

An additional point. The person they have charged is 15 years old. This comes at a time when Religious Education is being downgraded in Essex schools as it doesn’t contribute to the school league tables.